Why I Built Interperson.

I was a senior in college when COVID hit in March 2020. I think everyone remembers those first few months of lockdown. I was bored and stir-crazy like everyone else, but I was also concerned about losing touch with my friends, some of whom I didn’t know if I’d ever see again.

That was when I had the idea for a simple app that would remind you to text your friends.

I called it InTouch, and pitched it to my friends Nick and Azim. Those initial brainstorm sessions laid the foundation for Interperson, but at the time we were all heading into big boy jobs and we didn’t end up pursuing the vision.

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By the time ChatGPT came out in November 2023, I was working at a venture fund and had a front-row seat to the LLM explosion. While we laughed at uncanny Will Smith and marveled at the early days of AI coding, I also felt deeply uncomfortable at the direction many consumer AI companies were taking. They seemed to see the technology as a way to replace human friendship with AI companions, rather than a way to bring us closer together.

The watershed moment was looking at a company called Character.AI (no longer really around). This was a chatbot company that had some of the most impressive usage statistics I’d ever seen—over 1M monthly active users, with median usage over two hours a day.

That beats TikTok, Instagram, and even YouTube. The top 20 chatbots were all based on anime characters. And the average user was under 18.

That’s when I got really scared. I imagined my kids growing up in a world where they never feel the need to talk to another human, because their screens and AIs are just so darn interesting.

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I grew up in the golden age of the Internet, when technology brought us closer together. Facebook was where you saw your friends’ lives and whatever party was happening; AOL, GChat, and later Snapchat were where you messaged; and Instagram wasn’t full of professional content creators.

You probably remember that time, too.

Interperson is my love letter to that time, and my attempt to use AI to help weave a stronger social fabric rather than tear it down.

I’m not anti-AI; in fact, I’m optimistic about the potential advancements in manufacturing and medicine headed our way, and I think we’ll eventually be glad to leave behind laptop jobs involving Excel and PowerPoint.

But I think friendship and love are more meaningful when they’re between two humans. An AI doesn’t have a choice to love you or not, it just says the right things. Owning a dog is more real than that.

I know this is incredibly naive. I don’t have a business plan or investors. I just wanted to make something that makes people happy.

Please let me know if I succeeded and how I can do better.