How AI‑native leaders build second brains

Learn from others what it is, and what they do with it.

You can't call yourself an AI-native leader if you haven't built a second brain, for yourself first and then for your team.

Don't know what that is? You're not behind. It's a new skill, a human one, and most of what's written about it is noise.

I share here what I learn from other execs: what they built, how they use it every day, and what I'm building myself.

Have a second brain? Let's talk.

New to second brains?

A second brain is everything your AI needs to know about how you and your company work: the decisions, the processes and best practices, the brand, the meetings and emails behind them. You have probably built some part of it yourself already.

Why do leaders build one?

They want to:

  • reduce cognitive and information overload
  • make better decisions, faster
  • automate their workflows to give them and their team more leverage
  • improve their game every week by accelerating their learnings
  • add a learning loop that makes Claude (or whatever AI they use) better every day
  • build something that compounds for them in a world where AI is disrupting full industries
  • and... find more time for being human
Maxime Gaudin, CTO at Gladia, on why he built his own second brain. 60 sec.

Common uses for a second brain

Building a second brain is fun(?). But what for? Let's hear it.

One thing that almost everyone has built (often partially): a chief of staff

Here are the common jobs and responsibilities of an AI chief of staff.

Stay on top of your day

  • The morning brief
  • Inbox triaged, replies in your voice
  • Plan my day, focus time protected
  • Evening review, tomorrow confirmed

Never drop a ball

  • The one-pager before each call
  • Recap and follow-up after
  • Promises captured and chased
  • Decisions logged, never relitigated

Keep people close

  • Who matters and how to talk to them
  • People file from transcripts
  • Who went quiet
  • What customers said this week
Built one? Share yours

Get better every week

  • The top three, planned against the quarter
  • Committed vs happened
  • Does your calendar match your goals?
  • Call coaching, the pre-mortem
Built one? Share yours

And beyond the chief of staff

Where the second brain stops being an assistant: the things only your context can produce.

Maxime Gaudin

How MadMax makes on-brand, fact-checked decks

Markdown outline first, every claim checked against the brain, then the agent makes it pretty.

See the setup of other AI‑native leaders

I ask every guest to open theirs: the machines, the files, the process.

MadMax
CTO, Gladia
A Mac mini, a local Git, and a pile of paper that searches itself
  • A Mac mini at home, unreachable from outside the house
  • Giddy: his own small Git service, a local GitHub, where every email, Slack, WhatsApp and meeting lives
  • Paper Trail: an app on top that indexes a pile of scanned paper and searches it, no folders
  • Cursor as the front door, OpenCode + OpenRouter to switch models
Guy Yalif
Chief Evangelist, Webflow
Notion as the brain, Claude wired into Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Slack
  • The second brain lives in Notion; calls are recorded there
  • Claude reads Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and Slack directly; a Custom GPT on the side
  • BossGPT: how to communicate with one coworker, learned from your DMs and emails with her
  • A Chief of Staff with three jobs: plan my week, the goal of the day, meeting prep