If you haven’t already heard of Friend, the company that makes a $129 wearable AI companion—a plastic disk, containing a microphone, on a necklace—you probably also have not seen Friend’s recent ad campaign. Late this past summer, Friend paid $1 million to plaster more than 10,000 white posters throughout the New York City subway system with messages such as I’ll binge the entire series with you.

People hate these billboards. Revile them, even. Across the city, the ads are covered in graffiti criticizing the pendant (it doesn’t have eyes, bruh; CRINGE) as well as the idea of AI altogether (AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died); some vandals invite you to befriend a senior citizen instead of a chatbot, or volunteer with a community garden—you will meet cool people! Many of the ads have been ripped and torn. The backlash has grabbed far more attention than the product itself, so I wondered: 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 po