Howie: The AI Secretary | Austin Petersmith, Co-founder and CEO
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 100 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Austin Petersmith is the Co-founder and CEO of Howie, the AI secretary.
We talk about why AI assistants are so hard to build, why they decided to build Howie super narrow, and everything that went into their brand, name, and viral launch.
Thank you to Adam D’Augelli, Sophia Amoruso and Alex Cohen for help brainstorming topics for the conversation.
Thank you to Hanover Park for supporting this episode. Try the modern, AI-native fund admin at https://www.hanoverpark.com/Turner
Timestamps:
(3:35) Howie: The AI Secretary
(6:08) Why AI assistants are so hard to build
(16:19) Why Howie started in email
(20:49) Adding a human in the loop
(30:48) AI software vs AI-powered humans
(36:21) How a meme inspired Howie
(39:29) Inside the making of Howie’s launch video
(44:15) Howie’s viral launch video + Discussion
(53:47) Designing the brand
(1:01:37) Long-term opportunity and roadmap
(1:07:53) Working for Jason Calacanis
(1:12:00) Jason's media lessons
(1:16:51) Getting Howie's first users
(1:19:35) Pitch deck strategy that raised $6m
(1:24:09) The mistake of optimizing for growth too soon
(1:29:48) Building an AI company outside of SF
(1:33:13) Being Superhuman’s 1st customer, Mercury’s 3rd
Referenced
Try Howie: https://howie.com/
Jobs at Howie: https://app.dover.com/jobs/howie
Howie Dewitt Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/howie-dewitt
NewKid: https://newkid.services/
Follow Austin
Twitter: https://x.com/awwstn
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awwstn
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We think that professionals spend a ton of time on meta work, which is just work about work. |
| 0:05.7 | So anything a great assistant can do involving the calendar, Howie can do. |
| 0:10.0 | Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. |
| 0:14.6 | Today's guest is Austin Petersmith, co-founder and CEO of Howie, the AI Secretary. |
| 0:20.0 | Every AI product is called assistant or co-pilot, |
| 0:22.6 | and secretary is a word that more accurately describes what Howie does. |
| 0:27.9 | Howie officially launched two weeks ago with a viral video and much customer love. |
| 0:32.7 | This conversation goes inside the early days of the company, |
| 0:36.0 | including Austin and the team's very opinionated |
| 0:38.0 | approach, making Howie, one of the most narrow use cases of any AI product I've ever seen. |
| 0:43.8 | It has turned out to be a lot harder than we've thought to solve it. |
| 0:47.3 | We've built the flywheel and the architecture and all these things to solve the one thing, |
| 0:52.3 | and then we can do more and more over time. But all this has made it one of the few AI products that actually works, |
| 0:58.3 | growing double digits every month for the past year. |
| 1:00.9 | When you build for text message or Slack, |
| 1:03.3 | people expect it to respond at the speed of chat GPT, |
| 1:05.9 | and email has latency built into the system. |
| 1:08.4 | We talked about their decision to completely rebuild the product last year, adding a human |
| 1:12.5 | in the loop element, similar to how Cruz and Waymo trained self-driving cars. |
| 1:16.3 | We can always have a product experience that is far ahead of what the models at a given |
| 1:20.2 | time are capable of. |
| 1:21.2 | We also go inside the making of their viral launch video. |
... |
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