Tom Krha: how AI agents changed a Czech founder's workday

Czech entrepreneur Tom Krha, founder of the San Francisco design startup Pen, spoke on the Money Maker podcast about why he considers the classic nine-to-five workday a relic of the past — and how AI agents let him run five or six projects at once.

Krha moved to San Francisco back in 2012, at the height of the mobile app boom. His résumé includes a stint at Adobe, where he worked as an evangelist for Flash technology, as well as involvement in the Czech-Slovak startup Around, which Miro later bought for billions of crowns. In California he now runs the design tool Pen, where AI agents work alongside people on the same project. Krha recently also appeared in an OpenAI promotional video for its new Astra model.

According to the entrepreneur, AI is fundamentally changing the very nature of work: today almost anyone can put together their own working tool over a weekend, so the decisive factors have become quality, distribution and the uniqueness of the idea. “The time from idea to finished version has shrunk dramatically,” Krha notes, adding that marketing now matters more than ever.

In his estimate, promotion, distribution and building a personal brand today deserve around 50% of one's time — whereas in the past it was enough to put a product on the App Store and rely on word of mouth. Krha himself demonstrated, using examples, how AI can be used to switch the CzechCrunch website into dark mode or to design custom sets of Lego pieces.

Speaking about San Francisco, the entrepreneur notes that being physically present there isn't strictly necessary, but it is critical to be reachable in the same time zone and able to show up for meetings on short notice — something that simply can't be achieved from Prague. He also points to the huge difference in how effectively various engineers use AI: “If you weren't an engineer before, you've become one times more productive. If you were, your productivity has grown a hundredfold.”