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Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg launched Meeno less than two years ago with the intention of it being an AI chatbot that helped users through relationship issues. Now, the company is pivoting to focus on teaching predominantly male users how to connect romantically with women through interactions with voice-based AI characters. [Male loneliness] is a problem thats been getting worse for 30 years, Nyborg tells Fast Company. I never thought that this was something we could just go and snap our fingers and [fix]. The first iteration of Meeno, Nyborg says, allowed the company to prove that it could build something that appealed to men. She says the original platform, which will still be available on the Meeno app, attracted over half of its 100,000-user makeup as men. But they wanted it to yield faster results, and rapid developments to OpenAIs Whisper API and other technologies in the past few months meant it could rapidly decrease the amount of time its AI needed to offer insights. Users, she says, could get benefits within minutes instead of over three to four weeks thanks to the OpenAI advancements. The new Meeno is entirely web based, meaning it’s not going to be hosted on an app store. Users will go to the site, take a brief voice survey, and then get insights into how they present themselves. They’ll then make an account and go through fake scenarios, such as being prompted to talk to a woman while waiting in line at a pizza place. Users who want to go through more scenarios each day can pay $19 a month for a premium subscription. Think of it, she says, like Duolingo for dating. As part of its pivot, Meeno is raising a seed extension, with $2.7 million committed in the past few weeks. (The name, by the way, is a nod to Platos Meno writings.) The key to the platform, Nyborg says, was making it audio based so that it shows a clear intention of getting out of the house and interacting with people in the real world. A Pew Research Center survey from January found that while men and women report roughly equal rates of feeling lonely all or most of the time, men aren’t reaching out to their networks for help as much as women are. Nyborg says she and her investors have been testing out the product in the mornings, often feeling more confident in their conversations later in the day because they were warmed up. “Maybe someone pays you a surprise compliment, based on the band T-shirt that you’re wearing, which has happened to me, and what I’ve realized about myself is because I’m an introvert, if I’ve just left the house and I haven’t spoken to anyone, I’ve realized I can be a bit standoffish or aggressive,” Nyborg says. “And again, people are usually just trying to be nice and it can really make someone’s day doing that.”
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Some places are simply nicer to walk through than others. Compare a tree-lined path along the Seine in Paris to the side of a six-lane highway in Tallahassee, Florida, and the differences are obvious. But what exactly makes a place walkable is a matter of some debate. Those of the urbanist persuasion might point to a place’s density or mix of land uses. Platforms like Walk Score might favor accessibility, proximity, and travel times. One person might want to have a café within walking distance, while another might want the safety of working streetlights. Conditions are varied, and uneven. To better understand what exactly makes a place walkable, the architecture firm Perkins Eastman turned to a novel form of data analysis. In a new study, the firm combined qualitative pedestrian preference surveys, visual streetscape imagery from Google Street View, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to identify the specific type and mix of urban design elements that most influence people’s walking habits. Focusing specifically on older adults, the study is a window into the ways cities enable pedestrian activity, and how they can encourage more. [Image: Perkins Eastman] What the walkability study found is that people prefer to walk in places with a higher proportion of several basic streetscape elements, including benches, shade trees, sidewalks, and crosswalks. When those elements are provided in combination with one anotherplentiful benches and crosswalks, for examplepeople are likely to walk even more. [Image: Perkins Eastman] The study was based in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, where a decennial survey collects detailed information from more than 100,000 pedestrians about the experience of walking through this part of the city. This survey data was analyzed alongside Google Street View imagery of the district to see what streetscape elements were predominant in places people reported being most likely to walk. This analysis led to a set of urban design guidelines that suggest ways of making more spaces more walkable. [Image: Perkins Eastman] The resulting study, Are these streets made for walking?: How visual AI can inform urban walkability for older adults, was led by Haozhou Yang, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who was a design and wellness research fellow at Perkins Eastman from 2023 to 2024. He says most previous walkability studies rely on zoomed-out data from geographic information systems (GIS), inferring walkability from data points like the existence of sidewalks or a neighborhood’s proximity to retail. They’re not from the human perspective, Yang says. This [study] really puts the elements people