The Leaderboard

With: 200+ curated questions designed to deepen emotional intimacy and self-awareness.

With is far from the first party game question app, but its beautiful, pared-down UI stands out. The questions are incisive, maybe even a bit invasive (“Is there a part of your personality you dislike or feel ashamed of?”), which probably makes the app a good choice for a date night or evening with a close friend. I’ll be curious to see how often the makers update the questions — it would be nice to have different options depending on who you’re playing with.

Hi, hi, hi! Welcome back to the Leaderboard. In today's edition: AI is on a fast track to replace keyboards, a Founder and CEO responds to yesterday's takes, and Buildpad wants to make it easier to ship better products. Let's dive in.

Hello and Happy Monday! In today's Leaderboard: Beehiiv wants to make you rich through newsletters, Cheffie wants take the guess work out of dining, and a YC company wants to democratize access to data, but should it?

Happy Friday! In today's Leaderboard: Daily Dev just launched a Discord but for developer-led communities (duh), Rippling's employee analytics tool might lead to hiring babies, and Alibaba isn't content with just owning the knock-off sneaker market, it has set its eyes on becoming an AI giant. 

In today's Leaderboard: Notion's new AI assistant has the potential to finally give you peace at work, Spotify launched a new feature to curate bangers on demand, and a new platform is aiming to show scammers the door — but scammers are gonna scam...

Are designers about to be replaced by AI? I wouldn't worry about it, I mean one thing AI is no substitute for is good taste, you either got it or you don't. That's according to Sanjana, our Head of Content who gave her take about two new AI-powered design tools below. 

Slidejoy: On-demand presentation design (by a team of humans!). 

I’m glad to see Slidejoy is bucking the trend of throwing AI at everything and opting to instead focus on delivering value through simplicity while tackling the time-consuming, thankless task of creating Powerpoints. It’s a refreshing approach, though I’ll be more interested to see whether they can scale, expand and stay relevant without the automation their competitors rely on to fuel growth.

Solidroad 2.0: AI-powered sales and customer support conversation simulator designed to train customer-facing teams. 

It’s refreshing to see Solidroad focus on improving people rather than replacing them — an approach I rarely see in AI support tools. The interactive lessons and real-world simulations are a great touch, especially since you can customize them to fit your team’s needs, instead of relying on a library of templates and boilerplate scenarios. It makes ongoing coaching, which is always crucial, so much more manageable.

Clearspace (#2 on yesterday’s leaderboard) is a screen time manager that conditions access to selected apps on “proof of motion” — squats, pushups or steps. It reminds me a bit of how legendary mathematician John Conway (allegedly) made his computer login a difficult math problem to keep his mind sharp. More generally, I’m excited to see how advanced computer vision will enable all sorts of new technological possibilities.

Modal is the best serverless GPU platform. I know because I founded Banana.dev, a popular competitor. (Yes, writing this was quite the exercise on the ego). What I love about Modal is that it makes me *think differently* about how to write code. I don’t need a microservice, I just write a function. I don’t need S3, I just add a volume. I don’t need to deploy to show my coworkers my app, as I was developing in the cloud the whole time. Modal is what programming and deploying should’ve been from the start — with the added perk of GPUs.