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Jean-Denis Grèze

Co-Founder & CEO, Town

Search every verified Jean-Denis Grèze interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jean-Denis Grèze, co-founder and CEO of Town, has been discussing the company's pivot from an AI tax product for small businesses to an AI work assistant. He said the tax product generated nearly $1 million in its first year but was shut down because it was not expected to reach venture scale, as incumbents could adopt similar AI technology. Town, which operates from email and calendar integrations, aims to automate workplace tasks and has reportedly been in talks to raise funding at a $1 billion valuation, with a $55 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz previously mentioned. In recent appearances, Grèze has outlined his views on AI agents, arguing that agent-to-agent communication is less useful than framing AI systems as search problems, where the key is having the right information in the context window. He has also said that personal AI agents will likely serve more business than consumer customers, calling the consumer market "a market to zero" because individuals rarely pay for software. He has discussed Town's privacy practices, including federated data approaches that avoid reindexing user emails, and has predicted that users will increasingly trust agents to make data-sharing decisions within five years.

Recent appearances

  • Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI

    October 19, 2026 · 📺 a16z

    Jean-Denis Greze was CTO of Plaid. His next startup, an AI tax product for small businesses, made nearly $1M in its first year and was on track for $2.5M to $3M. He shut it down anyway. The reason: in the age of AI, it was never going to be venture scale. Incumbents could use the same technology to automate tax prep for their existing customers faster than a startup could win market share. Tax is also sold once a year, so he had about a one-month window to pivot before the door closed. The pivot became Town, an AI assistant that works from your email and calendar. It found product-market fit…

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  • 50 Gigawatts To The Face, 17% GDP Growth Please, Road to COD 4, Bing Gordon Joins

    October 19, 2026 · 📺 TBPN

    00:01:35 "You Can See Everything" Spoiler Talk 00:23:51 AI Data Center Forecast Jumps 00:33:59 Anthropic Staff Predict AI Boom 00:40:59 Call of Duty Campaign Review 00:48:32 Katie Drummond discusses Nathan Fielder’s film about Elizabeth Holmes, its complex portrayal of empathy, fraud, and human behavior, and its potential to become a classic. The global editorial director of WIRED also reflects on how the tech press once amplified Holmes’s claims and enabled the era of visionary, larger-than-life startup founders. 01:07:17 Bing Gordon, founding executive of Electronic Arts and co-author of *Ev…

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  • Can AI Agents Kill Office Busywork? Town’s Founder Is Betting On It

    October 08, 2026 · 📺 Forbes

    On this episode of the Agentic Edge, Town CEO Jean-Denis Greze sat down with Forbes to discuss how Town serves as an AI assistant to automate workplace tasks and streamline time management. Greze also discussed the company’s approach to earning user trust through privacy and security practices and the unique ways customers leverage the platform to automate workflows and business decisions. 00:00 Town’sCore Workplace Use Cases 02:02 Choosing Email And Calendar As The Focus 03:09 Differentiating Business AI Assistants From Consumer Platforms 07:11 Building User Trust Security 11:52 Approaches T…

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  • Jean-Denis Greze (Town) at the Machine Earning AI Summit

    October 02, 2026 · 📺 Newcomer AI Summits and Newcomer

    Town co-founder and CEO Jean-Denis Greze told the crowd at the Machine Earning AI Summit that he isn’t losing sleep over agents going rogue. He said humans will approve purchases at first, and the mistakes that slip through will get budgeted in, like credit card fraud today. He does think, however, that personal AI agents will end up serving more business and enterprise customers than consumers. He called the consumer business “a market to zero” because regular people rarely pay for software. The Machine Earning AI Summit was held on September 29 in San Francisco. Many thanks to our sponsor…

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  • Town vs Instinct vs GrokBot | Why the AI Assistant Market Is Not a Bubble

    September 07, 2026 · 📺 20VC with Harry Stebbings

    Jean-Denis "JD" Grèze is the Co-Founder and CEO of Town, the AI work assistant reportedly in talks to raise funding at a $1BN valuation. Before founding Town, JD spent seven years as CTO of Plaid. Before Plaid, he was Director of Engineering at Dropbox. He is also a prolific angel investor backing companies including Modal, BaseTen, Merge and NexHealth. ----------------------------------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:08 - Why Town Pivoted From AI Tax to AI Assistants 04:09 - Can Town Survive Google, Apple and OpenAI? 06:14 - Why AI Assistants Could Have Network Effects 08:48 - Wi…

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  • Agents' next frontier: agent-to-agent and network effects — Jean-Denis Greze, Town

