salesforce for friends
no one is dating, but everyone is hiring
*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•
Friends, there have been plenty of times when I thought for sure that the start-ups were fucking with us. The start-ups that pitched gamified prayers, or nicotine as a productivity hack, or cheating as a service (because who wants to actually learn!). Start-ups like MSCHF, which raised $24 million in venture funding for the literal purpose of pulling pranky provocations on everyone, only added to the suspicion.
Anyway, here’s a real start-up called Pally that’s pitching itself as, essentially, a CRM for your friends (Tagline: STALK EVERYONE). Pally tracks everything your contacts post online, “so you know when something important happens to someone you care about.” Its launch video gives extremely SF founder-specific use cases: providing the best flavor of bullshit in a fundraising pitch with VCs, identifying an engineer to hire who doesn’t like women (really!), and reminding you of a friend’s kids names when running into them on the street. The website warns about the consequences of not using such a tool: “Our relationships are the single most valuable asset we’ll ever have, and in an agi world that’s more true than ever.” It costs $30 a month.
It is a product that could only be created by people who have no separation between their personal and professional lives and who view everyone they meet through the lens of their own personal advancement. Some have noted how dystopian it seems.
That doesn’t mean it won’t work: People had the same complaint 20 years ago when social media began intermediating our relationships. Now, the weirdos who don’t use Instagram and Facebook study how-to guides for keeping in touch with their friends the old fashioned way (phone calls! how quaint!).
Anyway, Pally is featured in this wonderful recent NYM article. The article is one in a burgeoning genre looking at the culture of those quirky SF AI kids. (Strangely NYT’s version from 2 years ago called them “wild children” which is wrong - most of them don’t party or have any fun, they work 996, as WSJ outlined recently.)
I think my favorite detail is the guy who “sometimes brings a timer into their room and limits himself to five minutes of human connection before returning to his start-up.” I also love the line “No one is dating, but everyone is hiring.” The whole article reminds me a lot of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s great No Exit essay from 2014.
Rotten techmatoes
I have been writing about tech biz -themed TV and movies enough that it’s getting its own section.
The Social Network 2 (misinfo boogaloo?) is set to start filming soon. It’s about Francis Haugen (played by Mickey Madison) and her decision to speak out via WSJ reporter Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White). Jeremy Strong is playing Mark Zuckerberg. Glow-ups all around!
They’re calling it The Social Reckoning, which is extremely lol. What reckoning has Meta, with a market cap of $1.8 TRILLION, experienced recently? The mildly embarrassing failure of the Metaverse? The overexposure of MZ’s cool guy makeover? Or is reckoning referring to the way society is kindof-but-not-really “reckoning” with our total dependence on the offerings of Meta and every other tech giant?
Important Business Matters
Startup everyone’s into: Friend, a wearable AI companion whose founder courts controversy.
Startup everyone’s over: A deep dive on Caastle, the fashion startup accused of swindling investors out of 300m.
Reason to go on living: the oil and gas executives are standing up for wind energy
Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: Klarna’s corporate rap to “not like us.”
Latest crush: click on this steven levy take on SV’s rightward shift for the illustration alone
Latest heartbreak: brendan carr plans to keep going after the media
Latest thing the kids are into: Brewtiques. why is every store also a coffee shop?
Latest thing the olds are into: how all in red pilled the billionaires
a dall-e summary of this newsletter:
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