The story: a company in 72 hours

#The challenge

On 15 September 2026, three people from xAI sat down in a San Francisco studio, a block from where Dreamforce was taking place, with an unusual plan for a product launch. They were going to build a company from scratch in 72 hours, live, with Grok BotBot An AI teammate with a name, a job and its own conversation. It works on a computer in the cloud, even when you're away. See in the glossary → doing most of the work.

They were Matt Palmer, from developer experience; Lauren Tan, from the Grok Bot engineering team; and Roshan Sadanani, from product. They had no business idea. They had an empty GitHub, an empty Notion and not a single Bot. They warned from the start that there would be mistakes and that they would show them.

Day 1 · 0:00:00The challenge begins: a company in three days

#Three days of livestream

It runs for three days, almost nine hours each. The company is the thread that runs through it, but every few hours the studio hands over to other sessions. There's an introduction to Grok Bot for people who have never used it, workshops for engineering, product and founders, and conversations with guests who already run businesses with Bots.

That mix is great for learning. In the sessions you watch people who know the product well show how they use it every day. In the studio you watch three people use it in a hurry, in front of thousands of viewers, and see it break now and then.

Day 1 · 0:29:32The introduction to Grok Bot starts

#The story inside the course

The lessons go from basic to advanced and don't follow the livestream's order, because that's a better way to learn. You still get the story:

• Every module opens with what happened in the livestream, in order. Read the course from start to finish and you follow the company from the moment it didn't exist.
• When something was shown on video, the lesson links to the exact minute.
• The livestream diary puts each day's story on a single page. It grows as each day of the livestream comes out.

#The end of day 1

By the end of day 1 they had an idea taken from the audience's suggestions, a landing page live on its own domain and a team of Bots with names of their own. They also had a good list of things that had gone wrong, and those teach as much as the things that worked.

#The day 2 pivot

The next morning they changed their idea. Day 1's guests had warned that a pop-up in San Francisco needs licences and permits, and the Bots, which worked on the plan overnight, reached the same conclusion: there wasn't time. Ship by Thursday became a video game studio. Its first game turns the Bots people already use into characters that fight each other.

By the end of day 2 they had a playable prototype, sign-in with X, a leaderboard, music and video ads, all made by a dozen Bots splitting up tasks in Notion. Day 3 was for publishing it and finding players.

Day 2 · 0:11:08The agents sell them a pivot

The story really starts in module 1, just before they built anything.