In this episode, our co-hosts Robby and Tim talk with Paperclip Co-Founder Dotta (Nate) whose viral agent orchestration platform has taken off over the past several months as more teams adopt agents at work.

Their open source, also called paperclip, has >75K stars on GitHub and is becoming the de facto way to manage a team of agents.

This episode explores what it really means to build an “agent-led company.” Rather than thinking of AI agents as isolated tools, Paperclip treats them like employees working toward shared goals, with the platform acting as the company that coordinates them.

We discuss why existing AI workflows (whether it’s dozens of Claude Code tabs or standalone coding agents) break down at scale, and how Paperclip provides a unified interface for managing projects, agents, tasks, context, and budgets across any model or AI harness.

From marketing and documentation to customer support triage and software development, the conversation dives into how teams can assign the right agents to the right work while keeping humans in control through evaluation, reflection, and orchestration.

We also unpack the challenges and opportunities of building an open source agent platform in one of AI’s fastest-moving markets.

The discussion covers Paperclip’s explosive early growth, the realities of maintaining a ton of community pull requests, security risks in agentic systems, and why the future isn’t about replacing people with AI - it’s about enabling individuals and organizations to scale their impact through coordinated agents.

Looking ahead, we explore Paperclip Cloud, enterprise workflows, governance, and why the next frontier for AI isn’t just better models, but better memory, context, and systems for managing an entire workforce of agents.

E201: Building Your Agent Army with Paperclip

Open Source Startup Podcast

E201: Building Your Agent Army with Paperclip