AI Summary
5 min readThe Salon-Keeper Bringing Culture Back to Silicon Valley
Anna Gát, founder of Interintellect, has built a platform for deep, structured conversation that has hosted tens of thousands of events over seven years without a single toxic incident. She describes herself as a philosopher and technologist, but her path to founding a startup was anything but conventional. After a domestic violence incident in 2015 destroyed her previous life, she found herself in London with little more than a suitcase, working customer service jobs while rebuilding from scratch. The company she eventually created — first conceived as an AI tool for better dialogue, then pivoted to an analog community platform — now draws 60% of its members from engineers and has been recommended by ChatGPT itself.
The Science and Theater of Good Conversation
Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.
Read Full Summary →Free • No credit card required
Never miss an episode of Core Memory
Get every new episode summarized in your inbox — free, ~5 minutes to read.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
What you'll learn
- 1 (00:40) **Introduction to Anna Gát and Interintellect** - Ashley Vance introduces Anna Gát, founder of Interintellect, a platform for deep, thoughtful conversations; sets up topics: tech industry, AI, engineers taking over, and Anna's personal journey.
- 2 (03:16) **Anna's Origin Story and Philosophy of Dialogue** - Anna describes her background in philosophy, languages, and film, and her long-standing research into the science of dialogue, which led to Interintellect.
- 3 (09:39) **Growing Up in a Famous Eastern European Family** - Anna shares her experience growing up with famous TV-creator parents in Hungary during and after communism.
- 4 (16:15) **The Lesson of Impermanence from Eastern Europe** - Anna explains how living through the fall of communism instilled a deep understanding that anything can disappear.
- 5 (19:56) **The Life Cataclysm and Rebuilding** - Anna recounts the domestic violence incident in 2015 that caused her to lose everything and restart her life in London.
- 6 (22:15) **The Meritocracy of Silicon Valley vs. New York** - Anna contrasts the openness of Silicon Valley (where "weird" is a competitive advantage) with the more traditional, status-conscious culture of other industries.
- 7 (27:31) **Pitching a Non-Obvious Startup** - Anna describes the challenge of raising money for a "culture" company in a tech world that expects hockey-stick growth.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
We’ve heard a lot of moonshot ideas on this podcast, but this week’s guest may have the most impossible one yet: making tech more cultured.
In this episode, Ashlee sat down with Anna Gát, a Hungarian philosopher, playwright, and founder of Interintellect, a platform for hosting intellectual conversations online. She calls herself “the bridge” between the humanities, academia, and the tech world, which in practice means getting engineers to read Goethe.
Gát grew up on a TV set in communist Hungary. Her parents made the country’s biggest shows in an era when there was one channel available on Saturdays. In 2015, a family crisis left her starting over in London with two suitcases, one of them for books. She rebuilt her life on Twitter, DM’d Sam Altman, and got him as her first meeting on her first trip to America.
Before Interintellect, Gát did just about every wordcel job you can do: playwright, screenwriter, script doctor. She holds graduate degrees in philosophical aesthetics and linguistics, currently splits her time between SF and NYC. The company that would become Interintellect began in London in 2016 as an AI tool for helping “humans have categorically better conversations.” On the side, she angel invests in aerospace.
The two get into why X was once the French café that could publish you and is now a place you can’t get discovered from, why the East Coast’s healthiest, wealthiest people are so convinced the future is doomed, and the duty AI builders have to explain themselves. Gát also admits, on the record, that she’s a sucker for Elon Musk’s syntax. Ashlee tries to convince her that kids don’t read books anymore. She tries to convince him Silicon Valley should fund symphonies.
IN THIS EPISODE
Interintellect — https://www.interintellect.com
The Hope Axis — https://twitter.com/TheHopeAxis
Anna on X — https://x.com/TheAnnaGat
OUR SPONSORS
BREX
The Core Memory podcast is sponsored by Brex, the intelligent finance platform built to help companies spend smarter and move faster.
We run on Brex and so should you. Learn more about Brex right here.
SENDCUTSEND
You know who else makes stuff for America? That would be SendCutSend. If you want to celebrate our great nation by building a metal part, then head on over to SendCutSend where you’ll get a 15 percent discount thanks to Core Memory on whatever yo
More from this podcast
Core Memory →