In this podcast episode, Alex Rampell, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, talks with Jean Denis, CEO and founder of Town (also spelled Towne), about his entrepreneurial journey, pivoting from an SMB tax product to a horizontal AI assistant company.
The discussion begins with their history: Rampell had invested in Plaid when Jean-Denis was its CTO. After leaving Plaid and taking some time off, Jean-Denis initially launched a B2B AI-powered SMB tax tool. Despite working from a technical and product standpoint, they realized it faced severe go-to-market limitations. Because tax is an annual event, it could not be a daily active use tool, lacked word-of-mouth loops, and faced a ticking clock before incumbents copied the technology. Realizing it was not a venture-scale company, Jean-Denis and his co-founder decided to shut it down after one year—a difficult pivot driven by their core motivations for impact and team success.
Exploring new ideas, they asked why nobody had built a great agent working out of email and calendar. They found that no one had built great AI around common knowledge worker workflows like meetings, meeting prep, and answering emails. Leveraging the agentic capabilities of newer models, they achieved product-market fit very quickly.
Jean-Denis explains Town’s strategy: starting as a horizontal product with a focus on product-led growth (PLG) for SMBs and mid-market companies, while ensuring data security and privacy foundations can scale up to enterprise sales-led growth. They intentionally avoided starting with top-down compliance-heavy enterprise requirements to preserve a consumer-grade product experience, betting that enterprise leaders will demand the same magic they experience personally.
Addressing competition with foundational model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, Jean-Denis argues that Town offers a neutral intelligence layer. Rather than being tied to one supplier, Town routes requests through whatever model provider is best at the moment, saving money and de-risking vendor lock-in. Furthermore, Town ensures that businesses truly own their data, context, and memories, which represents a critical asset layer in the AI era.
The conversation explores how AI changes the software landscape. Jean-Denis argues that the unit of value has shifted from the app to the computer, as a human can do almost anything with a computer using AI. Town acts as a token allocation machine that automates long-tail research and tasks—such as a restaurant owner analyzing wholesaler price changes—that were previously too tedious to execute manually.
Finally, they discuss why AI adoption has not been evenly distributed across the economy. While Silicon Valley is surrounded by tinkers, the rest of the world relies on product experiences that demonstrate value immediately rather than a blank text box. Town solves this by observing aggregate power-user behaviors, providing custom-fit software routines, and lowering the barrier for non-tinkers to deploy AI effectively. Rampell and Jean-Denis conclude by discussing how the erosion of traditional supply aggregation and human friction will fundamentally reshape distribution, consumer habits, and industries like retail and advertising.