Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Evan Sharp, co-founder of the online pinboard site Pinterest in 2010, have teamed up to launch a new application aimed at solving what they describe as the "significant harms" caused by social media.
Regulatory filings reveal that West Co, the startup company the pair co-founded in 2023, has raised $29 million in funding for this new application. Named Tangle, the app officially launched in November and is positioned as "a new kind of social network designed for 'living with intention'."
Currently, Tangle operates on an invitation-only registration system, encouraging users to share personal goals or "life intentions" with friends, support each other's objectives, and "reflect" on the process of achieving them.
"This is a tool for making life more meaningful, helping people plan their lives with purpose, document daily truths, and discover the deeper currents that shape their lives," West Co stated in a recent job advertisement.
Headquartered in San Francisco, West Co states on its website that its mission is to "build tools that help people live more intentionally." Another job posting indicates that Spark Capital, an early investor in Twitter, led the company's seed funding round in 2024.
Stone noted that the current version of the app is still in an early testing phase and may be adjusted before a full public launch. The application sends users a notification each morning asking, "What is your intention for today?".
"It turns out that building a product to help people navigate their life journey is very difficult," he said in an interview. "But I believe it's all worth it."
In a recent podcast interview, West Co CEO Evan Sharp mentioned that he has been "obsessed for eight years with figuring out"—"what have we fundamentally changed with the phone and social media so that I can... help make it better".
"Over the past 15 years, we have inflicted serious damage on the human psyche and emotions; what can I build to help repair some of that harm?" he said.
Stone and Sharp are among a number of Silicon Valley executives confronting the negative side effects of their own products—companies that brought them immense wealth but also contributed to numerous societal problems.
Sir Jonathan Ive, the former Apple designer involved in the development of the iPhone, is collaborating with OpenAI on an AI consumer device project intended to address the "unintended consequences" of smartphones. Before founding West Co, Sharp worked for two years at Ive's design firm, LoveFrom.
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