Kortex: The $3 Million Dollar Mistake

Cortex the three million dollar mistake. One of the things I started thinking about was like what are the problems with Cortex? Like we can't make any step forward because we're just like marching in place and then the comments coming in and everything else is like what are we doing? Let's set these goals let's make them really aggressive and see what happens and we did that and we saw that the whole car

fell apart. We need desktop we need light mode because we could like that's

fell apart. We need desktop we need light mode because we could like that's how that's how slow we were going is like it was difficult to get light mode out of all things. And so we threw away the one and only advantage that we really had as a startup which is moving fast. 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 much shorter time. Literally three three weeks into being in Japan that hypothesis turned out to be true. In terms of like rebranding from Cortex to Eden what comes 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

your memories. I just went in and searched pink sweater and it resurfaced every single frame where someone was wearing a pink sweater at the exact time stamp. This is

insane I haven't seen this before. The second that you think you know what you're doing you're kind of fucked and it's like I don't know how to freaking manage a team dude. I 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 oh yeah we're actually doing something. Success is just like a series of perhaps well

calculated risks but like a series of big risks. Because as humans we're very prone to remaking the same mistakes over and over again.

Well yeah we're here to talk about why Cortex failed. Yeah. Three million dollar 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. Yeah. I

mean you know my philosophy mistakes you have to make them in order to actually improve. Yeah. So do you see it as a mistake? I I see it as

improve. Yeah. So do you see it as a mistake? 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 first -time founders that went into Cortex that uh definitely can be categorized as mistakes yeah. 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 so 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 yeah because we were forced to for the reasons we're gonna 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 gonna start rolling out Eden to

you so expect an email on that log into the app if you don't get an email because 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 gonna try and open it to the public and see if things are okay please take

note 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 but 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 yeah 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 were both students at the University of Toronto I was in computer engineering he's in computer

science and 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 went through the first couple of years of 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 pretty early on in university I decided to

go part -time and then take on a bunch of odd jobs and 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 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 two days before meeting you I'm going to write an apple notes and in that in that note okay I'll start with ghost writing 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 Coe and then your friend Dakota Robertson happened to be running a ghost writing cohort halfway through that call you basically said offhandedly 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 there'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 yeah and it turns out you you were working on an idea that was very

very very similar so then I'm just I just like start shamelessly barraging you in the zoom call with like oh like uh here's like everything I've worked on before I can help you with that like yeah like 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 I have

a lot yeah I'm sure you have a 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 yeah after there yeah I remember Dakota I'm I'm so sorry if you're listening to this Dakota I'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 because he was like all right I'll connect you guys on telegram later you can you can like sort it out offline he was kind of just like all right this guy is like derailing the conversation 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 like if we scroll all the way back up like I just barraged you with messages and then you're like not interested at first well yeah then I I sent you because I thought we were doing everything right like yeah this was our mine and Joey's first dive into software yeah and we just hired a developer off of Upwork yeah and we're

like this is what we want it wasn't really fleshed out I mean 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

is like yeah you need to burn this all down it 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 and you incorporated the company and

then the name Cortex came about and then you injected like the first amount of basically seed funding you brought me onto the call I saw what the guy had and then TLDR for the for the technical people that guy had spent like five months building basically a crud app which Ari can pull off in like two hours and now Ari could do in like 30 seconds yeah that's just what I did

so yeah to to give Ari some limelight here this is the most cracked engineer I know well I don't know how many no no no 100 % I I think it's like I I know some crazy cracked people like I know people working at autopilot and Tesla like meetings with Elon Musk

and so on like 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 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 I would disagree but yeah it's 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 -end facing things yeah and then you decided to build a text 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 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 because you know you always have a home with us so why not

oh that's sweet 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 that's a great analogy start 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 a projections without a product I was I did I do not agree with that philosophy but maybe it works for different kinds of startups we 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 it 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 it 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 requirement

to like going and doing stuff so 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 took all eight credits yeah it was eight credits in one year yes which is ridiculous finished as much as I could I'm like okay I'm back I'm a fourth year now 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 and towards the tail end of that like a co -op program 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 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 sounds he would often go to Ari because Ari had

worked on an editor project like for for his for his first startup so 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 I decided like oh like let's let's let's bring on this

person and then we'll make him fun 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 I 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 oh 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 two into doing that we realized that way of doing things at an early stage startup is so slow like 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 everybody 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 we need to change things we need to test things like we don't know what's again with the theme of this podcast being like mistakes are the only way to improve or you can't improve without mistakes is like we had to put something out there yeah 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 yeah 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 right 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 do you have that they don't it'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 yeah 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 because we were getting to this point where it's like we're not moving fast enough we 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 light mode yes because we could like that's how that's how slow

