For over a year now, I’ve been working non-stop on a new startup called Outgoing.
The opportunity to build Outgoing feels rare and special – a chance to build something that is Big and Important and potentially Society-Shaping – so I am grateful to be working hard on it.
I want to tell you why Outgoing feels like such a unique and promising project to me.
Outgoing is building AI for Local, and I think it will shape how AI is used by everyone in the years to come.
“Al for Local” is a term we made up, but here’s what we mean: an AI that is aware of what’s happening in the real-world, in our cities and towns; and an AI that has an explicit goal to get users out of the house, off the screen, to actively participate in society.
That awareness and that goal together, with the power of AI, are quite powerful.
We’re at an exciting moment in technology, where this new AI computing paradigm is being defined. In 2025 there is a rush of innovation to rethink how we find information, how we get work done, how we express ourselves creatively. New tools are gaining traction extremely quickly.
The technologist Jaron Lanier introduced the concept of “lock-in”, where at a crucial moment in a new technology’s development, certain decisions are made – about how it works, what it looks like, what purpose it should serve – that are then built on-top-of, and thus become impossible to change later on. It’s like a moment of wet clay when you can shape it, create any form, before it dries forever. This happened with file formats, with hardware standards, and it also happened with social media. Certain design decisions were made by Facebook, Twitter and Snap early on, and they caught on, and now it is impossible to revisit the shape of social media (unfortunately) – even though those decisions could have been different.
In this moment, as the tech industry defines the AI paradigm, Outgoing has the opportunity to contribute a thoughtful, humanist, pro-social vision. By building our vision of Local AI, we might just change the shape of the AI paradigm that is locked in for the coming decades, for billions of users around the world.
The real-world consequences of our choices now are massive. When people spend more time out of the house, with real people in their cities and towns, they build healthy societies in a fundamental way. Spending time face-to-face with others simply reminds us that we’re all connected. Less screen-time and less loneliness directly leads to more safety, healthier democracies and thriving local economies.
The vision we’re building at Outgoing, to achieve that goal, involves innovations on two key levels: the user-experience of AI and the knowledge-graph that sits behind the scenes.
AI for Local is more actionable than a chat box. Outgoing is map-first, so when you open it, you get a rich landscape of suggestions that all feel real. Outgoing can start conversations, and doesn’t just wait for a user to open a new chat – because sometimes there are great recommendations that people should know about. We’re developing an AI that is fundamentally social, so it’s easy to collaborate with groups on planning any activity.
Outgoing does not use the existing foundation models for knowledge about the real-world – we are building an alternative knowledge-graph with no hallucinations, quality filtering, and real-time knowledge of what’s going on in our cities and towns. Outgoing not only knows about the restaurants and concert halls around you, it also knows about the special menu this weekend and the upcoming shows for the coming months. We’re building a new kind of web-crawl to make this possible, and solving some hard technical challenges around how AI models can use large knowledge-graphs that are constantly being updated.
When it comes to consumer use of AI, “local” is the killer use case. It’s no surprise that every time one of the big AI companies has a new model to announce, they get on stage, talk about a few key business use cases, and then do their typical B2C demo – “I’m planning a trip to Paris, what should I do when I’m there?” – and if you look closely, the answers that come back are usually super-generic and out of date. So many new startups in the local and travel space are relying on those answers that come back from the big models.
Outgoing has a new approach that is graphically rich, naturally engaging, with much more relevant results.
We believe that in a few years, every major AI platform that wants to compete will need a dataset and technology like the one we’re building. We believe that our innovations on user-experience will influence the direction of all AI interfaces.
And most importantly, we believe that the objectives and sensibilities of Outgoing – to get people out there, in the real world, with no screen involved – could shape how AI evolves at a global scale.
I couldn’t be more motivated.
If you want to follow along, please sign up for our waitlist, and we’ll invite you to test Outgoing very soon 🙂
Rob