Our investment in Patina Systems
Shifting creative control from companies to people
Every day, billions of people around the world use apps to communicate, find their way around, take photos, or search the web. It’s impossible to capture the needs and preferences of so many people, so developers have to build for their idea of an average user. This leaves little room for individual needs or taste. It means hardcoded features you can’t switch off. Shortcomings in accessibility adaptations. Endlessly jumping between different apps because you can’t combine functionalities. And just a gradual accumulation of small frustrations.
This isn’t a novel insight. Plenty of teams have tried to give consumers the power to change this before through a universe of app builder apps and personal automation tools. But these transfer far too much responsibility onto users, who are usually not designers. They also tend to produce brittle tools that collide with ecosystem lock-ins, particularly with one well-known smartphone manufacturer…
A paradigm shift
We’ve been stuck in this paradigm for as long as any of us can remember. But we needn’t be anymore.
LLMs are now really good at writing code, to the point where they are now an indispensable companion to software engineers. GitHub Copilot adoption is growing 180% year-on-year, while Anthropic and Vercel have created open coding environments that can run in a browser to solve user requests.
At the same time, adoption rates for GenAI products are soaring. We’ll touch more on this in the upcoming State of AI Report, but companies like OpenAI have gone from tens of millions in revenue in 2022 to billions. Add to that, we’re seeing the rise of highly-capable small models that can be run on-device, whether it’s the Phi family from Microsoft or OpenELM from Apple.
While LLM-generated code isn’t perfect and software development will remain hard, it’s a safe bet that improvised software will be good enough for many applications and will at least serve as a good testbed for collaboration.
Enter Patina
That’s why we’re delighted to invest in Patina Systems, alongside Haystack, Cursor Capital, 2392 Fund, Soleio and others.
While most companies are using LLMs to accelerate the work of their in-house engineering teams, Patina believes the answer doesn’t lie in churning out more pre-made tools. Instead, it lies in empowering users who understand their own needs. Patina is taking the interfaces people know and love, like cameras, maps, and messages - and helping people to extend and share them in ways that suit them.
Patina was founded by my friend Tyler Angert, who was previously the first designer at Replit. He led design for its now legendary integrated development environment (IDE). Before joining Replit, he worked with the MIT Media Lab on Scratch, the world’s most popular coding platform for kids. He has an intuitive grasp of design and how to meet user needs - whether they’re a child or a developer working at a frontier AI lab.
We’re looking forward to sharing more in the near future. If this is a mission that excites you, shoot an email to tyler [at] patinasystems [dot] com or DM @tylerangert if you want to get involved.