Two Silicon Valley veterans who were among the early architects of Twitter and Pinterest have launched a new app that they themselves describe as an antidote to the “terrible devastation” wrought by social media.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Pinterest co-creator Evan Sharp have raised $29mn for their start-up, West Co, according to regulatory filings. The company was founded in 2023 and launched its first product in November—an app called Tangle, pitched as “a new kind of social network, designed for intentional living”.
Access to Tangle is currently invitation-only. Users are encouraged to share personal goals, or “intentions”, with friends, support one another, and then “reflect” on how those goals are being pursued. “It is a tool for meaning that helps people plan with intention, capture the reality of their days, and see the deeper threads that shape their lives,” the company says in a recent job posting.
West Co is headquartered in San Francisco. On its website, the start-up says its mission is “to build tools that help people live more purposefully”. The company’s seed funding round in 2024 was led by Spark Capital—one of Twitter’s early investors—according to another recruitment notice.
Stone notes that the current version of the app—which sends users a morning notification asking, “What is your intention for today?”—remains experimental and may change ahead of a public release. “It turns out that building something that can help people orient themselves over the course of a lifetime is very hard work,” he said. “But I believe it is worth it.”
In a recent podcast, Sharp, who serves as West Co’s chief executive, spoke of his “eight-year obsession” with trying to understand what smartphones and social media have fundamentally altered in human life in order to “fix it, at least a little”. “What could I create to respond, even in part, to the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we have inflicted over the past 15 years?” he asked.
Stone and Sharp are among a group of Silicon Valley executives now re-examining the side effects of the products and services that brought them success and wealth. Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s former chief designer and a key figure behind the iPhone, has described his work on an AI-powered consumer device with OpenAI as a response to the “unintended consequences” of smartphones. Before launching West Co, Sharp spent two years at LoveFrom—Ive’s design studio.
For Stone, Tangle represents another attempt to build on—and monetize—his earlier experience. He is also a co-founder of the publishing platform Medium and the Q&A app Jelly, which was later acquired by Pinterest. In 2019, he launched the investment firm Future Positive and currently sits on the board of Mastodon—another social network.
After leaving Twitter in 2021, Stone clashed with Elon Musk, who acquired the company and renamed it X. Musk is a “frivolous person”, Stone wrote in December 2022, describing the changes introduced by the billionaire as “destructive”.
West Co’s founding team includes former employees of Twitter and Pinterest. Another early hire was the Reverend Sue Phillips, a former Unitarian Universalist minister who has become an adviser to technology companies. On her LinkedIn profile, she is listed as the start-up’s “head of wise AI and ancient technologies”.