A founder may know a market well enough to spot a business opportunity without knowing how to write the software it requires. Agentic AI is now giving those founders another way in. They can describe what they want to build and work toward a functioning prototype, testing an idea while they are still figuring out the business around it.
EasyA wants to make that path accessible to founders. Its Jeeves AI execution engine helps users research a market and build an initial product. CEO and co-founder Phil Kwok believes this gives people more room to act on their business knowledge, even when they cannot write the underlying code themselves.
“It doesn’t matter if somebody is just prompting. If somebody doesn’t fully understand the inputs but is still getting great results, then that’s perfectly fine. If somebody understands those inputs and is also getting great results, then that’s great, too,” Phil tells me. “I think a lot of people who remain attached to a previous way of learning or a familiar way of working get this completely wrong. They assume that the inputs are what matter most, when, in reality, it has always been the outputs that count.”
That emphasis on results shapes EasyA’s ambitions for Jeeves, which it envisions as a way for founders to delegate more of the work involved in building a company to AI agents. The company announced on Sept. 10 that it intends to become publicly traded during 2027, allowing investors to back its approach to helping people build with AI.
From a Coding App to an AI Startup Platform
EasyA combines a mobile learning app with hackathons that connect aspiring founders to potential backers. The company says it works with more than 350 academic institutions and names Google and Amazon among its partners. The EasyA app has 1.3 million users, according to Phil.
The brothers’ own careers show how elite education can open doors. Phil studied law at Cambridge and worked at Sullivan & Cromwell, while Dom Kwok, EasyA’s chief operating officer and co-founder, attended Wharton before working at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. Their premise is that access to capable AI tools can give people a way to demonstrate what they can build, even if they lack the credentials or connections that might otherwise get them noticed.
“One of the main things we specialize in is making sure people have the tools at their fingertips to start building and turn the ideas they have into something real,” Dom says. “That’s central to what we do at EasyA, giving people access to the capabilities of blockchain and AI directly through our app.”
That audience gives EasyA a foundation for Jeeves, which it introduced in June to help users move from learning about technology to building with it. Phil describes the product as a step toward more autonomous AI that can take on the work involved in developing an idea into a business. His ambition is to give individual founders access to capabilities that once required the staffing and resources of companies such as Google or Meta.
“We are already using Jeeves internally to produce some of our marketing materials, supporting some of our operations. Jeeves is ultimately the execution layer that allows people to go beyond learning to actually executing, all from the push of a few buttons,” Phil explained.
Helping Founders Move From Ideas to Execution
Dom describes participants using Jeeves to research competing products before developing an initial prototype with a few prompts.
“We see one-person teams use Jeeves to create things on much faster timelines than they could before. Work that would typically take them months, they can now do in days,” Dom says. “One person can now handle workloads that would typically require five to 10 people, without constantly interacting with Jeeves to keep things moving. Jeeves can get on with that work in the background while the founder focuses on their own tasks.”
When I asked about results beyond faster prototyping, however, Dom’s examples centered on that development process. How those gains translate into a business customers keep paying for remains an open question. The distinction also matters for EasyA as Jeeves competes for founders’ attention alongside tools such as Lovable and Replit. Phil believes the answer starts with execution.
When I asked what separates a promising AI startup from something a larger platform could absorb, he pointed to the problems founders encounter inside their own companies.
“The truth is that most startups don’t die from homicide. They die from suicide, from founders turning against one another and from problems within the company itself, rather than from another business coming along and destroying what they have built,” Phil says. “When you ask what makes these AI startups really great, I think it ultimately comes down to moving very quickly and continuing to iterate. That’s the single most important thing any founder can do, particularly as AI compresses the time it takes to build.”
Where Human Judgment Fits as AI Takes on More Work
As Jeeves takes on more work independently, founders will need to decide how much authority to give it. I asked which decisions require human approval and how Jeeves handles judgment when its users step away from individual tasks.
“Ultimately, our vision for Jeeves is personal superintelligence. What that means is moving away from a model where you need humans in the loop at every single step of the process and toward a system where agents have the ability to operate fully autonomously,” Phil says.
He compares that approach to how a large company distributes responsibility across its workforce. “Sundar Pichai doesn’t need to be the human in the loop for every single decision that an engineer or staff member makes during the working day. You can’t run a company that way. For agents to be truly useful, they need full autonomy to get on with their work. That requires clear responsibilities and permissions governing what they can and cannot do. Those are the boundaries we’ve built into Jeeves.”
Phil believes that approach could eventually help a founder build a billion-dollar company alone. His answer describes how he wants delegation to work, although he did not identify a specific decision that requires approval or explain how Jeeves responds when an agent exceeds its authority.
Dom sees a continuing role for education as people become more ambitious in their use of AI. “One of the most important things people need to start learning is how to use AI effectively. There are levels to understanding how to use it and how much you can accomplish with the tools available,” he says. As founders hand more work to agents, they will need to judge the results and recognize when a task requires closer attention.
Why EasyA Wants to Go Public in 2027
EasyA draws part of its confidence from founders who have passed through its community. The company says Cognition co-founder Walden Yan and Listen Labs co-founder Alfred Wahlforss won prizes at its Harvard hackathons in 2022. Its September announcement puts the value of that broader ecosystem at nearly $30 billion. The figure refers to companies associated with its community, rather than EasyA’s own valuation.
For Phil, the planned public listing would give the community a way to participate directly in EasyA’s development. “We want our community to be able to join us on this journey. So far, Dom and I have never needed to raise capital for EasyA, but we have reached an important point in the company’s development. We have so much in the pipeline and so much powerful technology that we have yet to introduce,” he says. “Another important part of going public is the brand awareness it brings as we begin showing more people what we have built.”
He added that EasyA has publicly shown only about 1% to 2% of the technology it has built, including work from the lab it started this year.
Dom sees the planned 2027 listing as a way for the company’s users and supporters to own shares as it introduces more of that technology. “We want to make sure people have a meaningful opportunity to participate in that upside, rather than only buying in at the top,” he says.
The Control Layer Verdict
EasyA’s opportunity begins at a moment many promising businesses never get past, when someone understands a problem but lacks the resources to build a solution. Its app and founder community give it a way to reach those people early. With Jeeves, it wants to stay involved as their ideas become businesses and the work grows beyond what one person can handle. For EasyA, the most consequential shift could come when the people it helped learn to build begin relying on its technology to help them run what they create.
