Agents are impressive until there's actual work to do.
Every firm says it's AI-forward. Most bought ChatGPT or Claude subs and stopped there. I embed with your team, build the tooling that makes it real, and teach them to use it properly.
The gap
Saying you're AI-forward, and being it.
MIT's Project NANDA put a number on the difference in 2025: of the enterprise AI pilots they studied, 95% produced no measurable impact on the P&L. The models aren't the problem. The tools they're given, and how people use them, are.
One pilot in twenty moved the P&L
- The tools can't reach the work. Whatever your agent produces gets carried into your systems by hand. With Vorkane, that goes away.
- Nobody taught the team. A subscription is step one. The work begins after that.
The problem
Agents are smarter than ever, and limited by their tooling. Usually by design.
Ask your agent for the IC memo and you'll get a good memo, then your work handed back. Not because agents can't act. A vendor shipping to millions can't trust every customer with software that edits and sends, so everyone gets the locked-down version, and the embedded engineers, like me, go to whoever signs a nine-figure contract for their firm.
The solution
Eight things agents aren't allowed to do on their own.
The connectors agents ship with are good, and they've got better. These are the places they still stop, and the places Vorkane picks up.
| What you asked for | Agents on their own | With Vorkane |
|---|---|---|
| Send the email | Saves a draft for you to send | Sends it, as you, from your own address |
| Update a document | Writes you a new copy | Edits the existing file actually in use |
| Put numbers in a spreadsheet | Reads it | Writes values and appends rows |
| Build the deck | Reads slides | Creates and edits them |
| Share a file with someone | Shows you who has access | Grants it, and takes it back |
| Add someone to contacts | No connector at all | Creates, updates and searches |
| Put it on the task list | No connector at all | Creates and updates |
| Meeting transcription without a bot | Best-effort text extraction | Complete agentic meeting intelligence, with Nojoin |
Example workflows
Whole jobs, not first drafts.
Every one of these ends with something actually happening. That last step is the one you're still doing by hand today.
- Turn my call notes into the IC memo. Written up, into the committee folder, shared with the people who need to read it, and the slot in the diary. The notes come from Nojoin, my meeting assistant: the software is open source and costs nothing, and most firms pay me to set it up and run it for them, the same arrangement as Vorkane itself. Shared and booked
- Review this deck from my contact. Read page by page, then put through my hand-built VC analysis skill, tuned to your firm's thesis. The reply drafts to the relationship: candid with the friend you write to weekly, diplomatic with the new contact. Analysed, and the reply sent
- Model the waterfall for exit scenarios. Preferences, participation and the option pool pulled from the legal documents in the company's folder, and each exit scenario written into a live spreadsheet. Written into the real sheet
- Log this week's inbound to the tracker. Every deck that arrived, with stage, sector, round and ask. Filed, and the passes replied to rather than left in drafts. Replies sent
- AgentRead the founder updates in your inbox
- AgentFind the board packs and financials in Drive, and read the numbers off the page
- AgentVerify each figure and attribute it to its source
- VorkaneWrite it into that company's section of the update your firm actually sends
- VorkaneRepeat for every company in the portfolio, then compile the update
- AgentReview the narrative end to end
- YouRead the final draft and approve it
- VorkaneSend the approved update to your LPs
Workflows like this get built with me as playbooks, adapted to your systems and your conventions. Most of this one stalls today, however good the agent, because its tooling rarely reaches across every domain at once. Reaching across all of them is what Vorkane is for, and building the playbook is what a forward deployed engineer in the team means.
The team
A forward deployed engineer who has also been the client.
Most engineers build one capability for a great many customers. A forward deployed engineer builds a great many capabilities for one. One person who can do both AND already manages a venture capital portfolio is basically a unicorn.
- Eight Yearsin venture capital
- Over £40mdeployed in the last four years
- Board and Advisory Rolesan IC memo needs no explaining
- Cybersecurity, Aerospace, AIsecure code, from fields with no room for error
The tooling
Connectors, and whatever else your firm needs built.
Google Workspace ships today, and a connector for anything else your firm runs on takes a week or two. Beyond connectors, I build what your firm needs: a portfolio monitor, a system of record, whatever you can spec. The first exercise is always buy versus build, because sometimes the right answer is a product that already exists. Lead time and cost are quoted before you commit, billed as fractional CTO days at the rate on this page.
