Kortex: The $3 Million Dollar Mistake

Kortex: The $3M Mistake

00:00Cortex, the $3 million mistake. One of the things I started thinking about is like what are the problems with Cortex? Like we can't make any step forward because [music] we're just like marching in place. Then the comments coming in and everything else.

00:11It's like what are we doing? Let's set these goals. Let's make them really aggressive [music] and see what happens. And we did that. And we saw that the whole car fell apart. [laughter] We need desktop. We need light mode. Light mode. Yes. cuz we could like that's how that's how slow we were going is like it was difficult to get light mode of all things and so we threw away the one and only advantage that we really had as a startup which is moving fast.

00:34[music] We haven't tried. Why don't we just try? Like surely if we do those things we can rebuild the entirety of Cortex and more in [music] much shorter time. Literally 3 3 weeks into being in Japan that hypothesis turned out to be [music] true.

00:50In terms of like rebranding from Cortex to Eden, what comes [music] to mind for you? It's like a search engine for your memories. I just went in and searched pink sweater and it resurfaced every single frame where someone [music] was wearing a pink sweater at the exact timestamp.

01:03This is insane. I haven't seen this [music] before. The second that you think you know what you're doing, you're kind of [ __ ] And it's like, I don't know how to freaking manage a team, dude. I don't know the first thing that goes [music] into this.

01:16So, like me going into it, as long as I saw some form of progress, I'm like, ah yeah, we're actually doing something. success is just like a a series of perhaps well-calulated risks, but like a series of big risks. Because as humans, we're very prone to [music] remaking the same mistakes over and over again.

01:33Well, yeah, we're here to talk about why

How We Met: From Strangers to Co-Founders

01:38Cortex failed. Yeah. $3 million mistake. That's the title of this video. Very attention grabbing and polarizing, but yeah. Yeah. Uh on the topic of cortex being a mistake um I don't think it was actually a mistake but I want to hear like your take on that right you I mean you know my philosophy mistakes you have to make them in order to actually improve.

01:58Yeah. So do you see it as a mistake? I I I see it as a series of necessary mistakes for us to get where we need to go. Um, and fundamentally like I don't think the idea of building Cortex, the second brain app, was a bad one, but there were a lot of mistakes that we made as like firsttime founders that went into Cortex that uh definitely can be categorized as mistakes.

02:20Yeah, if you follow me, you know I talked for about Cortex non-stop for however many months or even years and then just stopped all of a sudden. And then people are like, "Oh, what's happening to Cortex? Where's Cortex?" Uh, a lot of things happened and we decided to pivot and build a new app, Eden.

02:43So, that sparks a ton of questions of like, okay, why didn't you stay building Cortex? Why are you doing Eden? Why did you rebrand? The first thing there is like where we stopped with Cortex wasn't our vision for it. We kind of just stopped there.

03:02Yeah. Because we were forced to for the reasons we're going to talk about. Yeah, but to frame even further and to say this early on in the video, Cortex users, you probably already know what's happening. You've gotten emails about it. If you don't know what's happening, starting Monday, the week right before the Monday right before Black Friday, we're going to start rolling out Eden to you.

03:19So, expect an email on that. Log into the app if you don't get an email cuz you'll get a banner in the app to transfer everything over if you want to. But for people who have not used Cortex, have been hearing about Eden, are very excited about it, Black Friday weekend from Friday to Monday, we're going to try and open it to the public and see if things are okay.

03:46Please take note, [laughter] this is early access. This isn't like any kind of public launch. Cortex users, it's not going to be up to par like having desktop app and mobile and everything else with Cortex. So, just please keep an eye on all the information.

03:57But what was Cortex? Let's start at the beginning. Like the very beginning. Yeah, the very beginning. How did we meet? For context, for people who have no idea who we are, I'm Matt, one of the co-founders of Cortex and now Eden. I'm Ari. Same story.

04:13Yeah, he's the technical guy. Deep deeply technical guy, our CTO. I'm the product guy. And we are both well for me were was but we we're both students at the University of Toronto. Um I I was in computer engineering. He's in computer science.

04:27And we both kind of have a background of like wanting to do something entrepreneurial or wanting to do something that's like not the conventional route. For me, I I went through the first couple of years of uh school in university, kind of just like pretty disillusioned with studying and going down the traditional computer engineering route, like getting a degree and then just getting a job.

04:45Pretty early on in university, I I decided to go part-time and then take on a bunch of odd jobs and do doing like random things outside of school. Long story short, I ended up hopping through a series of different startups. First, initially doing content and then contracting as someone doing demo videos for this other startup.

05:04Um, and that was right before I had met you. story for how that happened was that when I was at the last startup working as a front-end person, I realized that I did not want to do that for the rest of my life. I decided 2 days before meeting you, I'm going to write an Apple note.

05:24And in that in that note, okay, I'll start with ghostwriting. I'll start with like finding clients online and then eventually I'll systemize this process into like a software because I had learned some software skills and eventually I'll probably partner with Dan Co.

05:36And then your friend Dakota Robertson happened to be running a ghostwriting cohort. Halfway through that call, you basically said off-handedly that you were building a software. And then I was like just in my brain I'm like there's no there's no way.

05:54There's no way, right? Like and then and then I unmuted myself in front of everybody. There were like 50 strangers there. I just like decided, you know what? Like I might as well take a shot. Nothing but bad can come out of this. And then I just asked like what software are you building?

