Today I walk with @jgreze, co-founder and CEO of @TownAI, an AI on-ramp platform for individuals and businesses. 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(@a16z). 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 he waited until 45, after seven years as Plaid's CTO, to become a founder for the first time - The week he and his co-founder killed a working, revenue-generating tax-prep startup because it wasn't going to be a rocket ship - Town's real bet: not a smarter AI assistant, but an onboarding layer that gets normal people leverage from AI without writing a single prompt - His "accelerators, table stakes, foundations" framework for staying ahead of OpenAI, Gemini, and Google - Why turning "uncool" work into cult culture, from Dropbox's Team Cash to Plaid's colourful tights, built teams that stuck around so much more! Link in comments!