The multiplier
Permission is the smaller problem.
Vorkane removes the limits on what your agents are allowed to do. But most teams never even hit those limits, because nobody has shown them how to work this way. So I train teams too, on their own live work rather than a course.
Getting started
One hour of setup, then you forget about it.
- One approvalA Cloud project inside your own Workspace. Whoever administers it says yes once, and that's the only part that involves your IT. We can do it together on a call, or in person.
- Thirty seconds eachEveryone who's going to use it signs in once with their own Google account. The same screen they've seen a hundred times.
- Then I keep it runningUpdates, monitoring and fixes are mine. When something breaks it's usually mine to fix before it's yours to notice.
Pricing
Two numbers.
- Setup
£2,500£2,000 One-off, at a 20% founding discount. The install, everyone signed in, and one day of training. - Fractional CTO
£1,500£1,000 a dayOngoing, support included, at a founding discount from my usual £1,500 rate. I keep your tech running smoothly and your team on the best tools, with the skills to use them, and I build what your firm needs, a bespoke connector, a system of record, a portfolio monitor, within the days I'm working for your firm. The first exercise is always buy versus build, because that's the job. A light touch is one or two days a month; a firm going agent-first wants four. Training alone is the same rate, with or without Vorkane installed. - HostingIncludedI run the infrastructure your firm's private setup lives on, and the continual maintenance and development of Vorkane, inside the rates above. If your firm prefers its own infrastructure I'll run it there instead, and you pay that provider directly: usually £50 to £100 a month on a mainstream cloud, less at a budget host.
FAQ
Questions you'd ask on the call.
What happens if we stop working together, or you get hit by a bus?
Your data is yours, permanently and without argument. It lives in your own Google account, it never passes into mine, and you'd keep every email, file, document and diary entry exactly where it already is. Nothing to export and nothing to unpick.
What you'd lose is Vorkane and me. The software is mine to build, run and keep current, which is what the fee pays for, and it's the same arrangement your firm has with every other tool it depends on. I'd rather set that out in the first meeting than the last one. If the software ran itself you wouldn't need me, and I wouldn't be charging you.
Why hasn't Google, OpenAI or Anthropic just built this?
Reading is easy to get permission for and doing isn't. An outside company that wants this level of access has to pass a security audit and renew it every year, so most stop at reading.
I got round it by registering the software inside your own Google project rather than mine. It runs as your firm's own application, so Google isn't being asked to trust an outside vendor. The software itself is still mine: I build it, run it and keep it current, which is the part you're actually paying for.
The approach isn't a secret and anyone could copy it. What stops them is that nobody with funding wants a business that installs itself one firm at a time.
What happens if Google closes the gap?
Some of it they already have, and I'd rather say so than let you find out. Claude's own connectors, to take the biggest example, do calendars properly now, and they'll upload a file to Drive. On those, I add nothing, and the table above leaves them out for that reason.
But ask the question the other way round, because it cuts harder in that direction. Google competes in this market: Gemini inside Workspace is their product, and every outside vendor's access to Workspace, Anthropic's included, exists at Google's discretion and can be narrowed or withdrawn. Arguably the main reason that door stays open is that closing it on competitors while shipping Gemini would hand US and EU regulators a textbook self-preferencing case.
Vorkane doesn't sit on that ledge. It runs as your firm's own application, registered inside your own Google project, which is the position least exposed to a platform changing its mind about outsiders.
Is this safe? What'll my compliance person say?
Three things they'll care about. Vorkane signs in as each person rather than as the firm, so nobody reaches anything they couldn't already reach. It can't delete anything for good: mail and files go to the bin and come back for thirty days. And there's a record of every action that never records what was in it.
There's a page written for them at vorkane.com/compliance, and I'm happy to be on that call too.
Next
Thirty minutes, and you'll see it run.
Thirty minutes on a call and I'll run a real agentic flow end to end, in front of you. That's more convincing than this page is.
Most of my work arrives through someone who already uses it, so if that's how you got here, say who sent you and we'll skip the introduction.