06:07Yeah. And it turns out you you were working on an idea that was very very very similar. So then I'm I just like start shamelessly barging you in the Zoom call with like oh like uh here here's like everything I've worked on before. I can help you with that.

06:19Like like here here are like some previous links for things that I've worked on. Well the thing is like sorry there is that entire time I was thinking like okay okay like I've heard this before like [laughter] I have a lot. Yeah, I'm sure you have.

06:35A lot of it doesn't bear any fruit. And so, like me being in the spotlight on the call, I was just like, "Okay, yeah, I'll give you my telegram and we'll talk after there." Yeah. I remember Dakota, I'm I'm so sorry if you're listening to this, Dakota.

06:47I'm so sorry for interrupting your thing. Um, and I'm pretty sure he probably got a little annoyed when I was doing that as well, cuz he was like, "All right, I'll connect you guys on Telegram later. You can you can like sort it out offline."

06:58He was kind of just like, "All right, this guy's like derailing the conversation. [laughter] like let's get this back on track. But then me having gotten your telegram, I was like, "Oh, [ __ ] Yes, this is an opportunity." So then I remember like right after the call, I just like I can literally pull it up right now.

07:15Like if we scroll all the way back up, like I just barged you with messages and then you were like not interested at first. [laughter] Well, that Yeah. Then I I sent you cuz I thought we were doing everything right. Like this was our mine and Joey's first dive into software.

07:26Yeah. and we just offshed this entire process, this entire podcast is going to show like what iteration actually is and it's a lot. Yeah. But yeah, you you I sent you that and what we've been doing and then I kind of just to summarize what the message back was was like, yeah, you need to burn this all down.

07:57It sucks. And then I'm like, "Oh, okay. Now I'm listening." Over that weekend, you and Joey had decided to fire that guy, bring me on. And then I think at that point, maybe you started to take it more seriously, and then you you incorporated the company and then the the name Cortex came about and then you injected like the first amount of basically seed funding.

08:14You brought me onto the call. I saw what the guy had and then TLDDR for the for the technical people that guy had spent like 5 months building basically a CRUD app which Ari can pull off in like two hours and now Ari could do in like 30 seconds.

08:33Yeah, that's just what I [laughter] did now. So yeah, to to give Ari some limelight here, this is the most cracked engineer I know. Well, I don't know many. No, no, no. 100%. I I I think it's like I I know some crazy cracked people. Like I know pe I know people working at autopilot and Tesla like meetings with Elon Musk and so on.

08:52Like I think he is at least on the same we need to keep him quiet. he's going to be getting a bunch of emails with [laughter] I'd say like technical skills-wise I wouldn't say I'm like super cracked or anything but the thing that I do have going for me is I would disagree but is like the thing that really makes a difference especially in startups is just persistence like going into it like my first attempt at startups like I had zero knowledge about any sort of like web development or front-endf facing things yeah and then you decided to build a

09:29text editor yes that's an insane first project to take on. Yeah, that's kind of how we met. My conditioning from a very young age because of my parents was that, you know, anything's possible. You can do whatever you want. Total opposite what my parents told me.

09:42[laughter] Props to all your parents. Yeah. Yeah. They they always made it seem like, okay, you always have a fallback with us. So, don't worry about being safe. Try experimenting. Try something crazy cuz you know, you always have a home with us.

09:53So, why not? A that's sweet, right? And my dad always put this business aspect into my head where he was like, you know, even if you like sell a toothpick, if you can sell it to enough people, you'll make a lot of money. So like [laughter] that's a great analogy.

10:05Start small. Start with whatever you'll you'll make it work somehow, right? I went into a incubator program and the incubator program told us to structure things in a way that I didn't agree with where they wanted us to like think about the market think about right like the business proposal and project revenue before you had projections without a product ever [laughter] being built which I was I did I do not agree with that philosophy but maybe it works for different kinds of startups.

10:36We ended up just building a prototype, brought it to them and they just told us, you know what, you're too young. You should like come back when you're like about to graduate. And I'm like, and the prototype that you had built was embed notes, right?

10:47It was a note-taking app. It was a note-taking app. That was my first ever attempt at building something outside of like school just in the hopes of turning it into a real product. And when you get a feedback from people who are like much senior than you, that you know, you should just come back when you're like older, you're like too young, it's it's kind of like it feels bad.

11:04It feels really bad. It's like, what do you mean I'm too young? That was that it was because you weren't a fourth year student. Yes. I wasn't graduating, right? And to me that just seems like dumb. Like there shouldn't be any age uh requirement to like going and doing stuff.

11:17So I took that advice and I said, "Okay, you know what? You want me to be a fourth year student?" I combined my second and third year education into one. Yeah, he he took all eight credits. Eight credits in one year, which is ridiculous. Finished as much as I could.

11:34I'm like, "Okay, I'm back. I'm a fourth year now." [laughter] And that was a few weeks before you met us. Yes. Uh I was doing this while I was working at a different company called Flip and I did software engineering for them for a year just to see what like industry feels like.

11:51And towards the tail end of that like a co-op program, right? Yeah. A co-op program. Towards the tail end of that, Ian was already working with you guys. Yeah. So for context, we have a team member called Ian. He um he was one of

The Fatal Team Structure Problem

12:04the first people that I had like kind of like brought on. Ian was initially responsible for building out the first couple of editor features for Cortex. And the problems that he would run into in trying to build an editor, which is a lot more complicated than it it sounds, he he would often go to Ari because Ari had worked on an editor project like for for his for his first startup.

