# Town competes with AI labs through neutral models and portable data

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/town-competes-with-ai-labs-through-neutral-models-and/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Jean-Denis Greze](https://realalpha.app/builders/jean-denis-greze/) · Jean-Denis Greze is founder and CEO of Town. · Led Plaid’s EPD from $10M to $300M+ in ARR, then co-founded Town, an AI assistant for everyday work.
- Host: [Erik Torenberg](https://realalpha.app/people/erik-torenberg/) · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz · Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.
- Show: a16z Podcast
- Episode: [Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/), Oct 19, 2026
- Moment: 34:07 to 42:25 of the episode (8 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/town-competes-with-ai-labs-through-neutral-models-and/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2047

## Quote

> “that if there was ever a better solution than town, switching to that other solution would **take a day**.”
> — [Jean-Denis Greze](https://realalpha.app/builders/jean-denis-greze/) at [38:13](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2293) · a16z Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Route work to whichever model is best for the task.
2. Keep business context portable across AI providers.
3. Use agents to share internal knowledge under privacy rules.

## About this segment

Jean-Denis Greze says Town routes work to the best available model and lets customers own their business context. He argues that portability, no training, and agent-mediated sharing distinguish it from the labs.

From “Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI”, Oct 19, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[34:13](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2053) but I'd love to have you expound on why use Town. And also just like business, I mean, so many people that are probably listening to this that might be entrepreneurs are also wondering like, uh-oh, are those guys going to eat my, not you, Town. Like you have this weird situation where you have the infrastructure layer and you have the application layer. That's always been the case. They're like, you know, Cisco and Akamai were infrastructure companies in the 90s.

[34:36](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2076) and then Amazon and eBay were application companies. But never in a million years did Cisco say, you know what, we're going to build a bookseller. We're going to build an auction website. We're going to build a directory like Yahoo that competes with... No, they were just happy selling their switches and load balancers and everything. So I'd be curious, maybe define how you think about town versus the people that you often buy the tokens from.

[34:58](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2098) And then how should others maybe think about this kind of weird time that we're living in where it's like infrastructure is becoming application. I mean, it is risky always to be competing with your suppliers, right? And we are competing in a way. Because they have cheaper cocks, right? We're competing as a supplier. So you got to ask yourself, is that naturally the right state of the world? So the small answer, which is not the good one, is we believe very different things about the experience of the user initially around email and the calendar that for whatever reason, none of the other players have really focused on.

[35:36](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2136) And there's a lot of complexity to email and calendar, which makes our product much, much better there. But that's a small answer because obviously someone at OpenAI, at Anthropic, at Google could wake up and decide to do that. So the better answer actually is to think about our customers and what they want. And when we talk to like a mid-market firm, so that's a firm with like 500 to 1,000 employees about town, what we tell them is like, hey, listen, do you know which model provider is going to be the best model provider over the next three to five years?

[36:10](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2170) Like, what's your opinion on that? And they don't know. And they don't know. And you're like, well, you know, if you buy the OpenAI product, well, then you'll always have OpenAI models in that product. And what if OpenAI is not the best model provider, doesn't have the best intelligence for you for the next three to five years? Then as AI does more and more for you, You may be at a competitive disadvantage.

[36:34](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2194) Or what if they hike the rent? Yeah, all of that. And so the first thing is we're just like, look, we're neutral app. We will use whatever supplier we think is the best for you in the moment. And that's like a big part of it. It's also not just general intelligence, which supplier is better at voice, is better at video, is better at slides at that time. We feel like it is our job to determine from all the AI capabilities, frontier model, open weight, what is the right thing for you as a business.

[37:04](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2224) And I think you can save money there, but also you can de-risk ever having made the wrong partner. And there are companies that picked OpenAI like two years ago, and then Anthropic was better at coding for a 12-month period. And those companies had to use both because they realized to be competitive, they needed Claude, right? And they needed those models. And I think if you're a smart business, you really think about the neutrality of who's providing intelligence for you and who's routing.

[37:34](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2254) So that's like one reason. I think the second reason, which is like very important, is our stance is that you own and like truly own as a business the data and memories and context that's being created on town. And so, you know, in the old world, pre-computing, if you're a business, you had different assets. You had physical assets and you had maybe like human assets, right? And increasingly now, maybe people call it context, but there's the set of assets, which is all the things that AI knows about your business to help you run your business effectively.

[38:15](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2295) And I think you should own that entire bucket. And I think you should own it so much that if there was ever a better solution than town, switching to that other solution would take a day. that's what I'm selling I'm selling you want to own that asset and I think if you look at anyone who's deploying FDEs to build software for you what they're trying to do is they're trying to make it more difficult for you to switch at any point to someone else so first you want neutral intelligence but I think you also want the app layer on top of the intelligence to be one that you feel comfortable you could move to something else and in the new world that's really like it's owning this context layer and having someone who makes it available to you.

[39:00](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2340) Now, that means town, the risk that I'm taking is that the switching cost for my customers is easier. But that's my selling point. And look, if I can't have the best product in the market, then that's okay. Then that just means I'll lose. But that's my competitive stance against the labs. And the third part for me is just on training. And I think, look, if you're a large enough company, the labs won't train on you.

[39:22](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2362) but it's the way you operate your business, if that ever makes it into the weight of someone that's reselling to someone else, that basically you're selling what makes your business successful to someone else and you really don't want to do that. So I think we are on the training layer. We are like, we don't train. That's just not part of our philosophy as a business. And then the final one on competition is we believe different things about the world and about, I think, the relationship between a human and AI where we are probably more forward-thinking than even the labs are.

[40:00](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2400) So the Teams product for town has a mode around basically building an internal CRM where we're trusting agents to decide what information at the company that is available to other employees at the company. Let me just give you an example. You're in town and you say, does anyone know someone in the finance team at this potential customer? And town's able to look at, talk to the agents of other employees at your current company to find someone who's connected to that lead that you want.

[40:38](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2438) That's like a really powerful product, but from a privacy perspective, you really have to design it really, really well to work. And the way I think about that is, we are really thinking about how do you get AI to operate, humans to operate at the speed of AI and not at the speed of humans. So the speed of humans version of that question that just asks is you would go in Slack or Microsoft Teams and be like, does anyone know someone on that team?

[41:01](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2461) And then everyone at your company would have to read that message and think about it and you get an answer like it daily. Yeah, exactly. Humans are slow routers. That's right. And for us, you're going to get that answer immediately because we've decided that for that kind of a question, we will trust AI to mediate the security and privacy of that request within a company. And we believe things like that that can really speed up a company that I'm not seeing anyone else do.

[41:24](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2484) And it's like when you're building a startup, you always have to think about what does the future look like? And I think the future looks like a lot less human in the loop than we see today. And I think our job is to get companies to be comfortable with that universe because the economic benefit for them far outstrips any risks that they would see in that experience today. so those are the differences I think that like data ownership and neutrality are like so important and you know if you're look at what's happening to Rogo what's happening to Harvey if you look in OpenAI they're building vertical companies that are competing with that and from a competitive standpoint you're like oh man those labs are really unstoppable but if you're a neutral business choosing who to work with you got to think about

[42:11](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=2531) well how far up the stack are they going to go So I just think strategically it shouldn't make sense for most large companies to really be beholden to any one lab.