Today’s episode dives into the mind of Ida Josefiina, the co-founder and CEO of Sane, a social knowledge sharing platform. Josefiina talked about how her foray into existentialist ideas and the power of collective intelligence put her on a journey to start this company. She spoke about how she thinks about hiring for the mission-driven company and how it could scale. Plus, she talked about why she doesn’t consider Sane to be a social media platform.
Have you ever thought about all of the experiences, shows, books, people, places, and other pieces of media that have all been mixed together to make your unique personality and interests? Do you think you could build a multi-media map to visually show all of these elements? On today’s episode of Found, the co-founder and CEO of Sane, Ida Josefiina is explains how they’re breaking social networking as we know it to find a solution for collective reasoning and even mitigate existential risk.
In this episode you’ll learn:
Today’s episode dives into the mind of Ida Josefiina, the co-founder and CEO of Sane, a social knowledge-sharing platform. Josefiina talked about how her foray into existentialist ideas and the power of collective intelligence put her on a journey to start this company. She spoke about how she thinks about hiring for the mission-driven company and how it could scale. Plus, she talked about why she doesn’t consider Sane to be a social media platform.
Becca Szkutak 0:02
Hello, and welcome to found TechCrunch this podcast where we bring you the stories behind the startups from the folks who are building them. And I'm joined as always by the fabulous
Dom Davis 0:10
Dominic Midori Davis.
Becca Szkutak 0:12
Hey, Dom, how's it going?
Dom Davis 0:13
I'm good. What about you?
Becca Szkutak 0:15
I'm good. Just already getting sad about the summer ending. Everyone who's like pro-fall. I feel like it's already posting about it.
Dom Davis 0:24
The pro-falls? Yeah, I'm pro-fall. So I'm ready for this summer to wrap it up.
Becca Szkutak 0:31
Today, we have a good show for you. We're chatting with Ida Josefiina from sane which is a social knowledge sharing platform powered by a special canvas. If that sounds crazy and funky, definitely listen on.
Hi, Ito. How's it going? Very good. How are you doing Becca? Feeling like summers flying by?
Ida Josefiina 0:55
Y eah, same. I'm sitting here in the heat with no AC in my apartment in Barcelona. And I'm just sweating through
Becca Szkutak 1:02
rough about the heat. But I mean, not going to say I'm not jealous about Barcelona.
Ida Josefiina 1:06
I don't think that you should be jealous about Barcelona at this time of the year at all. I cannot understand why anyone would want to visit here in August. So wherever you are, I'm sure it's more comfortable
Becca Szkutak 1:16
Barcelona listeners, you'll have to email us and confirm or deny so diving into why we're here today. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about Sane
Ida Josefiina 1:25
Yeah, absolutely. So at Sane we're building the future of how we discover, create and share ideas online. Recently, we've been distilling this as saying that it's an integrated web for ideas. But more concretely speaking Sane is a social platform powered by a spatial canvas where users create shareable multimedia knowledge, graphs to showcase any type of knowledge. And the flexibility of this kind of spatial interface gives people the medium to show not just what they think, but also how they think by organizing notes, ideas, links, images and other media visually, and
Becca Szkutak 2:01
how did you land on this idea?
Ida Josefiina 2:02
Oh, my gosh, that's the big question. How far back do you want me to go?
Becca Szkutak 2:06
Oh my God, give us all the details.
Speaker 3 2:08
All the details. Okay. Well, it starts out when I was nine years old, and my, my family and I moved, we moved to California from Finnish Lapland, where we're originally from as I grew up half my childhood in California. And then we moved back to Finland when I was 15, which was kind of crazy, just because it was Lapland middle of nowhere, I was a teenager, you can imagine, like the angst of leaving all your friends and then being kind of stuck amongst reindeer and nature and Well, long story, I became very sort of existential and started thinking a lot about things like, you know, who am I, and why am I here? And what is humanity? Where is everything going. And throughout all of this sort of process of thought I came to discover the field or idea or concept of existential risks. And since then, I've been very, very passionate about existential risks, particularly mitigating existential risks. My career has kind of taken me in different places always been very aware of this sort of looming possibility that we need to do things now or otherwise, we won't survive or thrive into the future. So first started out in politics as a teenager. And then quickly when I was 19, pivoted into tech just because it felt like the place where you could just build stuff without waiting in or asking for permission, it could be automatically a lot more global, and sort of bounced around a lot from different parts of Europe and lived in China for a while, went back to California, and eventually came to the conclusion that while we have, you know, all of these individual existential threats or risks, whether it's in climate change, or in AI alignment, or in bio weapons, or nuclear threats, or whatever it may be above that we have sort of this umbrella problem, which is whether we can create enough collective intelligence or collective wisdom to be able to solve all these individual problems. So there's so many different ways that you could start attacking this problem, obviously, and it's a huge one, I actually believe that it's like the most urgent and pertinent problem that we have, because it's sort of the problem above all the other problems. But I think like one big way in which we could take a significant step forward here is to actually use the internet as a massive opportunity. So I think the internet just has so much potential in contributing positively to the problem of collective intelligence. And that's essentially why we're building things to build like a new big platform for a better way to discover, create and share ideas online.
