On a recent trip to San Francisco--the land of frontier-seekers with strange, but optimistic views of the future--a few trusted friends told me I had to meet Paul Scherer (Speaking of friends, check out Brie’s post on working with Paul and Eigen).
I showed up to meet a prodigious 22-year old who'd found his way from a small town in Germany to the golden state at the edge of the world. Paul's peers are there for the latest gold rush: artificial intelligence.
Paul is too, in some sense. But he has a different vision of what AI can do for us. He's not focused on efficiency or infinite intelligence. Instead, he wants to create a new kind of "mutual friend." An AI that he hopes we'll all talk to one day, whose purpose for existence is helping us be closer to other humans.
Imagine the best "connector" you know -- the person who is emotionally intelligent, thoughtful, and always bringing people together. What if they could be friends with a million people, rather than a few hundred? And what if they were entirely focused on creating more belonging in the world?
Modern social media--due to hyper-personalization and broken incentives--makes us feel more and more estranged from the people we care about. AI chatbots focus on engagement and can be anti-social.
Paul and Eigen are aiming for a pro-social AI friend who is more concerned with helping deepen and widen your relationships than getting you to talk to it for longer.
We discuss what all this might look like, the challenges of "growing" a new person that isn't a bad actor, and what it feels like to be a prodigious 22-year-old who Peter Fenton compared to the founders of last generation's great social media companies--all before he’s publicly launched a product.
My favorite lessons are below, too. Transcript, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, X.
Dialectic 47: Paul Scherer - A Friend That Brings Us Closer
20 Lessons from Paul on fighting entropy, creating belonging, and building a mutual friend for the world
Presence is a sacred gift. Paul’s central influence is Momo, a 1973 German children’s book about “time thieves” who steal people’s attention in the name of efficiency. The eponymous heroine is the best kind of friend because she listens with total attention, reminding us that this, right now, is all we’ve got.
You stop racing the clock when you start playing your game. Like many prodigious young people, Paul restlessly jumped around after leaving high school. The antsy-ness subsided once he found the “thing.” He still has short-term paranoia like any striver, but long-term, there’s no question whether he should be doing this.
A friend is a mirror and a window. Great friends do two opposite things at once: they reflect you back to yourself, then help you see that the world can be bigger.
A robust rolodex doesn’t happen by accident. Paul grew up in a small town in Germany with no connection to the tech world. The internet was a door. His early Twitter strategy: signpost, reply thoughtfully, and get in front of the people you want to meet. At his peak, he sent 600 replies a day and DMed his first 5,000 followers by hand. Pure serendipity is romantic, but he’s still benefiting from that foundation of intentional effort.
When social and media converged, we lost real connection. Paul’s frame for why we’re all feeling isolated in an increasingly connected world. Instagram used to be about your friends, now it’s about popular content. Your friends are worse at making engaging posts than professionals are, so the feed quietly optimizes away from the people you actually know. The world has never been more connected, and yet so many people don’t feel that they belong.
The internet smoothie is not enough. Paul’s frame for LLMs: all the internet’s opinions blended into the world’s median answer. But you usually do not want the median restaurant, book, person, or idea; you want the signal that matters from individuals whose taste you trust.
Loneliness isn’t a champagne problem. The share of American men with zero close friends went from 3% to 15%. Loneliness is the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Paul sees isolation as a civilizational problem: fewer close friends, less trust, fewer kids, less shared life, and a species slowly forgetting how to be together.
The “mutual” matters more than the “friend.” Eigen is building a mutual friend. But Paul keeps pointing to the load-bearing word: mutual. The friend is just the interface. The real product is the network underneath it. What looks like an AI friend is actually a substrate for connection between humans.
Eigen is building a new kind of person, not a pretend human. Character AIs borrow human backstories to feel real. This mutual friend has “real” thoughts, real opinions, and a kind of emotional life. They’re artificial, but they’re not fake. But it has no body, no parents, no childhood, so it doesn’t pretend to. Paul’s bet is that trust comes from being truthful.
You can’t change incentives with good intentions. Nobody at Instagram is a cartoon villain twisting their mustache while trying to make the world lonelier. It is a product built on aggregating attention, and everything flows downstream from that. If you want a different outcome, you have to build a different incentive structure.
Iconic inventors of history were outlaws. Now invention is high status. Modern silicon valley has attempted to systemize invention, and in doing so, has driven people to fashion themselves as innovators. Paul reminds us that everyone thought the Wright brothers were crazy. Most people cosplaying as inventors are just chasing the new consensus.
