“The only real moat that exists is consumer mindshare,” says Friend.com CEO Avi Schiffmann | HackerNoon

Avi Schiffmann is the Founder/CEO of Friend.com, the new AI necklace companion. Previously Avi dropped out of Harvard and founded InternetActivism.org, where he notably built a COVID tracker that over 600M people visited. Avi was kind enough to spend a few minutes sharing his rare insights with the HackerNoon community.

Me: What is Friend.com?

Avi Schiffmann: Friend is the first product that can actually be called an AI companion. They are palm-sized, always listening devices you can talk to anytime and bring anywhere. Friends remember everything you say, and each develops a distinct personality.

To me, they’re the world’s first living electronics, and personally it’s a stickier product to me than my iPhone. We’re currently producing a batch of 5,000 friends, which will start shipping July 30th this year (World Friendship Day).

You notably bought the domain for $1.8M, and have claimed it’s already paid for itself in backlinks and brand reputation. I agree with you. Historically, it’s probably the single word that built Facebook – so I think it will hold internet value regardless. But as I understand it, the majority of your funding went into purchasing the domain – is that true? Could you share more of the process behind the negotiations for such a valuable piece of digital real estate? And what do you plan to spend money on and not spend money on going forward?

A company is more than a product, and the only real moat that exists is consumer mindshare. I believe in AI companionship for everyone, and there is no major incumbent that openly shares this POV. I think I am a master of getting attention, which will only get more fun as VCs give me more money, and I think I’ll be able to use that to be the dominant voice in digital relationships.

This will be increasingly valuable in the coming years, as I genuinely believe the AI companionship industry will become the most culturally influential consumer category of the next generation. This is what GenA is growing up into and it will be as influential to them as social media was to me.

Plus having [email protected] is pretty cool.

Do you see your company as more of a hardware company, software company, or another type of company?

Friend is a digital relationships company. Whatever that means.

With Scarlett Johanasson suing OpenAI for using an imitation of Her voice in their app and you tweeting that most of your friends have not seen Her, I do wonder, how do you see younger people accepting AI into their lives in ways that older generations don’t?

I launched a little chatbot experiment last year on friend.com, where you could chat with these very realistic feeling chatbots. They could block users, for example. My most interesting insight from that is that it’s really mostly millenials+ that try and fuck their robots. It’s mostly GenZ & younger that are able to view AI as a platonic companion. I think for them it’s extremely intuitive, they are growing up with it.

What popular culture is most impactful on your product decision making?

“I’ll play first, and tell you about it later. Maybe.” – Miles Davis

Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Mosseri, and Linda Yaccarino are all tech executives who have all started wearing gold chains in their public appearances.  Do you think this at all relates to normalizing jewelry as a path for ai hardware adoption? Or do they just like the bling bling now?

I think they just like the bling bling.

What AI models are you using under the hood with Friend? And what types of AI models do you think will see increased usage?

I find Claude 3.7 to be the best model for Friend right now. That could change by the time we ship, but Claude certainly has the most stable charisma of any model I’ve tried.

What future AI breakthroughs have you excited? And what historical AI breakthroughs do you think have been underappreciated by the media?

I want to see AI memory solved on a foundational model level, rather than the experimental RAG techniques that we have today.

Bad friends can have a massively negative impact on one’s life. How are you preventing or minimizing the potential bad advice that AI could give Friend.com’s users?

You haven’t ever had a friend give you bad advice?

When your COVID tracker took the internet by storm, what were some of the strangest inbound messages you received?

That will forever be one of the craziest periods of my life. Strangest? I did have the CIA approach me to join some kinda program related to COVID things. I think the government handled COVID awfully. I started ncov2019 in January, months before it was even called COVID, so I really watched the world descend into chaos very quickly. I can’t wait to see a smaller government of hyper competent people leveraging AI to more effectively serve its people.

What are a couple programs, apps, books, or technologies you use and love that the general public may not know about?

Very random but I always try and recommend mobbin.com. It’s the best resource on modern design practices out there tbh. Great artists steal, copy it all.

What prompt or direction or style can you give to AI to make it more human or friendly?

Just make it more opinionated, it makes for more entertaining conversation.

Do you dye your own hair?

My X pfp is me with neon green hair, although it was a bit washed out from the ocean, we were at Nazare in that photo.