20VC: The $100 Billion AI Assistant Race: Town vs Instinct vs GrokBot | We Spend $75K Per Engineer on AI Tools | Why the AI Assistant Market Is Not a Bubble & AI Assistants Will Replace Every App on Your Phone with JD, Founder of Town

Jean-Denis Grèze (0:00)

I know what I'm building is a top three priority at Google and Apple in the next 12 months. Not a top ten priority, like a top three priority. I think talking about modes is a little bit of a luxury, and you have to be more successful than towners today for it to matter.

The product in this category that will win will have a network effect at the agent level. I think you'll trust your agent to decide what data to share with other people without you intervening in five years. The speed of the market is insane, Harry. I've never seen anything like it. You can build now at the speed of machines, but you can only learn at the speed of humans. I don't think Instinct and Town are trying to do the same thing. We have passed the point where we will go back to a world where humans are looking at lines of code. I mean, the run rate is at least 75k per engineer.

Harry Stebbings (0:43)

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, the hottest category in Silicon Valley is AI assistance, consumer and enterprise. On the consumer side, you've got Instinct, scale to a $2.5 billion valuation, index and benchmark leading. On the enterprise side, you've got town.com, founded by today's guest, Jean-Denis or JD. Formerly, he was the CTO at Plaid, and this conversation today is probably one of the most pertinent discussions that there is on what is happening in the AI assistant market? Is it being truly commoditized? What's the business model behind it? Will consumer and enterprise converge? What does the future of AI assistance look like? This and so much more in the episode with JD today.

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You have now arrived at your destination. JD, dude, I'm so excited for this because in all honesty, I have a lot of fans on the show where I kind of need to pretend to be excited by their product and I'm not really. And I love town. I was saying the team used it here. I'm a DAU. And so I was so excited when we agreed to do this. So thank you so much for joining me today, man.

Jean-Denis Grèze (4:15)

Yeah, thanks for having me. Honestly, I didn't know that you're a DAU until like three minutes ago. So I'm super happy and send me all the feedback about the product because you're a DAU. But when you're a founder, you're always embarrassed about your product.