German founder raises $15M from Benchmark to build a 'world's mutual friend' social platform that bridges filter bubbles

Speaker 1: fun That's crazy.

Speaker 2: Well, congrats on the progress and thank you Yeah.

Speaker 1: Great to meet you,

Speaker 2: Jonathan. Company. And we'll Such a pleasure, guys. Have a

Speaker 1: good one. Great stuff.

Speaker 2: Goodbye. Up next, we have Paul Scherer from Eagan. Eagan raising $15,000,000 from Benchmark to build a mutual friend platform. Paul, how are you doing?

Speaker 1: What's going on?

Speaker 4: Hey. So good to meet you guys. Great to meet you.

Speaker 1: Great to meet you. And excited that you're not building another agent for the enterprise. No. You got got something new for us.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Break it down. Introduce yourself and the company.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, so great to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 8: You know,

Speaker 4: we're we're we're building, you know, we call the world's mutual friend.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 10: Sort of,

Speaker 4: you know, instead of all of all these things that are, you know, out there trying to, you know, optimize our own bubbles, We're sort of you know, they're diverging more and more, you know, the world that's super hyper personalized for all of us

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Is also really isolating because it's different for all of us. We we wanna bring these bubbles a bit closer together again.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So walk us through the experience. Well, first, maybe, like, where are you in this journey? You've raised some money, but do you have a team? Is the product live? How are you thinking about actually building the company?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, it's super early. Yeah. We're we're really, really grateful for all the support and all the partners that we've, you know, been able to meet. I'm from Germany. I literally grew up in this, tiny village, less than a thousand people. I moved here, like, less than a year ago to San Francisco, and I've been I I I literally landed. I had a one way flight here, stayed in a hostel. And a few months later, I've been, you know, meeting some of the greats and they've been, you know, so incredibly helpful. And we we've built a small team. It's very early. We don't you know, we haven't launched anything when we were working with, you know, early early users to build something really special and something really meaningful.

Speaker 2: So what can you share Living the

Speaker 1: s living the s f dream.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, maybe take us back first and were you doing before this? How did you get into startups? Walk me through that.

Speaker 4: I I I've been building things, you know, forever. I grew up, you know, in this sort middle class town, and I never knew anything about entrepreneurship, so I've always been building things. And then during the pandemic, I actually just went on Twitter, and I started to spend a lot of time, like twelve hours a day on Twitter. I think I have, like, 25,000 tweets and replies from, like, like a Sound good. From, like a three month period. Yeah. And and that's when I first you know, I I, you I didn't know what a VC was until I was like 18. Yeah. And, yeah, it's just like during the pandemic, I was like about to turn 17, I left high school to to do that. And so I've been been doing startups for five years now. You know, spent some time in Paris where I worked with the incredible people of a company called Augment. And then, you know, I could finally get a visa and go to The US, which I always kind of felt like was was my real place to be.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Alright. And then take us through the idea, Maze, and how and how you landed on this, like, general kind of space.

Speaker 4: You know, I think I've always been, like, really interested in sort of this this intersection of of arts and culture and, you know, technology. And, like, you know, growing up in this, like, you know, place where I grew up, and I I really love German children's literature. And there's this book that my dad read me when I was 10 about this little girl called Momo, who kind of connects everyone in her little town and helps sort of save the world from the time thieves. And I've always been inspired by this, and so it's been something I've been thinking about for a really long time. And I think now, more than ever, we really need this. Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Feels very early, but you got Benchmark to come in and invest $15,000,000 They are the consumer social fund. They're willing to bet, you know, big and early. But typically, I see them investing after there's like a spark or like some sign real like sign of of of life? Do you feel like do you feel like you're there yet and that you have something that early users love? Like, at what point do you and and then, I guess, at what point do you think you'll you'll launch?

Speaker 4: So I think with Benchmark, you know, and and just more broadly, we we already see, I think, moments of magic. And it's very, very early, but it's been just really incredible to see how people create these moments of connections, you know, early early users. And I think just partnering up with Benchmark has been, you know, incredible experience. And I think I I don't feel like I've ever pitched Benchmark. I think we just Matt and we sort of very quickly and Zio got down, like, three days. And we we very quickly just realized that we had very similar ideas of what the future should look like and that we wanted to go on this journey together. And everything else kind of became secondary to to just like trying to make that happen together.

