The View from the Office. 

I invited Alec Skriloff and Matt Gacek, co-founders of Squib, a startup that tries to create a digital clone of your personality and then uses AI to write social media posts, over for tea. 

Alec and Matt are engineering students finishing their final semesters at Indiana University in Bloomington. They were in town to scout out the startup and venture scene.

They are wrestling with the first big decision facing every founder in America: San Francisco or New York? (Add your vote in the comments.) 

The trip yielded great meetings along with the revelation that you can walk around the Lower East Side at 2 a.m. and easily find a place to get a slice.

That’s a powerful argument for NYC since some people in tech argue that startups run off “optimism and pizza.”

The idea for Squib, which they started along with Jack Haymart, grew out of a project at school. The goal is to build personal profiles and then leverage AI to generate content.

It’s a cool concept with lots of challenges and potential. Since I run a writing agency to help CEOs communicate, I was understandably skeptical of how much can be done without humans in the loop.

We talked about the challenge of defining areas of interest and then creating the tone or voice for each writing agent.  

At one point, Matt noticed the manual typewriter that sits on the bookcase next to my table. He was curious, so I took it down for a demonstration.

I struck the keys to show how each keystroke advances the carriage by one character while unspooling the ribbon to provide fresh ink. I explained how a bell rings when you get to end of the page and you have to grab the metal rod and slide the carriage back to the starting point.

“What’s a carriage?” he asked.

This is why I keep the typewriter. It’s a physical reminder of the enormous changes in technology that have occurred since I started work. (I used a manual typewriter at my first reporting job at a newspaper in Mexico.) 

It seems hard to believe how fast and far we’ve come in the past four decades.

Alec and Matt reminded me how much the pace of communication technology is poised to accelerate.