There are no rules at the Origami Agents headquarters — except have fun, get shit done, and down at least five energy drinks per week. There are two choices: Monster Energy Zero Ultra in a badass white can or a Skittles-flavored concoction known as C4.

Located in an orange brick house in Hayes Valley, Origami Agents is a scrappy, 10-person startup that builds AI agents meant to be research assistants to human sales reps so they can focus on closing deals. The “office” for the 6-month-old startup —which doubles as sleeping quarters for some team members — is optimized for a 17-hour grind. 

“Everyone’s working every waking hour,” said cofounder Finn Mallery, whose ultra-grindcore routine starts at 7 a.m., with sales calls, coding, and recruiting tasks regularly lasting past midnight. Mallery tries to intersperse his extreme work sessions with 15-minute walks and a few rounds of pull-ups. 

The scene is essentially a crowded college apartment classed up with decor ordered from Amazon. With three amateurishly themed work rooms filled with desks and mattresses strewn on the floor of the single bedroom, Origami Agents is trying to vanquish trillion-dollar tech incumbents to develop the next generation of AI applications.

“We’re building the first generalized system of AI research agents that’s going to change how people use the internet,” said Mallery, a recent Stanford graduate, who hopes that one day, sales-specific agents will enable every internet user to search for information more efficiently. “Then Google becomes obsolete,” he said.

Origami’s lofty ambitions are being fueled by $2 million in seed funding, $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and many, many pounds of ground beef. The five men working out of the Hayes Valley office (five more employees are on their way to San Francisco) eat the meat, seasoned with carne asada spices, off greased-through paper plates for most of their meals. 

“It’s 800 calories and 90 grams of protein,” said Austin Kennedy, who is on a leave of absence from college in Illinois to help build the company. Kennedy often takes the role of company cook, frying up a big batch of ground beef in olive oil for the team and chasing the meal with a carton of blueberries. “My diet is basically meat and fruit.”

Origami’s relentless ability to grind has gained recognition in tech circles to the point that even anti-aging messiah Bryan Johnson scolded the team. 

“I respect your work ethic,” Johnson wrote on X. But “your intelligence is built with nutrition/sleep/exercise … [and] without those inputs, you will have inferior intelligence + your inferior intelligence then builds an inferior ai.” 

Mallery isn’t having it. 

“It’s kind of ironic because he started companies when he was really young,” Mallery said, referring to the startups Johnson founded while in college. “I bet he didn’t sleep much.”

Mallery’s strategy for dethroning Google boils down to convincing his friends to move to San Francisco and work with him. So far, it’s working. At the beginning of the year, Mallery and his cofounder Kenson Chung, who went through Y-Combinator’s fall 2024 cohort, were the only employees at the startup. Now, they have 10. 

One of them is Connor Burd, a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz. Burd started Bink & Preflop Wizard two years ago, a poker tracker app that makes around $700K a year, according to Burd. 

“I scaled it enough to where I would never have to get a job, and then curiosity led me here,” said Burd, who intended to travel the world after college but instead became a founding engineer at Origami. He’s postponed those travel plans indefinitely, perhaps until the startup IPOs. 

Two rooms over, in a space decorated with a tropical rainforest wallpaper and hanging artificial green leaves, Luke Clancy is on his tenth call of the day trying to sell Origami’s product to prospective customers. The 22-year-old considers himself the “father of the house” because he taught his coworkers/roommates how to do dishes. 

As the company enters a hiring blitz and is poised to outgrow its Hayes Valley setup, Clancy is gearing up to become a moderating force in the company when the first argument inevitably takes place. 

“It’ll be something related to our product.” Clancy said. “Or maybe Austin’s ground beef.”