we were going is like it was difficult to get light mode out of all things and 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 app huge that's another thing with cortex is like we had 80 000 users but we

were so siloed that the amount the speed at which we could build things our mobile experience which is like how 80 percent 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 try to sign up and then they're like they log into the cortex web version and they're like okay this is crap

and then they leave yeah and it's like so sure we have this many users but how many did we lose along the way a lot we started out only free yeah and then introduced paid tier and the paid tier like didn't even make sense because we were a note -taking app only yeah 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 yeah 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 yeah

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 where this doesn't feel like a startup that we're building it 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 yeah and i was i spent too much time justifying that that was my mistake is we should have called it quits earlier yeah people see cortex but then they're like okay what about mobile what 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 yes for example literally the choices that we made for authentication for for for how we

scaled hosting etc i think you should like so we get into it better than i can i came into cortex a couple months after uh it was already set up set up yeah and i was just brought on for initially engineering yeah it was just part -time engineering work yeah 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 yeah that was the fundamental problem and i've seen like even mid -sized companies you have like groups of five to six people whose full

-time job is just handling all of that stuff and we're a team of five to six people doing that plus 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 so yeah just just

to like nail into like one example right um and for for the non -technical people like authentication was one of these problems for the non -technical 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 like what could what could be so hard with that sign up with google what could be so hard about that

right and like the answer is it shouldn't be that hard for it should be simple it should be really really simple unless you try to build it yourself 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 the startup were to own all of this ip if we were to

control and own everything but 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 sinking literally thousands of dev hours on

building those things yourself and not spending that time on working on the actual product yeah like that's 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 as people hear this and i was like

oh well that's a like a stupid mistake like 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 and

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 yeah we say we're a second brain or whatever company but like we're spending all of our time like does our time reflect that yeah

no yeah 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 um and and like because 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

were like oh well obsidian has offline like well thanks for just like ruining our entire day like yeah yeah like we know like come on like that's not the only selling point of this but there's a point there yeah and it's like it shouldn't have been it 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 down that direction as well yeah and the aggressive deadlines thing that was my bad well i was all for it yeah the thing is like oh okay we like we're gonna make some progress here yeah the way i saw things moving was like okay

maybe we just don't have enough pressure on us maybe 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 nine to five yeah what's wrong is at a big tech company the product market fit is guaranteed it's stable the income is guaranteed the

profit's guaranteed like you know that the product will exist the next day at a startup that's not necessarily the case 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 and 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 what can break yeah and we did

that and we saw that the whole car fell apart 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 sink in yeah and 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 have 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 so we're further solidifying ourselves as this thing that we didn't mean to be i guess all 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

leading 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 iterate on and not like entrenched in all these open source or like build -it -yourself technologies that take insanely long to iterate on but then ari and i were both on that trip and then we decided you know what 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 why 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 like 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 yeah 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 like 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 were stuck in the mud like yeah it's gonna be six months before we can get on that it wasn't originally planned to be eden we were just planning on i guess replacing

cortex yeah we were 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 blurple branding like blue slash purple yeah glowy gradients yes

uh dark theme yeah i wanted that because my branding is black and white yeah i'm like we're gonna be launching it to our audience and all of this other stuff and like we once we decided oh we're rebuilding it we 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 techie vibe but we're not reaching the audience for the vision that we were going to achieve so 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 literally just start a new company clean slate yeah but this also imposed some limitations is like the cortex users trusted us so much yeah 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 treat it as beta it's only going to be web mobile will come out when it comes out we'll say 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 just 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 yeah so 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 it 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 well uh 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 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 another thing with that is like it's a curated space

yeah it's not like yeah you can google search yeah you can ask ai yeah 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 yeah 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 which is just like it's like a search engine for your memories it'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 and then when you want to resurface the ideas you can just save it you can just search by exactly what you remember so for example oh i remember like dan co said that one thing about one

person business and i just hit one keyword shortcut search up like dan co 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 dan co talks about this it'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 reference when i'm writing so it's like almost like the search engine for your memories and i think about that and i compare it to what cortex was and i was like it's not there it's so different it's manual process yeah tags and back yeah yeah and and it just it just felt like if this was the original vision then why are we still stuck on this so eden

