Post by Jonathan Waldorf

My entire founder journey started because I've used Obsidian since university. My co-founder, Oliver Moreland, did too. I get bored pretty quickly when lectures move slowly. I'd inevitably start working on something else, look up five minutes later, and realize I'd completely lost the thread. So I started putting every lecture, slide, and definition into one giant Obsidian graph. Eventually, that graph got big enough that I needed help summarizing and organizing it. Back in 2024, I tried ChatGPT and Gemini for this. Both were still pretty rough. Nothing out there did what I actually wanted, so I started building it myself. Then I met Lucas Baur, my other co-founder. He'd worked in private equity and saw the same problem at a company-wide scale. The three of us decided to build this as a company. We didn't have a client yet, so we tested it on ourselves first. We fed our own internal messages, notes, and decisions into it and asked: how is our business actually running? The answer was uncomfortable. Even as a team of 3, our decision-making was way messier than we thought. We hadn't noticed, because none of us could hold the whole picture in our heads at once. That's when it clicked. Once information is actually organized, a system can reason over it in ways no person can, because it doesn't run out of room to hold everything at once. We got into YC with this premise. In hindsight, building a company was a fairly extreme solution to getting distracted in lectures.