Speaker 1: Do you think there's a risk of becoming a dating app? Or is that the wrong way to think about it?

Speaker 4: That's funny.

Speaker 1: Because I just like historically historically, the like, you know, meet meet people in your area apps even if they're intent you know, they they they're intended to create, you know, friendships. You know, you you may get power users that are have other intentions.

Speaker 4: I mean, totally. I think for us, we care more about, you know, strengthening, you know, already existing relationships. Right? We live in a time where we have all made way more relationships than, you know, ever before. You know, a hundred years ago, you might have a 100 friends. Today, have probably, like, about 600 relationships. And we really care about making these relationships meaningful much more than, like, adding just random people on top of that. And so I think it's less of a thing for us.

Speaker 1: Are you have you been surprised that, you know, we're this far into the consumer AI boom and yet the only AI apps topping the App Store charts are basically language models?

Speaker 4: I think it's it's natural, maybe. I don't think we're in the consumer AI boom yet because, you know, the the the the great product people usually take, you know, a bit of time to sort of come out of the woodworks and start, you know, imagining what the new paradigms might look like. We've seen, you know, an incredible thing, which is that the sort of single player experiences are more powerful than ever ever before. Mhmm. You know, multiple orders of magnitude. I think now the interesting thing is how, you know, how are how are the enduring experiences built? Like, what what what does it, you know how how do you build a product that, you know, is so different that it couldn't have been done, you know, five years ago because it's just a new paradigm and sort of new primitives? And I think it takes time to to find and invent that.

Speaker 2: How do you think about Dunbar's number? I remember Dave Morin had this app Path that you were supposed to add no more than a 150 friends, I believe. And I'm wondering if you think that number's changing or you think that there's some sort of, like, optimal ground truth to that idea of the of Dunbar's number? Have you reflected on that at all?

Speaker 4: We think a lot about it, and I think there's a lot of interesting things in Dunbar's research. Mhmm. To me, the two things that stand out are that the the headline number is growing. Right? We have way more relationships than ever before. It doesn't mean that we're you know, our brains are getting better at your computing, the the social dynamics. But the real big problem is that we have way less close people. Right? So and I think that really is the the most interesting thing to me is how do we get that back.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What do you think do do you think there's anything to be done on the social networking side to make filter bubbles less less prevalent. There was some some work done, it felt like, on YouTube where you would watch one video and immediately get served another video that was similar, and so you'd wind up sort of down a rabbit hole. And then YouTube seemed to have changed the algorithm to sort of show you the opposite side of the argument. If it was a video for in favor of something, you'd see a video that took the other side pretty quickly. But I agree with you on the general trend that, like, there there is these, like, know, niches and niches and niches. And that's been good in some ways, but it's also created some isolation. Have you just reflected on, like, if you had full control over all the social platforms, what you might do differently?

Speaker 4: It's an interesting question. I think what's missing is sort of opinion. Right? We went from, you know, five newsletter outlets, you know, maybe 12 radio stations, a bunch of TV stations to, like, sort of infinite nuance. Right? And and everything, you know, every take that you could possibly have, you can find it on Twitter. Mhmm. And and what we want is not the average of the world. Right? Like, you don't actually care about the recommendation or the take of the average of the world, but you care about, you know, the take that your people care about.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And so there's sort of like, we we think there's something in the middle. Right? An in between space that's really interesting that brings you closer with actual people versus, you know, just makes it the average of the world or, you know, leaves you alone in this, like, hyper isolated bubble where you you you know, you end up seeing things on TikTok that maybe are generated on the fly, and, like, no one else will ever see that video. And you can't go to your office anymore and be, guys, did you see this, like, insane thing? Like, and and talk about it.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. How do you think about just app growth? There's obviously viral loops that can happen with anything that's somewhat social even if it's a little bit tighter. There's launch videos and paid marketing. Have you explored sort of like the current landscape of what it takes to actually make it in the App Store, which feels like more competitive than ever?

