Work
I'm building PaperHouse — the unifying notebook, the interface of thought, the time machine of mind.
Why?
›Existing writing tools are not good enough.
Do not overlook this reason. Creatives are sensitive to interfaces; that's the space they live in and the brush they create with. As McLuhan said, the medium is the message. The tool you think with shapes what you can think. I see so much friction in today's creative process, and I hope to reduce that friction so humans can unlock more creative potential.
›An idea I can't find again is an idea I effectively never had.
I write a lot but my writings are everywhere. Yes I had an inspiration and wrote it down somewhere; where is it? Apple Notes, my notebook, Google Doc, …, Claude? There should be one unifying database for everything you've ever written, with seamless search and a connected graph. Good ideas can compound, which is why they must be in one place. If we can build that corpus, it will be the strongest personal context layer.
›Every word you put down is a snapshot of a brain state that will never exist again.
Brains are powerful, but they forget and they change shape. My family preserved a few writings from my childhood; reading them now I go like “How on earth did my thoughts go there?” I was visiting a fascinating mind that I no longer recognize. Thank God I still have that access; had we lost the writing, I would have lost the portal to go back in time. I believe my stories, my words, deserve the utmost respect. But that is too much work and responsibility on my shoulder, so I'd want a personal AI to help me with organizing and remembering. The more vividly we can reconstruct the brain state behind what we wrote, the closer we get to accessing a literal time machine.
