The First Attention Company
Last week, we launched Avec, an email app that lets you handle your Gmail inbox in seconds.
Many of you have asked us the same question: “why email?”
We chose not to answer this question on launch day. We wanted to focus instead on achieving something that seldom happens in consumer tech these days: deliver a beautiful product that works, and talk about it plainly.
That said, the truth is that we’re not just building yet another email app. If anything, we're the only email company that hates email as much as you do.
We're building software that lets people reclaim their attention.
The attention economy has been so wildly successful that we barely have any attention left.
Take a moment to consider what this means for the future. We’re promised AIs that can do any work. What will we do? Distract ourselves on endless slop feeds while reality passes us by?
If our collective attention is in shambles, it is not because of some collective failure to discipline ourselves. Instead, our tools have failed us: they haven't kept up with the information flood that we now live in. At a minimum, we should demand from our tools that they protect our attention.
In that context, starting with email seemed only natural. Email is the most open way you can be reached. It is the channel that’s already overflowing with spam. It is the inescapable mental weight that you carry through the day. It is ground zero for attention.
But our goal is to go beyond protecting your attention. If all we get out of AI is a better spam filter (and spam to match), we’ll just be back where we started.
Our vision for Avec is one of powerful agents that help you identify what needs your attention, help you decide what needs to get done, and get it done for you. And unlike hard-to-steer chatbots, they will feel like a natural extension of you, much like the voice drafting feature that already exists in Avec.
Done right, these tools will do more than just protect your attention: they’ll let you reclaim and sharpen it. They’ll help you say what you mean more effectively, decide what matters more clearly, and spend your time on the things you actually care about.
Our ambition is to build the first product that truly meets that bar, and in so doing, to raise the bar so high that we’ll collectively demand much more from all our tools.
Attention is all you have. We are the very first company that will let you reclaim it.
Join us on this journey: download Avec for free on the App Store at https://t.co/Y2rF709OTL.
I actually don’t hate email now because of Avec. It’s so refreshing to know that I can go through my inbox and just have it feel so intuitive. Keep up the good work and congrats on the launch!!
Also banger video 🚀🚀
We've raised $8.4m to make software that sharpens your attention.
We're starting with an email app that lets you handle your Gmail inbox in seconds.
We call it Avec. It's available now!
Most of us run Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions and never think about what that actually turns off.
So I read the source. Some things I didn't expect:
→ Context management is mostly deletion, not summarization
→ The safety classifier deliberately ignores the model's own text so it can't persuade itself
→ There's a verification subagent with an anti-rationalization prompt that most users never trigger
At the end of last year, we announced two big milestones at Quanta: our Series A and the launch of Prism.
Now we’re finally getting together to celebrate 🎉
We’re hosting a curated gathering with founders, finance leaders, and friends of the team — and we have a few spots left. RSVP https://t.co/dATvkXoafz
Doing a pop-up on Christmas Day!
If you’re in SF and need some extra warmth or simply something to do, stop on by for some Chai and Coffee (and some pastries too). We’ll be serving from 8:30 to 2, and all proceeds will go to charity.
Link in the 🧵