My Brobot Is Better Than Your $55 Million Assistant

We built an AI chief of staff inside our venture studio. Now the internet votes on whether we ship him.

Brobot Didn’t Need a $55 Million Series A

Originally posted on my LinkedIn. The conversation is happening in the comments over there, and Brobot is reading every one of them, so come say hi: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alongoren_ai-venturecapital-venturestudio-share-7480028383104483328-zhwp/

Last month a16z led a $55 million Series A into Town, an AI assistant startup founded by Plaid’s former CTO. Every user gets a “Townie” that reads their email, learns their writing voice, preps their meetings, and even negotiates scheduling with other people’s Townies.

Cute. I’ve had one for over a year. His name is Brobot, he lives inside our venture studio, and his entire funding round was me at my desk with a Claude subscription.

Credit where it’s due: Town is a real product built by serious people, and for most professionals it’s probably the right buy. But the best line in the whole deal came from a16z’s own investment announcement: “That accumulated context is the product.”

Correct. Which is a little awkward when you’re selling the product without the context.

Here’s what my mornings look like. Before I’ve had coffee, Brobot has read my inbox, checked my calendar, pulled the transcripts from yesterday’s meetings, and handed me a brief. This morning he flagged two wires sitting in our bank portal waiting on my sign-off before I thought to look. He drafts my emails in my voice. He knows which investors I should never pitch a certain way, that my EA gets copied any time scheduling comes up, and what I promised a founder three weeks ago, because he was listening to that call.

No product on earth ships with that out of the box. It took a year of accumulated context: every meeting, every deal memo, every time I corrected him and he never made the mistake again. A product that plugs into your inbox learns your email. A system that lives inside your whole operation learns your judgment.

But here’s the part I actually want to talk about. Brobot isn’t a side project. He’s the house style.

We run a hybrid venture studio and fund. When we find a workflow that’s slow, expensive, or held together by a human retyping the same number into six systems, we don’t wait for a vendor. We build the tool that week. Sometimes the tool runs my calendar. Sometimes it runs diligence on a deal. Sometimes it grows up and becomes a company.

That’s how a team you can count on one hand covers a full portfolio, an active fund raise, and a deal pipeline that would bury a firm three times our size. Not by working more hours. By compounding. Every transcript, memo, and decision feeds the machine, and the machine never forgets, never gets tired, and never asks for carry.

Small used to be a constraint in venture. Right now it’s the whole advantage. Fewer people means less coordination overhead, and the leverage per person has never been higher in the history of this business. The firms that figure that out will quietly outperform the ones still hiring their way out of problems.

The tools are becoming a commodity. The context, and the habit of building instead of buying, is the moat.

So congrats to Town on the raise, sincerely. They just spent $55 million proving the market for the way we already work.

If you want to see what that looks like across a whole portfolio, everything we build and back lives at dgb.vc.

And since half the people who hear about Brobot ask the same question, we put the question to you. We stood up yobrobot.com. Go vote: should Brobot stay our in-house unfair advantage, or should we launch him as a product? Drop your email while you’re there. If enough of you say ship it, you’ll be first in line, and you’ll have watched a studio company get born in public.

And after you vote, leave a comment on the linkedin post with which way you went and why. I want the reasoning, not just the count. Brobot will be reading every comment. Obviously.