We're building what we needed on our first month here.

We came to San Francisco for two reasons: to build in AI, and to get one of our kids into college here before the school year started.

We thought the hard part would be the company. It wasn't. It was finding somewhere to live.

We saw a lot of apartments. We sent a lot of texts and emails, most of which were never answered. We took rides across the city to viewings where thirty other people were already in line. We filled out applications, paid the fees, and got nothing back — over and over, while a school year and a lease deadline moved closer.

The loop is familiar to anyone who has arrived: to rent you need credit, for credit you need a card, for a card you're asked for an SSN, and an SSN takes time you don't have. Meanwhile a phone plan, a bank account, and everything else your life here depends on are all waiting on each other.

Most of these have a right answer. It just lives in the heads of a few people who already made it through — which bank opens an account on a passport, which one will issue a credit card without an SSN, which carrier has the small-business plan, which property manager accepts a co-signer. Nobody writes it down, so everyone pays for it again in weeks, fees, and rejections.

So we started writing it down — and building a personal agent that carries out the tasks for you, saving you a great deal of time, effort and money.

Housing was simply where the pain hit us first. The same pattern runs through everything a newcomer has to do here, and we're building toward those next.

1. The agent works for you — not for providers. No paid ranking, no lead selling, no commission on regulated transactions.
2. Verified, not guessed. Every answer carries its source and the date we checked it, says whether that source is an official page, a community post or someone's first-hand experience, and tells you when it has gone stale rather than pretending it's current. Where we've inferred something the source doesn't literally say, the answer says that too.
3. You approve every action. Drafts, calls and emails go out only when you say so.
4. We don't touch what should stay licensed. Opening accounts, signing, paying and government filings are always done by you, or referred to a licensed professional.

We started from our own problem, so we described it the way we lived it: no SSN, no credit, no history. But that's one instance of a more general wall. What a landlord actually asks for is proof of income in a format they recognise — usually recent pay stubs. Plenty of people who have an SSN, a credit score and real money still can't produce that:

• Self-employed, freelancers, 1099 contractors — 1099s, tax returns and bank statements, but no pay stubs
• Founders — the company doesn't pay a salary yet
• Between jobs, or just laid off — no current income to show
• Green-card holders and citizens moving back — foreign income doesn't count, no U.S. income yet
• Living on savings, or retired — assets, but no income stream
• Newcomers and students — neither an SSN nor income

So the product asks what proof you can actually produce — pay stubs, 1099s, tax returns, bank statements, an offer letter, a co-signer, extra deposit — and checks that against what each place will accept. Not having a pay stub is a format problem, not a verdict on you.