Allen Chen

eng at Sierra

[Jean-Denis Greze 💡 @jgreze]

Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you.

We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction.

Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents.

We think that’s backwards.

The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you.

Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so.

All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time.

Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@vijayiyengar 💚 @vijayiyengar Been awesome learning from how you're crushing the builder-manager role

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@jgreze 💚 thank you for all the mentorship and advice!!!

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

https://t.co/N3TUiWZuif

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@ptr wtf are you doing

[Vijay Iyengar @vijayiyengar]

AMA! 2 weeks ago, we posted about Sierra's AI-native interview process. Many eng leaders have reached out asking questions and sharing that they're evolving their processes too.

Wanted to answer some of the most common questions we've gotten to help teams evolving their interview. If you have more questions, just drop them in the 🧵

https://t.co/S1N8LWbOH5

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

i've never worked this hard while having this much fun

[Bret Taylor @btaylor]

Today, Sierra is releasing Ghostwriter, our agent for building agents. With Ghostwriter, you can create an AI agent for your customer experience — one that can chat, pick up the phone, speak dozens of languages, take action on your systems of record, and be protected with industry-leading guardrails — simply by having a conversation. No clicking, no forms, no menus.

Codex and Claude Code have transformed how we build software, making it possible for software engineers to orchestrate and review the work rather than doing all the work themselves. We think the same transformation will happen for all software. Rather than every enterprise app having a web app for humans and an API for automation, every software platform’s UI will be an agent that can do the work on your behalf.

I recorded a demo of my building and optimizing an agent with Ghostwriter so you can see how powerful and easy it is to use. It’s completely changed the way our early adopters build agents, and it’s changed the way I think about the software industry. Let me know what you think, and, if you’re interested in trying it out at your business, please reach out directly.

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@ZhaiAndrew Huge! Congrats 🎉

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@thsottiaux Planning is just not as good as Claude Code and Cursor. 5.4 anecdotally loves implementation details rather than great explanations of design and architecture.

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@adityaag @ptr is building this!

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@ptr sounds like you should

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@ptr @worm_emoji 😊 ty tess

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@backus insanely impressive. twitter had a ton of custom infra (custom on-prem stack, networking, observability, storage, etc.), mobile, web, product, video serving, not to mention the actual product.
impressive to do this with 25 engineers, even without ds/ml

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@ptr 👑

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@pandemona https://t.co/qHCblZYRxZ

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@ptr did vibe coding reset you system clock or something

[Bret Taylor @btaylor]

Sierra just hit $100M in ARR, just seven quarters since we launched in February 2024. @claybavor and I are very grateful to our customers and proud of the Sierra team, who has redefined the meaning of intensity and craftsmanship. I have never had this much fun in my career. (Photo is Clay signing the contract that crossed the $100M mark) https://t.co/RxPdSH7Olp

[Allen Chen @allenschen]

@vim_dzl its what you were born to do. youll figure it out

[Nikunj Kothari @nikunj]

We spend years getting comfortable at companies building consensus.

Then, we join the dictator and finally ship something that matters..