koans

not your typical koans, but here is what we believe:

1. less is more. excel is enough. those 100 SaaS tools are scams.
2. we haven't evolved for 90% of conversations being async text. it's draining.
3. nothing beats a blank piece of paper to augment human thought. and quality pens/pencils.
4. conversational flow is when you slip into a conversation. a friend calls your name, you look over your shoulder, and before you know it, you are lost in conversation. all without trying.
5. everything is a surprise. we don't know where the next thought comes from; the next word from our mouth. that's the magic of spontaneity.
6. flowy:slack::chipotle:taco_bell
7. flowy is NOT productivity, efficiency, video conferencing, pushing a culture, social, chat app, meeting tool, workspace. by building afresh, we create a pure place and a new way of life.
8. voice is more unique than any other attribute.
9. the big void: capturing conversation as opposed to drafted thoughts.
10. thought-to-conversation latency: understand the human mind to augment what humans are thinking.
11. "the menu is not the meal, the map is not the territory, the word is not the thing." - alan watts
12. know thyself to know others.
13. the past doesn't matter as much. it slows us down (chat history). the past described in the present is always a surprise.
14. miller's law: the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2.
15. the quickest way to make your boat go faster is to make it lighter.
16. we don't know how long a conversation will go on for.
17. phone numbers have area codes even though the new world is nomadic.
18. nature has no boundaries. you can't bucket conversations into topics. that's merely SQL databases changing how we model the world.
19. conversations are not about interfaces, screens, emojis. they are about seeing, feeling, hearing life around us. it's an automatic process, not a rigid one.
20. we don't record every conversation in real-life. you experience and remember what the universe wanted you to experience and remember.
21. everyone's experience of something is different. that's the beauty.
22. each moment is a surprise. that's what we want. - jiddhu krishnamurti
23. time is the great equalizer. the scale of a group's thoughts within a time window doesn't exceed miller's law (# people x 7). most of the time, thoughts/topics overlap. these "topics" evolve every millsecond as a function of the "surprise"; thus, you can never accurately name a topic.
24. starting with simple worldly primitives (e.g. wood, hammer, terminal) adds constraints that lead to purity.
25. tribal hunting. if you enable synergy, you blur the lines between the individual and group as if it's one organism.
26. tectonic shift: keyboards will disappear. no one will bend their necks texting in 10 years. voice-first is the future. in the past 5 years, every chat app added a record button under your thumb.
27. tectonic shift: telecommz is changing with SpaceX DTC & improvements in bandwidth, latency, and the webRTC stack, and table-stakes experiences like cloud, real-time.
28. tectonic shift: people are more nomadic. phone area codes are irrelevant. the world is a global village.
29. tectonic shift: the internet is only getting messier. used to be bots, now called AI. AI can be used to make the world more human OR infiltrate the digital world.
30. tectonic shift: minimalism, anti-consumerism, social media detox are growing trends.
31. browsers, operating systems were built for utility & information. they put information (overload) before human-to-human interaction. it's quicker to get to exploitive dopamine than your best friend.