ben guo
agent artist
writing
projects
- personal-monorepo-template – my setup
- codingchart – pareto frontier charts
- rgnrte – white noise generator
- rough.day – news aggregator
- stripe.town – history of a generational co
- act60.me – move to puerto rico
- wrench – let agents drive browsers fast
- transmute – agent tools for video
- kb – repo knowledge base
- direct – let agents drive UI fast
- oprte – multi-sub codex driver
- sound.fish – content-addressable music
elsewhere
reading
- reality has a surprising amount of detail
- agentic web index: spoofing & security
- felix and i
- a tome of forbidden technologies
- discovery loop — continuous exploration
- feynobg: a sota model for background removal
- google search is dying. what comes next is worse
- harmony explained: progress towards a scientific theory of music
- let’s all meet up in the y2k
- nvidia’s risky business
- petri nets as a music sequencer
- something is changing in the unit economics of software
- tech leaders say ai means less work - their staff say they work up to 90 hours a week
- the gargantuan lie that is collapsing the world’s climate
- why is everyone in tech so sad?
- joe rogan experience #2530 - timothy alberino
- developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust
- llms reward expertise
- mirrorcode: what's the largest software project ai can complete on its own?
- martin shkreli breaks down the collapse of situational awareness
- sarah's wager
- the artist who colored ghibli
- the rise of million-dollar companies with just one employee
- the shape of things to come, part 1: the continuous thunderdome
- it scrolls up
- trajectory: a standard format for agent experience data
- obliterate, don’t automate
- the building block economy
- heaven in a silicon chip
about me
I'm an artist, designer, founder, and engineering leader. In software, I’ve worked deeply in AI, fintech, mobile, developer products, and consumer apps.
Software: In 2023, I co-founded an agentic inference platform, Substrate, long before agents were a thing. We pivoted to Zo Computer, the first consumer agent with a cloud computer. Zo launched in June 2025 and inspired OpenClaw. Before becoming a founder, I spent eight years at Stripe, where I created Terminal, Stripe's in-person payments product, and managed teams across mobile SDKs, mobile apps, creator payouts, and Connect onboarding. I started my career on the early Venmo team in 2013, after studying Neurobiology and Computer Science at Harvard.
Music: I was trained as a competitive classical pianist and composer. I played synthesizers in the Brooklyn band Scherzo (2013-2015), and have been recording my own music since 2008. Selected works:
- Weird Moon – Net Sadness (2019)
- to Ascend is to Transcend – Vaportown (2023)
- hueworld – Net Sadness (2015)
I was born in Ohio and grew up in Baltimore. I write regularly about building my software factory, making music, and living in Puerto Rico on Substack. This is my resume.
