Plaid 前 CTO 年入近百万美元仍关停首个创业项目，转型做 AI 助手 Town

Jean-Denis Greze, founder of @TownAI, on the question that made him kill his first startup despite n...

Jean-Denis Greze, founder of @TownAI , on the question that made him kill his first startup despite nearly $1M in first-year revenue: can you outrun the incumbents using the same technology? "After one year, we had what I would describe as a good business pre-AI... But post-AI, this was not gonna be a venture scale company." "We realized that the incumbents were gonna be able to use the technology to automate tax prep for their existing customers faster than we could grab market share. That's like a key thing if you're a founder you have to think about." "Your advantage if you're a new entrant is you're faster moving, you can build a different product, you can use different go-to-market approaches, but there's a ticking clock on the wall." "It felt for tax like we wouldn't be able to get to hundreds of millions of revenue before our competitors, the incumbents could, because you can only sell tax once a year... It's rare for people to brag about their tax prep situation." @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 💬 4 🔄 3 ❤️ 10 👀 4351 📊 4 ⚡