The Synthesizer: An Inquisitive Person’s Digital Career Path

Last week, our tech founder and product lead for Kortex – Matthew Ao – had an epiphany.

First, for those who don’t know, Matthew is a homewrecker.

13 months ago Joey and I started building Kortex (formerly ValueVault).

10 months ago we hired one (1) developer to build this second brain app.

But not just any second-brain app. One that is actually useful. One that gets results. One that allows you to turn your database of knowledge into impactful writing for content, videos, podcasts, team collaboration, student projects, and more. Eventually allowing us to create a new kind of social media.

Most “second brain” apps are just glorified note-taking software.

On July 13th and Joey spending $50,000 – things weren’t going too well.

Our weekly calls and updates were slow and boring.

Our zest for the project was fading fast.

We weren’t making the progress we wanted to make. And I don’t know what we were expecting to happen with one developer… but we had never done this before. If you know me, you know I like to just start building things regardless of how much I know… and it tends to work out pretty damn well.

At the time, Joey was helping Dakota Robertson with his ghostwriting cohort.

I showed up for a guest call to talk about my writing process.

Toward the end of the call, I mentioned that Joey and I were building an app.

Matthew unmuted his mic, “Wait, what kind of app?”

We gave some brief details about the app, he said he had some ideas, and we took the conversation to the DMs.

In short, he convinced us to burn ValueVault to the ground and start over.