Dom Davis 4:28
Just to go back on one thing, what is existential risk?
Speaker 3 4:31
Yeah, good question. So existential risks are risks that pose an existential threat to humankind to the human species. So there are so many different like very specific technical or scientific definitions to what might an existential risk actually be. Some people think that an existential risk is where everyone dies. And that's it. It's as simple as that other people think that existential risk also includes civilizational collapse, which means that not everyone dies but essentially all functioning civilization collapses, that we would have to rebuild everything essentially from scratch so that we would have no real beginnings. So there's a bit of debate on what specifically existential risk refers to, but the way that I think about is some kind of tragedy that would kill at least 50% of the human population and do severe damage to how our civilizations function and operate today.
Dom Davis 5:22
So and So how does your platform kind of address that again?
Speaker 3 5:25
Well, I'm this I mean, it's a kind of like an indirect route of things that relate with one another, right? So I don't I mean, I wouldn't say that Sane is directly solving existential risks. But I think that collective intelligence is one of the biggest sort of pieces of the puzzle when we think about existential risk. And so much of it has to do with like, what kind of tools we have as a global society, and how we work together, how we collaborate, how we can actually create, create new wisdom, create new intelligence to be able to solve all these individual problems, whether it's in climate or any other existential threat. So I'm really passionate about enabling people to have better foundations and tools for being able to create knowledge in different ways. I really think that it's more of a tool problem, rather than the human problem when we're not thinking, producing, working with ideas in like a nice holistic way that makes us feel good and increases our capacities individually. And collectively, it's a toy problem, not a human problem. So that's what we're hoping to tackle there.
Dom Davis 6:23
Yeah. And it's so interesting, because I imagine like you started off thinking about existential risk. So naturally, you go into politics, thinking you can fix this. When did you realize like, okay, politics is not going to fix this. And actually, a company might better address this.
Ida Josefiina 6:36
Yeah, that's also a great question. For me, like building a company isn't the thing that I wasn't thinking as a teenager, even as a young adult, like, I want to build a tech company. For me, it's not like the thing that I want to do. But it's such a powerful mechanism for solving really big and important problems that I think it's just like the best way to make an impact and have influence in 2023. I always think that if it was maybe 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, like I don't know, if I would be an entrepreneur, maybe I'd be like a writer or a painter. Like there's like different mediums. And I think like the meaning of building tech companies, there's just like a very, very powerful one now. So yeah, I did politics for a while. And it just felt like no one was desiring to have the sort of important fundamental conversations of how do we make sure that the humankind not only survives, but thrives into the future, thinking that if we only have, let's say, a five and six chance of even surviving past this century as humankind, which some scientists think is the case. So for me that's like, so incredibly urgent and scary. And we're clearly in this like age of heightened risks. So it doesn't make sense to spend like 99.9% of all the time talking about who gets more or less, especially it was in Finland. So it's like a very well functioning state with a small population. So it seemed like the problems that were being discussed and on the table constantly just wasn't getting to any of the global sort of human level conversations that I thought needed to be had. So from there, it was sort of a path of exploration, I, I didn't leave politics thinking, I'm going to necessarily build a tech company that's going to solve all these problems. But instead, I wanted to explore the sort of domain of tech and I moved to China and started reading all kinds of things. I didn't go to university, because I thought that if I, if I went there to study something specific, they would just tell me what to read and what to think. And I thought, I could explore a lot more on my own, just being an individual agent in the world, and eventually sort of like through a lot of different activities and processes, like it led to actually building saying, but it wasn't a very, like direct, clear, straightforward path.
Becca Szkutak 8:46
And kind of one follow up to that. Because, like you mentioned, there are these huge problems, there are many different ways to potentially start to tackle or even just start thinking about potential ways to start approaching these problems was what seen is now your first idea, how did you end up landing on building a platform like this as your first foray into looking into this problem?
