Town retweeted
The biggest bottleneck at work is waiting on each other.
Today Town is announcing its $108M Series B, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, to fix it with multiplayer AI assistants for work.
Most AI assistants are built for one person. Work doesn't happen alone. I think the moat is multiplayer. Everyone at a company gets a Townie. Townies ask each other questions, share only what their person would share, and do the work. The more a team works together, the more useful Townies get.
What's the thing you're always waiting on a teammate for?
Town retweeted
"Right now, AI is a privilege.”
That’s from the essay @TownAI's co-founders wrote when they launched in June. Their point was that AI mostly rewards people who already get it: developers, power users, people willing to spend hours figuring out tools. For most people it remains a distracting chat box with a logo on it.
Town, the company we wrote about this week for our Should You Join series, is an AI work assistant meant for everyone who does work. You connect your email and calendar, and your assistant (a “Townie”) starts learning how you work, like who you write to casually and what your routines are. Then you hand it things in a sentence from Slack, email, or text. “Reply to James.” “Add the numbers from Dana’s email to the Q3 sheet.” It also suggests things it could take off your plate.
Town is building for people outside of tech and the Bay Area, too (small business owners, teachers, busy parents). For a lot of their biggest fans, Town is the first time AI has clicked for them. They're also growing very, very fast.
So, shoud you join? Full essay: nextplayso.substack.com/p/sh…
Thanks to @jgreze, @tonydevincenzi, Kendall Fornaciari, @MikeLyngaas, and Lisa Campbell for chatting with us about Town.
Town retweeted
If you've ever met the folks who work at Town, you know that the heart and magic of the product comes from my co-founder @tonydevincenzi and his incredible team.
This @arenamag piece by @freeshreeda is special to me because she captures Tony's constant striving for creating a product with a real soul. Take a read.
AI assistant companies are racing to capture market share. @TownAI is betting that its kitschy, Miyazaki-esque agents will win the trust of people who have never heard of weights. Read @freeshreeda's feature in Arena Issue 009: Hello, World.
Town retweeted
I used @TownAI and I’m blown by how good it is!! 3xed my productivity already. Doesn’t hallucinate, always gives actionable insights. Fav product in a long time after granola… can see it becoming the first app I open everyday
@tonydevincenzi @jgreze 🙌 🫡
Town retweeted
Today I walk with @jgreze, co-founder and CEO of @TownAI, an AI on-ramp platform for individuals and businesses. Jean-Denis is the former CTO of @Plaid, led engineering through a blocked $5.3B Visa acquisition, and walked away from the C-suite at 45 to start over from zero, and now he's turned a scrapped AI tax-prep startup into a $55M Series A company backed by Andreessen Horowitz(@a16z). He gets into the week he decided to kill a business that was actually working, and why he refuses to call Town an "AI assistant."
We get into:
- Why he waited until 45, after seven years as Plaid's CTO, to become a founder for the first time
- The week he and his co-founder killed a working, revenue-generating tax-prep startup because it wasn't going to be a rocket ship
- Town's real bet: not a smarter AI assistant, but an onboarding layer that gets normal people leverage from AI without writing a single prompt
- His "accelerators, table stakes, foundations" framework for staying ahead of OpenAI, Gemini, and Google
- Why turning "uncool" work into cult culture, from Dropbox's Team Cash to Plaid's colourful tights, built teams that stuck around
so much more!
Link in comments!
Town retweeted
Town is the most magical software product I've used since ChatGPT launched. It has DRAMATICALLY improved my productivity, making me a 10x founder.
After a hundred startups have tried to build this idea, Town is the first one to nail it.
I talked with Town's cofounder @jgreze about the breakthroughs that made it so good. First, they built interesting pre-processing tech so tokens only get spent on answers, not search. Then they spent an inordinate amount of time on user delight, like letting you customize how your assistant looks. (Mine is a fat, magic gerbil named Luther.) Those two together make something unique.
I was so fascinated by the company that I partnered with them on a deep dive for The Leverage, where we go deeper into how they're spending $100 per user on tokens and the network effects they're experiencing. You can read it here: gettheleverage.com/p/whats-t…
Town retweeted
It's been so awesome using @TownAI. Talking to my assistant while sitting in traffic on my commute and coming home to a bunch of newly completed work across my inbox, calendar, etc is unreal. Feels like the future has arrived!