12:23So then after consulting Ari like several times, Ian just thought, wait, why don't you just join the company? I guess like this is where we start to get into what were the mistakes that we made with Cortex. The very first mistake we made was how we structured our team.

12:36I decided like oh like let's let's let's bring on this person and then we'll we'll make him front and lead and let's play on. Well, the the thing about like one I come from the quote unquote one person business background or like me and my editor after that and it's like I don't know how to freaking manage a team, dude.

12:54I don't know the first thing that goes into this. So like me going into it, as long as I saw some form of progress, I'm like, "Ah, yeah, we're actually doing something." It was compartmentalized based on tech stack. And that was fundamentally the wrong approach because years into a year and or or two into doing that, we realized that way of doing things at an early stage startup is so slow.

13:14like you're structuring your team the way big tech companies structure their teams for the wrong reasons. It makes much more sense for every single person on the team to be laser focused on product to be laser focused on like what is it that we're actually trying to build and can we get product market fit and what that translates to is everybody should be full stack.

13:41Everybody on the team should be working on features not parts of a feature to serve another person on the team. Let me make this like tangible uh to the non tech person. Yeah. Is like what this means in a sense is okay as a startup or a small team who don't really know what they're doing yet especially like coming from our backgrounds is like iteration is one of the most important things.

14:08We need to change things. We need to test things. We don't know what's the theme of this podcast or you can't improve without mistakes like we had to put something out there see how people used it see how we used it and then from there it's like okay this isn't really going to work let's rip it out.

14:27Yeah. But then the person that built that is like okay we can't keep doing this because then it throws everything else off and introduces all these other bugs that is like cross domain rather than the thing that the single person is working on and it just slows us down rather than what we're trying to do which is speed up to get to a point where we have something that's good.

14:44Right? That's the entire thing. As a startup the number one advantage that you have is that you're small, you can move fast. Um, and it's like why will these big players not catch up to you or like what what what do you have that they don't?

14:56It's speed. And fundamentally we structured our team and our technology which you can get into in a way that was antithetical to moving fast. Um, and so we threw away the one and only advantage that we really had as a startup which is moving fast.

15:15Yeah. So the AC cortex, it works. There's some bugs. Sure, those bugs get fixed, but then like we get the emails of like, hey, you guys said this update was coming. Yeah. Where is it? And that's a month later. And we made a big mistake of like we we had this like ambitious uh goal that we set cuz we were getting to this point where it's like we're not moving fast enough.

15:40We need to like push harder with the structure that we had, which wasn't going to work. But we're like, "Okay, we need mobile. We need desktop. We need desktop. We need light mode." [laughter] Light mode. Yes. Like that's how that's how slow we were going is like it was difficult to get light mode out of all things.

15:58And there were like a few other things, but like the big ones is like mobile, desktop, and mobile's a huge one for a note-taking appuge. That's another thing with Cortex is like we had 80,000 users, but we were so siloed that the amount the the speed at which we could build things.

16:19Our mobile experience, which is like how 80% of people are going to find you if they're watching YouTube on your phone or they see a tweet of mine or Instagram, they go to the uh Cortex website, they sign up and then they're like they log into the Cortex web version and they're like, "Okay, this is crap."

16:37And it's like sure we have this many users but how many did we lose along the way? We started out only free and then introduced paid tier and the paid tier like didn't even make sense because we were a note-taking app only. Only did we start like actually seeing a good amount of revenue when we introduced the AI feature but the AI feature is like the USP of that is oh you can use all models.

16:58Yeah. In there you can use any model. So you can technically quote unquote replace chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. And you can reference notes and it's like that is a big selling point, but it's nothing like fancy. It's nothing uh it's nothing that you don't get in like say notion or even in claude built in now.

17:17Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so we're at this point where we're like we aren't a compelling app. Like it's good. It works. I do all my writing in it. I like it. I couldn't see myself living without it. But it's like there's nothing spe this doesn't feel like a startup that we're building.

17:36It feels like we're just rebuilding Obsidian with an AI chat latched on. And I didn't want to face that for the longest time. People would comment that. Yeah. And I just be like, "No, that's not what it is." Because I have this different image of it in my head and I was I spent too much time justifying that.

17:49That was my mistake is we should have called it quits earlier. Yeah. People see Cortex, but then they're like, "Okay, what about mobile?

Why We Couldn't Ship Mobile or Desktop

18:01What about desktop? Hey, I haven't heard from you in a month. Where's the update?" Yeah. And it's like we're just stuck like on maintenance and bug fixes. Like we can't make any step forward because we're just like marching in place. There were also many many deeper underlying like technical decision problems.

18:18Yes. for example, literally the choices that we made for authentication for for for how we scaled hosting etc. I think you should like probably get into it better than I can. I came into Cortex a couple months after uh it was already set up and I was just brought on for initially engineering like just part-time engineering work.

18:40Yeah. So I come in and the the way the stack is set up looked very similar to what I've seen at other big tech companies where we had like our own open- source um authentication system hosted and our own like EC2 instances and we have guys like running around with Terraform scripts and a lot of other stuff like that where a lot of things that we decided to build ourselves that was the fundamental problem and I've seen like even midsize companies you have like groups of five to six people whose full-time job is handling all of that stuff and we're a team of five to six people doing that

19:15plus building the product. So to me looking at that I just went okay this is going to be a bit of a challenge. Yeah it's tough and you can't back out at that point. Yeah, you can't back out because people start using it and it's like it's like um yeah, just just to like nail into like one example, right?

