Engineering is philosophy applied
“I just had a strong gut feeling about trying that,”—her intuitions and principles weave through everything, from product development to the distribution of her startup.
The difference between a philosophy and a vision is in the direction: we move toward a vision, but we act from our belief systems. A vision is a goal, while a philosophy is a guiding principle.
It’s a different building framework. Visions are louder and favor aggressive scaling. Philosophies are more connecting and encourage nurturing. The time scale is different. “Instead of an exit strategy, the focus is on the exist strategy,”—as she puts it.
Beauty
Her product is beautiful. And in this case, beauty is a philosophy, not a set of trends, standards, or canons.
Beauty is a moment when the external perfectly matches the internal. As a philosophy, beauty is a practice of contributing a piece of self—a cultivated internal sensibility—to the world through decisions, ideas, and aesthetics.
“SEO is just boring to me,”—she states calmly, without elaborating. As a founder, she is engineering a product that manifests her way of being on the Internet.
The product
“A perfect balance of focus, creation, serendipity, solitude, community,”—says their website. She builds a knowledge base, a home for collecting and shaping ideas.
Creativity
She believes that to be creative, one needs no process but to play. So the whole space is a playground: cards, thick font, and clunky “hand-crafted” icons. Aesthetics serve a function.
You save something you like—a quote, an image, or jot down a thought—by creating a card that works like a Lego module. It’s an atomic unit of information that goes into your library. You can organize your cards, but there is no assigned hierarchy.
Since units are small and reusable, they can live in multiple contexts—you can plug them into their network, find related ideas, and play with them.
Garden
She often uses a metaphor of a garden—something one needs to tend to: you plant seeds, water them, and with time they will sprout. Just saving one artifact once won’t do much. But when connected with other units on a regular basis, they start shaping ideas.
After the onboarding, there is a building phase—you build up your library with “your taste.” Then there is a discovery phase where you explore what else is in the network, looking for related and new ideas. After that, there is a maturity phase: you tend to your library by adding more and building associations.
At some point, an idea will spark and you will create. It won’t happen immediately, but with time and practice, often when you least expect it.
Serendipity
Someone said somewhere online: “Engineers build for predictability. Designers design for serendipity.” There is truth to that, but serendipity happens when the right conditions are in place. In this case, the condition lies in a connection and that’s how serendipity is engineered: through similarity, proximity, and randomness. Connecting thoughts increases the probability of a full idea.
If a thought is plugged in to the “collective mind,” it will sprout an association that can later turn into something whole. You can’t predict when, but it will surely lead somewhere.
Your cards, your units of information are always working, building up new trails for lucky accidents because you aren’t the only one working.
Collective
The experience is more collective than social—the value is in the community.
You can share, you can borrow, you can follow people, you can even chat with AI to brainstorm—you get access to someone else’s mind without entanglement.
There are no likes or comments—competition for attention has been removed. Who created the cards and when are de-prioritized—the information units are evergreen. There are few interaction options—they’re designed for contribution.
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“I hope we get to do this together for a long time,”—was her exit from the screen.
Time is what makes her product valuable. The more data accumulates with time, the more value there is for users and the more value the platform acquires as a resource. The growing library of plugged-in thoughts is not only a repository of raw data, but an idea incubator.
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