Town raises $108M Series B at $1B valuation to build AI workplace assistant with multiplayer and multi-channel support

Speaker 1: Ben Margera's been to the top New York Stock Exchange. What else do you need to know? Let's bring in our next guest, the co founder and CEO of Town, Drummond. Here he is. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: What's going on?

Speaker 1: How are you doing?

Speaker 3: I'm great. It's good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on, John Jordi.

Speaker 1: Thanks for hopping on. Sorry for keeping you waiting. We've been running a little bit late, but we've been having a lot of fun here. You have some amazing new news. What happened in the world of town?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm CEO of town. We just raised our series b, $108,000,000 at a billion dollar valuation. Congratulations. Thank you. You've got... I guess tell you Menlo Ventures. Second best bell.

Speaker 2: What? Who's got the first?

Speaker 1: New York Stock Exchange?

Speaker 3: That's right. I gotta get the IPO bells. That's number one. But yours is the second best. I

Speaker 2: was about to get offended,

Speaker 1: but No.

Speaker 2: But they've got Well, this

Speaker 1: they have an amazing bell.

Speaker 2: We have a gong. Yeah. Six months in Yeah. He was like, wait, why didn't we do a bell?

Speaker 1: Bell, like a Liberty Bell? Like a huge bell would have been so much more on brand. They actually do have a gong for taking a company public but only on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Then you hit the gong if you're if you're going public in Asia. In America, we ring bells except on the TV show that we ran.

Speaker 3: I can have a secondary... My goal is to have bells in all the continents just by having more and more listings after IPO. But, yeah, today is series b.

Speaker 1: Congrats.

Speaker 3: You know, you said it. It's a Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures are leading, and we're very lucky to be here.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Talk to us about the surface area of the product. I'm very interested in this concept of like personal agents are getting deployed. There's a whole bunch of different AI companies that are... The pitch is basically like merge your entire life with us and it's sort of extreme but also people are down and they're doing it. And then and then there's this question of like, will you take your personal agent to work? Will your work agent follow you home? We've heard people complaining about my engineers are using the craziest like high reasoning model to check the weather. And then somebody else might be like, wait, you let your your muse see my company's data because you linked your email? No. No. No. Like Facebook will not be seeing our company data. And so I'm interested in in in where you see the surface area currently, how how these lines blur over time. What is your model of the future of personal AI agents?

Speaker 3: Yeah. So I mean, think first stepping back, we believe that the way most humans will be interacting with digital information is not going to be through apps in the future. It's going to be through, like, assistants that are that are very much theirs, right, and that are optimizing for their success in life.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: There is a... There is this tension between personal, right, and work use. And if you talk to businesses, which is what we do, you know, all day, you find out that businesses really care about their data and their information and privacy and security and understanding, like, how their workers and employees are are doing the best work that they can. So, you know, our perspective is that it makes sense for people to have, like, a work assistant that is really focused on work tasks and has that entire, like, data privacy security collaboration story handled perfectly. And that's what we've been building. Now, in fact, there's... We have some customers that are like, I'm okay with my employees also connecting a personal account because I'm okay with that. And then the employee can use this for personal use cases.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Speaker 3: We have other businesses that are like, hey, no. We want clear separation on data. And we think, like, a great platform on the business side allows people to... And businesses to choose into what's the right experience for them.

Speaker 1: How do you think about threads and the the user experience that comes with, if you have a real personal assistant, you might have them on text, which is basically just one big thread that's endless and you can't really kick off a new text thread with the same person. At the same time, you can email your assistant 10 emails and have 10 threads going back and forth. And you can see other personal agents are sort of, some of them are leaning towards like, hey, just have one big monolithic context window and we'll do our best to remember stuff from a long time ago. Others are saying like, no, have an individual thread for each project and folders and organization. Like, what have you learned about the way people will work with agents and how it may or may not, like, mirror the way people work with real personal assistants?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, it's a really it's a really good question. Like, I think... So in our product, right

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Our... One of our principles is we should be wherever you work Yeah. And wherever you are. Right? And the truth is you're in WhatsApp, you're in iMessage, you're in email, and sometimes you do need like like a home base on your phone or your desktop. So we're in all of those places.

Speaker 1: It's got to come to the bar with me after work for happy hour. That's why you called it townie, right? Because when I go to the bar, there's always a townie hanging out?