19:31Um and for for the nontechnical people like authentication was one of these problems. For the nontechnical people, authentication is just logging in signing up very very basic stuff like you expect any app to just have you just log in and sign up.

19:43Like what could what could be so hard with that? Sign up with Google. What could be so hard about that, right? And like the [snorts] answer is it shouldn't be that hard for simple. It should be really really simple unless you try to build it yourself.

19:49[laughter] And I think it's a mistake that a lot of first-time founders make. Um where you think you think to yourself it would be very valuable if I were if we as a startup were to own all of this IP if we were to control and own everything.

20:07But all of that and uh and trying to scale prematurely or trying to trying to worry about like, oh, I want to own the IP so I'm not relying on third party vendors way too early on translates to syncing literally thousands of dev hours on building those things yourselves and not spending that time on working on the actual product.

20:33Yeah, that's the that's the thing is like when I hear you guys say this, it's still in my head as someone who's never seen the code or done anything with the code is like, okay, well, how hard can it be to set up? I think that puts it into perspective is people hear this and it was like, oh, well, that's a like a stupid mistake.

20:44Like it it shouldn't have been that much of a problem. That's the thing is like entire companies are built solving authentication. Yeah, that shows how much of a problem it can be if you do it yourself is you're in essence like you become an authentication company somewhat at that point, but now you're split between what you're trying to build and building authentication.

21:08And that's just one of the pieces. Yeah. Well, it's like if the product is a second brain or what we envisioned it to be beyond that and now we're doing something that another company does, especially as a small team. Yeah. Then it's like, what kind of company are we?

21:20We say we're a second brain or whatever like does our time reflect that? No. So that's like the problem of it. Yeah. And and and like authentication is like one of many many examples. Another one is like trying to build a sync engine ourselves.

21:39Um yeah, and and like off offline mode was the other thing we requested because uh since we envisioned it as so much more than just a second brain by the time we had the second brain portion of it done, people are like oh well obsidian has offline.

21:57Like well thanks for just like ruining our [laughter] entire day. Like like we know like come on like that's not the only selling point of this but there's a point there and it's like it shouldn't have been should it would have been difficult but it shouldn't have been that difficult shouldn't have taken like notion as an example everyone has been like crying to them about offline mode and what four years later now they finally have it and it's like the way that we were building it we were heading down that direction as well.

22:26Yeah. And the aggressive deadlines thing that that was my bad. Well, I was all for it is the thing is like, oh, okay, like we're going to make some progress here. Yeah. The way I saw things moving was like, okay, maybe we just don't have enough pressure on us.

22:38Maybe we're just like too comfortable because one of the things like as a result of us structuring things in a more big tech way was the mindsets of our team became more big tech where it's like, okay, it's a 9 to5. Yeah. What's wrong is at a big tech company, the product market fit is guaranteed.

22:58It's the guaranteed profit's guarant. Your number one mission as a startup is to find at least in the early stage is to find product market fit so that people so that you actually make something people want. And that's the fundamental thing that like we did not spend our time on like focusing on the fact that we haven't yet built something that people actually want.

23:22And so I thought, okay, we need to do something different, right? Let's set these goals. Let's make them really aggressive and see what happens. Because then once you once you like push it to the speed limit, you start to see what things are breaking, what can break.

23:39Yeah. Yeah. And we did that. And we saw that the whole car fell apart. [laughter] Like what's the worst thing imaginable for a note-taking app? You write stuff and it disappears. Yeah. And we caused a lot of that by trying to build our own sync engine.

23:53Yeah. And it the the other thing is like we were confident in that not happening and then it happened and we're like oh my god like we don't like this is like the cardinal mistake that we shouldn't

More Of What Made Us Fail

24:06have made. And so those come in and we split attention again and it's like as we continue to change things and we're digging ourselves deeper into this tech hole that is already causing problems. It's like they just keep coming up. And going back to like the very beginning, it's like that wasn't our vision for the app.

24:21So, we're further solidifying ourselves as this thing that we didn't mean to be. I guess all of this leads up to like um me and Ari getting really frustrated over time with like just not being able to make actual progress on the product itself and we decided to take a trip to to to Japan.

24:41Leading up to the trip, we've had several conversations. We had many many conversations and between ourselves and with other people on the team like hey what do you think about rebuilding? What do you think about like just like throwing everything not throwing everything away but like just like putting everything aside for a bit and try rebuilding in a drastically different way that is much leaner much quicker to to to to iterate on and not like entrenched in all these open-source or like build-yourself technologies that take insanely long to iterate on.

25:12But then Ari and I were both on that trip and then we decided you know what be because it's like kind of like a vacation to everybody on the team. It just looks like oh we're just flying out to like have fun for like a month or whatever. But then to us it was like you know what because we're we have this opportunity anyways while we're overseas let's just in secret from the rest of the team try to rebuild it like we haven't tried.

25:39Why don't we just try? Yeah. Surely it can't be that hard if we were to choose technologies that we're more familiar with. Outsourcing a lot of the problems and abstracting away a lot of the problems to like third party providers. Like surely if we do those things we can rebuild the entirety of Cortex and more in much shorter time.

25:56Like we just started out with that hypothesis and literally three three weeks into being in Japan that hypothesis turned out to be true. So it went to show that like we should have scrapped things way way way way earlier because if we can do it in three weeks at that point, what's stopping someone else from doing it in a month as well?

26:15Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing is we would see all of these like great apps coming out and we'd send it in the group chat and be like oh this is cool. Yeah. And like we'd get inspiration, like a short hit of inspiration, but then it's like uh we can't we can't do it really compete.