Ida Josefiina 9:08
Yeah, it definitely wasn't the first there's actually like a really kind of funny sequence of events that actually led to Sane becoming Sane, but it first started out with like the same kind of like problem, space or mission, like we need more collective intelligence in the world. And I started thinking a lot about the role of culture or pop culture in how it sort of delivers ideas to people and what people are thinking as a result of what kind of culture or pop culture they're consuming. So my co founder, Tina and I, we first started building this project called studio 1x, which was essentially a project that collaborated with different contemporary artists and nonprofit organizations to do these, like what we called opinionware or these like limited edition, like collectible art objects that told stories of really cool ideas that we wish more people had access to. So that was like the first thing that we started doing within this problem space and then After that, we got very sick of having to send like packages of like weird items all over the world. And like the logistics part of it was just a nightmare. And it just wasn't fun at all. So we're like, what if we just ditched all the items like all the materials stuff, and we just focus on the ideas. So we started writing this newsletter, essentially about like all the cool ideas that we wish we had known about earlier, and that we think are really powerful. And especially like younger Gen Z, people were just like, get really excited about so started writing a lot about existential risk about like the hard problem of consciousness and about like weird theory from different places that we would find and sort of like within more of like an academic environment that we would then translate into sort of more easy to consume bits in a newsletter. And then that like went pretty well, we got a lot of really good feedback on it, people really loved it, they're like, these ideas are super cool. I love this, like, I would love to go more into this direction or that direction. So we started thinking about how we could actually scale this out into a tech product that would allow anyone interested in sort of like any field more or less to go down the rabbit holes that they found more interested in. So if you're interested in let's say, like, the whole area of consciousness, like you could get these like reading experiences and understand different papers and see like where the ideas would lead you. So we built this version of Sane, it was already called Sane at the time in 2021. But then in early 2022, before we were going to launch it, both of us just had like a very deep feeling that this wasn't it like this wasn't solving the problem that we really wanted to solve. And we had this very long, like random, hard to heart conversation that neither of us knew was coming about, like what product we built and what actually represents and how it's solving this problem. And, and both just realized that it wasn't getting to the root of what we wanted to do if it was only about consuming more that there had to be like a piece of the puzzle that allowed people to also create and where there would be the sort of like peer to peer networks, and it would really enable creativity and enable self expression. And through that the best ideas or formed. So it just felt like it wasn't going to happen on an app where all you could do is consume, even if it was like interesting things and beneficial things to the human mind. So yeah, that day that was I think in like February or March and 2022. It just all came together into like what is still today very much the concept of Sane. And since then now it's been a bit over a year we've been working on that.
Becca Szkutak 12:22
I'm very interested to know and how did you meet your co founder,
Ida Josefiina 12:25
I went to her fifth birthday party, or maybe her sixth birthday party. She was my Tina' s, my little sister's friend in preschool. And then her older brother, I'm not sure there was a Connection there. And I just remember my first memory of Tina is at her birthday party in Finnish Lapland and her dad had built this like floating structure into the river where all the kids could go and jump off of and that's how I know I know, Tina, but then a lot of things have happened since then we weren't like good childhood friends or anything or relationship was really like solidified in our early 20s. We'd always known each other but that's when we really got more to talking. And I think we just realized that was some kind of intellectual soulmates and here we are.
Becca Szkutak 13:10
Now just so fun you like never hear founder stories are always so interesting. So it's either like we met at a networking lunch at Stanford, or they're like, our mothers hiked this mountain together 25 years ago. It's like their stories are always so interesting. Yeah. It's always so fun to ask. Noting that you guys you mentioned last year trying to fine tune the idea of trying to make Sane into like more of what you guys were originally envisioning. I'm curious what it's been like building since then. And kind of like where you would pick yourselves up now.
Ida Josefiina 13:38
Yeah. So since last year, we started really like prototyping and building out the very first MVP of saying, we went to New York in the autumn of last year to join beta works think camp, which was amazing because it they do these camps at beta works every now and then. And they always have a theme to them. And last year, it was tools for thinking, which is kind of a niche thing, when you think about it, I've actually made incredibly good friends out of this program, like most of us have just become incredibly close since the camp happened at beta works in the autumn. And it's been really weird to realize that there really isn't that many people in the world who are like building a niche tool for thinking kind of software. And so through that process, like the sort of foundations of like, what kind of company we really wanted to build, and like the MVP was becoming something and we started testing it with alpha users, etc. So a lot of those were just solidified during that time. And since the beginning of this year, we've been really working on like, be one of sane that's sort of like the first like beta version of saying that's going to be coming out this autumn. Yeah, there's four of us. And we're going to be all relocating to New York by the end of this year. So that's also an exciting step for us to becoming an in person team in New York City. Yeah, that's basically where we're at today.
