Say Bonjour to TAO's Closed Beta

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Newsletter #012
Contents:

• Meet the User-Owned INTERNET BROWSER from a Yale-Rutgers-GoogleForStartups Entrepreneur 😍

• Tappy tappy, merci beaucoup 👩‍💻

• Upcoming TAO Talks 🍿

• Closed Beta Sneak Peek! 👀

Bonjour from Montreal,

(Yes, TAO will be available in Canada…once Google and Apple approve us for that region).

Someone on TikTok asked if the TAO team could build a browser based on our ethos of Power to the People. I told them it’s already being done 😉 But not by us!

So, I got an intro to Matt Martensen, the founder of User Cooperative, and we had an AMAZING conversation about what he’s building 😍

If REI and Chrome Had a Baby: The User-Owned Internet Browser

Matt Martensen has a Yale MBA, a finance degree from Rutgers, and spent over 15 years working across Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and international markets.

He’s held leadership roles in everything from high-growth startups to legacy institutions, served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Google for Startups in London, and advised companies like Shopkick (which eventually exited to Trax).

Now he’s building User Cooperative to return tech power and profits to the People.

This is our third conversation on TAO Talks and they just keep getting better! We’ll continue to speak to mission- and vision-aligned founders and thinkers; because TAO is more than a social media app.

It’s a vessel to harness and connect the global movement of restoring Power to the People.

@humanexperienced

@TAO Social is now in closed beta and while our dev & design teams continue to refine it and we open up to invite-only, I’m on the hunt to... See more

Know someone who would be a good fit for a Talk? Reply to this email with a brief summary and links.

In the pipeline of TAO Talks we’ve got:

• DAO experts as we search for an optimal community governance structure;

• The technology partner who’s virtually eliminating bots on TAO;

• Our tech lead if I can wrangle him before he leaves for Europe;

• A hyperlocal food app by farmers out of Atlanta; and

• Even some American healthcare and insurance professionals who have real, actionable ideas about how to TAO can be the backbone for a People’s Healthcare System.

We’re not just thinking big…we’re going for it. Playing full out. And it all starts with our minimum viable product. Our first pass. Our closed beta…

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Check Out Closed Beta!

Below you’ll find two video recordings of the first pass at TAO’s MVP.

This is what the TAO team accomplished with:

• 2.5 months

• No funding

• 3 amazing volunteer developers

• 4 wonderful volunteer designers

• 1 insanely brilliant Tech Lead (keep an eye out for a TAO Talk with Adam)

• Almost everyone on the team having full time jobs, families, and kids — and working on TAO as much as possible after hours

If, through a mix of crowdfunding and philanthropic donations, we can secure the funding to offer employment, some of the team would be willing to go full-time with TAO.

And given what we accomplished with so few resources in a short period of time, and how WELL we work together, we already know this is a team that WOULD 👏MOVE👏 MOUNTAINS👏.

PS, disregard the political content in the samples. Because we’ve built a TikTok-style front end for Bluesky as our MVP, it pulls content from Bluesky, and at the moment Bluesky is politically charged since it was initially a lot of Twitter refugees that landed on AT Protocol.

Our first pass at a customizable algorithm will allow you to quiet the political side of things if you so choose. Or not! Whatever works for you works for us.

People from all walks of life are welcome at TAO, and our intention is to cultivate a space where people get out of the echo chambers and onto the bridges.

We also have functionality to record and edit videos in-app.

More details on how to join closed beta in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on the newsletter. We’re working on an awesome onboarding program for our early users.

I booked six weeks in an AirBnb so I can be intensively heads-down on TAO and my agency (I mean, I want to spend all my time on the altruistic TAO stuff, but also a girl’s gotta eat…poutine).

Now that I’m settled, I’ll be back to regularly posting TAO developments on TikTok :-) See you there!

Sending Amour & Poutine,
Chiara Scuro