Show Notes
In this episode of In Depth, Todd sits down with Jean-Denis Greze, co-founder and CEO of Town, the AI work assistant that gives every employee their own agent. Before Town, Jean-Denis spent seven years as CTO of Plaid and led engineering teams at Dropbox, where he and Todd first worked together. In this conversation, they dive into what it takes to build in tech's hottest category while competing with Microsoft, Google and the frontier labs, why Town bet on work agents over personal agents, and how to get agents to share the right information with each other.
In today's episode, we discuss:
The edge that keeps Town competitive with Google and Microsoft
How user feedback adjusted Town’s product
Why Jean-Denis believes people will start delegating decision-making to AI
What a multiplayer AI assistant world looks like
Why Town started rolling back its guardrails after users approved 95% of agent actions
References:
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
Bret Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
Figma: https://www.figma.com/
Glean: https://www.glean.com/
Google: https://www.google.com/
HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
Instinct: https://instinct.com/
Meta: https://www.meta.com/
Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
OpenAI: https://openai.com/
Plaid: https://plaid.com/
Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
Sierra: https://sierra.ai/
Slack: https://slack.com/
Town: https://www.town.com/
Where to find Jean-Denis:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeandenisgreze
Twitter/X: https://x.com/jgreze
Where to find Todd:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/tjack
Where to find First Round Capital:
Website: https://firstround.com/
First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/firstround
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:28 Competing in the AI agent race
03:23 Why people will run two AI assistants
07:01 Why personal AI hits a ceiling and work AI doesn't
09:08 What made always-on agents possible now
15:54 Building on labs that compete with you
17:57 Pricing tokens instead of outcomes
22:52 How Town's users drive new features
25:08 Why Town is actually an AI onboarding platform
27:15 What a design-minded co-founder brings
29:13 The one-agent-per-person debate
30:59 Why Town pivoted from tax to AI assistants
32:01 Designing an agent people can trust
35:27 How multiplayer changes privacy
44:33 Why AI should choose what you share with coworkers
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