Dreamer: the Personal Agent OS — David Singleton

Mar 23 update for Latent Spacenauts: this episode was recorded before the Dreamer team announced they were joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, and it turned out to be the last interview they did before the news became public. Consider this a snapshot from just before the transition!

In 2024, David Singleton left Stripe and joined forces with Hugo Barra for a buzzy stealth startup named /dev/agents. This month they emerged out as Dreamer, a consumer-first platform to discover, build, and use AI agents and agentic apps, centered on a personal “Sidekick” that helps users customize experiences via natural language.

Sidekick is nothing less than an “agent that builds agents”, with all the complexity that that entails:

You’ve seen many many website builder, app builder, and even agent builder startups by now, but our favorite detail is the sheer amount of work that has gone into the “full stack” nature of the platform, including shipping their own SDK, logging, database, prompt management, serverless functions, and so on. Most platforms restrict the tech stack you can use just to get off the ground — Dreamer does it “right” by letting you push whatever arbitrary code you want to their VMs.

Paying the Builders

Of course former leaders of Stripe and Android would not stop at just building the tools, but also building the ecosystem. Dreamer is deeply aware of the 4 sided network effect it has going on and is ready to fund all of it.

It’s time to Dream!

Full Video Episode

on youtube.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Meet Dreamer Purple

[00:00:00] swyx: Okay, we’re here in the studio with David Singleton. Welcome.

[00:00:08] David Singleton: Hey, Wix. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:09] swyx: It’s great to have you. Uh, we have very sympa that your company color is the same as Lean Spaces color.

[00:00:15] David Singleton: That’s right. Dreamer Purple.

[00:00:17] swyx: It used to be Devrel agents, which I thought was very cool. It’s like you call back to Devrel Payments.

[00:00:22] David Singleton: Yeah.

[00:00:22] swyx: And you were obviously CTO Stripe. And talk to me about just the origin or thinking process behind Dreamer. Yeah. And maybe, maybe start with like, what, what is Dreamer?

[00:00:31] David Singleton: Yeah.

[00:00:31] What Is Dreamer

[00:00:31] David Singleton: So Dreamer is a new product, uh, which everyone can come and play with today. Um, it’s a place where everyone, literally, everyone can discover, build, and enjoy and use AI agents and agenda apps.

[00:00:45] And we really did design it for consumers, for folks who are not necessarily. Uh, have any kind of technical background. It’s really aimed at everyone. I think often of my sister, she’s very smart. She’s not in the slightest bit technical. She has lots of problems in her life that [00:01:00] she would like to be able to have great software and intelligent software to solve.

[00:01:04] But you know, even with the rise of tools like Cloud Code and so forth, she’s got no way to get started. And Dreamer is a place where she can come in, grab some intelligent apps that other people in the community have built, start using them right away, and solve real problems in her life.

[00:01:19] Sidekick And Waitlist

[00:01:19] David Singleton: And at the core, we have a personal agent called the Sidekick.

[00:01:24] Um, you can give your sidekick a name, you can give it its own personality, and it really helps you across your entire day, your life. It helps you use all of the agents on the platform, and it also helps you build anything you want. And we’ve been working in this for a little while. We recently launched in beta.

[00:01:41] So anyone can go to dreamer.com, join the wait list. Um, and we have many, many, many people in the community now who are building really fun, really powerful, really useful. Agents and the agentic apps for themselves.

[00:01:54] swyx: I think we’re gonna go right into a demo. Yeah. I just wanna make an observation that, uh, you, you, [00:02:00] you put discover first before build.

[00:02:02] Mm-hmm. But actually, at least for the engineers in the audience. ‘cause we are primarily engineers and you’re primarily targeting consumers, right?

[00:02:08] David Singleton: Yeah.

[00:02:08] swyx: For engineers. Like, there’s a huge full stack of stuff, which we’re gonna dive into. Let’s write. It’s so impressive. I’m like, holy s**t, this, this is what I’ve always wanted.

[00:02:16] Cool. Uh, so, so I think that’s really good and I’ve, in some ways, I think given your background given, uh, Hugo’s, is it Hugo? Hugo.

[00:02:24] David Singleton: Hugo. Hugo Bar. Yeah.

[00:02:25] swyx: Hugo, it’s not surprising that you can basically kind of build an app store Yeah. For agents.

[00:02:30] David Singleton: Yeah. So Hugo was my co-founder. Yeah. Um, Hugo and I met with our other co-founder Nicholas Checkoff in the very early days of Android at Google, where we were building Google’s first mobile apps.

[00:02:41] Uh, we then contributed to very core pieces of Android itself. And you’re right, we were really excited about building two things. One, solving a bunch of problems. That this breakthrough technology here I’m talking about mobile needed to have solved in order to make it work for real people at scale. And then secondly, building this ecosystem, um, [00:03:00] of third party developers using the Play Store, um, and able to deliver way more value on the platform than we could have delivered on our own.

[00:03:08] And we think about Dreamer in exactly the same way. So I was working at Stripe, as you mentioned, and we had the opportunity to put some of the very first AI agent systems in the world into production. And from the moment we did the first of those, I was just struck with a strong sense of conviction that this is breakthrough technology that’s gonna change how all of us work with computers and phones and so forth, all of the, the technology in our lives, but.

[00:03:34] There’s a lot of problems to be solved, for real people to be able to make this approachable. Um, and it really is kind of a direct analog for what we were solving back in the early days of mobile apps at Google and, and Android. So it’s, it’s been fun to bring that to life.

[00:03:47] swyx: Yeah. Uh, let’s look at it.

[00:03:48] David Singleton: Yeah, let’s take a look.

[00:03:49] Dashboard And Daily Briefing

[00:03:49] David Singleton: So, uh, dreamer.com, this is our homepage. This is where you can come and, uh, watch some videos about what is here and sign up for the wait list. Once

[00:03:57] swyx: you, I, I just wanna say for those listening, ‘cause we have a lot, you [00:04:00] know, switch to YouTube, look at the animations. So much care.

[00:04:03] David Singleton: We, we really care about, uh, this product being fun.

[00:04:07] Uh, and, and inte