Daniel Sternberg

Dad, AI stuff, lover of music gadgets, kitchen measurement devices and hoarder of headphones. VP Eng @raspberry__ai, formerly @Notion, @GustoHQ, and more.

[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.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@nickbaum @thesamparr @davekashen I think for a lot of ambitious people fear of inadequacy is definitely a career driver in one’s 20s and 30s. But if fear of inadequacy and incompetence is driving you by your 40s, especially if you have a family, you’d likely be better off getting some therapy.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@garrytan Based on my experience at startups, there’s even at successful ones quite variable weighting on autism vs empathy loops.

IMO it’s easier to bring in other employees and leaders to help with empathy, harder for the autism one

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

Obvious Upton Sinclair quote here - applies to both parties

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Oh man, this is going to be a very tired argument we are going to have for the next 5 years

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@steve_flusberg Congrats friend!

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@merm_bot @teej_m @jxnlco @Sirupsen and team focused on just building the fastest most scalable vector db and won over the teams who were actually scaling the use cases that needed that. And then when they added more capabilities like lexical search, we trusted them because they’d crushed it so far.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@merm_bot @teej_m @jxnlco I think there was some drama I don’t know about, but fundamentally they tried to expand their product offerings too quickly. They wanted to speedrun a Snowflake strategy with a lot of packaged enterprise products and features.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@teej_m @jxnlco Yeah, I have a couple theories

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

I was there!

https://t.co/DXFDQR9mND

[jason @jxnlco]

Literally remember conversations with ctos about moving from pine cone to turbopuffer back in the day.

Nuts.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@adamnash @ashleymayer @EmilyDreyfuss It’s scarier in creative/artistic fields where your specific artistic/creative style was your brand and now your exact style can be replicated by a model. If you’re working at say, an animation studio, you don’t own the right to any of that IP and don’t get paid in equity either.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@GergelyOrosz What a great team

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@Sirupsen Huge congrats to you and the team Simon!

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@MikeLyngaas Ah man I meant to watch this!

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@jamiequint “This is probably bad for your mental health” != morally bad.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@jamiequint I don’t think I’m making a moral claim, it’s advice…

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

Heading down to older daughter’s class camping trip right now.

It’s cool everyone, life is short. Find fulfillment in a variety of ways - family, community, and yes intellectual pursuits and achievement too.

[Taylor A Murphy @tayloramurphy]

begging people to find a partner and have children. but also to talk to normal people and interact with the real world.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@gordon_cassie 50% DAU/MAU in B2B software is quite good unless your MAU as a % of paid seats sucks.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@clairevo Keeping up with the Joneses is a thing everywhere but the SF tech version is *extreme*.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@antoniogm But there is a world between that outcome and “middle class”.

[Daniel Sternberg @sternberg]

@antoniogm $11M pre-tax means you can own a nice home in cash and you just work to pay for kids stuff and the rest of your expenses.

Magic number for “don’t need to worry about working for money unless you want to” with multiple kids, private school, nice vacations is ~$15M post-tax.