Dom Davis 14:58
That's so exciting. So So now I'm really interested in what is it been like fundraising for this product and explaining your ideas and your company to investors.
Ida Josefiina 15:08
So we raised an angel round of about $400,000. In 2021, when we were building the app. Now, this year, in March, we closed our pre seed round that was just shy of $1.3 million. And we have some really amazing investors on board who I think are extremely excited about, like the future of the social internet, when really thinking about how we could make like, we've been thinking about Sane a lot as like I mentioned this like integrated web for ideas. And one metaphor that I like to compare same to sort of thinking as like a G Suite for creativity that really enables people to like, think and create ideas and share them in ways that feel much more frictionless than what's currently available in this like linear, chronological, pretty fragmented formats on the web. So I would say that our fundraising process was quite smooth considering the market and everything that's going on. And we got pretty lucky landing some very, very incredible investors like beta works. I mentioned, our round was led by Cyan Banister at Long Journey Ventures, and she's just been a dream to work with. Yeah, I don't have any complaints really?
Dom Davis 16:12
Are most of your investors in Europe or in the US?
Ida Josefiina 16:15
In the US. Yeah. For the preseed for sure.
Becca Szkutak 16:18
Obviously, the mission you guys are going for isn't at all similar to Twitter, or other like social media kind of platforms. But there's definitely ties there of kind of like finding a digital space where people come and share ideas and kind of learn off of each other, and sort of are able to collaborate and connect in many of those ways. And I'm curious, as you mentioned, the fundraising process went smoothly, but social media is in such a weird place right now. So whether you guys consider yourself part of that, or just sort of something that's similar and running on like a parallel track, people are probably drawing comparisons between the two. And I'm kind of curious what it's been like for you guys cutting through some of the noise we've seen in social media over the last year and how people are starting to like, think about these different platforms in ways they want to connect online differently.
Ida Josefiina 17:03
For sure. I mean, I do think that the Twitter comparison gets made a lot. And to some extent, it's also relevant, because it is the sort of biggest platform for exchanging ideas that we have today, right and seen as sort of within that domain. But I would say that, if I were to maybe try to like say one point that would explain like how to put Sane in a different bucket than a lot of this other conversation that's happening, I would say that Sane is sort of integrating a lot of these different spaces that we use for different reasons into sort of one seamless platform on this spacial interface. And I think that it's partly just due to technological maturity, that we're coming to a point in time in history in which we might be ready for something less fragmented, that would be sort of this like one holistic, cohesive experience for discovering creating and sharing ideas online. So I can explain maybe a little bit about just like the basics of how sane works in practice, so that the listeners can get an idea of how it works. But like, the very sort of foundations of it is that on saying, you create this Knowledge Graph to showcase any type of knowledge. So one very basic use case or example of this could be that you for example, Becca create an About Me space. So we call them spaces, and you say like, Hey, I'm Becca, you create a note in there, maybe you put a picture of yourself and you say, like, I'm really interested in like topics XYZ. And you just link those topics there maybe through like an image or a book or a video or whatever. And you say, I first discovered this, like reading these books in my grandmother's yard, and then you put a picture there when you were a kid. And that made you think of like, you know, A idea that led you to B that ended up you like going to a university C and all of these like, letters that I'm saying, which represent notes in this like weird verbal explanation can be you know, an image or a link or a document, a PDF, an audio file, whatever you want it to be. And when you have the autonomy to visually organize that information, however you like, and you can get as like crazy and creative with it as you want. You're giving me a lot of context as the viewer of the space on not just like what you think but how you think. I think that that's actually very, very interesting, like seeing how people end up explaining who they are through a combination of different types of media at saying like the Atomic unit is really the idea. It's not an image like on Pinterest, or it's not a tweet, like on Twitter. It's like the concept of an idea that can live through different mediums. So when you have autonomy to visually organize this information, you're giving so much of that context that we get in like the IRL, analog world all the time, but we just don't get through the internet because it's a very specific format. Like we basically just took a book and then put it on the internet. And we're like, this is how it works. Like it's linear chronological and it works most of the time on this like timeline based situation. So Sane breaks a lot of those rules, which I think has really interesting effects. Like first of all, like one space that a friend of mine created was called a decade of thinking and she created this like space that was essentially a 10 year old timeline where she explains like how she ended up becoming progressive political economist focused in Latin America. And she linked all the books and papers that were like the most formative and shaping her thinking. And she added little notes. And like, what she was thinking at the time, how she ended up asking some kind of question like, where she ended up working, how she ended up quitting, how she ended up like doing everything that she did through 10 years. It's just basically like a drag and drop thing. And if you take a look at that space, in about two minutes, you have so much more understanding of not just who this person is, but also like how she thinks and what her beliefs looks like. And I don't think that there's anything else like this, especially at scale on the internet today. So then this comes into, like the discovery function. So if you think that there's a bunch of these spaces, like whether it's for like someone who's been like researching the hard problem of consciousness that I mentioned earlier, and it's this sort of space that allows you to easily navigate the literature within this field. And you can actually go and you're like, How can I understand what the hard problem of consciousness is, and someone's added like a note, that's a