3 min read
Adding to her long list of entrepreneurial pursuits, Martha Stewart has now become something of a tech bro. Which isn’t really that surprising. After all, this is a woman who had the keen foresight to start a catering business in her kitchen 50 years ago—and grow it into a multi-conglomerate empire worth hundreds of millions. In that time she has published more than 100 books, launched a magazine, and lent her name to everything from spirits (she has a line of gin with her bestie Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre), to CBD gummies, to beauty (she launched Elm Biosciences last year).
Now she is the co-founder of an AI-powered home management app called Hint. And while it is technically a new venture, let’s be clear: Stewart had the idea for it decades ago. “I pitched it when I first started thinking about the home, where I called it the Home Organizer,” she says. “I took it to Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr, who was my mentor there, said, ‘Oh, it’s a little advanced for the technology.’ And he was kind of right, but I never stopped thinking about it.”
Leena Kim
Leena Kim
To tease Hint’s launch, Stewart opened the gates to her Bedford estate. Her famous peafowl were there to greet us. As were her majestic Friesians. A delightful lunch—tomato tarts, a fennel salad with olives and provolone, arugula and radicchio sprinkled with pine nuts, chilled poached salmon in a yogurty dill and cucumber sauce, a heavenly vanilla bean panna cotta with grapefruit granita and a drizzle of Sicilian pistachios and olive oil—was served in the pool pavilion. Everyone went home with a money plant. But not before taking in the immaculate grandeur of her kingdom, where not a single blade of grass is out of place.
“In this whole place,” Stewart says of her 153-acre sprawl, “every single tree, or bush, or shrub, or flower that you see, except for the very tallest trees, I planted and nurtured. And most of them were grown from rooted cuttings. So I’m very proud of the fact that this is a real, basic garden built on an idea.”
Kathryn Cooper
Stewart and Brian Kelly, aka the Points Guy, who is an investor in Hint.
If you don’t know what rooted cuttings are, this is partially where Hint might come in. The app is meant to be like a supercharged AI home assistant that can do everything from pulling all the property data available on the internet about your address, to keeping tabs on your appliances and digitizing the stacks of user manuals you stuffed in a drawer eons ago, to finding the best contractors, electricians, landscapers, and roofers in your area to ensure you’re not being taken advantage of, to reminding you when it’s time to renew your insurance policy, to telling you about the health of your soil and what to plant in it, to clueing you into the energy rebates you could get if you replaced your windows. “This really is an operating system for your home,” says Hint co-founder and CTO Kyle Rush (Yih-Han Ma is the third co-founder of this endeavor, and the company’s CEO).
Martha Stewart
Hint scores you based on how well you’re maintaining your home. Martha’s is 100, obviously.
Stewart, for her part, supplied all of her books to create Hint’s knowledge base, wrote guides for the app, and even had a hand in its signature color scheme (they are inspired by the eggs from her farm). Plus, there is the sheer volume of her five decades of institutional knowledge, which she has imparted into the less tangible elements, like the way the AI communicates and the practical tone it should use when giving guidance.
And it turns out introducing Hint from the bucolic splendor of her estate was a genius move. A subtle way to hint (get it?) that maybe, just maybe, if you can have a better handle on your housework and landscaping and energy bills, and if you can master your soil’s pH and plant the things that will thrive in your zip code, you can be more like Martha Stewart. And one day, your home will be as perfect as hers.
Leena Kim is Town & Country’s Senior Editor, covering the travel, jewelry, style, arts and culture, education, and weddings beats. She has no priors—she has been at the magazine since 2013, having started her career at T&C as the assistant to the editor in chief.