There is a certain kind of startup that becomes famous for one weekend and then has to spend the next decade figuring out what it actually is. Magic is that startup, except it figured it out.
In early 2015, a small team fresh out of Y Combinator posted a phone number to Hacker News and told people they could text it for anything. Food, a ride, a last-minute gift, a plumber. The internet, being the internet, tried to break it - and instead made it the top-voted post of its moment, with the New York Times and CNN following within weeks. The pitch was almost suspiciously simple: text us, and it's handled.
Simple pitches are expensive. Behind that one phone number sat human beings doing the unglamorous work of actually getting things done, and "anything" is a very large surface area to staff. The version of Magic that went viral - part concierge, part genie, part dare - was not the version that would last. What lasted was the underlying observation: busy people are surrounded by work that does not require them specifically, and they keep doing it anyway.
So Magic narrowed. The "text us for a taco" novelty gave way, around 2016, to premium subscription assistants, and eventually to the model it runs today: dedicated remote assistants matched to a business, priced by the hour, cancellable anytime. Executive assistants. Admin support. Customer service. Bookkeeping. The kind of roles that quietly determine whether a founder spends their week building or scheduling.
The founders' backstory helps explain the confidence. Before Magic, the core team - including CEO Mike Chen and Aaron Kemmer - built Made in Space, the company that put the first 3D printer on the International Space Station. Going from orbital manufacturing to booking calendars sounds like a downgrade until you notice both are the same discipline: doing hard operational work reliably, at a distance, without dropping the ball.
The most recent chapter is the one that keeps the company from looking like a relic in an AI world. Rather than pretend chatbots will not touch the assistant business, Magic did the opposite - it handed the tools to its people. Every assistant now works with Magic AI, an in-browser layer wired to premium models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and Magic 24/7 puts an AI on the front line to answer instantly, with a human stepping in when the task needs judgment. The tagline practically writes itself: hire an assistant, and that assistant has their own assistant.
"Magic is kind of like you had a friend, or assistant, or family member you can go to and say 'Hey, I need this' - and then it's done."
- Mike Chen, Co-founder & CEO
Whether that model wins is partly a question about labor and partly a question about pricing. Magic sells time in fairly plain terms: roughly $270 a week for a part-time assistant, about $540 a week for full-time, with Magic 24/7 available on its own. A $10-an-hour assistant, introduced in 2021 for small businesses, sounds like a race to the bottom until you pair it with training and AI tooling, at which point cheap labor starts to look like leveraged labor.
The client wall does the rest of the talking. Magic points to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, GitLab and its own alma mater Y Combinator among the names that have used it - not bad company for a service that began by offering to fetch people lunch.
