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a16z Podcast · 3 min · Oct 19, 2026
Town earns access to company systems in stages
Jean-Denis Greze
Town starts with email and calendar, then uses early value to earn access to CRM and other systems.
In this episode
Full episode- 3:04A nearly $1M tax business still wasn’t venture scale7 min
- 24:35A $1 monthly routine can save a restaurant thousands3 min
- 29:00AI can make custom software scale better than FDEsPro pick 5 min
- 34:07Town competes with AI labs through neutral models and portable data8 min
- 52:29Agents should answer to users, not advertisers7 min
- 18:14Town earns access to company systems in stages3 min
- 45:37AI adoption depends on showing people what to automate3 min
- 13:34Great user experience should come before enterprise controls3 min
“simply by connecting their email and their calendar.”
Jean-Denis Grezeat 19:24 · a16z Podcast
Takeaways
- Start with email and calendar, not core systems of record.
- Earn permission for deeper access by proving value first.
- Enterprise adoption also needs audit, privacy, and cost controls.
About this segment
Town starts with email and calendar, then uses early value to earn access to CRM and other systems. This staged approach gives users a benefit before IT handles controls and costs.
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.
Erik Torenberg, Host · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.
From “Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI”, Oct 19, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 18:20
Yeah, so I often think about things that happen at the speed of a human, right? And first of all, assistance as a category is used by a few million folks, right, worldwide today. It's still very early in the adoption curve. So I don't even think all of the CEOs have gone there. And just like the iPhone, it will probably take 6, 12, 18 months for most people to experience this magic, even in their personal life.
- 18:52
Once they do, then there's a question of how do you adopt that within the company? And I think it is more complicated than just the iPhone because the way agents work is they're more and more effective if they have access to the data and the APIs that run your business. If they have access to those things in a secure, privacy-preserving way, then they can do lots of things for you. But if they don't, they're only really as smart as the data they have the access to.
- 19:20
So I think the way we think about the journey is, first, be able to go to any company and get a few people at that business simply by connecting their email and their calendar. So not the core systems of record yet, to feel enough magic that they're like, oh, this is going to bring a lot of value in my work. And as I said, for external facing roles, the calendar and email are real sources of insight about how you can automate part of someone's work.
- 19:51
And so then you can show up with the assistant. You can be like, I can help prepare you for these meetings. I can tweak the decks for that meeting to use the design language better and to be updated with the latest numbers that are in this PDF that was sent to you. And just from that, people will start to feel the magic. and then you ask yourself, well, have I earned the right to ask you to connect your CRM?
- 20:12
Have I earned the right for you to go to your IT team and ask all these other tools to be connected? And I think that journey will happen more at the speed of humans. And you have to have the other side of the coin. You have to have the audit logs. You have to have the posture that allows privilege information not to be shared with the agent. You need the cost control for the CFO so that they understand that if their whole team operates on town, they're understanding where money is being spent and that tokens are being used efficiently.
- 20:44
It's all that side of things that will take more human time to adapt because you're still selling into a Fortune 100 company that has to be run with a certain level of diligence. As you move down market, as you move towards SMBs and mid-market firms, I think you have fewer of those requirements and the adoption will be much faster. And so our current bet right now is we are really focusing on from a product experience and self-serve growth, the SMB market, the mid-market, and then from a what security compliance finance features do we need, focusing on the enterprise.
- 21:17
And we think we can knock out that whole part of the space.