Speaker 3: It works for you. It doesn't drink with you. Oh. That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. It's

Speaker 1: serious. That's what the $108,000,000 is for.

Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, I think you can find humans to drink with and let's let's keep it that way for as long as possible Oh, wow. As society. I'm definitely prohuman on the drinking. There we go. So what we what we found...

Speaker 2: So Yeah.

Speaker 3: Text is magical

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Right, for a lot of our users Yeah. Because it's just like... It's one click away. Everyone has text messages. They know what to do. But when you need to do deep work, you don't... And you have five projects going on, you can't be managing all that by text. Yeah. So the way we organize the product is, like, you can put your townie in an email to help you schedule something. Wherever you're on the go, you can take a picture from your phone. You can send a text to have something happen. But say you're going have a project with three people on your team, with you and your townies, your AIs are going to work together on it, it's going be long lived. You want that to be a separate thread, like, dedicated to that project. And, you know, like, I'll give you one, like, example because we've really focused on the multiplayer. Like, it's one of the big differences between our product and others in the market is

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 3: It's not just you and your agent. It's not just you and your AI. It's you and your coworkers. Mhmm. So for example, at the office, I have a channel where employees can go into the channel, and they can ask me to do admin tasks for them across all of our software because I have admin rights across all of the software. So they ask for the thing to happen, and then my townie is like, hey. Can I do that for Bob? Can I do that for Jane? And I'm like, yes. Go. It's kind of like our meta IT admin channel that people go into. I don't want that to be my text messages. I only look at that channel once in a while to like, you know, give someone admin rights or create a Google group or whatever it You want that in a separate...

Speaker 2: In in general, it feels like agents over the long run will be able to solve like the the the sort of inbox problem where like a modern...

Speaker 1: Like

Speaker 2: creative... No. Yeah. No. Basically basically, I mean like I'm I'm at the point where I'm like, wow, we really ended up in a place where there's like 15 different inboxes that I probably should be paying attention to on any given But I sort of prioritize them based on my usage, so I'm on iMessage over here, and then I realize I missed this thing on WhatsApp or whatever it is. Like, can we... Can... Is is this a way to solve... Like, are we heading down a path where this can be solved? Where where the agent can just pull from all these things? Or are we cooked?

Speaker 3: Look, the dream is, no, we're not cooked. We're not cooked. That's a good... Do do you think... Do you ever wonder what like, you know, president Trump or, you know, like Elon Musk, like a really, you know, famous person or like Serena Williams, like, go about their day, you know, they're not looking at their 17 inboxes probably. They have a very capable assistant that's like, hey, these are the three important things for today. These are the things I'm handling for you. But at any point, you know, if you start asking them questions and grilling them, you know, they let you as the boss, like go in there and figure out what's going on. That's the dream, I think, for most of these products. So, you know, like I have a workflow in town where my Slack's not manageable. Like my Slack, unfortunately, it's like not a place that I can go. And I go, I'm like literally, what has happened in the last five hours in Slack that I need to know? What's happened in the last five hours in Slack that I need to respond to? And, you know, it takes a few minutes and then it tells me. And right now it's like I have to ask those questions, but we have something that's coming out soon. It's in the other direction, right? It gives you kind of the home base for what you need to do. But there's trust to get there, right? Because what you don't want is you don't want it to miss out on something that's really important to you because something that you know in your head that maybe your system doesn't know yet. So, you know, with all these products, it's like you have to earn the trust to become the one glass pane for people's universe. And that's the goal. Like, that's what we're building towards. Right? But you you can't take away the control of the human without earning the trust first.

Speaker 2: Talk about the the challenge and opportunity of making recommend... Like, making recommendation... An agent making recommendations to the user because looking at the purely consumer side, I've seen, like, a personal agent realize like, oh, my user, the human user

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Is into cars. And then it recommends a bunch of products that a car person might technically could buy, but there's no substance from the recommendation. Like the rec... It's like it's like getting Yeah. A retail worker that just started yesterday at a at like a car parts store that's just making recommendations without like a fundamental deep understanding. And I think when people think about... When people are talking about like, okay, where's like where's this sort of undeniable revenue attribution gonna come from in AI? I think of it as like a town that says like, hey, you're totally missing this massive opportunity over here and I took a pass on starting down that journey and then you do that thing and it, you know, adds $5,000,000 of annualized revenue or whatever whatever it is. Right? So I feel like that's gonna be this... Those are like the superstar employees that like see an opportunity, drive at it, and create new value, whereas before everyone was sort of oblivious to it.

