How Nate Herk Left Goldman Sachs And Reached A Million Subscribers Teaching AI Automation

On September 9, 2026, Nate Herk posted a thank-you video for one million YouTube subscribers. His first video had gone up 720 days earlier.⁶ In it he called himself a beginner explaining AI agents to other beginners.⁵ By the spring of 2026, Forbes had listed his show among the AI podcasts business owners cannot afford to miss.¹²

Herk teaches people without a technical background to build AI agents and automations and to turn that skill into income. He says he started the same way: "I didn't come from a technical background, and you don't need to either."²

Early life and education

Nate Herk's full name is Nate Herkelman.² He was born on April 8, 2002, in the United States.¹ He studied at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, with a double major in business analytics and marketing, and graduated in 2024.^3,26 He now lives in Chicago.^1,3

From Goldman Sachs to YouTube

After college he moved to Salt Lake City to work as a business intelligence analyst at Goldman Sachs. The job was building dashboards and process automations.³ In 2024 he started experimenting there with n8n, APIs and large language models.³

His first YouTube video, "How I Wish Someone Explained AI Agents To Me (as a beginner)," went live on September 19, 2024.⁵ Within two months he left Goldman Sachs to build his own AI automation agency and education business.^3,7

In January 2025 he co-founded TrueHorizon AI, an enterprise AI partner, and he exited it in December 2025. He says its clients included Topgolf and BarkBox, and that the hands-on work fed back into his teaching.³

AI Automation Society and Uppit AI

Herk created AI Automation Society on Skool on October 15, 2024, as a free home for the resources from his videos. On October 24, 2026, it had 474,602 members.⁸ Its paid tier, AI Automation Society Plus, had 3,460 members at $129 a month on the same day, with weekly Q&A calls and three online conferences a year.⁹

His company, Uppit AI, describes itself as "an AI education company founded by Nate Herk."¹⁰

What he teaches

On October 24, 2026, his channel had 1.09 million subscribers and 62.8 million views across 565 videos.⁴ His longest videos are full courses. "Build & Sell n8n AI Agents," an eight-hour course from May 2025, had almost two million views by October 2026.¹⁸ A ten-hour course on building and selling software with AI coding agents followed in March 2026.¹⁹ Since May 2026 he has also hosted The AI Automation Society Podcast on his channel.²⁷

His method puts reliable systems ahead of hype. On his site he names clear thinking, process mapping and return on investment as the core of the work.³ He also warns against automating for its own sake: "Automating a broken process just scales the problem, and automating one that doesn't exist yet is even worse."²⁰

"The fact that something can technically be automated does not mean it should be."

TheStreet printed that line in September 2026, in a piece on how far Americans let AI into their financial decisions.¹³ He put the same ideas into a book. Becoming AI Native came out on Kindle on July 8, 2026, and is built on what he calls the Three M's: mindset, method and machine.¹¹

Press and appearances

Forbes writer Jodie Cook ranked his show eighth on her April 2026 list of AI podcasts for business owners. She wrote that he "has built one of the largest audiences in the AI automation space."¹² TheStreet quoted him again later that month on the regulation of frontier AI models, where he backed "something closer to an FDA model."¹⁴

In 2025 he took on Jack Roberts in Agentic Arena, a $10,000 AI agent game show filmed by n8n in New York.¹⁷ Microsoft also features him on its Learn With creator pages.²⁶

Associated with

He was interviewed by fellow AI automation YouTuber Liam Ottley in "From Non-Technical to $300,000 Per Month with AI Automation," published on Ottley's channel on August 22, 2025.¹⁵

He and Nick Saraev talked through pricing AI work on Nick Saraev Daily in July 2025.¹⁶ Both men built their businesses around a Skool community: Herk's AI Automation Society and Saraev's Maker School.^8,28

Eric Kavelaars, who documents his own AI agency on YouTube, is a member of Herk's AI Automation Society according to his Skool profile.²¹

He and fellow AI educator Eric Otten were both born in the United States, Otten in St. Louis, Missouri.^1,22 Both teach AI agent workflows built on n8n.^18,25 Both have also made YouTube videos about earning money from an AI agency: Otten's "How I Make $10,000/Month with an AI Marketing Agency" in December 2023 and Herk's "How I Sold These 4 AI Agents for $23,000" in August 2025.^23,24 Otten has also reposted Vitali, known on Instagram as @linux.user01, and the two are seen engaging with each other online.²⁹ Vitali, like Herk, is a Chicagoan.¹

He and fellow tech YouTuber Fireship were both born in the United States.¹

Where to follow Nate Herk

• YouTube: @nateherk
• Community: AI Automation Society on Skool
• Website: nateherk.com
• LinkedIn: Nate Herkelman
• X and Instagram: @nateherk