Companies

A Company is the biggest box in askTheodor. Everything else — workers, tasks, goals, projects, routines, and a knowledge Library — lives inside a Company. If a single Worker is one employee, a Company is the whole little business you’re running on your machine.

You can have as many Companies as you like. A solo consultant might keep one Company per client; a founder might run “Marketing”, “Engineering”, and “Ops” side by side. Each is fully self-contained, so work and knowledge never leak between them unless you choose to share.

What a Company holds

• Identity — a name, a one-line mission (“why we exist”), and an avatar (an emoji or an uploaded image). The mission isn’t just decoration: it’s quietly fed to manager workers as background when they hand out work, so delegation stays on-message.
• An optional client framing. Set a “for {client}” name (and a client logo) and the Company re-frames itself as a client engagement — handy for freelancers billing several clients from one app. The header then reads “{Company} · for {Client}”.
• An org chart. Workers are slotted into roles in a hierarchy. A manager role automatically gains the ability to delegate down to its subordinates, computed live from the chart.
• Its own work and knowledge. Tasks, Goals, Projects, Routines, and a Library section all belong to the Company. Open the Company and you see only its things.

The Company OS

Each Company also carries a small operating system — a set of house rules folded into every affiliated worker’s instructions:

• Brand Kit — colors, fonts, tone words, a sample “this is how we sound” paragraph, banned words, and an image style for any pictures workers generate.
• Compliance — pick a preset (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2) or write your own rules; optionally redact personal data and set a retention period.
• Preferred vendors — your go-to registrar, host, email, payments, and so on, so a worker reaches for the right tool when a task needs one.

The Company OS sits in a clear chain of authority: a worker’s own character, then the workspace-wide Tribe Doctrine, then the Company OS, then the specific task. When the Tribe Doctrine and a Company OS disagree, the Tribe Doctrine wins.

Start with one

You don’t need a sprawling org chart on day one. One Company, a couple of workers, and a clear mission is plenty. Add structure only when the work asks for it.

See the Companies screen to create one, and the Company profile to edit its OS and org chart.

In practice

Two reasons to split, and only two. Create a second Company when the two bodies of work should never see each other’s knowledge, or when you want to know what each one costs separately. “This job feels different” isn’t a reason — a second Company you don’t maintain is worse than one Company with clear tasks.

Common splits that hold up: one per client (freelancers and agencies — this is the strongest case, because confidentiality becomes structural rather than remembered), one per function for a founder running everything, one per business for portfolio owners.

Write a real mission line. It isn’t decoration: manager workers receive it as background when they hand out work. A vague mission produces vaguely-scoped delegated tasks, and the cause is genuinely hard to spot after the fact.

When a Company setting seems ignored, check the Tribe Doctrine. It outranks the Company OS. That resolves most “I set this and it didn’t apply” confusion.

Companies don’t isolate Theodor

Workers stay in their neighbourhood, but Theodor spans everything by design — that’s what makes cross-portfolio questions possible. If material must be invisible even to your own orchestrator, use a separate workspace on a separate machine, not a second Company.

🎓 Learn it hands-on: Companies as neighborhoods

Terms in this page

• Company — the top-level container (a “tenant”) for one team and everything it owns: workers, tasks, goals, projects, routines, and a knowledge Library.
• Worker / persona — a single configured AI character with a name, role, and tools. See Workers.
• Mission — a one-line statement of why the Company exists; shown on its profile and used as background context when managers delegate.
• Org chart — the hierarchy of roles inside a Company; a manager role can delegate work to the roles beneath it.
• Company OS — the per-Company rule set (Brand Kit, Compliance, Preferred vendors) that’s folded into every affiliated worker’s instructions.
• Tribe Doctrine — the workspace-wide rules that apply to all Companies and outrank a single Company’s OS. See Tribe Doctrine.
• System prompt / instructions — the background text given to an AI model that shapes how it behaves before it sees your message.
• Avatar — the little picture (emoji or image) that represents a Company or worker in the app.