definition and then linked it to like a podcast that's really cool about and linked it to the Original Thomas Nagle's paper like what is it like to be a bat, that's so much more easy than going on Google and searching for that, and then going through this chronological like SEO based list of search results, and actually not knowing where to go or what to do. So I'm really excited about like this discovery on Sane, because the also the depth of information is pretty huge. When people are embedding like entire PDFs, or audio files or videos or, you know, ebooks in there. There's a lot to search for. And if I go back to like Maria's example of of the decade of thinking, I just think that if you're an 18 year old kid thinking about studying like Latin American Studies in university, and you go on, you go on saying, and you type in Latin American Studies, and you get these spaces that show actually people who are within the field of Latin American Studies, how they ended up getting there, and what they were looking at what kind of questions they were asking what they were reading, I think that's pretty powerful. And, and that's how we really think about sort of like this holistic, not fragmented space for dealing with ideas on the internet. And I think that that is quite fundamentally different than a lot of the conversations that are being had of like, what is going to be the next social media platform? What is happening with Twitter, what comes next? I think what comes next is like this one very holistic experience that allows people to like have the best tools for and least friction for creating, discovering and sharing ideas.
Dom Davis 22:23
I love the concept of everyone sharing and, you know, just intellectually coming together. But one thing that it seems no social media platform has been able to properly tackle is misinformation. So how do you approach the idea of content moderation and misinformation spreading on your platform?
Ida Josefiina 22:42
Yeah, we're still really early. And I think that we have so much to figure out within that space that I would be lying if I said I had any, like, very clear answers for how we're going to tackle those problems. But I think also just the nature of the way that the product is designed and how it works, already combats, a lot of the problems that we're seeing on these like chronological timeline based feeds of today's so if you think that like you would create spaces that were full of misinformation, and I just don't think that they spread it with the same kind of velocity as like a timeline based feed would be spreading misinformation in any ways. So in this case, like I think the architecture of the product is like a first way of combating that, when it comes to sort of thinking about content moderation. It's a theme that we've talked a lot about internally insane. But I don't have any like clear specific guidelines or answers for exactly how we're going to do that yet. We're super early, we haven't even launched yet. And I think we're gonna have to see like how the first like steps of the community and things go to make like a very clear set of guidelines for how we'll deal with misinformation.
Becca Szkutak 23:46
And sort of thinking about the launch coming up. What do you think about the rollout? Are there any specific demographics or groups of people you're thinking are sort of like a good area to kind of like roll this out to and then grow from there? Sort of like, how are you thinking about getting out of the beta phase, and then sort of scaling from there.
Ida Josefiina 24:03
So we're going to be rolling out first for waitlist. And I think what we're probably going to do is do a waitlist launch. And then a few weeks later do like a private beta launch, which just means that the people now on the waitlist also have invite codes that they can send over to their friends. And it's been really incredible to see like what kind of people we have on the waitlist, they're not that different from each other, to be honest, like if we put like a, we have this type form questionnaire that people filled out when they want early access. And then we generated this word cloud out of the responses of like, what do you do in life? Or what are you interested in? And the themes are pretty similar? Like I would say, that same sort of initial audience is really somehow design adjacent. So they're not necessarily like designers, but they're somehow like visually intrigued, or they might be designers or they might be studying something related to design, which makes a lot of sense because it is a spatial platform. It's a spatial interface, and designers use the likes of Miro and figma and these types of things a lot. So it would make sense that like another canvas for dealing with not just visual things, but also for ideas is like the next natural step in the evolution of how they think about doing any kind of work or development of ideas. So that's the big one. And then we've been calling Sane sort of like early target audience info punks, my co founder coined the term. So an info punk is someone who's just sort of like curious about the world, maybe challenging traditional information dynamics and looking for alternative ways to pursue information and considers themselves to be like a thinker of some sorts and is sort of into the internet, like the internet hangs out on the internet and wants to pursue different paths for like creating, thinking, etc. Online, I think another thing that we've noticed is that our early target audience are the type of people who really want to share and they have something to say, but they don't necessarily have a medium right now in which they would feel the most comfortable sharing their ideas. So substack, for example, like if you want to write on substack, it's a pretty high bar to reach because you need to know what to write about and full article format, have a rigorous publishing schedule, and then, like, do it very publicly, right. Or if you're on Instagram, like it's a very specific format, like you just post pictures with captions, and this like timeline based grid, or on Twitter, you need to be able to participate in like the constant flow of witty banter to sort of get attention there and be a part of the community. So I think all of these platforms are very much catering to like, what we've been sort of calling the digital extrovert in ways and I'm saying is, in a way, like a solution for like digital introverts who are extremely creative and have something to say is have something to share, but maybe lack like the medium. So on Sane like, you can just connect a quote to an image and write like a little note on it. And that's a way of self expression, which is much, much easier than for example, writing like a full blog post and feeling like you need to be some kind of authority even to do that. So we're hoping to like significantly remove the barrier of entry for who gets to be a creator, and who gets to share on the internet.