encounter every day at the front. [Image: Perkins Eastman] Google Street View offered Yang a deep pool of data about the real world conditions experienced by pedestrians in Hong Kong. His study used 32,512 images from Google Street View, separated throughout the district at 10-meter intervals. Machine learning techniques then broke each image down to identify individual streetscape objects within the frame and how much space they accounted for. One image might show tree canopy covering roughly half the image and sidewalk making up about a quarter. Other images show benches and walls. Still others highlight crosswalks and how much space is dedicated to car traffic. With new AI computer vision, we can really understand the quantifiable amount of those elements in the open environment, Yang says. By focusing in on seven categories of streetscape elementssidewalks, streetlights, trees, crosswalks, benches, walls, and windowsYang and collaborators from Perkins Eastman were able to draw correlations between the presence and combination of those elements in places with high rates of pedestrian activity. These correlations then informed a set of urban design guidelines developed by Perkins Eastman’s senior living team. These guidelines include combining street furniture with greenery and open space, pairing crosswalks with improved street lighting, and increasing the social interactivity of a space by having more benches in areas with a higher amount of street-facing windows, balconies, and patios. The study draws these connections through the lens o improving walking conditions for older adults, with the health and social benefits that come from being more mobile and independent. But the implications of the research are much broader, according to Perkins Eastman senior living principal Alejandro Giraldo. These are things that are universal design,” Giraldo says. “It’s not just addressing the seniors. It absolutely will, but it’s also addressing people with mobility issues or children. Yang says that even though the data in this study is from Hong Kong, AI enables the model to be tuned or tweaked to the conditions in other cities, informing what might improve the walkability of that stretch along the Seine River or the side of that highway in Tallahassee. Although there might be some cultural differences and context-related differences, the model can be applied to other cities, Yang says. For Perkins Eastman, which has designed senior living projects for more than 40 years, the designers are already looking at ways of integrating these findings into current and future projects and improving conditions for older adults. You want to find the differentiatoras a community, as a developer group, as a residentof what is making me live here, Giraldo says. To change the perception of aging is very critical for us. Demonstrating these tools allow us to create a more sensitive communities.
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There are so many ways to die. You could fall off a cliff. A monk could light you on fire. A bat the size of a yacht could kick your head in. Youve only just begun the game, and yet here you are, stranded on some strange mountaintop, surrounded by ruins. If youre a newcomer, youll be dead within moments. If youre a hardcore gamer, youll probably be dead a few moments later. But death isnt the end. Death is the beginning. Youll respawn in a graveyard, and that graveyard will lead you to a vast chasma pitchblack pit of certain doom. Taking the plunge down into that pit will surely lead you to more death. If the fall doesnt kill you, its reasonable to assume that the monsters lurking down there will. You can bypass this chasm if you want tothe game will let you keep exploring and playing for hours and hours and hours. In fact, as far as the games concerned, you need never take the plunge at all. And if you were a reasonable human being, you wouldnt. But you arent a reasonable human being. Youre a gamer. You choose the plunge. You jump down into the crevasse, and its a good thing you do. Because in Elden Ring, the only way to access the built-in tutorial is by taking that leap. Its there, in that graveyard, down that pitch-black pit of certain doom, that your learning begins. The drop-out Stacey Haffner dropped out in her senior year of high school. She had enough credits to graduate, but life just kind of pulled me away, she says. In years to come, she would return to schooling three more times, and each time, life would pull her away before she finished. She did eventually get a high school diploma, but that was it. She never got a two-year degree. She never got a four-year degree. And she certainly never got a graduate degree. Where did this dropout life lead her? To Microsoft, where she worked on a Windows product serving hundreds of millions of users. To Xbox, where she launched the Xbox Live Creators program, democratizing console game development. And then to Unity, where she became the director of product working on DevOps and eventually transitioning to AI and machine learning. Her role focused on guiding large, multidisciplinary teams with the goal of launching new products within the company. Basically, I ran a mini startup within the company, she explains. My collaborator and I built the whole strategy and vision, from org[anization] culture to final product. Stacey didnt get where she is today by studying like an A-plus student. She got there by studying like an A-plus gamer, leveling up the way every gamer levels up: you see something scary, you take the plunge. Thats