Speaker 3: I mean, the holy grail, which also happens to go really viral online, so it's to everyone's advantage to talk about it, is is when the agent finds an opportunity for you to, like, save money. Right? If you're, like, a small business and one of your suppliers is jacked prices, it's like noticing that and telling you, hey. Here's another supplier you can use, and you can make free, like, $10.10 k right now. Right? Those are incredible. I think what you're talking about is even more proactive where it's like, hey, your competitors have changed their marketing strategy in this way and you should try that. And look, I found some influencers that can do a first pass at that. Like, we're we're all... It's going in that direction, but I think you also have to be realistic about what the state of AI is and how much hand holding it needs, you know, by humans. Also, think there's a risk with productivity if it's like low, you know, if it's like missing the mark too much and that it really tires the human. I don't know if you've used products that feel like thirsty to you. You know, they keep like recommending things and you're like...

Speaker 1: Push notifications and stuff.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Don't like... Or it comes in

Speaker 2: to you like you you have someone... If the agent's like, hey, like I noticed you're not running meta ads. You should consider running meta ads. It's like there's probably a reason why we're not using the biggest... The best marketing channel that's ever existed in the history of business. Right? That's right. Like, it's not like no one thought of it. Right? And so it's very easy for an agent to just be opportunity seeking and then come up... Come to with an idea that destroys the trust right away because you're like, yeah.

Speaker 3: That's right. So, I mean, that's where, like, there's UX. You have to think about the UX deeply. You were talking about, like, what if you're just in text message all day? The problem with text message is there's only way that it could suggest something to you is, like, slam you with a text, like, at the wrong time about the wrong thing. But I think if you look at what Town has done or what Muse has done, right, we have like... There's like a discover tab where you can you can see things that are possible. And so I think there's also a moment as a human where you're like, hey. Right now, I'm starting to think about advertising again in our marketing strategy. And you know what? Like, don't you tell me there what you think I could do, and let's work together on identifying something, right? And from a proactive perspective, what it might tell you as opposed to you doing to your meta ads, it's like, hey, you haven't changed what you're doing in terms of your marketing strategy in a couple months. I've done some analysis for you that you could read that's probably worth your time at some time in the next week to look at. And then once you've looked at it, I can work with you on implementing this stuff. And that feels more like a... That feels more like what a good business partner would do. They do the research first. They're not just like slamming you with like a thing that they spend two minutes thinking about. Like, imagine you go to your CEO, you're like, yeah. I noticed we aren't doing meta ads. But if you go to your CEO and you're like, hey. Like, the meta algorithm has changed, and I'm noticing competitors that used to not do meta ads are now doing meta ads, and this is what it looks like. So that's what everyone wants to get to, but it's, you know, the compute that you have to pre spend to make those kinds of recommendations work is really, really hard. So our focus right now, like, as a company on on the productivity is just like, let's meet you with things that are, like, clearly you're gonna wanna do. Right? Let's start to spend more compute time on the big areas, but not slam it in your face like all the time. Be thoughtful about when in the product we come to you because it might be useful. And I'm going admit, like, sometimes this works and it's magical, and I get feedback from customers that's like, oh my god, you saved me money or you saved me a bunch of time or you opened my eyes to something that I didn't think was possible. And sometimes we totally hit the mark off. Right? And it's not... It doesn't feel good and I'm like, ugh, we have so much work to do to make this an incredible product. That... That's why we're only series b.

Speaker 2: Yep. Well,

Speaker 1: not bad. Well, was... Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah. It's so obvious that we're we're still in inning inning one with all this stuff and

Speaker 1: I love it.

Speaker 2: And

Speaker 1: Yeah. Lots of work to be done, but very clear thinking about how all this develops. Yeah. Great stuff.

Speaker 3: Thanks. I appreciate all. Thanks for having me online and Yeah. Thanks for the good questions.

Speaker 1: Have a great day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is here with us in person live in the Ultra Dome. We have Quinten Farmer.