Speaker 4: I think maybe the answer is to not make it in the app store. What does it look like to build something, you know, I don't know how the I mean, we have obviously strong opinions on how the how the world might look like and where I I I don't I'm not convinced that it's gonna be another app.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I

Speaker 4: have this wonderful story that one of our investors, Ben Silberman, told me when I first met him about sort of, you know, his son describing his job, like Ben's job. And he was just like, oh, you know, he he was asking, you know, all these squares on your phone? And my dad makes one of them. Yeah. And I don't wanna make another square. And I think we have enough squares competing for our attention, and maybe the the next thing isn't another square, but something completely different. And I think that's what's exciting about this time. You can build something that just truly has never been there before and that sort of escapes any previous incumbent.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because, like, even within Pinterest, the app that Ben Silverman founded, there like, it has more squares within the square. It's like

Speaker 1: all the way down.

Speaker 2: The layout, it tends to be a

Speaker 1: bunch of squares. Will. Yeah. We're extremely curious to to try to try what you're building when you're ready. I know the chat is. I think the mystery is good. Everyone's coming out. They're launching with, you know, the three minute launch video explaining, and you're just coming out with pure mystery.

Speaker 2: Where can people go to do you have a wait list at least?

Speaker 4: We're on teamiagen.com. You can sort of visit our office Okay. At

Speaker 1: Visit the office. You're

Speaker 4: you wanna learn more I'm the website. Person. Yeah. We love in person. That's why we built our office as the website. Oh.

Speaker 1: No email no email capture on the on the No.

Speaker 4: We're I think

Speaker 1: You guys are post email, post app, post This

Speaker 2: is amazing. I love it.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Come come visit us on our on on on our office website or in person in our office. We're hiring exceptional people, and we're excited to build something really special.

Speaker 2: I like this this typewriter that you can play on. This is very fun. Beautiful website. I absolutely love it. The bowling balls and everything.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Great great website concept. Unfortunately, it will be copied relentlessly.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: But But

Speaker 2: You will

Speaker 1: you did it first and that's what matters. Anyway Great to meet you, Paul. Very excited to Yeah. To see where you guys ship. Yeah. And come back on

Speaker 4: when We'll we

Speaker 2: talk to you soon. Have a

Speaker 5: good Thank you.

Speaker 2: Did you hear that Alphabet is poised for a $100,000,000,000 windfall on the SpaceX investment they made. Google owns around 5% of SpaceX and could get

Speaker 1: Tyler's fired.

Speaker 2: 100,000,000,000 from SpaceX's IPO. They manage to pull it off at the 2,000,000,000,000 valuation, not bad. That is a crazy stat. And

Speaker 1: They needed a windfall.

Speaker 2: Ashay Sanghvi from Haystack says, what are the odds that this was a result of this? And he's showing the debate between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel where Peter made the argument that Google is printing too much cash and needs to innovate, needs to invest in more things.

Speaker 5: It's funny. Dwarkesh actually asked a very similar question to Nvidia. He was like, oh, you guys have all this extra cash. Yeah. Are you gonna train a new model? Like, something internally. Right? Because they've said they're gonna do open source model.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Aren't they? Wasn't the answer just yes?

Speaker 5: I I mean, he didn't say like, yeah, we're going after the labs. Yeah. It's like very different. They're doing open source. But it is it feels like a very similar question.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They're also doing self driving cars at NVIDIA, and obviously Google's been very successful with that. It feels like the the Google investments that burned money for a very long time, although they obviously stayed very profitable, A lot of those penciled out very, very well. And and it does seem like the the end result of this discussion was Google should invest more, and they did. And they invested in SpaceX and Waymo and a bunch of other projects. And some of them didn't pan out, but certainly many many of them did. What else is in the timeline?

Speaker 1: Mark is noping out. Zach says, okay. Actually in same paper published yesterday, a research group in Korea built a gene switch you can control wirelessly using EMFs. Wow. EMFs. Like looking at the fields. They expose mice to 60 hertz EMF. Yeah. Same frequency as your wall outlet using a pair of large coils that generate a uniform magnetic field around the animal for cyclic three day or four day off pulses. This showed that you could activate OSK to do epigenetic reprogramming in the progeroid in aged mice, extending lifespan and reversing aging markers across multiple tissues, conditionally switch on mutant amyloid genes only in aged mouse brains, letting them separate aging effects from amyloid to study AD biology in a way previous models couldn't. No drugs, no impacts, just a magnetic field from outside. The body That's pretty crazy. I'm close to taking a victory, like, a drug. I'm I'm very paranoid about about EMFs, but