Jacob's Origin Story

Jacob's life-arc is the spine that organizes everything else in this wiki. He told it to David in the car, somewhere on the 880, in roughly chronological order.

The kid who built things

Jacob grew up making things. Lego Mindstorms was the gateway — "the biggest Lego ever." He did robotics in middle school, taught himself web development around the same age, started getting paid for client work, and by high school had hired 19 of his friends to work alongside him on small startups and websites.

"I went to bed every night thinking about cool, creative bot ideas that I wanted to build. And I always dreamed of being an inventor when I grew up as a kid. And yeah, I really like making inventions, and so I'm not right. My kid self was pretty on point in a lot of ways."

The injury

Junior year of high school, Jacob developed severe repetitive strain injury from typing and writing. It became hard to do the work he loved most. The pain was constant; sentences were hard to hold in his head; sparks of motivation evaporated before he could capture them.

This is the wound around which most of his vision crystallized. Two reactions:

1. Cultivation: Yoga, qigong, meditation. Helped a lot but didn't fully resolve the issue. The detour into Contemplative Practice became one of the most valuable things in his life — see Qigong (Arms-Up Position) and Iyengar Yoga.
2. Voice interfaces: He began designing hands-free input systems. He went to MIT and worked on voice recognition interfaces for two years, building tools that turned out to be better for everybody, not just for people with limited typing capacity.

"It turns out that I built UI paradigms that are just better for everybody, not just better for [the injured]."

The salons

At MIT, because Jacob couldn't code as freely as he wanted, he hosted intellectual salons and gatherings. He estimates the people he introduced to each other have raised over $200 million in venture capital together. He started building schemes to systematize the matchmaking. One scheme became a knowledge graph for people; the first customer was Silicon Valley Bank, which needed the same market intelligence Jacob was doing — but for people, since SVB does business development through events.

This is the seed of IdeaFlow.

Oxford and Tim Berners-Lee

Jacob spent a year studying abroad at Oxford. There he met a TA, "way smarter than me," a quantum-computing PhD student who also believed knowledge graphs were essential for augmenting physics work. They started an open-source project together. Tim Berners-Lee — professor at MIT and Oxford, inventor of the web — became one of his research advisors, and "ended up being a little bit helpful."

Take-the-year-off

Last year of college, Jacob took off to start the company. Got angel funding, including from Naval Ravikant, scrambled, raised VC, and is now shipping an enterprise product.

"And so the high level parts of the mission, though, that's like, sort of tactically what happened. But I haven't captured the high level parts, the sort of philosophical angles."

The "if I died" question

Mid-injury, Jacob asked himself a hard question: if I died right now, what would I most regret never bringing into the world? The answer was his list of ideas.

So he made the list public. The result was unexpected: people contributed back. Anton Osika (just-pre-Lovable) found the document and reached out. People all over MIT started sharing their ideas. Jacob realized: there's something to be done here for the world, around sharing ideas — and he felt it acutely.

That observation became:

• manifestos.world — a Vision Charter for world-visions
• World Issue Tracker / World Progress Bar — civilization's bug tracker
• Accretive Collective Action — Kickstarter for boycotts, pledges, and collective acts
• The whole IdeaFlow / Sparks of Motivation / Open Gestalts family of ideas

What he'd do differently at 17

David asked. Jacob's answer:

• Take the injury seriously immediately — top-tier acupuncturist, body worker, PT, cupping, qigong; reduce course load; treat it as a real medical priority
• Train preventatively for connective-tissue conditions (he suspects he has slightly anomalous connective tissue)
• Start serious qigong earlier — especially holding the arms in the seven-minute position. See Qigong (Arms-Up Position).
• Study Iyengar yoga earlier at the California Yoga Center in Mountain View (where his dad's first teacher teaches; his dad is a yoga teacher and sleep scientist)
• Pay more attention in linear algebra. "I think my linear algebra intuition is still not as deep as I want it to be."
• Develop literary / artistic taste alongside CS. He did English and CS at MIT but wishes he'd developed "the ability to write tasteful literature" further.
• Find the IdeaFlow idea sooner — the central life project came a couple of years later than it could have.

The shape of the arc

Pain forced cultivation; cultivation revealed the inner ecosystem; the inner ecosystem made visible the outer collective; the outer collective demanded tools to coordinate; the tools became IdeaFlow and the family of Accretive Collective Action mechanisms.

The arc is what makes the vision coherent: it's not theoretical. Each piece was forged by an actual moment in his life.