Just three months after Maven’s public launch, Kenneth Stanley – the former OpenAI researcher who co-founded the social media platform designed to facilitate serendipitous interactions – is stepping down.
Stanley posted on Maven and X that despite enthusiastic responses to the platform’s launch, Maven “could not achieve the kind of growth curve that investors want to see to justify increasing investment, and there is likely still a missing ingredient for that kind of growth.”
In order to extend Maven’s runway, Stanley and one of his co-founders Blas Moros decided to pursue other opportunities. Jimmy Secretan, Maven’s chief technology officer, told TechCrunch the company has a few months’ worth of runway left.
“We did what we did because it was a way of becoming very efficient and more of a tight ship,” Stanley told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “I would have preferred to get funding and stay on, but this does allow us to survive and fight another day. A lot of people think it’s a good cause, so I thought we should preserve the cause and keep it going.”
On social media, Stanley honed in on this point, saying that the internet needs something like Maven, “something to take us away from the endless convergent popularity contest and closer to serendipity.”
Secretan will stay on in his role as chief technology officer to drive product innovation and next steps. The founders decided that Secretan would be the obvious choice to stay on because he was the one who built most of the app.
Maven soft-launched in January, and TechCrunch covered the platform’s public debut in May. Twitter co-founder Ev Williams and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are among Maven’s backers, who contributed to a $2 million seed round in 2023. Stanley told TechCrunch at the time the two tech leaders invested in Maven because they believed in its mission of helping people increase their chances of serendipity.
Whether Maven could raise more funds or attract the user base necessary to grow on this mission was always an open question. Maven allows people to follow and connect with topics they find interesting – from neuroscience to parenting – but there are no likes, upvotes, retweets, follows or ways to amplify content to the masses. While those features of social media arguably make it more toxic, they also keep users engaged.
When Stanley spoke to TechCrunch in May, he mused about possible paths to monetization to attract more investors, such as a subscription model or advertising.
Secretan told TechCrunch that Maven would need to grow its user base before looking to monetize.
“At Maven, we were very good at getting people into deep conversations about really interesting things and especially unexpected, surprising interests,” Secretan told TechCrunch. “Part of the problem is that those kind of deep conversations where we excel tend not to be very viral…they make growth a little bit harder because they’re hard to share.”
Following the co-founder’s exit, Maven will bring on product design help on a contract basis to maintain that philosophy while also attracting more users.
“We’re not just sort of taking the easy way out and drowning the feed with just the most popular and lowest common denominator stuff,” said Secretan. “So I think there is a way to thread that needle.”
The founder also mentioned that Maven created a spin off app called Ryff that uses generative AI art to help users follow their interests and explore new spaces.
Stanley told TechCrunch he’s looking towards “new opportunities” and is ultimately “excited to think about AI again.” He noted that what he does next might have a connection to “open-endedness,” an area of AI research that looks at algorithms that are designed to constantly invent and solve new tasks. Stanley has described the concept as an antidote to optimization, where AI is given an outcome to achieve and must find the path towards getting there.