26:26Like we just knew every time we saw an app come out and do really well that it's like oh we were planning on doing that but like we we're stuck in the mud like it's going to be 6 months before we can get on that. It wasn't originally planned to be Eden.

26:39We were just planning on I guess replacing Cortex. Exactly. Yeah. So aside from the technical issues with Cortex, we were kind of in that a lot there were there are a lot of tech companies that have the blurp branding [laughter] like blue/p purple.

27:06Yeah. Glowy gradients. Yes. Uh dark theme. I wanted that because my branding is black and white and so I'm like we're going to be launching it to our audience and all of this other stuff and like we once we decided, oh, we're rebuilding it.

27:21We actually got to take a good look at what we had built and be like, okay, Cortex doesn't look that good. People like it because it resonates with them and they're more of like that dark techy vibe, but we're not reaching the audience for the vision that we were going to achieve.

27:39So that led to like, okay, maybe this isn't just a replacing Cortex. Maybe this is a rebrand as a whole, but it's an entirely different tech stack. So why don't we actually start over? Like this is us starting a new company, clean slate. But this also imposed some limitations is like

The Japan Trip That Changed Everything

28:03the Cortex users trusted us so much. How do we, I guess, make it up to them? How do we get everything that they've been looking forward to for so long into this like incredible experience? And we may be hyping it up now as a reminder when we roll out to Cortex users and open for Black Friday weekend, just know that that's like early access.

28:21Treat it as beta. It's only going to be web. Mobile will come out when it comes out. We'll say [snorts] that rather than giving a date, which is something that we've learned is if you have a deadline or if you have a public date you want to give out, push it back by like two weeks.

28:39Just give yourself some breathing room so you're not Yeah, Eden we think is really cool, really good. Like we'll go over features, but with that there's obviously going to be things that can be improved. So, if you're joining during early access, give us feedback and know that you're coming in on something that isn't its full potential, but is much further along the path than Cortex ever was.

29:05So, do you in terms of like rebranding from Cortex to Eden? What comes to mind for you? What were the decisions behind that? One of the things that comes to mind is it's really hard to get across what a second brain is to anybody who's not in like the productivity niche.

29:16It makes sense as a concept, but as like a process, it doesn't. Yeah. Right. Well, one I guess good bit of context here is that while we were building Cortex, like I was trying to do what I do best in building community. Yeah. Uh doing writing cohorts to educate people to use Cortex.

29:39uh creating tutorials on the Cortex YouTube and a lot of them were fairly popular but when people would watch them they we'd get questions and support a lot of like okay well like I have to use tags I have to use backlinks I have to connect things like I'm not really getting what I have to do here part of the original vision for me was also just like what is a second brain if you actually boil it down to like what what function it serves well we think about like well you can think about what a brain your first brain does.

30:12It it stores and retrieves information right that that's ultimately what a brain is good at doing like a storing and retrieving information really really quickly. You store information so that you can quickly retrieve it later so that you can use it in your projects so that you can use it to create content or so that you can use it to write books so that you can write you can you can write research papers write video scripts um use it for any kind of creative or information related endeavor.

30:37Another thing with that is like it's a curated space. Yeah. It's not like yeah you can Google search, you can ask AI, you can tap into the entire like water hose that is the internet of information, but this is the place of like your favorite ideas, the ones that mean something to you, the one that you saw and you're like, I need to save this for a project I use later.

30:54Yeah. But if that's not findable or usable, then you're back at ground zero and you either need to come across that idea again or you need to somehow type in the right keyword into Google or AI in order to get that idea back to you. And another way to put it would in my mind was just like it's like a search engine for your memories.

31:12It's like you you can just really really easily whenever you come across a video that you like, someone says something that you like or a podcast that you like, a blog post that you like, just hit a single shortcut, not have to think about anything and it's just saved somewhere.

31:26And then when you want to resurface the ideas, you can just save, you can just search by exactly what you remember. So for example, oh I remember like Dan Ho said that one thing about one person business and I just hit one keyword shortcut search up like Danco one person business or whatever and it's the exact frame or the exact moment from the video that I remember not just every moment from the internet where Danco talks about this.

31:49It's the one where I saved because the way that he worded it there is the way that like really made it click for me and the way that I want to

Eden's Search Feature

32:02reference when I'm writing. So it's like almost like the search engine for your memories. And I think about that and I compared to what Cortex was and I was like it's not there. It's so different. It's manual process. It's tags and back. And and it just it just felt like if this was the original vision then why are we still stuck on this?

32:19So Eden for me is like okay well what do creative what sparks the word creative or artistic or some other things of that nature? And we started brainstorming names. But the branding we knew had to be brighter. It had to like fall into that space and it had to be we had to be able to see it getting into millions of people's hands.

32:38Like Cortex for us, even though Obsidian did great, it's like we don't really see that like Cortex. Like do you hear that as like a household name? Oh, what do you take notes in? Cortex. It's like I don't really want to use that. It's it's also it's also just like every single time I put it in front of someone like put the actual app in front of someone and just anecdotally especially when I did this with like some of my my uh friends who are girls like if I would put it in front of them immediately their reaction is like oh this doesn't look like something I would use.

33:11Well we're we were trying to build something special as well like if we would have had the mobile app and would have been called it like Cortex notes. It's a note-taking app. Go in take notes. Oh cool AI chat tacked on. But since we were like in this state of dissonance of like we're not a note-taking app, but our product reflects that, our messaging around it is like, oh, it's this thing, really cool system.

