YouSaid · the spoken record

Shida Li

lines on the record: 59
first: 2025-08-18
most recent: 2025-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“From the bottom up. So it's kind of like a backwards database because all the data is already in there. You're just like looking at it by saying, show me all notes that the tag books, for example, or a link to Casey. And then I get a table and then I have all my metadata and I can edit it. So it's quite powerful if you're someone who enjoys tracking the books that you read or the movies that you watch, the places that you go, articles you've read, you can very easily create these structures or do project management. So we're really having a lot of fun with that. It's been way more popular than we expected. It's currently in beta. So hopefully we will be releasing the first public version in the near future and then I kind of expect that we're going to be working on this for maybe until the end of the year or even longer because the feedback has been so positive.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, this feature called bases. The idea is that in Obsidian notes, you can store properties, metadata about the current file. So for example, if I have a note about decoder, I might put the name of the host and like a list of episodes. And for each episode that I'm listening to and want to take notes on, I might write down which guests were on there, what date came out, what was the episode number, and what basis allows you to do is kind of visualize your notes of a certain kind as a table or as little cards eventually things like a Kanban view or other types of views. So it's like a visualization layer on top of the data that you already have. And we just make it really easy to create that database.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems more likely that we would just die of old age as an app. And maybe we'll have some other, like maybe five years from now, we'll have some other idea for a different app that we want to work on or something like that. But it's hard to imagine just running out of things to work on.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least I have this point of view that Obsidian is not necessarily going to last forever. Like for sure there's going to be a point in time. I don't know if it's in five years, one year, ten years, 50 years, but probably we're not going to be using these exact same kinds of apps. And I don't know what is going to replace it. Or if we're maybe not even going to be using computers in the same way, like interfaces may change very radically. I'm not sure what it is. I do feel confident that The files that you create will end up being really important in that new world and we're seeing that with AI actually because it turns out that all of the LLMs speak Markdown and are using Markdown a lot behind the scenes because it's just plain text and that's what LMs are good at. But I don't know the answer to your question. It's hard to imagine a world where we completely run out of ideas.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The sands are always shifting. Like we have operating systems that are changing. We're built on top of macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android. Like we have to keep Obsidian working on all those platforms. So that work is sort of never ending. Part is challenging, but it's hard to really imagine what would happen first. Like we run out of ideas and features or something totally radically different comes along that people want to use instead of obsidian entirely. And I think”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That being said, I do think AI can be really powerful for certain uses. The question is, you know, in the long term, do we end up giving an API to the plugin community so that they can more easily build those types of functionalities? Right now, we're not working on it. We've just kind of been holding off and watching what's going on. We don't feel a sense of urgency to suddenly put all these things in there because To be honest, the plugin like if you really want that, the plugin ecosystem is there for you and you can do it. There are things that to us are much more important in the priority list that we want to work on first that with our limited capacity we would rather set our time aside forward.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Options we build in, we're not comfortable with the idea that our users' data could be stored in OpenAI servers without their consent. I think a lot of tools out there are just kind of defaulting to this feeling of, hey, there's this arms race, we got to put AI into everything. Let's put a little magic button everywhere. I don't think that that's us. Like we want to give users confidence that their thoughts are theirs things are not going to be like used in terms of training the next LLM.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Summary generated by AI. Now There are tons of people using. Because of the plugin architecture, AI is by far the most popular category of new and up-incoming plugins right now. There's a lot of plugins that people are making using AI. A lot of the LLMs are very knowledgeable about Obsidian and its API. So you can just go into Cloud or whatever and just say, hey, make me an Obsidian plugin that does this or that. And that's a big challenge for us because we're like, there's like a mountain of plugins that is growing really quickly that we need to review. And it's like happening faster than we can keep up with because of AI making it so easy to make plugins. So AI is definitely being used. I think our philosophy as far as how it would ever make sense to be put into Obsidian is it has to fit with the principles that I described that are in our manifesto on our website, which is it would have to be private. So whatever.