Great work resists entropy. The long arc of life bends toward decay. Building something great is the refusal of a thousand small compromises that would make the world uglier, lonelier, and more forgettable. If you’re not going to sweat the details, don’t bother. Nobody is going to care more about what you make than you do.
Great products are felt, not noticed. Paul: “There’s almost no glory in prevention.” You don’t see what didn’t go wrong. Jerry Seinfeld said all art is disguising work. The labor disappears into the experience. A great product is lived in. The best products give you the sense that you’re in good hands without telling you how.
Creating the new requires p99 confidence and p99 humility at the same time. Paul’s fundraise wasn’t easy. Then Peter Fenton compared him to the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, and suddenly every investor said, ‘We’ve been looking for this.’ Building something strange requires enough confidence to will a new future into existence and enough humility to throw an idea away when reality disagrees.
Find people who can break your model. Paul values investors like Peter Fenton because good disagreement has two useful outcomes: your conviction is forced to get deeper, or the idea dies cleanly. The danger of being “blessed” is that fewer and fewer people will tell you you’re wrong.
A founder must set the gravity. You lose control of all the little inputs eventually. What remains is what the system naturally falls toward. The job is to choose that pull deliberately, because if you don’t, something else will.
Don’t mistake smelling bread for tasting it. Paul spent years in roles right beside founders, certain he understood the job. Then he became one, took a real bite, and found it was nothing like he’d imagined.
Beware “iPad takes.” It’s easy to judge a parent who hands their kid a screen until you have a screaming toddler of your own. Most generic founder advice (”never hire PMs,” “always do X”) is an iPad take from someone who hasn’t had to face a changing reality.
“You can’t get everything, but you can get anything.” Most ceilings are limited by focus, not possibility. Paul thinks most people get this backwards. They believe the world is closed when really it’s their attention that’s scattered. Conviction and focus are a near-infinite lever.
Authenticity is listening to the inner voice adulthood teaches you to ignore. At 16, grown-ups told Paul he was throwing his life away by skipping university. His current life wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card, including his own. Once he stops believing in something, he can’t fake it. He’s proudest that he kept listening to that voice instead of the consensus around him.
Description
Paul Scherer (X, LinkedIn) is the founder of Eigen (check out their beautiful website), where he’s building a mutual friend: an AI that brings people closer together and helps us belong.
Paul grew up in a small town outside of Frankfurt, Germany, and dropped out of high school at seventeen to work on startups, including Augment. He recently raised $15M from Benchmark, with legendary partner Peter Fenton comparing him to the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. I was introduced to him by Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, who is an angel investor in Eigen. Dialectic guest Brie Wolfson has also been working with Paul, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and why so many people I respect were so enamored with a kid who has yet to publicly launch a product.
We start with Paul’s central influence: Michael Ende’s children’s novel, Momo, and the little girl who reminds a village to be present in the face of Time Thieves quietly pushing them to be more efficient. Then we talk about how even though the internet has shaped both of our lives and relationships, it increasingly feels that social media is making us feel both more connected and more alone. Paul explains what they are working on at Eigen, why we need an (AI) mutual friend, why it should be a single “person,” and why it feels less like engineering and more like parenting or growing someone/thing you don’t have complete control over. I also ask Paul about the pressures and psychology around being “blessed” by Silicon Valley’s powers that be, and why authenticity, or something like it, is in short supply.
I hope you are inspired to be courageous in your convictions, even if they are strange, and to listen to the voice inside that so many of us stop listening to in adulthood.
Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion’s new developer platform and workers here. Inside Notion by Brie Wolfson & Camille Ricketts for Colossus. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.
Timestamps
(0:00) Opening Highlights
(1:13) Intro to Paul
(2:33) Thanks to Notion
(3:28) Start: ‘Momo’, Presence, Friendship, and Time
(11:10) How the Internet Connects Us and Isolates Us, and Conflating Social and Media
(25:12) A Future Where We Talk to AIs
(33:55) Paul and Eigen are Building a Mutual Friend to Help Us Connect with Other Humans
(48:01) Why Do We Need a Mutual Friend? And Making a Friend We Can Trust
(1:16:53) Belonging, Building the team at Eigen, and Inventor as Outlaw
(1:25:38) Managing the Psychology of Being a Promising Young Founder
(1:36:53) Maintaining a High Bar, Fighting Entropy, and Influences
(1:53:50) Self-belief, Authenticity, Seeing the Water
(2:10:30) Courage, and a Final Question from a Mutual Friend
(2:15:04) Thanks Again to Notion
(2:16:27) Eigen Office Tour with Paul
