Looking for the fourth
You say something, and it doesn't land. Emotions rise, and you stop taking in what the other person is saying. One unnecessary sentence slips out before you can stop it.
Humans have had language for some fifty thousand years. We invented letters, the telephone, the internet. Today we can cross not only time and distance but even the barrier between languages. And yet the gap at the root of communication — the distance between what we mean and what the other person actually receives — has barely changed at all.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle named three elements that give words their power to move people: logos (logic), pathos (emotion), and ethos (character). Two millennia later, no one has found a fourth.
We want to find that fourth element, and to build it. Our name, tetos, joins those three with tetra, the Greek for four.
If communication changes, everything can change with it — from the mood in a meeting room to the way a society makes its decisions. We genuinely believe that.
The clues are on the ground
I began my career selling recruitment advertising, and for more than twenty years since, I have worked where people and organizations meet. As head of HR, I saw a company grow from around 70 employees to more than 700. I later took on leadership roles on the business side, and most recently joined an early-stage startup as a founding member, where I oversaw the business as a whole.
One thing happened again and again. A problem would look like a matter of strategy or systems, and turn out to be a gap in communication. However carefully we designed the strategy or the system, that gap stayed open.
At tetos, I sit with the same problem today — as a sounding board for executives, and in the training room. Leadership teams talk past one another. What leaders are certain they have communicated never reaches their managers. People leave the company without ever saying the thing that was hardest to say.
An organization is where the gap in communication shows itself most vividly. So we start there, not with theory. We stay with the conversations in front of us, and feed what we learn back into what we build.
Not replacement, but collaboration
Most discussions about AI are discussions about replacement: which human tasks can a machine take over?
We are interested in something else. Not handing our work to AI, but working alongside it — so that people and AI together can reach conversations that people alone could not.
We are looking for something no one has found in two thousand years, so there is no guarantee we will succeed. But unless someone starts somewhere, the next two thousand years will look much like the last.
We want conversation to become more enjoyable, and dialogue to feel better than it does today. What we are working toward is a society where moments like that are ordinary.
tetos has only just been founded. We hope you will enjoy watching what we build — and, if it interests you, that you will cheer us on.
Hozumi Hattori, Founder and CEO, tetos Inc.
