One board for everything your group chat keeps losing.

At early Google, Misc was an internal email alias that let employees discuss miscellaneous topics and offer and ask for help. It was where you might see one of our founders asking for a ride to San Francisco or an engineer asking if you saw their missing Google Pony, a custom made My Little Pony figurine with Google colored hair. It was where people might organize an after hours Settlers of Catan meetup or where a new hire might ask for recommendations for which neighborhood in Mountain View to live in. It was a space built on trust that made the company more like a community than purely an employer. It was a way people who worked together could support each other and have open conversations.

Over time, this became such an important part of Google’s culture that dozens of new email aliases for sub communities started to emerge. Housing. New York Misc. Mothers. Pickleballers. Photography Enthusiasts. Crypto Curious. It was a way we could lean on people we knew to learn, get support, give support to help us take care of life while at work.

As a leader for a large Google alumni group, this is one of the things that people tell me they miss the most after leaving.

Mutual exchange is the bedrock of communities today. Our ability to ask for help, offer help, and support each other is what keeps communities strong. People offering feel valued. People asking feel grateful.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence has made our work stability and online interactions less trustworthy. I can’t know if I’m interacting with a real person or a bot. I don’t know if I can rely on the internal company chat 3 months from now. Our lives, outside of work, require more stability than ever before. People want to know where the real people are, and this is exactly what Misc was designed to facilitate.

We’re intentionally leading with slow-tech, something intentionally independent and self-sustaining to give people online spaces and interactions that they can trust. The people are real. The communities are real. And we hope you find real benefit from being a part of this movement.

This project is built, funded by, and maintained by early ex-Google community builders (with help from Claude Code) who missed being able to share and exchange with people we trust. Today’s solutions just didn’t feel adequate. It’s hard to trust the person on the other side of the exchange. At least not fully.

We missed spaces where real neighbors, colleagues, friends and acquaintances could help each other out with the little things in life.

There are no AI features, unless our users want them one day. The only AI used was to help build this service, and we reviewed the code before it was committed to ensure that it did only what we wanted it to. No more, no less.

We’re still in our beta, so we’re not yet charging, but we plan to set future pricing that is fair and designed to cover hosting fees, operational costs and fair, livable salaries, and to make sure we have a solid “rainy day” fund should revenue get scarce. Inspired by Costco, we won’t extract profit at the expense of the communities we serve. We lead with creating value for them and winning together.

Only people your group’s admin has added. Members sign in with a one-time key sent to their email, so there are no passwords to share or steal.

Misc is built around asking and offering with a community you know, with no ads, no fear mongering, and no attention algorithms deciding what you see. Posts stay organized by category, so the sublet doesn’t get buried under 200 messages.

Only in groups whose moderators turn on Intros. Across all of Misc, posts offering or seeking sexual services or explicit content are removed and reported.

Any post or message can be flagged. Your group’s moderators review it, and our team backs them up.

For our beta, we’re starting with groups in New York City & surrounding metros. If your group is somewhere else, join the waitlist anyway and tell us where.