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So far, there's no AI options that are built into Obsidian except in WebClipper, which is intentional because it sort of lives outside of Obsidian itself. We have a feature called Interpreter that allows you to at the time that you're capturing a web page basically put in a bunch of prompts or questions. if you want to fill in metadata about that page and you want to say like who was the author or let's say you're saving I don't know products because you're doing research on what podcasting microphone you need to buy next you could grab all the metadata and specifications automatically just by putting in this prompt and it will kind of save all of that but that's like living outside of obsidian and it's not about replacing your thinking the fear that I have when it comes to AI is I don't want in my own use to replace my thinking the insights that I'm going to gather with”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really, really fun. And because we don't have investors or any kind of top-down pressure telling forcing any deadlines or anything like that, it's very self-motivated. And I'm sure that there's lots of people in the community who wish we would release things faster, but we don't want to give up the kind of freedom and flexibility and joy that we have building it.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone will become an advocate or a champion for something. So, for example, I'm always using the iOS app and I'm always coming across edge cases where I feel like there's too much friction. And there's other people on our team who use Android or who use Linux or who use Obsidian in a slightly different way. And it kind of becomes your mission internally. This is not really that different than other companies, I don't think, but it kind of becomes your flag to raise with the rest of the team and kind of convince the rest of the team this is an important problem that we have to work on now. But because the organization is so flat, we can make decisions very easily or it's very easy for one person to just go off and like prototype something for a few days and show it to the team and say like, hey, I've like kind of solved this problem, like help me get this polished in a way that we can release it.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of people in the community were saying, Hey, you know, this is like a major hole, a gap for obsidian, all these other apps have great web clipping tools. And so we built one. I think that whether it's through plugins or through just general complaining that we're hearing from the community, we kind of know what the biggest gaps are. So we always have generally an idea of what we want to work on next. I think there's also a self-motivated aspect to it, which is because our team were using it all day, we also”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, so we have this manifesto that you can look at if you go to obsidian.md slash about. I think that is in a way the most powerful driver of what are we doing because it describes our values, which are to make this app that's super private, super customizable, and durable around this kind of idea of these files that hopefully you'll be able to own for the rest of your life. I mean, the community is always driving us towards the next big thing that's a problem. So, for example, last year, one of the big things we started working on was Web Clipper. A lot of other apps have something like that. I think it was, you know, Evernote was probably the first one that did a really good job with this back in the day. Then, you know, there's services like Pocket that has shut down recently. And so...”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, it's been profitable since pretty much day one. Since like, I think even before Sync launched, Catalyst, which was like the donation program was the first thing that launched. And so it's been profitable for five years”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we also have a couple essentially donation programs which are catalyst in our commercial license where we have users who want access to the beta versions or want to support us because they believe in what we're doing. And so they can essentially send us money. So those are the main ways that we make money. Then we have like merch, but it's actually all break even so we don't really end up making any profit from that. But, you know, the thing is because the team is small, we don't need mountains of cash to pay for that. And we're just, it's just us and some computers. So it's not like there's a big amount of expense. So it works.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a few different revenue sources that Obsidiana has. One is our sink product. You probably want to use Obsidian on multiple devices. So if you have a phone or iPad, computer, because the files are local to your device, you need a way to keep those versions in sync. You can totally sync your files using Dropbox or iCloud or Google Drive. There are many different services out there, but we make one that is our Obsidian sync service. We think it's the best one because it's totally integrated into the app and it has a few extra features like around version history and it's end-to-end encrypted. So by default, it's like much more secure than a lot of the other options that are out there. That is one of our major revenue drivers. Publish is our other service where you can take your notes in Obsidian, make a website out of it.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's achievable. You know, we use Discord and our equivalent of Slack to chat as a team all the time. And we're in there kind of consistently talking. But in terms of synchronous meetings, it's quite, quite rare. But I think part of it is because we have such, everyone's a user of the app and everyone's like knows generally what something Obsidian E feels like and we generally only have one or two goals at any given time. So it makes things quite self-motivated as far as how the team functions.