In mid-2018 I wrote a blog post that talked about the flow - the state of mind when you are immersed in performing a task. At the time I said we were building a platform to help people be in the flow and do their job efficiently. Today, Fred Wilson wrote a blog post about how software that is in the middle of the flow is most valuable:
If you build software that sits in the flow of something important (mission critical, recurring, etc) then it will increase in value over time, and sustain its value, much more significantly than something that “sits on the side.”
And even though this flow is slightly different from the one I mentioned, they are facets of the same process - if a tool is not in the middle of the flow, it's not contributing to it. We are still building our product, the beta is available here, and we firmly believe our users will find flow much more easily than with other tools.
But being in the flow is not the only thing I wanted to mention today. A couple of days ago, Matt Clifford mentioned his observation in a tweet:
One unexpected benefit of writing a weekly newsletter is that it creates an external, searchable repository of a big chunk of the interesting things that I read - like a curated, outsourced memory.
— Matt Clifford (@matthewclifford) February 17, 2020
The phrase "curated, outsourced memory" instantly clicked with me as a good description of Avogadro One. Our vision is to provide people with an extension of their memory and brain processing power - a metacortex of sorts, which will save them from routine tasks and will maintain the flow when working with information. (Note that we do not want to replace humans with technology, but to give them more information processing power)