33:30Yeah. You store all your knowledge. We over complicated it to make it more novel than it was because we knew we needed to build something more novel and we were marketing the product as more novel when it wasn't. So that was like a point of confusion.

33:48Yeah. Which leads to what's actually novel about Eden. Yeah. I think. Yeah. So, uh, one other thing is you mentioned in the second brain process, uh, like being able to capture or store information and retrieve information. Like you're big on the search feature.

34:01I'm big on the canvas feature because I'm always viewing things from the lens of like how am I going to use this in my workflow? And if my like if I'm a if I'm not able to write in it every morning Yeah. and like navigate that seamlessly with search involved.

34:17Yeah. It's like, okay, well, would I use this? Yeah. because I don't use notes to write in because it doesn't serve that function. Uh so yeah, we didn't really explain explain features. You said capture anything with keyboard shortcut, retrieve anything with Yeah.

34:30Yeah. So I think like fundamentally for me what it boiled down to like the vision I originally had for Cortex and now that we are actually carrying forward to Eden was like just a really seamless way to capture anything at a moment's notice and then recall exactly what you want later.

34:44Thinking about that problem I boiled it down to well why don't we also just build like aside from like a really good capture system a really really good search system. Um, so and and so that's one of the uh really cool new things that we we've built with Eden, which is a really really really powerful search engine.

35:03So to give more context, what the search allows you to do is it allows you to search across not just like text, which is what most search engines do. It allows you to search across literally specific visual frames in any footage that you've ever captured.

35:20So, for example, um the the the the prototype that Ari showed me, he uploaded a bunch of episodes of random anime, and I just went in and searched pink sweater, and it resurfaced every single frame where someone was wearing a pink sweater at the exact timestamp.

35:38And I was just like, "Holy [ __ ] this is insane. I haven't seen this before." Like, YouTube doesn't even do that. Google search doesn't do that. like no no no finder app or or or search app or note-taking app for that matter like has a search this granular that takes me to the exact point that I want.

35:56There are some that we discovered after we built it, but we're not going to name them. [laughter] Yeah. But and and they're $600 a month. Oh yeah, that's ridiculous. Terabyte per terabyte. Yeah, it's ridiculous pricing. But but even even if they do exist like usually the companies like usually each company solves like one fragmented part of the entire creative workflow, right?

36:20Like search is only one of the parts. There's also capturing anything really easily which is like uh I just want like a single keyboard shortcut where I can like I'm looking at a YouTube video, boom, press a keyboard shortcut, it's done. Or I just like if if I'm not someone who likes using keyboard shortcuts, I can just copy the link, go into the app, paste it in, boom, it's done.

36:37the the phrasing here that I think a lot of people will resonate with, but we may not say very much is like just that it's a drive for anything. It's a drive for all media that's transcribed. Like as a creator, that is such a magical thing is like any YouTube video I paste is not only downloaded, which you have to go and get a sketchy app to do that right now, [laughter] but it's also transcribed and you can read it right there.

37:04Yeah. And you can search the frames of it and the transcript of it. Now, that's just YouTube. Like, think 3-hour long podcast. Incredible tool. Like, that's all that could be an app in and of itself. Yeah. The second is like Instagram reels.

37:21Where can you actually download those and watch the video outside of Instagram and have them transcribed? Yeah. Tweets, Substack articles. For for context there, for like our mobile app, one thing that you can do is like you're watching an Instagram reel.

37:32You just click share and you send it to the Eden app. Yeah. and then it'll save the video and download it into your workspace in whatever folder you choose. And then everything in that video will be transcribed and searchable. So if even if it's like a specific style like a specific visual style like you search like cinematic moody, it'll take you to the specific styles that you're looking for later when you're when you're like actually doing work in the workspace.

37:57Yeah. But now think of it like this is like if you use AI, you know that one of

Canvas: Spatial AI for Creatives

38:03the big problems is context. And when you're trying to help it, help you like brainstorm stuff like how a landing page is structured or teach you like you uh save a reel because you're like, "Ah, this is great. I want to emulate this structure and pull some things from it."

38:15Now you have like I can create a folder of best reels and I can literally at@mention that folder in a chat. Yeah. And be like break down what works about all these reels. Yeah. You can't chat with a reel anywhere else or a YouTube video. And it's like that is like a huge missing piece with AI.

38:33And when you can, usually you're only chatting with the transcript. You're not chatting with the visual information. Whereas the AI chat, and this is something that Ari worked on recently as well, like what it allows you to do is it not just you're not just in our chat, you're not just chatting with the the transcript of the videos, you're chatting with the visual information.

38:50So you can do things like, oh, break down the shots in this YouTube video and explain like why it worked or or why it's visually appealing. Why is the hook in this video or in this reel visually appealing? That's where canvas comes into play is like so canvas you think miro, you think mind mapping, you think collage, you think other things, but um the chat interface is like onedimensional.

39:18like you're having one chat, you have to copy paste things in and out of it. Uh if you want to clear the context and have something else, then you create another chat. Um so a canvas feature where you can drag PDFs, YouTube videos, reels, anything in your own MP4 files.

39:38Yeah. If you're a YouTube like it's a Dropbox replacement, so you store all of your video files in there. If you need to find B-roll, you search for a specific shot, boom, it pops up. You clip that out, send it to your editor, good to go. But you upload those as well.