    September 03, 2026 · 📺 AI Engineer

    Jean-Denis Greze and his wife share an agent that can read both of their inboxes, including mail from before they were married, and neither of them minds. Greze is CTO of Town and spent seven years as CTO at Plaid. He opens by rejecting his own topic. Agent to agent, he argues, is not a useful concept. Every LLM system is really a search problem: what matters is whether the right information sits in the context window at the moment of the tool call. The ideal is a single agent with access to all the world's information. What blocks it is not context length but privacy, and he reaches for the C…

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  • Episode 003 - Jean-Denis, CEO // Town AI

    August 24, 2026 · 📺 AnchorBrowser

    What happens when a company stops relying on a shared Notion doc to remember how it works — and lets AI agents do that instead? This week, Gabi is joined by Jean-Denis Greze, co-founder and "Mayor" (not CEO) of Town, an AI assistant startup that just raised a $55M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Before Town, Jean-Denis spent nearly seven years as CTO of Plaid, scaling the engineering org from 20 people to 350 through a $13.4B valuation. He breaks down his thesis of the "self-organizing company," how Town's agents read across email, Slack, and docs without eroding trust between coworkers,…

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  • Town's CEO on the self-organizing company

    August 13, 2026 · 📺 Casey Newton

    Last week on the Platformer podcast, Replit's Amjad Masad predicted that within three years, we'll be using fewer apps and more agents — with the agents using apps on our behalf. For the fifth episode of our miniseries on productivity in the AI era, I talked to someone building one of those agents. Jean-Denis Greze is the co-founder and CEO of Town — though his actual title there is mayor. Town's signature bet is that you will not have a relationship with a piece of software so much as with a character. Your assistant — Town calls it a townie — gets a name, a personality, and an animal avatar…

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  • He Left Plaid at 45 to Become a Founder for the First Time. — Jean-Denis Greze (Town)

    August 05, 2026 · 📺 Luba Yudasina

    Automate Compliance (and get $1,000 off!!) - https://vanta.com/luba Today I walk with Jean-Denis Greze, co-founder and CEO of Town, an AI on-ramp platform for knowledge workers. Jean-Denis is the former CTO of Plaid, led engineering through a blocked $5.3B Visa acquisition, and walked away from the C-suite at 45 to start over from zero, and now he's turned a scrapped AI tax-prep startup into a $55M Series A company backed by Andreessen Horowitz. He gets into the week he decided to kill a business that was actually working, and why he refuses to call Town an "AI assistant." We get into: Why…

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  • The AI Assistant That Actually Gets Work Done | Jean-Denis Greze, Town

    August 03, 2026 · 📺 Liftoff with Keith Newman

    What if your AI assistant didn't just answer questions—but actually understood how you work and helped get things done? In this episode of Liftoff with Keith, Keith sits down with Jean-Denis Greze, Co-Founder & CEO of Town, to explore the future of personalized AI assistants and what it takes to build AI that can work across the tools people already use. The conversation dives into how AI can move beyond the traditional chatbot experience to help manage tasks, workflows, email, calendars, and more—while learning from the context of how each person actually works. Jean-Denis also shares insi…

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  • Why Trust Is the Bottleneck for Agents — Jean-Denis Greze, Town | AI Engineer World's Fair 2026

    July 08, 2026 · 📺 WorkOS

    The default assumption in consumer AI has been that more autonomy is always better: let the agent act, let it send the email, let it book the meeting. Jean-Denis Greze, founder of Town and former CTO of Plaid, says that's backwards. The products that win will be the ones that earn autonomy slowly. In this conversation, Jean-Denis breaks down how Town decided AI should never be allowed to send an email, only draft one: why the company pivoted from AI tax prep to a personal assistant after watching preparers drown in email and scheduling, how Town graduates an automation from "draft only" to "j…

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  • How an 11-Person Team Ships a Feature Every Week | Jean-Denis Greze, Town CEO & Fmr. Plaid CTO

    June 08, 2026 · 📺 Span

    Velocity feels like the whole game in engineering, but Jean-Denis Greze thinks most teams are chasing it in the wrong places. The CEO of Town and former Plaid CTO sat down with Stephen Poletto to uncover what really moves the needle when you build with AI. The result? A grounded conversation about what's really changing inside engineering teams right now, why the traditional vertical SaaS moat is dead and where defensibility is moving, how Town's 11-person team ships a major feature every week, and why a model that wins on benchmarks can still make your product worse. Plus: the Claude Code…

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The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →