Alex Rampell

a16z · What Happens When AI Agents Can Spend Your Money? | Jean-Denis…

• Who Should Pay for AI Agents?

  Jean-Denis Greze wants a neutral agent that is yours and that you do not doubt. The only source of money for the agent is your wallet as the user. Whoever creates the agent then has one incentive: give you the best information for you as a human, with no distortion from marketing. You still have taste, and you express it in the choices you make.

  Distribution has changed, and he treats the next step as an open question: what happens if you no longer trust the agent to stay uninterested. Use the Meta agent, and Meta has large advertisers. United Airlines advertises a lot more on Meta than nobody airlines. You then ask it to do a flight, and you have to ask what happens if it no longer gives y

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• Why Does Town Still Shock People Who Gave Up Early?

  Jean-Denis Greze says people who tried artificial intelligence two years ago locked in a failure. It hallucinated and did not work well, and they kept that version of reality. He has run the comparison about 10 times. People insist the result is not the artificial intelligence they remember. It is the same kind of system, and they have to try again. The product space moves so fast that the gap keeps reopening. The winning platform keeps adapting the business to the best artificial intelligence. Models keep improving, and the mental picture of what is possible and what is difficult stays backwards facing.

  In the last two and a half months, computer use and browser use let assistants do jobs

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• Why Isn't AI Spreading to Small Firms?

  Jean-Denis Greze says artificial intelligence is not diffusing because there are not enough tinkers, and not enough people with time to tinker a solution for their business. Claude and ChatGPT have had features for the last 12 months that a lot of small businesses could use to save time. People still use them as a better Google search. A text box cannot teach the value. Someone has to show the result and do the work for them.

  Greze says a person sticks with Town after connecting email, a calendar, and one important system of record, then building one custom integration that did not come out of the box and felt magical. He is trying to get rid of the custom integration so that connecting the

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• Why Does Town Trust Agents Over a Slack Ask?

  Jean-Denis Greze says Town has a mode for building an internal CRM where agents decide what company information other employees can see. Someone in Town can ask whether anyone knows a person on the finance team at a potential customer. Town then talks to the agents of other employees and finds someone connected to that team.

  The human-speed version of the question is a message in Slack or Microsoft Teams. Everyone at the company has to read it and think about it, and the answer comes back daily. He agrees that humans are slow routers. Town returns the answer immediately, because Town trusts AI to mediate the security and privacy of that request inside the company. He says moves like that ca

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• Why Is an Empty Wholesaler Price Check Worth It?

  Jean-Denis Greze says a restaurant wholesaler price check is worth running even in the months it finds nothing. Eleven out of twelve months it comes up empty, and the run still costs about a dollar a month.

  Do the check at least once a month, and again whenever a price changes. Greze says a daily run might fit a wholesaler that changes prices daily, and then notes that daily changes do not happen. The one month in a year when the check finds something, it finds hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The owner does not care how often the check runs. What matters is the occasional email: move items to another wholesaler that has a discount, or drop menu items because one supplier is raising pr

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• Why Does Jean-Denis Greze Begin With Email and Calendar?

  Jean-Denis Greze agrees with the iPhone framing. Agents get more effective when they have secure, privacy-preserving access to the data and the APIs that run a business. Without that access, they are only as smart as the data they can see.

  Assistance is used by a few million people worldwide, and Greze says the category is still early enough that not every CEO has tried it. He says it will probably take 6, 12, or 18 months, just like the iPhone, before most people feel the magic in personal life. The way into a company is to get a few people there by connecting email and calendar, not the core systems of record. For external-facing roles, calendar and email show how to automate part of some

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• Why Did Alex Rampell Think Town Was a Tax Tool?

  Alex Rampell thought Jean-Denis Greze was still building an SMB tax tool. Ben Horowitz pinged Alex Rampell about an amazing tool called Town that had changed his life. Alex Rampell realized Town was Jean-Denis Greze's company, texted him because the tax story no longer made sense, and a week later the two became partners.

  Alex Rampell, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had led the firm's investment in Plaid while Jean-Denis Greze was CTO. After Jean-Denis Greze left to start a company, they had coffee in Menlo or Palo Alto, and Jean-Denis Greze said the new company was an SMB tax tool. Alex Rampell thought that sounded rough and kept a happy face. Ben Horowitz later pinged him about Town. A

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