For more than a decade, the social media industry has been obsessed with scale, engagement, and growth at all costs.
Now, two of the people who helped shape that era are quietly asking a different question: what if social apps helped us slow down instead?
That’s the premise behind West Co, a new startup co-founded by Biz Stone and Evan Sharp, which is building an alternative vision for what social technology could be. According to reporting from the Financial Times, the company has raised $29 million in funding, with Spark Capital leading its seed round. The startup launched an invite-only version of its first product, Tangle, in November.
But this isn’t another attempt to reinvent feeds, creators, or virality.
It’s something far quieter, and far more philosophical.
From Engagement to Intention
Sharp, who serves as CEO of West Co, describes the company as emerging from a deeply reflective place. Speaking about the motivation behind the startup, he asked:
“What could I build that might help address just some of the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we’ve wrought the last 15 years?”
That question alone feels like a direct indictment of the modern social web, especially coming from founders whose previous products helped define it.
Tangle’s core mechanic is strikingly simple. Each day, the app asks users one question: “What’s your intention for today?”
Users can share their intentions with friends, creating a lightweight social layer around personal goals, reflections, and daily realities. The idea is not to perform for an audience, but to plan with intention, capture the reality of one’s day, and identify deeper patterns over time. In other words, it’s a social app that starts from inside the user, not from the feed.
A Reaction to 15 Years of Algorithmic Pressure
West Co’s positioning feels like a direct response to the last era of social platforms, one dominated by dopamine loops, algorithmic amplification, and attention extraction.
Instead of asking: What will people like? What will perform? What will spread?
Tangle asks: What matters to you today?
That shift may sound subtle, but culturally, it’s radical.
It reflects a growing recognition across tech that engagement-heavy systems have had real psychological consequences, from anxiety and burnout to distorted self-image and chronic comparison. Importantly, this isn’t framed as an anti-social stance. The social layer still exists. But it’s designed to support accountability and reflection, not competition or performance.
Still a Work in Progress
Stone has been clear that Tangle is not a finished product. He told the Financial Times that the app could change significantly before it launches publicly. That openness matters. It suggests West Co is treating this less like a product rollout and more like an exploration, testing what social interaction could look like when it’s not optimized for outrage, speed, or scale.
It also raises an open question: Can a social app truly resist the gravitational pull of metrics, growth, and monetization once it leaves the invite-only bubble?
Will Tangle “fix” social media? Almost certainly not on its own. But West Co doesn’t feel like it’s chasing disruption in the traditional Silicon Valley sense. Instead, it feels like a signal, one coming from inside the system, that the industry may finally be ready to question the values it has been optimizing for.
If the last era of social media was about broadcasting the self, West Co is quietly experimenting with something else entirely: Listening to it.