Becca Szkutak 26:57
And you definitely are making a good point, some of the downfalls you get from some of the other platforms that some are definitely feel you're all in or it's nothing and others are like very catered to specific types of posts, switching gears just a little bit thinking of everything we've talked about so far, and sort of how you guys are building the platform and sort of this mission that's driving behind it. How do you think about hiring? What are you looking for, when you're chatting with potential people to hire? And what does that process look like? Because this is a company that sort of just hard to compare to say, like, relevant experience here doesn't seem like there'd be like an easy box to like, check.
Ida Josefiina 27:33
I'm looking for the weirdos like Tina and I are like both of us are I don't think that we're really like the traditional, like tech founder background before you actually founded a tech company. Like Tina is a designer, she's like, built an eyewear brand before she has a master's degree in food design. And, you know, she's like, this, you know, that's Tina, Tina is amazing. And she's incredible product designer. And my background is also like, it's a bit different, you know, like being in politics and then kind of traveling around a lot jumping from different places, then going into tech, but also kind of going out of tech before going back into tech. So we don't have like the classic went to Stanford or MIT and then worked in XYZ company and then did like z and then ended up like building like, what the startup is. We've really meditated on this like hiring question a lot. It's actually been like a very hot topic internally for the last couple of months, as we've been trying to think of like, what really is this company? What kind of company culture do we want? Like, what kind of day to day like life do we want as a team and like, one thing is to say like, we definitely want to be in person, we want to be in New York City, because it's just hard to do something as like epic is like building the future of the social internet if you're not like with this high density of serendipity, exchanging ideas and being creative together all the time. So I'm a pretty firm believer in the in person work, work culture, Tina's dreaming of doing like studio lunches, like cooking for everyone. I don't know if that's going to work out in reality. That's a That's a dream and a desire. And as we've been thinking about who to bring on board after now, we're for people, but I think we're really looking for the people who are extremely thoughtful. They're very philosophically intrigued by the problem that we're solving and the why of what we're doing. And they'll have the sort of desire to actually engage in these questions and conversations inside and outside of work. And maybe they don't have the most traditional tech background and that sort of like big tech CV. So definitely looking for the weirdos, the thoughtful people, the design adjacent people, the people who just can't stop obsessing over like the most interesting philosophical questions of our time. And I think those are the people that we're also going to have the best possible time doing this company buildings company, and it has to be that way because we spent all of our time and energy in it. So why would we want to do with people that we don't like them?
Dom Davis 29:46
I mean, New York is obviously the greatest city ever. But why did you decide to build an expand your business in New York rather than San Francisco?
Ida Josefiina 29:53
Oh San Francisco's too far, both culturally and just geographically from Europe. Tina and I are both from Europe and New York, we just had the best time last fall there with a beta works crew and made a lot of friends and sort of felt like we established the initial seeds of, of a community and what a community first thing would look like in New York. So it just felt like things really fell into place there. So and then also, just honestly, the fact that it's a much shorter time zone away from like, European ground. And also in terms of flight time, like California is really far away. So also, I think in New York, we'll find more of the weirdos in California, I think it's like more a classic tech bro situation. And in New York, maybe we can find some of the freaks to convince to join this journey of ours.
Becca Szkutak 30:39
Thinking about building a company thus far, you got a really interesting point getting ready to sort of launch into the next step. You're thinking about hiring, thinking about kind of munching this, these policies and things of the like, what has this journey been like for you personally, building this company? Obviously, you started out politics very different. Seems like you've been on this journey for quite a while of discovering how much you care about the space and like care about this mission. So how is it? What has it been like, so far building this type of a company?
