Town 创始人 Jean-Denis Greze 谈 AI 创业公司如何应对大模型厂商竞争

Jean-Denis Greze, founder of @TownAI, on the question every AI app founder gets asked: what stops th...

Jean-Denis Greze, founder of @TownAI , on the question every AI app founder gets asked: what stops the big labs from crushing you? "It is risky always to be competing with your suppliers, right? We're competing against our suppliers. So you gotta ask yourself, is that naturally the right state of the world?" "Someone at OpenAI, at Anthropic, at Google could wake up and decide to do that. So the better answer actually is to think about our customers and what they want." "It is our job to determine from all the AI capabilities, frontier model, open weight, what is the right thing for you as a business. And I think you can save money there, but also you can de-risk ever having made the wrong partner." "There are companies that picked OpenAI like two years ago, and then Anthropic was better at coding for a 12-month period. And those companies had to use both because they realized to be competitive, they needed Claude." "If you're a smart business, you really think about the neutrality of who's providing intelligence for you and who's routing." @jgreze @arampell Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter a16z @a16z Jean-Denis Greze was CTO of Plaid. His next startup, an AI tax product for small businesses, brought in nearly $1M in revenue its first year, and he projected $2.5 to $3M the next. He shut it down anyway. The reason: in the age of AI, it was never going to be venture scale. Incumbents could use the same technology to automate tax prep for their existing customers faster than a startup could win market share. Tax is also sold once a year, so he had about a one-month window to pivot before the door closed. The pivot became Town, an AI assistant that works from your email and calendar. It found product-market fit fast enough that Ben Horowitz messaged a16z's Alex Rampell to say it "changed my life." In this conversation, Alex and Jean-Denis cover: - How to know when to kill a business that's working on paper - Why Town competes with OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies it buys its tokens from - Why the "forward deployed engineer" model gets worse as AI gets better - How a $1/month AI routine can save a restaurant thousands - What agents mean for Amazon, advertising and the future of shopping 0:57 How Ben Horowitz discovered Town 2:20 Why Town started with AI tax prep 3:55 Why tax couldn't be venture scale 6:30 Shutting down a working business 10:24 The customer ask that became Town 13:35 Why Town built for users before IT 16:18 AI's iPhone moment at work 21:28 Jevons paradox for executive assistants 23:13 Town as a "token allocation machine" 28:00 How Town tailors itself to each job 34:03 Competing with your token suppliers 42:24 Staying off the AI labs' radar 44:42 Why AI isn't spreading evenly yet 52:32 How agents break the ad model 55:35 The friction humans actually enjoy 57:05 Why supply aggregators lose to agents YouTube: youtu.be/o_5f4N6Nq80 @jgreze @TownAI @arampell Your browser does not support the video tag. 🔗 View on Twitter 🔗 View Quoted Tweet 💬 8 🔄 3 ❤️ 23 👀 6363 📊 7 ⚡