“We’re a long way from pants,” Andy Dunn, founder of online fashion retailer Bonobos, told TechCrunch. Now, the former CEO is taking on a completely different challenge: he wants to help people make friends.
Dunn’s newest venture, Pie, is a social app focused on bringing people together in real life.
With an $11.5 million Series A raise and the funds to pay organizers to host events, Pie has grown to over 130,000 monthly active users, despite only being available in San Francisco and Chicago. But more users meant that the in-person events hosted through the app were also getting more crowded, making it harder for people to connect.
The young company was faced with a problem: if hundreds of people show up to an event, how do guests know who to talk to? How can they make friends when they walk into a busy room, surrounded by strangers?
“This is the beauty of building a startup,” Dunn said. “A solution creates a problem.”
Luckily, a possible fix for this problem wasn’t hard to find.
Two event organizers on Pie were already working together to build a tool called Sparked Connections, an AI-powered quiz that tries to predict who people will get along with best at a given social event. Pie acquihired the two founders, Samir Mahafzah and Sam Stubbs, and folded the quiz into certain gatherings, which are branded as “Sparked by Pie.”
At Pie’s “Coffee with Strangers” event, for example, each person who RSVPs will take a short personality test, where respondents rate how much they agree with a given sentiment on a scale of 1 to 5. These prompts are varied, and include things like: Are you willing to sacrifice stability to pursue a passion? Do you believe in astrology? Do you pray? Do you vote? Do you have any toxic traits?
Before the event, the quiz’s algorithm divides respondents into groups of six, based on who the AI thinks is most likely to get along. Then, those six people are placed into a group chat on Pie, where they can get to know each other before the event.
“We’re starting to power it through [ChatGPT]. And then when we get feedback loops of who connects with who, and who invites people to stuff, we’ll start to see, well, why do people hit it off?” Dunn said. “And I think that’s such a dark art that without the AI inflection point, I think it would be an almost unsolvable problem.”
With increasing concerns around Americans’ level of loneliness, it may seem depressing that we need algorithms to help us make friends. But if you’ve ever connected with a new friend via Instagram, or dated someone from Bumble, then you’ve already let AI into your social life.