Paul Scherer
Paul Scherer is the Founder and CEO of Eigen, a San Francisco-based AI startup he founded at 22 after arriving in the United States on an O-1 visa in 2025. Eigen's flagship product, Mutual Friend, is an AI platform designed to facilitate connection and collaboration between real people, positioning AI as a social bridge rather than a personal chatbot or assistant. Scherer, who grew up in a small village near Frankfurt, Germany and taught himself to code after leaving high school, raised a $15 million seed round in April 2026 led by Benchmark Capital, with backing from Ben Silbermann and other angel investors.
“Early-stage AI company building what they call a "mutual friend" — a single AI entity with a distinct personality that knows all its users and creates social serendipity between them. The product is in private beta.”
Source→“"A lot of what we're thinking about and what we're creating starts actually counterintuitively, not with the friend part, but the mutual part... right now we're like four engineers and like three of them are working on the network piece."”
Source→“"The share of American men have like zero close friends went from like 3% to 15%... half of American adults report being lonely... feeling lonely is the equivalent to like smoking 15 cigarettes a day."”
Source→“Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari introduced Paul Scherer to podcast host Jackson Dahl; also referenced as a sounding board for Paul's ideas about purpose and restlessness.”
Source→“"If I tell my mom about Waymo, she's really scared... and then you just force her to take a Waymo and it's like, I don't want to do this. It's like 10 seconds of the ride. It's like the most normal thing in the world."”
Source→“"it is very clear that the aura of success like preludes us... that's good in some ways because it means you get to hire really amazingly talented people."”
Source→“"I have to give some credit to Zach Sims on this... what if the world that's perfect for each of us isn't the world that's perfect for all of us."”
Source→“"He was always asking people... if you weren't working at Pinterest, where would you work? And sometimes there'd be people like, 'I'd probably work at Stripe'... and he was like, 'oh, you're probably not going to be the right person.'"”
Source→“"Demis Hassabis made this point when they were meeting with Google and Facebook about acquiring DeepMind... he asked Zuck about VR or something and he gave equally great answers. And he's like, 'oh, you're just looking for opportunities.'"”
Source→“Participants: Jackson Dahl, Paul Scherer. Podcast: Dialectic. Date: 2026-05-27.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.