My AI team, screenshots and all

Hey there! In case you forgot, I'm Art Parmann. The poker player from the Table 1 Podcast who can't stop starting businesses.

In March I gave a robot $1,000 to start a business for me. By April it had done nothing. So I ghosted you for six months and built my own robots instead.

This is what that looks like. Screenshots included, warts included.

Quick heads-up first: Rounders to Founders relaunched this week as a community for poker players building startups. If you're building anything, even a napkin idea, join free and post your build. It takes two minutes.

The honest scoreboard

I'm not running some empire of AI companies. Mostly I'm automating the businesses I already have, starting a few new ones, and shoveling dirt on what didn't work.

• Table 1 (my poker podcast and media brand): automating. The media side runs on AI agents now. I still show up, record, and take the sales calls.
• SlotMaps: automating. Same deal.
• Snagworth: a 28-day test that started on the 18th. Six days in, still zero paying customers.
• Rounders to Founders: relaunched this week as a community. You're reading it.
• PokerHQ (software for running a private poker game): crawling back from the dead. It got its own AI team this week.
• Seat Jumper: folded. Turns out nobody wants to gamble their seats at a football game.
• Ask Charlotte: became an internal tool. It helps me run Table 1 and my personal life. It's basically a customized GrokBot.
• AdSimple: still not doing anything. Might be the next one I hand to an AI team.

Two businesses being automated, three experiments, and three that are parked, retired or turned into tools.

So what's an "AI team"?

It's not a chatbot you ask questions.

It's a set of AI "employees." Each one has three things:

1. A job description. A file that says what the seat is for, what it's allowed to do, and what it must never do.
2. A schedule. Snagworth's CEO seat wakes up six times a day. Its watchdog checks everything every hour.
3. A boss. Every seat reports to an AI CEO, and the CEO reports to me.

They run on my Mac using Claude Code. Nobody chats with them. They wake up on schedule, read their job description and the latest orders, do the work, leave a note for the team, and go back to sleep.

The CEO is the only one allowed to merge code into the live site. Everyone else proposes changes and the CEO reviews them. And there's exactly one file where they're allowed to ask me for anything.

Here's Snagworth's team this week:

Six seats: CEO, Data & Pricing, Engineer, Growth, CFO & Auditor, Watchdog. Under them is the scorecard the CFO seat keeps. Look at the top line: 0 paying out of 10. The robots crank out code every day. They don't conjure customers.

SlotMaps has its own office page. Every little person is an AI seat at its desk, and the feed at the bottom is them clocking in and out all morning. Up top: 2 new payers this month against a goal of 1. SlotMaps is at $234.93 MRR from 8 paying subscribers after 18 months (R2F Verified, the full chart is here):

And this is Table 1's studio board. Sixty seats handle editing, clips, booking, distribution and the sponsor pipeline for the podcast. See "Needs you 45" up top? That's the pile of questions waiting on me. Yeah.

The prompt

People ask what I type to get one of these. It's less magic than you'd think. I tell it what I want, like I'm hiring.

For Table 1 I said:

"I want a whole team, CEO all the way down the list handling everything and I'm only needed for showing up to take ad sales calls/decisions and going to the studio."

For Snagworth:

"If a company can do it with 5 employees we can do it with 0. Know within a few short weeks whether we have a business here."

Then Claude Code and I build the same five things every time:

1. The rules. Money is mine. Nothing goes out in my name unless I've said it can. No fake customers, no fake reviews. Where the passwords live.
2. The org chart. Every job a real company would have, even if one AI seat wears five hats at first.
3. A contract for every seat. What it's for, how it's measured, what it can and can't do, and the exact instructions it reads every time it wakes up.
4. The schedule. Which seats run, how often, on which model.
5. My inbox. One file. Every ask is tagged: "only you can do this," "just decide yes or no," or "FYI." If it isn't on that list, the CEO decides.

That's it. The rules file matters most. Botch it and the robots will cheerfully do the wrong thing on a schedule.

Does it actually work?

Some of it.

They're great at the grind: shipping small fixes, writing drafts, checking that things are up, keeping the books honest. They stink at the part that matters most, which is getting a stranger to care. Snagworth is six days in with zero paying customers, and no robot fixes that by itself.

So I don't think of it as "AI runs my business." It's a staff that never sleeps, and I'm still on the hook for every call that matters.

What changed here

Rounders to Founders is now a community at rounderstofounders.com for poker players building startups. There's a daily blog about all of the above, forums, a page for what you're building (with a running log the rest of us can follow), and Cash Out, where you can sell a build or a domain you're done with. Three are listed right now. Free to list, free to sell; the only fee is Escrow.com's. This newsletter moved off Beehiiv and comes from the site now. Weekly, Friday mornings.

How you build is up to you. A co-founder, a team, freelancers, no-code, agents. I'm just showing you how I'm doing it.

And if a weekly email about building startups isn't what you signed up for, the unsubscribe link at the bottom works in one click. No hard feelings.

If your day to day is multi-tabbing terminal windows more than poker tables, it might be time to get on R2F.

Your move

Post what you're building, even if it's just an idea and a domain: join free and post your build. Free, takes two minutes.

In March a robot pocketed my money and did nothing. This time I built the team myself. Come build yours.

— Art

PS: Not building anything yet? Join anyway and say hi in The Lobby. I posted first. Or just hit reply. It comes straight to me.