The AI Alien Companion App That's Bringing In $4M a Year (Best of the Pod)

About this episode

LLMs are a new medium for storytelling. That’s according to the creators of Portola, the company behind Tolan: an embodied AI companion that lives on its own planet and chats to you with a distinct personality. In 2025, Portola's founder and CEO Quinten Farmer and Head of Story Eliot Peper joined Dan Shipper to explain how they’re building this new medium from scratch. Their aim is to help users go from overwhelmed to grounded through conversations with Tolan that feel personal and spontaneous, not scripted.  On this week’s AI & I, Dan revisits his conversation with Quinten and Eliot. They discuss why response time is everything for voice-based AI interfaces, how Portola designs AI personalities users will click with, and why character-driven AI could become a new computing interface.  If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Go to https://attio.com/every and get 15% off your first year. Timestamps:  00:01:30 - Introduction  00:04:07 - Talking to the Portola CEO's Tolan, Clarence  00:09:11 - How Portola went fro