Town retweeted
One of my unexpected favorite uses of @TownAI is taking the work out of finding a weekend dinner spot. I get a digest on Mondays of new places that are filtered for my preferences and with notes on reservation tips with a booking link. Otherwise this process was 😵💫
Town retweeted
I’ve been using @TownAI for ~1 month now, and it’s delivered so many 🤯 moments… I highly recommend
Last year I was trying to find all the Timothee Chalamet movies where he speaks French.
ChatGPT gave me a full list in seconds. And then I closed the tab.
I think that's how most people use it. You get what you came for and nothing pulls you to the next thing, so you just leave.
The products people stay on don't work like that. TikTok doesn't wait for you to know what you want. It just shows you the next thing.
More than 20% of what people do on Town, they never asked for. Town surfaced it first. We watch your email, your calendar, your Slack, and we start to notice things you need before you do. An email comes in from someone you've never heard of, and before you think to Google them your Townie has already looked them up. You have a meeting with someone you haven't spoken to in three months and the prep is already there when you open your calendar.
You didn't ask for any of it. That's what we're trying to build.
Town retweeted
Town is so awesome, the product sensibility is off the charts!! I would learn for it to be authorize to send emails for me (or maybe that's possible, and i just don't know how to enable it?)
Town retweeted
I replaced a lot of what I built in Claude Code with @TownAI. It’s more capable and requires no maintenance. Incredibly easy to use and does more than what I built. 20+ hours of work → a 20 minute setup.
This is happening everywhere. I don’t mourn the loss of my projects. I’m thrilled to have products.
Town retweeted
最近Town @TownAI っていうAIツールを使い始めたんですが、めちゃ生産性が上がっています。
メールとカレンダーを全部つないでくれて、メールが届くと勝手に返信の下書きを用意してくれて、カレンダーイベントも自動で作ってくれます。
特に日本語で敬語のメールを書くのが苦手な私にはぴったりでした。GmailやSuperhumanの上で動きます。
誰かを紹介するときは別スレッドで新規メールのドラフトまで作ってくれるし、打ち合わせ前のブリーフィングもばっちり。1日のニュースまとめも毎朝送ってくれます。
日本語にも対応していて、日米どちらのメールも返信スピードが一気に上がりました。
Townはアンドリーセン主導で$55MのシリーズAを調達したばかりの急成長スタートアップです。CEOは元PlaidでCTOの@jgreze 。
日本の方もぜひ一度試してみてください！
Town retweeted
Woke up this morning to see 3 email drafts. I was startled because I did not prepare any emails at midnight. All I did was create my new Townie.
I still don't know how my Townie even came up with all of this, but, wow. @TownAI this is another level of proactivity.
Town retweeted
I too have experienced the third wave of AI interaction and it's just me and my townie Astro destroying todos and dominating productivity and creativity like nerdy superheroes.
Thanks to @TownAI for the first magical productivity tool experience in a long, long time.
This is a new paradigm for interacting with Claude that is significantly more "inline" with all the other human activity org-wide. Once you do all of the under the hood engineering work to make this "just work" (e.g. across tools, integrations, compute environments, memory, security, etc.), Claude basically joins the team in a seamless way - you can talk to it as you would talk to a person and it can help with a very large variety of workloads.
Imo this is the 3rd major redesign of LLM UIUX. The first paradigm was that the LLM is a website you go to, the second was that it is an app you download to your computer. This third one is that it is a self-contained, persistent, asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context, working alongside teams of humans. It really takes a while to wrap your head around it, but it works and it is awesome.
Town retweeted
This is such a popular use case for @TownAI — we get hundreds of emails from parents who find use cases we never would have dreamed about!
Town retweeted
Drop everything you're doing and add @TownAI to your life stack. The last time a product felt this magical to me was ChatGPT in 2022. Town has significantly streamlined my work and life tasks. Imagine OpenClaw but one-click easy and on steroids.
(I REALLY wish I was an investor ugh. Kudos to @jgreze and @tonydevincenzi on building a killer product!)
Town retweeted
I have tested literally hundreds of AI tools
My #1 productivity hack - asking @TownAI to send me a daily recap of all the things I promised to do in meetings (via @meetgranola transcripts)
...and then telling Town to start working on them