39:50So, imagine that I have like my raw filmed YouTube video. I put that on the canvas. I put uh one of the better YouTube videos of mine on the canvas. I put a few reels on there. Uh I put my brand guidelines, other things. I can connect all of those to an AI chat so they're pulled in as context, ask it whatever I want, like break down this video and replace it with something from this video, so on and so forth.

40:13And then I can connect any AI chat to any individual item, right? It's kind of free form visual spatial AI which for creatives I think that's a big thing. I've been using it every week for my newsletters and it's like kind of liberating to not have to open a pane now because like if I just want to take a little idea boom create a note in there jot it down there.

40:38Yeah. Drag that around to where I'm writing the newsletter in the canvas. If I have to research something with AI add an AI node ask it. Um, the other thing that it's helpful with is I don't have to take much manual notes anymore because a lot of my ideas come from YouTube videos or audiobooks or other things of that nature.

40:56But if it comes from a YouTube video, then I just add that YouTube video to the canvas and if there's a specific idea that I wanted, I connect that to an AI chat and I'm like, what was the idea about this? Or explain this concept to me in the way the video does.

41:07Right. Boom. That's my research for the newsletter. Right. Right. I'm not asking the AI to write it all for me. I'm just like, I have this rough idea of what I want. I have these sources all in my workspace. How do I get the information out of those sources uh in like a synthesized way because that's a different use case from like finding the exact part of it?

41:27Yeah. And then drag that over right next to where I'm writing the newsletter and it's like I have my outline, I have my research, I have an idea I threw over here, I have an image. Yeah. Yeah. I think like a drive for media, all sorts of media.

41:44Yeah. All transcribe is a really good way of putting it. The the change from Cortex to Eden, it's like the scope of what we're building is like 10x bigger than what we've done before. It's like we went from a note-taking app to now building Google Drive, Miro, Poppy, um like Frame.io, all downloaders from like different

Why We Chose Eden Over Kortex

42:05websites that like sketchy websites that let you download Instagram reels or YouTube videos. All of that is now Eden. And and we're able to do that because of the because of all the mistakes that we made and the what we've learned from them.

42:17Like the way that we structure our team now is that every single person has to be laser focused on a project ra and and has to be full stack rather than like focusing on one compartmentalized part of of the app. And the the way that the the tech is structured to begin with allows for us to actually build these things really really really quickly and move really quickly.

42:34And so I think like like definitely yes, Cortex was a mistake, but it was it was a necessarily learning process for for us to be able to like get here. Yeah. All right, let's wrap up with how we came about Eden as a name and like the branding.

42:53Yes. Branding behind it, but like the brand messaging. Yeah. So like what we first did when we decided, okay, we're actually doing Eden. we're doing something new is like we had to rethink and clarify exactly who we're for. Um what what how are we going to like what do we want to be known as?

43:18Yeah. Is the main thing is like you think of the company 10 years from now who do you want to serve? Who's attracted to it? So on and so forth. And we were initially we started with like who are we for? Initially with Cortex, we're for creators, which is still kind of who we're for, but what kind of creators?

43:36And then we think deeper and it's like people who still deeply care about their craft. Yes. Two is like, okay, well, what's the opposite of AI slop? And it's craft or like artisan work. And then we started to draw that distinction of like okay we're more for artisans or people who want to be artisans because in the future when AI slot become so noisy like the artisans are going to be the one that stands out.

44:00So we're taking a bet on the the future of the artisan so to say. All of that started to come together and we started to get this really cohesive brand vision where it's like everything we put into this app, every minor detail we add has to be this like focused around craft and artisan level work because the people that we become and build for have to be attracted to this thing, right?

44:20They have a very high expectation of quality and polish. We went through a bunch. We're like, "Okay, we're for craftsmanship. What about like Da Vinci? There's Da Vinci Resolve. [laughter] What about this or this or this?" And we just went through Greek names, Renaissance names, artistic names, etc., etc.

44:38And I think I threw out just like Eden. Yeah. You randomly said Eden. Yeah. And like thought about it. Yeah. We were kind of we were at we always hit this point. There's a cycle in the ideas that we have when we're trying to refine a feature or we're trying to refine the name or whatever part.

44:56And it's like we run through so many ideas to the point of nearly giving up and just like forgetting about it and then we throw one out and it's like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, that one's good." Yeah. Yeah. We thought about Eden for a while. There were there was a number of reasons why it's good.

45:08Oh my god. The logo was Oh, wow. a pain to get to. So, so for those of you who follow me but don't know that Matt and Ari have their own channel, go watch it because it's a very different vibe from mine. It's like I watch it. It's fun. [laughter] But uh thank you.

45:30Yeah, the thing there with the logo. Props to Jason. Oh yeah, Jason videographer. He's not in frame, but maybe he'll face Has he face revealed yet? He has. He has. Okay, [laughter] we got Jason. Uh the thing with the logo is like we had this really good logo that we really liked and wanted to keep and it looked good in the mo like the app icon and every it was just perfect and we posted it or they included it in one of their first video on their YouTube channel at the end and then someone commented like isn't this the same as like Flora?

46:05Yeah, isn't this the same logo as Flora which is another canvas based or nodebased app? And then we looked at it exact same and it's like how did we even come to that logo and it's kind of simple. It's like four pedals. Yeah. And it fit our name perfectly.

46:17So we're like do we have to change it? So if anyone from floor is watching this, we changed it and we did change it. Now we have something that I I think it it's grown on me a lot. And on the note of like the name Eden, the reason why we thought that the name was good is because Eden was the garden of knowledge, right?