Ida Josefiina 31:07
Yeah, that's a big question. Honestly, there's been so many different kinds of phases throughout this whole process that it's hard to sort of, like summarize into one, but at times, it's been incredibly lonely, like, it's just been super fucking hard. And I, it's just been like an incredibly big challenge of trying to start with this, like, huge global problem that I care about, and trying to figure out how I can actually build a solution that may can make some kind of impact to it. So it's been a lot of just effort and trying to understand like, what the thinking around this looks like. So it hasn't been about trying to figure out how to build a startup that I can get off the ground, and that can succeed. But before that, there was like, years of me trying to actually understand how the world works. How different like forces across government and technology and creativity and culture, play a role and making the world go round and round. And then understanding like what the institutions within these look like, and how do people actually collaborate and come up with ideas. It's just been like a massive amount of exploration and thinking and reading and trying to understand the world. That part I think, was extremely fun, in many ways. Like it was just it felt very enriching and intellectually challenging. But also, I think a lot of people looked at me for a really long time being like, you're completely crazy, like, what are you doing? Like, why did you quit your job, like, What the hell is going on? And it hasn't been easy to try to like test these different kinds of like methods or approaches to it at all. So some of it has been incredibly challenging as well. But I think that the day that Tina and I kind of like, understood why the app of what the Sane like mobile app that we were building for consuming ideas, wasn't working. And we immediately realized, like, what the solution that we wanted to build is, then it's been significantly easier because there's just been this like, massive amount of momentum and speed that has like, driven us forward in many ways. And also in my personal life, it's helped a lot. I'm getting married now moving to New York, like just building different kinds of communities than friends. So I think that once the idea kind of got solidified, in a way, a lot of other things in my life also fell into place. And it's this sort of like cycle of momentum and happiness and joy, that probably also shows up in the work, right? I mean, it's all very connected. I don't know, that was a very messy answer for your question. But honestly, I could not have done better because it was a very hard question.
Dom Davis 33:36
Yeah, no, congratulation. Congratulations on the engagement on the upcoming wedding.
Ida Josefiina 33:40
Thank you.
Dom Davis 33:41
We're almost at a time. But before we wrap everything up. One last question, what is next for you? And also the company?
Ida Josefiina 33:48
Yeah so for me it's like balls deep and wedding planning. Sorry for the expression but it's just been like very
Becca Szkutak 33:55
happy expression, I stopped
Ida Josefiina 33:57
I have to otherwise you would not understand how intense has been recently. So it's like full wedding planning mode full getting to thinking about launch mode, which is also happening this autumn, the wedding and the launch are both happening within like a pretty short timeframe. So that's something to look forward to and be extremely nervous about. And the New York situation is happening like a month after that. So just preparing for that whole process. So yeah, that's like the company and the personal life and everything that you could possibly imagine, like wrapped up to like 110 week cycle. So that's what's next.
Dom Davis 34:30
Are you getting married in New York?
Ida Josefiina 34:31
No, here like close by to Barcelona, like an hour and a half away in the countryside.
Dom Davis 34:36
And that's gonna be nice.
Becca Szkutak 34:37
Oh, that's lovely. Sounds
Dom Davis 34:38
lovely.
Ida Josefiina 34:39
Yes. I'm very excited.
Becca Szkutak 34:41
Thank you so much for coming on. This has been fun.
Ida Josefiina 34:43
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Becca Szkutak 34:52
So that was our conversation with Ida. Dom What do you think?
Dom Davis 34:54
Yeah, I really, really liked it. It reminded me of a lot of things at once. I'm most Thinking of Pinterest and Tumblr. But I also couldn't stop thinking about the fact that like how useful this could be in schools for teachers and students to track their thoughts, but also like, imagine your teacher having this and then putting all the notes up, or you get like some philosopher guy, or like an author, and they just put all their thoughts there, and it'd be kind of easy to interact and go with them. I still don't know how you deal with people who just have bad thoughts, but I guess that's subjective, right? What a bad thought is.
Becca Szkutak 35:30
Yeah, I like your point about the school though, because that's totally right. Like brainstorming like this, like imagine writing a paper and like you make a post about, oh, I want to talk about this. And then you like, Link, all of the sources you would use to, like make that point? Like, I feel like that would actually be really helpful. I can see myself wanting to read this. I'm not sure if I'd want to do my own. If that makes sense.
Dom Davis 35:49
That's the thing. Yeah. Would you someone will, someone will take the time to do it? I'm thinking about like, the SparkNotes people that the Oh yeah, like, took the time to summarize all those books. Shout out to you guys. Someone will do it. Maybe do you think enough people will do it?
