How does Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Friend, feel about being the most despised tech founder in America’s largest city?
To my surprise, he was visiting New York from San Francisco when I reached out to ask about this. He told me that he was in fact in the city to see his vandalized billboards—and he was game to meet me last Wednesday in the West 4th Street station, where he’d purchased a prominent array of Friend ads in two long entry corridors. That morning, every single Friend.com ad I’d seen in the station had been scribbled over, but only a few hours later, they had all been replaced with new posters.
Still, a few were freshly vandalized; when we approached one that said Fuck AI!, Schiffmann, with a Friend device dangling over his black T-shirt, said, “I love it.”
As Schiffmann tells it, the backlash was all part of the plan. The ads were meant to work as a canvas and provocation, he told me, because traditional marketing is passé: “Nothing is sacred anymore, and everything is ironic.”
Read more | THE ATLANTIC