Village Labs

Tap into your company's intelligence with one AI across all your apps.

[Alex Calder @ATCalder]

As the CEO of Coworker, a lot of people asked me this week what I think of Claude Cowork...

Firstly, the name is an inspired choice – we've drafted a lil letter to let @AnthropicAI know we think so too!

That aside:

1.

Claude Code's great, but being great at understanding structured code ≠ being great at understanding the messy, unstructured ‘code’ that is company context.

Claude Cowork is a wrapper on Claude Code: give it tools, time, and ungodly token use and it'll hack at work tasks. But ask basic things like 'what happened in our all-hands last week' and it spends 2 mins trawling Jira (!?), Notion, and Drive before admitting defeat.

The problem is it's the same 'tool maximalist' approach that @OpenAI and Claude enterprise use. Neither work great.

Understanding company context is brutal. Conflicting/outdated info, weird data structures, people disagreeing... An agent tool RAGing through that minefield gets blown up by errors and irrelevant data - all the stuff that's already broken enterprise AI trust.

Agents do better when they've done their homework. When we connect to company data, we run a stupid amount of models in the background constantly generating a dense context graph. This 1. gives agents the right context quickly, and 2. info on how to operate: 'how does this company structure Salesforce', 'who works on what', 'which conflicting source is correct.'

2.

Speed matters. We moved away from the Claude Code architecture b/c we found business users are hyper sensitive to speed (<10 secs outputs vs meandering through tools).

3.

The consensus view that foundational players ultimately win enterprise AI is wrong.

We're big fans of Anthropic, but the 'Claude Code built Claude Cowork in 1.5 weeks' brag is actually a bearish indicator for how seriously they're taking this category. Their 'prep my day' can't yet connect to calendar, email or Slack. 'Organize my desktop' as a hero use case lacks user understanding– there's a reason no-one's done this since 2002: work happens in the cloud, not your machine.

It’s the same reason ChatGPT Enterprise is subpar and why @glean dominates the space despite being 'just fine.'

There's a fundamental incentive misalignment between foundational labs and companies. Most companies are hedging across model providers. They want systems that maintain context across agent infrastructure with the flexibility to swap models. That's a path to commoditization for foundational, and an opportunity for 'neutral' operating systems to manage context and route workloads to the ‘cheapest cost per successful task’ model (many will be open-source). After all, you wouldn't let your electricity provider control your thermostat.

True superintelligence will emerge when companies can deploy lightning fast agent swarms with shared, learned context across enterprise data. No platform is close to that today. But our team at @coworkerapp is squarely focused on the exact enterprise neurosurgery that'll deliver it.

[Village Labs @usevillage]

and @usevillage is the easiest way to get connected.

[Alex Calder @ATCalder]

If you're a CEO and you're not figuring out how to get every ounce of your comany's data connected to LLMs, you are behind.

It's the equivalent of not having an internet connection. Except it's going to happen way faster.

[Village Labs @usevillage]

We're basically building a brain that routes information flow extremely efficiently across an organization.

It's early but @usevillage has been an absolute gamechanger for our team + 30 others. DM us if you want a free trial.

[Village Labs @usevillage]

Companies spend $30k per employee/year on meetings. It's insane.

We built an AI that eliminates 50% of them👇

[Village Labs @usevillage]

We route and summarize all that information based on the people, teams and topics you follow in the org.

If something happened in a meeting related to a project you care about...guess what...that gets included in the summary routed to you each day.

[Alex Calder @ATCalder]

Companies are addicted to meetings. We looked at the data: it's a seriously unhealthy addiction 👇

[Tom Dörr @tom_doerr]

I feel like this could not only save me 1+ hours each day, but also get me more relevant information more quickly. Thought about building something like this myself @usevillage

[Village Labs @usevillage]

@tom_doerr @tom_doerr 🙏 would love to get you hooked up. DM us!

[Alex Calder @ATCalder]

Humans used to just talk to exchange ideas.

Invented writing 👉it's crazy not to write down the important stuff.

Internet 👉 it's crazy to still use books &amp; filing cabinets.

Very soon, it's going to become crazy if your data isn't connected to an LLM, esp for businesses.

[Alex Calder @ATCalder]

Team @usevillage shipping some pretty crazy updates atm🤯

Woke up to a summary of all the stuff our team did last week, all unresolved problems, and what’s planned this week based on all our Slack, Jira, Docs, GitHub, Hubspot data. All written by AI.

Feels like I’m cheating?

[Village Labs @usevillage]

In the past decade marketplace platforms have grown at a screaming pace but most have yet to achieve profitability. 2023 is THE make or break year. Here's a quick list of challenges they must overcome. @ATCalder on our blog.

https://t.co/8tCSvwnjAs

[Village Labs @usevillage]

Tech behemoths that have spent years expanding are now laying off thousands of workers. Is this a signal of a broader economic meltdown to come? Well, it's complicated. Village CEO @ATCalder digs in on our blog. 👇

https://t.co/h1I0GaJGzv

[Village Labs @usevillage]

Tech behemoths that have spent years expanding are now laying off thousands of workers. Is this a signal of a broader economic meltdown to come? Well, it's complicated. Village CEO @ATCalder digs in on our blog. 👇

https://t.co/h1I0GaJGzv

[Village Labs @usevillage]

Check out the second installment of 'Designing the Best Marketplace Incentive Programs' focused on Specialized Suppliers.
Village Labs founder Bradford Church breaks it down. 👇
https://t.co/6heuSIfuyG

[Village Labs @usevillage]

In 2016, Uber &amp; Didi’s war in China became a bloodbath.
Both companies were engaging in expensive and aggressive tactics to beat the other out of the Chinese rideshare market. Here's what it looked like from the inside...

Read the blog for the whole story
https://t.co/aipwV6np9i

[Village Labs @usevillage]

--&gt; Two Critical Factors for Marketplaces to Win &lt;--
The competition dynamics between Uber and the Chinese rideshare company, Didi, reveal 2 critical factors for every marketplace company to understand in order to 'win' their market. Let's break it down. 👇

[Village Labs @usevillage]

Your platform needs to constantly run towards new tech or it will eventually suffer from rapidly evolving technology your competition embraces.