Becca Szkutak 36:05
That's the thing. But I mean, it's so hard to think about things like that, when you like start to look at other companies, like people always talk about Uber is like the classic example. Five years for Uber was founded. If you were like, hey, like I'm starting a company where you get in a stranger's car, like they'd be like, What are you crazy, like, so in the way that like Tumblr and Pinterest really did Garner cult followings, I definitely think this could. But at the same time, like getting a new platform is getting people to do stuff like this can be really hard, especially because it feels like everything we do now is online, and everything has to be connected to everything. And we have to be following our friends on X, Y, and Z and reading more about this and reading more about that. I feel like it's might be harder in this environment to get people to not need to try it. I'm sure it'd be easy to get people to try it. But I just watching what's happened with like blue sky and scale and hive. It's like, can you get people to like, keep coming back?
Dom Davis 36:57
Yeah, I think it could become like really, really popular for certain people, which I guess is kind of her niche audience, the really intellectual types. Now for no reason at all. I'm thinking of like the crazy conspiracy theories, people could just map out on their I know, it's like, there's the good and the bad of a platform like this, for sure.
Becca Szkutak 37:17
And I think this also is a good example. It's so easy covering startups to get like caught up in the oh, well, this platform or this company needs to get like every single user and make so much money and be like a billion dollar, whatever. And it's like the company's people, especially when you get into this, like more social platform space. She's so right to say like people like want those kind of like smaller communities that were like people tend, which of course, can become an echo chamber, and as you mentioned, can get bad depending on like what people are talking about. But I definitely think this will find success with the groups it's targeted to like, well, that'd be a big enough audience per se to like, be a venture bankable company down the line, like continue to gain investor interest and stuff like,
Dom Davis 38:00
I don't know, maybe it doesn't need it.
Becca Szkutak 38:02
That's true. Maybe it doesn't need it, which is always interesting, because you hear about companies like this. It's like she has such a strong mission. And like, maybe it's a bit far out for me. But the principles make sense, wanting to protect people against these huge risks that I mean, like climate change and stuff. It's very easy to wrap your head around. Well, I guess not for everyone. But for most of us, very easy to wrap your head around that being a threat and her passion of like wanting to do something about it and thinking it's going to take like a collective group is like, I mean, that's a good basis to build something off for sure.
Dom Davis 38:34
Yeah, I think you're totally right. It's gonna find its audience. I mean, I still use Pinterest, because you don't like hear people's thoughts. It's just you and pictures. It's kind of peaceful. And Tumblr, I still use Tumblr, Tumblr, you know, again, just peaceful blogging, you mind your own business? So maybe there is, you know, room for? I don't know, I don't want to use like safe spaces on the internet, but like, a place like this to just share thoughts and be intellectual.
Becca Szkutak 38:59
What is Tumblr? Like? No, I used to be like, so obsessed
Dom Davis 39:02
Tumblr, you know, I don't know, because I've had my Tumblr since eighth grade. So like, since I was 13, or whatever. And it's just quiet. Like, sometimes I retweet the same memes over and over again. Sometimes I see discussions that I saw, like decades ago. But it's just quiet. But people are there for sure. But it's not bad.
Becca Szkutak 39:22
That's so interesting. One of the other things that kind of stood out to me from this is her talking about fundraising. I'm just always so cynical about VC fundraising, because it's like, we've talked to founders on the show before who were like we have this product and we have all these customers and VCs were like, no one wants that. And it's like, no, he said, we have all these customers and like the market it's cared for, like clearly wants it. And VCs are still like, Nope, no idea why I would ever invest in this. And then it's like something like this like it's out there. It definitely like I said, good mission running underneath. It. Definitely seems like they're building really thoughtfully. But then she was like, oh, fundraising was really smooth and I'm just like, that's a little intro So maybe a little surprising.
Dom Davis 40:01
Maybe she targeted her investors really, really well. Yeah, no, you're totally right. There's gonna be like this life changing technology like this will save humanity and but and investors are like, I don't know. And then you see something that's like really far out and it's always like, this is so cool. I know it always gets back to what the VCs want, which I think is one of the main questions of life.
Becca Szkutak 40:23
I know. I think I asked myself that more than I think I probably should have two founders hosted by myself. TechCrunch Senior Reporter Becca Skuta, alongside Senior Reporter Dominic Midori Davis found is produced by Maggie Stamets with editing by Cal our Illustrator is Bryce Durbin funds audience development and social media is managed by Morgan Liddell Alisa stringer and Natalie Kreisman TechCrunch is audio products are managed by Henry pic of it. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
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