Better recommendations start with people you know.

The idea for tessel started about five years ago with a simple frustration: I was tired of sharing recommendations with friends and family one place at a time whenever they traveled somewhere. And given how often people kept asking me for them, there had to be a better way.

As an unofficial pizza expert—and having lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York—I was usually the person friends came to for a pizza recommendation. But mine were buried in years of places I’d saved to Google Maps: an increasingly chaotic collection with no real organization, no context for why I’d saved something, and no quick way to find the right place when someone asked.

The problem wasn’t just keeping track of the good places. It was knowing where to find the next one. Recommendations live everywhere—texts, group chats, notes, conversations, and unorganized maps. And when you’re looking for somewhere new, trust transfers: you trust the people you know, and that trust carries into the places they recommend.

So I decided to build the thing I wished existed: one place to keep track of the places you love, share them with friends, and discover somewhere new through people you trust.

Whether you’re looking around the corner or exploring halfway around the world for the first time, tessel was created to make finding the right place easier.

The less time you spend searching for a great place, the more time you have to explore. So get outside and map your world.