46:34It's like Yeah. It's it's the place where knowledge began for humanity. Um, and we want our app to be the place for that is like your home as a creative. And the old logo, it was duplicated across so many startups. [laughter] Yeah. Every single day there was another another company that had the same logo.

46:58Yeah. I think we have something more unique now. Yeah. We have something extremely unique now. Yeah. All right. Let's end strong. Biggest

The Logo Crisis and Rebrand

47:05either lesson or failure. I think the biggest thing is a lot of times people will like at least for me like a lot of times people will say oh this is too hard you shouldn't do it because it's too hard and until you actually try giving up at that point is like it it's meaningless like we wouldn't be here if we just listen to people saying oh it's too hard you should just not do it like even Eden wouldn't exist if we if we kept to that advice yeah there there there It's actually a common reaction that we get like when we when we meet like VCs or random founders or investors and we

47:44explain what we're working on and the fact that we're trying to build something that's better than Google Drive. [snorts] The initial reaction that a lot of people give us is like how are you going to do that? Like yeah, it's too hard. Why would you do that?

47:56Why would you do that? Yeah. And several months later, we're at a point now where I actually think we have a better product. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's possible. Just have to try. Yeah. You just have to try. If I were to like zoom out and and and see what I've learned big picture, it would just be that like h you there's no point in not taking risks.

48:19That's a poor way to frame it. But everything that I I've done is uh and everything successful that that came in my life came as a result of taking like a big risk. For example, going part-time in university, contrary to what my parents suggested, in order to pursue shitty random jobs outside of school that were like contentbased and like paid like pennies.

48:43But if I didn't do all that, it wouldn't have led me to meeting you. And being on that call, taking the risk of just like public humiliation by by by trying to pitch you in front of 50 strangers. If I hadn't done that, we wouldn't be here. And then taking the risk of flying to Japan and

Biggest Lessons From Our Failures

49:03rebuilding the thing when we had the existing app to worry about and when we when everybody in the team told us, you know, rebuilding is probably not a very good idea right now. If we didn't take that risk, we also wouldn't be here. So, I think like success is just like a a series of perhaps well-calulated risks, but like a series of big risks.

49:20And I think anybody who makes it big does things that seem conventionally like a bad idea. Yeah. But you know that it's a good idea and can lead to potentially something great. Yeah. Oh, mine is the second that you think you know what you're doing, you're kind [laughter] of [ __ ] where like I thought that a lot of the skills and things that I had learned from my whole content creator journey and freelancing and all these different types of products would transfer over like onetoone to a startup.

49:52It's like I'm having to relearn, not relearn but refine a lot of those things cuz I I have to refine them to the point of like revealing what the principle actually was. I thought I knew what the principle was, but now it's like things are thrown on top of their head because it's like, okay, set a deadline pressure that kicks people into action.

50:11And when I'm applying it to myself, it's like I can I know what I'm trying to do. So, I have all of the the different variables accounted for in that situation. But when trying to apply that to a team, it's like you don't really know how that's going to work.

50:28And when it doesn't work, you're like is like this fundamental framework principle. Yeah. is this framework of how I work wrong as a whole and then it's like okay well how then what's the actual deeper underlying truth there and and that's the thing is like how do I apply my worldview to a team like not that I'm trying to impose my worldview but how do I make sense of this team in a way that I can best like guide or lead you know what I mean because I can lead myself just fine I think sure I'm an idiot sometimes but like like [laughter] for a team it Like

51:05I think about that a lot is and it kind of frustrates me is like I have like these people that I feel like I need to guide but it's also a value of mine to let people do their own thing. Yeah. And so then it's like where do I draw the boundary between that right?

51:17It's like I want everyone on our team whether they want it or not is another problem to be able to take feel as if they are like partly owning this thing. They have the the ownership mindset to the point where they can make decisions solve problems on their own.

51:39So it's just a ch it's a very like interesting and rewarding challenge that I am trying to new sets of problems. Yeah. Yeah. better sets of problems. Yeah. And I think one thing that we need to look out for in the future is we we've made mistakes in the past.

51:57That's for sure. That's this video. A big $3 million of mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. We will continue to we will continue to. But I think what sets people apart is whether you can take your mistake and not repeat it. Because as humans, we're very prone to remaking the same mistakes over and over again.

52:16And keep in mind that we will continue to make new mistakes and we we'll have to watch out for them and learn from them the same way that we made all the mistakes that led to Cortex. Yeah. And you guys will see it in real time [laughter] and you will be the ones to inform us of these mistakes.

52:28So with that said, again, rolling out to Cortex users from highest payment tier just because there's less people to the free tier. That's going to happen the Monday before Black Friday through Thursday. This video will be out on Thursday. Friday through Monday is the only time the early access will be open to the public.

52:51So, if you're watching this within 4 days of it going out, go sign up and try it. And uh after that, we will do a full public launch at some point in 2026 that will be with desktop, mobile, etc. Yeah. And then um in between that time, we may try something.

53:10So if you're watching this in between that like dead zone, uh you may be able to reach out to an Eden user and get them to invite you to the platform if that's a thing. Leave a comment and maybe someone can help you. Comment on someone who actually got in.

53:27Go on Twitter, go on Instagram, find people that have gotten into Eden and they should be able to send you an invite link and they'll only have a limited amount, like three to five. Yeah. So, it'll be a fun way to see how quickly eating grows and how much people actually want to use it.

53:40So, with that, thanks for coming on. I guess we're a safe channel, but uh yeah, this is the Eden co-founders. Enjoy Eden. Thank you for your time.