Jason Alco

CEO / Founder @poplco (YC W21). Forbes 30 under 30. Software Engineer. @ycombinator @ucla

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

BREAKING: Claude is now your AI assistant for events

Introducing Ask Popl.

Connect it to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or event Copilot today ✨

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

@WillowVoiceAI 2 pieces of feedback so far:
- it continues to write saying “ah” as “oh”
- when i say “line return line return” for 2 line returns it actually wrote the word “line return” twice. Wispr flow already has this down where it know those key words mean line return

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

PRESS RELEASE: Today, we're announcing the official MCP for event lead capture.

Popl for Claude is now live.

In-person events are chaotic, and the data they generate has historically been difficult to organize, analyze, and turn into action. We hope this MCP brings more structure, value, and efficiency to the events industry in an AI-native way.

Huge thank you to John Robison and the Anthropic for Startups team for helping us bring this to life.

Read the full release below 👇

https://t.co/fl1PyG15PS

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

Love seeing this. In-person events continue to become more strategic as a GTM channel 🚀

[Andrew Yeung @andruyeung]

This is insane.

According to @Cloudflare, AI agents now officially generate 57.4% of all web traffic.

The dead internet theory is coming true. This means two things for entrepreneurs and marketers:

1. If you're selling a product, you now have to market to agents, not just humans. e.g., many companies have already started writing blog posts specifically designed for AI agents to read.

2. In-person experiences and marketing will become critically important. It's the ONLY channel where you're guaranteed to reach real humans.

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

@hunterjisaacson Day 1 🤝

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

Progress is never linear…I often have to remind myself of this, but love being reminded

[Hunter J. Isaacson @hunterjisaacson]

I made $0 in 2017, 2018, 2019

Less than $100K in 2020, 2021

Millions in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026…

Never quit

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

This is honestly terrifying…

-ly cool

[Popl @poplco]

Today we’re launching the MCP for in-person events

Going from offline to online has historically been a very tough problem to solve.

- in-person conversations aren’t captured
- we connect on fragmented social media platforms
- a contact card or linkedin does not equal an email or a phone number
- event organizers are buried in spreadsheets from cvent, luma, partiful, etc

That changes today. Introducing Ask Popl, your AI assistant for events.

Excited to use AI to make the offline to online data problem a little less painful ✨🤝

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

@franjohn21 Smart, but my issue with this is it requires an app to be downloaded! So pure iMessage agent plays like @interaction won’t be able to utilize

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

Just hit 100K reviews on the App Store as a b2b platform…

That’s more than @SlackHQ @Shopify @stripe @cvent 🤯

(Secretly it’s because @poplco still has thousands of individual users signing up daily)

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

A benefit of living in 3 of the biggest cities in the last 3 years is that I feel like an expert anywhere I go:

LA: Hey Jason, I'm headed to the Palisades. Should I take the 405 or Sunset? Neither, take the 10 to the PCH for the views.

NYC: Jason, I'm looking at new apartments in Manhattan. Which neighborhood should I choose? Start cheaper on the East Side or Lower East Side, then once you're established, graduate to West Village, Tribeca, or even Hudson Square.

Miami: Hey Jason, I'm taking a date out tonight. What should I hit? Fire, hit Amazónico for apps, then Komodo across the street for mains, then Sugar rooftop for drinks, and end the night at LIV in Mid-Beach 🔥

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

One of the biggest gaps that @claudeai has, is knowing how claude itself works.

Our team constantly goes to claude to ask questions about how to use claude and claude ends up looking up websites to figure out how to answer questions about itself.

Imagine if claude had a build in internal knowledge base and was an expert on itself

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

To show my team just how AI forward I am as a CEO, I now send all slack messages through a Claude skill that uses Fable.

Honestly it’s a massive unlock, and not too expensive

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

And they even put Claude above OpenAI 🙃

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

After the recent #WWDC, I can see why OpenAI is suing Apple. The use cases we would typically use ChatGPT for are now handled by Siri AI, and Siri AI is now powered by Google 🙃

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

After the recent #WWDC, I can see why OpenAI is suing Apple. The use cases we would typically use ChatGPT for are now handled by Siri AI, and Siri AI is now powered by Google 🙃

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

@_cat_turner Doing my best 😉

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

I shared this note with the Popl team today:

We've made the difficult decision to increase our workforce.

This is not a cost-cutting exercise.

This is not a reflection of anyone's performance.

But after AI-enabling our team across sales, marketing, product, engineering, CS, and ops, the reality became clear:

We're building faster than ever.
Closing more than ever.
Delighting customers more than ever.

And moving with more leverage than we've ever had.

AI didn't make our team smaller.

It made our ambitions bigger.

And as an in-person GTM platform, we've always believed the future is humans and AI working together.

So we're hiring.

Link in comments 🚀

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

Join us: https://t.co/rPDI3fLAXt

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

And use @poplco of course, may be a bit biased 🙂

[Finn Mallery @fin465]

talked to a YC company that scaled from $0 → $2m ARR in their first 6 months with their ENTIRE GTM built off going to conferences.

Here's the playbook they cracked (step by step):

~4 weeks before:

> Post abt the conference and tell attendees exactly how to reach you
> Send personal DMs to the right ppl on LinkedIn and X
> Reply within the hour & lock in 10 top targets to close.
> Send everyone else to your drip email campaign.

Then, set a meeting block of 1-3 days during the conference:

> make shared booking link for the team
> Reserve a quiet café / private dining room
> Pack in 12 meetings per day, 30 min each, with buffer time built in

While you're there:

>Hand every prospect a thoughtful small gift and a personal card
>Single out 5 standout customers whose pain ur product actually solves
>Pull them aside for a casual on-camera Q&A in a solid film spot
>Don't pitch hard.
>Let the conversation breathe and weave your product in naturally.

The 4 weeks after

>Hand the raw footage to a freelance editor + ask for ~15-20 punchy clips with captions.
>Drop a new clip every couple of days on LI / X
> use these clips when you post online about the next conference to keep the momentum

This is the formula, costs less than a few thousand dollars to execute.

They’re on track to end the Y1 at ~$6m ARR (B2B, targeting large enterprises) + STILL not using any other channels for customer acquisition

[Jason Alco @Jasonalco]

@SlackHQ Our team loves the platform, but we really need to fix the mark unread feature.

It’s been broken for years now. First, you should be able to mark a channel as unread without opening the channel and selecting a message.

Second, half the time marking a message as unread doesn’t work. I have to go message by message, trying over and over until one works.

Please fix this, thank you 🫠