What if your AI had its own computer? Ben Guo, co-founder of Zo Computer, joins Mike to talk about building the cloud PC for the agentic era.
Ben's path to founding Zo is anything but ordinary — from studying neuroscience at Harvard, to building iPhone apps on a whim, to joining Venmo when it was just 20 people in New York, to spending 8.5 years at Stripe. Now he's co-founded Zo: a fully managed, elastic cloud computer that gives your AI a real environment to live in, build in, and operate from — without touching your local machine.
In this episode, Mike and Ben dig into:
- What Zo Computer actually is — and why "AWS for normal people" might be the best way to describe it
- Why OpenClaw on a VPS falls short and how Zo fills the gap with elastic, data-center-grade infrastructure
- Model agnosticism in practice — using OpenAI, Anthropic, open source models, or your own API keys (yes, including your Claude Max plan)
- Texting your computer — Zo's iMessage and Telegram integrations and what ambient computing really looks like
- The agentic app store — Zo's skill registry, Stripe Connect integration, and the emerging marketplace model
- AI and "eating your vegetables" — why Ben still browses his own code and what tasks he refuses to hand off to AI
- In-person vs. remote in the AI era — why Zo is hiring in Brooklyn and SF and what spontaneous collaboration still offers that async can't
- Pair programming's comeback — how mob programming becomes pure ideation when AI handles the keystrokes
- Book rec: The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander and what architecture theory has to do with great codebases
Whether you're a developer nervous about giving AI access to your production machine, or a non-technical person who just wants cloud computing to stop being intimidating — this episode is for you.
Resources:
🔗 Try Zo: zo.computer | zocomputer.com
X: https://x.com/0thernet
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/0thernet
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