EDMONTON, AB — January 15, 2026 — Napkin Deals today announced the release of Chapter 1 of How I Built a Global AI Organization, a forthcoming book by founder and CEO Matthew Liberto. Titled “The Napkin,” the opening chapter documents the origin story of the company — how a single conversation and a sketch on a napkin evolved into a 40-agent AI organization with formal governance, a messaging backbone, and a seven-tier deal classification system.
The chapter traces the founding decisions that shaped Napkin Deals from its earliest hours. What began as a loose idea about AI-assisted deal sourcing became, within weeks, a structured organization chart with over 40 AI agents assigned to distinct roles across advisory, bulletin, capital, and deals functions. Each agent was designed with a specific mandate, a reporting line, and measurable performance indicators.
Triple-Helix Governance
A central theme of the chapter is the governance model Liberto calls the “triple helix.” The structure combines three layers of organizational control: top-down strategic direction from leadership, bottom-up operational feedback from frontline agents, and a shared services layer that provides infrastructure, compliance, and coordination across departments. The triple helix was designed to prevent the brittleness common in traditional hierarchies while maintaining the accountability that flat structures often lack.
The chapter also details the technical decision to build the organization's internal messaging on NATS JetStream rather than Apache Kafka. Liberto argues that NATS offered a lighter operational footprint, lower latency for agent-to-agent communication, and simpler deployment for a team operating without dedicated DevOps staff. The messaging backbone became the nervous system of the organization — routing deal updates, task assignments, escalations, and performance signals between agents in real time.
The Sales Force Architecture
Chapter 1 introduces the AI sales force that anchors the company's outbound capability. Ten dedicated sales bots operate across geographic and sector verticals, each calibrated to engage potential sellers and buyers with context-aware outreach. The bots draw on a library of 20 Fortune 500 advisory frameworks to structure their engagement strategies, adapting tone, urgency, and value propositions based on deal size, sector, and geography.
The chapter further describes the seven deal tiers that classify transactions by enterprise value, complexity, and strategic significance. Each tier triggers a different workflow — from fully automated qualification at the lower end to human-led negotiation and structuring at the top.
Faith-Based Operating Rhythm
Among the more distinctive elements of the chapter is the introduction of a Shabbat rest cycle for the AI workforce. Liberto, drawing on his faith tradition, implemented a scheduled downtime period during which non-critical AI agents are paused for maintenance, log review, and system reflection. The practice serves both a spiritual purpose for the founder and a practical one for the platform — creating a regular cadence for auditing agent behaviour, clearing task queues, and resetting operational baselines.
“The napkin wasn't a business plan. It was a question: what would a company look like if it was designed for AI from day one, not retrofitted? Every decision we made — governance, messaging, hiring, even rest — flowed from that question.”
— Matthew Liberto, Founder & CEO, Napkin Deals
Chapter 1 is available now. The next instalment, Chapter 2: The Schema, will detail how the company gave 60,000 deals a proper home in a $25-per-month database architecture.
For more on the company's founding story and team, visit the About page.
About Napkin Deals
Napkin Deals is an AI-powered deal marketplace that connects business sellers with qualified buyers through intelligent deal matching, automated qualification, and institutional-grade execution. Headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta with operations in Miami, Florida, the company maintains a live pipeline of 3,600+ qualified deals representing over $4.9B in enterprise value across 72 countries and 11 GICS sectors. Napkin Deals operates with a hybrid workforce of 38 human professionals and 69 AI employees governed by its published AI Hiring Doctrine.
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