Just three months after Maven's public launch, former OpenAI researcher Kenneth Stanley is stepping down as co-founder of the social media platform designed to facilitate serendipitous interactions.
Stanley wrote in a post on Maven and X that despite the enthusiastic response to the platform's launch, Maven “has not been able to achieve the growth curve that investors would like to see to justify increased investment, and there is likely still a missing component to such growth.”
To extend Maven's lifespan, Stanley and co-founder Blas Moros have decided to pursue other opportunities. Jimmy Secreton, Maven's chief technology officer, told TechCrunch that the company still has a few more months of life left.
“We did it because it was a very efficient and tight-knit way to organize,” Stanley told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “We would have preferred to have gotten the funding and stayed, but this allows us to survive and fight again. A lot of people think this is a good thing, so we thought we should protect the cause and continue.”
On social media, Stanley highlighted this point, saying the internet needs something like Maven, something that “moves us away from the endless, concentrated popularity contests and moves us closer to random luck.”
As Chief Technology Officer, Secretan will continue to drive product innovation and next steps, and the founders decided he was the natural choice to stay on since he built much of the app.
Maven soft launched in January, and TechCrunch reported on the platform's public launch in May. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are backers of Maven, which raised $2 million in a seed round in 2023. Stanley told TechCrunch at the time that the two tech leaders invested in Maven because they believed in its mission to increase people's chances of serendipity.
It was always an open question whether Maven would be able to raise more funding or acquire the user base it needed to grow its mission. Maven lets you follow and interact with topics of interest, from neuroscience to parenting, but there's no way to like, upvote, retweet, follow, or otherwise disseminate content to the masses. These features of social media arguably make it harmful, but they also keep users engaged.
In an interview with TechCrunch in May, Stanley discussed possible avenues of monetization to attract more investors, including subscription models and advertising.
Secretan told TechCrunch that Maven needs to grow its user base before it can aim to monetize.
“At Maven, we've been really good at engaging people in deep conversations about really interesting things, especially unexpected and surprising interests,” Secretan told TechCrunch. “Part of the problem is that these kinds of deep conversations that we're good at tend to be less widespread. They're less shareable, which makes them a little harder to grow.”
Following the departure of its co-founders, Maven plans to hire a product design assistant on a contract basis to maintain its ethos and attract a larger user base.
“We're not taking the easy route of just filling up your feed with the most popular and least common things,” Secretan said, “so I think there's a way to thread that needle.”
The founders also mentioned that Maven has created a spin-off app called Ryff that uses generative AI art to help users pursue their interests and explore new spaces.
Stanley told TechCrunch that he's looking at “new opportunities” and is ultimately “excited to think about AI again.” What he does next, he noted, may have something to do with the “open-endedness” of AI research, a field that studies algorithms designed to constantly invent and solve new tasks. Stanley describes the concept as an antidote to optimization, where an AI is given an outcome to achieve and must find a path to get there.