for me is like okay well what do you create 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 yeah like 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 well 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 yeah 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 yeah 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 store information and retrieve information like you're big on the search feature i'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 yeah and if my like if i'm if i'm not able to write in it every morning yeah and like navigate that seamlessly with search involved yeah 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 features yeah capture anything with keyboard shortcut retrieve anything with yeah yeah 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 thinking 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 so 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 so 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 time stamp and i was just like holy shit 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 finder app 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 there are some that we discovered after we built it yes we're not going to name them yeah but and and they're six hundred dollars a month oh yeah that's

ridiculous per terabyte yeah 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 like search is only one of the parts there's also capturing anything really easily which is like

i just want like a single keyboard shortcut where i can like i'm looking at a youtube video boom press the keyboard shortcut it's done or i just like if i'm not someone who likes using keyboard shortcuts i can just copy the link go into the app paste it and boom it's done 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 yeah 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 but it's also transcribed and you can read it right there yeah and you can search the frames of it and the

transcript of it now that's just youtube like think three 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 where can you actually download those and watch the video outside of instagram and have them transcribed yeah tweets with sub stack articles for context there for like our mobile app one thing that you can do is like you're watching

an instagram reel you 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 yeah but now think of it like this is like if you use ai you know that one of the 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 oh this is great i want to emulate

this structure and pull some things from it now you have like i can create a folder of best reels yeah and i can literally at mention that folder in the chat yeah and be like break down what works about all these reels yeah you can't chat with the reel anywhere else or youtube video and it's like that is like a huge missing piece with ai and when you can usually you're only

chatting with the transcript you're not chatting with the visual information yeah 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 ai chat you're not just chatting with the the transcript of the videos you're chatting with the visual information so 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 one dimensional like 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 yeah 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 so 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 and 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 yeah 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 but 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 right 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 yeah 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 or yeah yeah i think like a drive for media all sorts of media yeah all transcribe is a really

good way of putting it the change from cortex to eden it's like the scope of 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 websites 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 like the way that we structure our team now is that every single person has to be laser focused on a project right and and has to be full stack rather than like focusing on one compartmentalized part of of the app and the way that the tech is

structured to begin with allows for us to actually build these things really really quickly and move really quickly and 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 yes 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 yeah 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 were for creators which is still kind of who we're for but what kind of

creators and 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 yeah 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 slop become so noisy like the artisans are going to be the one that stands out so 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 yeah right they 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 what about this or this or this

and we just went through greek names renaissance names artistic names etc etc and i think i threw out just like eden yeah you randomly said eden yeah and like i thought about it yeah we were kind of we were we always hit this point there's a cycle in the ideas that we have when we're trying to

refine a feature we're trying to refine the name or whatever part and 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 okay yeah that one's good yeah yeah so we thought about eden for a while there were there's a number of reasons why it's good oh my god the logo was 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 thank you yeah 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 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 mobile like the app icon and everything 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 yeah isn't this the same logo as flora which is another canvas based or node based app and then we looked at it exact same it's like how did we even come to that logo and it's kind of simple it's like four petals yeah and it

fit our name perfectly so we're like do we have to change it so if anyone from flora is watching this we changed it yeah we did change it now we have something that i i think 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 it'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 yeah every single day there was another another company that had the same logo yeah i think we have something more unique now yeah we have something extremely unique now yeah all right let's end

strong biggest either 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 is it's actually a common reaction that we get like when we when we meet like vcs or

random founders or investors and we explain what we're working on and the fact that we're trying to build something that's better than google drive 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 why 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 so it's possible just have to try yeah you just have to try if i were to like zoom out and and see what i've learned big picture it would just be that like you there's no point in not taking risks that'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 content based and like paid like pennies but 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 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 rebuilding the thing when we had the existing app to worry about and when when everybody on 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 series of perhaps well calculated risks but like a series of big risks and 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 of fucked 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 one -to -one to a startup it's like i'm having to relearn not relearn but refine a lot of those things because 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 and 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 and 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 yeah 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 for a team it like i 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 it's like i want

everyone on our team whether they want or not is another problem to be able to take feel as if they are like partly owning this thing they have the ownership mindset to the point where they can make decisions solve problems on their own so it's just a challenge 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 that's for sure that's this video a big million dollars in 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 and keep in mind that we will continue to make new mistakes and we will 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 yeah and you will be the

ones to inform us of these mistakes so 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 so if you're watching this within four 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 so 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 go 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 eden grows and how much people actually want to use it so with that thanks for coming on i guess for a safe channel but uh yeah this is the eden co -founders enjoy eden

thank you for your time