how she learns new software (I kind of just jump into it.). Its how she learned to overcome her fear of public speaking (I just started putting myself on stage.). And its how she navigated every step of her careerjust following the next challenge wherever it led. After dropping out of high school, she says, I didnt know what I wanted to be. I really had no clue. So I just tried things that sounded interesting. With each job, she got inquisitive about what she loved and what she hated, and then she used those insights to guide her next cycle around the loop. Eventually that process would lead her into game development, where shed go toe-to-toe with the NBA in a virtual duel to the death. But not until shed tried a string of dead-end jobs. The career game loop First she answered phones at a staffing agency. She found that work unbearably mundane, but loved learning new skills every time she got to fill in for recruiters who played hooky. So she switched to human resources (HR) and recruiting. Working in HR and recruiting, Stacey realized that her role was pretty adversarial. She was tasked with protecting her company rather than its people. And its people feared her. That wasnt going to fly for Stacey, but she did love playing analyst every now and thencrunching the data on employee performance, turnover rates, recruitment metrics, and so on. So she became an analyst next. It turned out that analyst work was only fun in short bursts, not as a full-time job. When Stacey told her staffing agency that she wanted something new, they offered her a project management role at Microsoft. And it turned out that project management was the perfect fit. About a decade later, she manages the managers. Staceys cycled the Core Career Game Loop many, many times, and each time, shes had to level up. Shes used all kinds of strategies along the way, always evaluating what skill she needs to learn, what learning opportunities are available to her, and which methods will support her best. Shes used booths at conferences, classes at a local college, company-provided training, coaching from bosses and peers, and the most reliable tactic of all: taking the plunge and figuring things out on the fly. Ill watch tutorials, or read a book, or do whatever, she says. And then at some point, Ill get bored of the tutorial, and Ill just go try, and play around, and do a thing. Thats how shes learned everything shes learned. Its how shes achieved everything that shes achieved. And its how she eventually beat the NBA at its own game. Nothin but net When Stacey isnt handling AI for Unity, she creates games for her studio, What Up Games. Shes the CEO, and her husband, Ben, is the CTO. About 10 years ago, she went to a conference where she tried virtual reality (VR) for the first time. For Stacey, it was love at first sight, and she raced home to tell Ben about it. Ben hadnt experienced VR yet, but what he had experienced was sticker shock: the developer equipment was outlandishly expensive. Stacey insisted he give it a try anyway, and Ben was willing. So they got some goggles and, as Stacey puts it, Two hours later, Ben finally took off the headset, and he was like Lets go make a game. Before doing anything else, Ben wanted to get his head around the virtual physics of VR experiences. So the two of them got to work on a basketball simulation. Basketball seemed like a fun way to figure out the mechanics of VR gravity, but the duo didnt actually know anything about sports. They didnt care much either. And, again, they were entirely new to VR technology. Im reiterating this because I really want to emphasize: these two could not possibly have been worse prepared to go up against a multibillion-dollar pro-ball brand. But did that stop them? Of course not. We already covered this. Gamers are not reasonable human beings. Once theyd nailed the basic physics, Stacey and Ben figured they might as well introduce some competition. So they built their first game mode: a VR version of H.O.R.S.Ethe schoolyard basketball game where players compete to out-aim each other. Then came multiplayer mode, and before they knew it, What Up Games had a fully operational basketball experience on its hands. They called it Nothin But Net. The next time a major games conference hit their calendars, Stacey and Ben brought the game with them. And it absolutely killed. The pair had to lay down duct tape to accommodate the unexpected queue of enthusiastic players, which grew and grew as the day went on. Then came the official release date. And then came the weeping. We were devastated, Stacey says. I cried so hard! Completely unbeknownst to Stacey and Ben, a major studio with official NBA licensing had also been developing their own VR basketball game all this time. By some cruel twist of fat, that blockbuster game dropped on precisely the same day as Nothin But Net. In an instant, years of development were made completely moot. Everything Stacey and Ben had worked for. Every innovation theyd pursued. When we saw that game release, we thought that no one would even look at ours, Stacey says. They were about to be blown out of the water by a gaming goliath. Except, when Stacey stopped crying and checked the industry news a few days later, it turned out that this goliath couldnt reach the net. The official NBA game had tanked. Hard pass. Avoid it, read one review. Excerpted from The Career Game Loop: Learn to Earn in the New Economy by Jessica Lindl. Read more at www.careergameloop.com. Published by Wiley, 2025.
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