It is a Tuesday morning in Palo Alto and Omar Shaya is not staring at a roadmap. He is staring at his phone. The notification on the screen is small, almost shy. It is reminding him - politely - that the email he half-drafted on Sunday is still sitting there, and that the friend he meant to text about dinner is back in town this week. Two ideas. One phone. A quiet nudge. This, more or less, is the entire product thesis of a company that used to be called something else.
01The Pivot Hiding Inside a Name Change
For most of its short life, this company was MultiOn - a name that sounded, depending on the listener, like a stadium light system or a tongue twister. The original pitch was bold: web-browsing AI agents that could book your flights, order your dinner, fill out your forms. The kind of demo that made VCs lean forward and pundits write columns.
Then a quieter idea took over. What if the most useful thing an assistant could do wasn't to act for you, but to remember with you? In January 2025 the company announced it was changing its name to Please. The new domain - please.ai - had somehow gone unclaimed. "Silicon Valley forgot how to say please," one teammate joked. So they took it.
02What Please Actually Does
The app is, on first glance, a reminders app. You can capture a thought - typed, dictated, snapped from a photo - and forget about it. The app does not. Later, when the moment is right, it surfaces what you wrote, sometimes alongside the thing you wrote three days earlier that turned out to be related.
This is the "connect the dots" feature, and it is the part of the product that distinguishes Please from the dozens of other to-do apps fighting over your home screen. The morning brief gives you a curated view. Shared reminders let groups plan a trip without spawning a fifth group chat. Calendar integration keeps the whole thing from drifting into fantasy.
There is also a more interesting twist: Please Pros. For requests the AI can't reasonably finish on its own, the app can route the task to a human professional. The polite assistant, in other words, knows when to hand off.
What you can do with it
- Capture ideas in seconds, in any format
- Get nudges at the right moment, not just at the right time
- See related notes auto-connected
- Wake up to a morning brief
- Share lists with friends, partners, teammates
- Hand difficult tasks to a human Please Pro
Who it's for
Creative professionals, planners, the chronically over-committed - anyone whose best ideas arrive between meetings and disappear shortly after.
03By the Numbers
Where attention goes
Approximations based on product positioning, not internal metrics.
04The Founders
Omar Shaya
Founder & CEO
Stanford GSB alum. Built products at Meta and Microsoft before starting MultiOn (now Please) in 2022. Posts publicly about consumer AI on X and LinkedIn, and tends to write about the company in the first person.
Div Garg
Co-founder
Met Shaya at Stanford. Worked on the agent-research side of the company in its earlier incarnation, when the pitch was about autonomous browsing rather than calm capture.
05Timeline
06The Polite Assistant
There is a reason most assistants - human or otherwise - feel exhausting. They demand. They escalate. They notify. Please makes a small, almost contrarian bet: that the best AI in your pocket is the one you barely notice until you need it.
This is partly a design philosophy and partly a survival strategy. The reminders category already has a default: Apple Reminders, preinstalled on every iPhone. To win an inch of attention, a new entrant cannot simply be louder. It has to be smarter, calmer, or both.
Please leans into both. The morning brief replaces the dread of opening the app. The dot-connecting makes the user feel like the app has been paying attention even when they haven't. And the name itself - written in lowercase, ending with a period - is a manners lesson disguised as a wordmark.
07Backers & Neighbors
On the cap table
- General Catalyst
- Amazon Alexa Fund
- Samsung Next
- Maven Ventures
- Individuals from OpenAI and early Google DeepMind backers
In the same arena
- Apple Reminders (the default)
- Notion, Todoist, Things
- Granola, Reflect, Mem
- The wider field of AI-native personal assistants
08Watch & Read
09Find Please
10Closing Scene
Back to Tuesday morning. Shaya's phone buzzes - quietly, once. The note he scrawled on Sunday is now a finished email, sent. The friend he meant to text has dinner on the calendar. The phone, having done its small job, goes dark again. The roadmap on the wall, untouched, can wait.
This was supposed to be the era of AI agents shouting at us about everything they could do. Please is making a quieter wager: that the version that wins is the one polite enough to stay out of the way until you need it. A reminders app, in other words, that finally lives up to its name.