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we have two people who are full-time working on community related things, sort of customer service and plugin review essentially. So one of the ways that we scale is that we have a very active communities on Discord and Reddit and elsewhere. So there's a lot of user help. So users help other users, which is nice because it means that we don't have to have as many customer service people on staff. And then we have essentially three full-time engineers and me and then Erica who works on marketing and community and other things. So over time, I kind of, I guess I'm the only person who's a designer by training, I suppose. So I end up doing a lot of UX design, a lot of marketing related things are web-facing stuff. But I've also in”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At least in my personal life, the way that I try to address that is I'm very aware of how the business of so many of these apps works and that they are trying to capture your attention and time. So I'm always disabling notifications for everything, trying to spend a lot of time walking in nature doing woodworking, cooking, other activities that I find restorative. It makes my obsidian time I feel more rewarding and productive and useful because productive is not even the right word. It's just I have things to write about. I have a life that I'm trying to dissect. Oh, what happened today or what problem am I trying to solve? And if you don't have those other things going on, then you don't have something to write about. And you're now just like in the space massaging something.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who keep trying new apps and nothing sticks for them or get caught up in the organization or beautification of their notes. And I think that can happen in any app. I mean, I hear about this from just in general. And I think, I don't know what the cause is. My sense is it has nothing to do with the apps unless they're like literally trying to engagement bait you in these weird ways i i think it's just sort of an affliction of like the digital age where these things are so malleable it it scratches an itch that we have in our brain to like optimize and for certain people if you're someone who loves solving puzzles or like doing sudoku or something it just like it's like kind of addictive in a way that might not be the most healthy and I'm not exactly sure how to solve that. I think it's something that”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they can sometimes be designed with anti-patterns that are explicitly about that. Like some companies have metrics that they track number of active users and how do they define active. And so now they're sending you notifications so that you're reminded to come back to the app so that you do whatever the thing is. You know, that's part of the reason we're not interested in having any of this data because we don't really want to be tracking our users in this way or incentivized to create usage where none is needed. If your use of obsidian is throughout the day, you have these like random ideas and you just want to pop in and drop a note like inside of your daily note or something like that, you should be able to do that and not get sucked into this thing that's like trying to engage you. There are a lot of”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask you about one challenge I've had using tools like this. I wrote about this a couple of years ago about how I had spent a couple of years linking and tagging all my notes and reviewing them on a pretty regular basis and still not feeling like I was getting a ton of new insights from that process. And I came to be worried that these tools can be a substitute for thinking rather than an enhancement for it because if you sort of spend all day tending to your digital garden, you might not spend as much time just walking down the street and giving your brain the chance to breathe a little bit and ideate. So was I just using these tools incorrectly or do you think that sometimes productivity tools can be counterproductive for people?”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not trying to be like Notion. Notion has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I think they're an amazing, especially on the collaboration side. They have a lot of advantages that make their app better at certain things. But we're just a small team. Our focus is to keep making the tool better stay small. As long as we're making enough money to stay afloat, we're not trying to take over the world. We're not trying to be the next Microsoft. It makes it a lot easier for us to take these long-term decisions that we feel are better for ourselves or for our users. It's the tool that we want to use all day long. So it's okay if people leave. And different people have different brains and different approaches to thinking. And so maybe they should leave. Maybe that would be better for them.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's not a database that is in the cloud. It's not a database that is on your computer somewhere that other apps can't access Yes, I think it makes it a lot easier to leave the app, but it also paradoxically, I think, gives people comfort that they have that option at any time.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So with Obsidian, your data is there. And I think that the feeling that that gives you of kind of freedom and security, paradoxically, is quite sticky because even though you have all your data, you could just, I mean, I personally, with my fault, my obsidian files, I'm constantly editing my Obsidian files not in obsidian. Like I will use code editors and other tools to do like mass modifications to hundreds of files. You can run Python scripts on your data. You can kind of do anything because it's just files at the end of the day.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We actually don't know how many users Obsidian has. We don't know how sticky it is in a lot of ways because we don't have any analytics. It's very privacy oriented, so we don't track anything about our users. We don't know what suddenly causes someone to churn or whatever. Those are things that we prefer not to track. We also The data doesn't have to be exported. If someday obsidian went out of business, you would still have the app on your computer, but even if you chose not to use it, you wouldn't even have to launch the app. You don't have to export anything out of it. And this is one of the big issues people had with other tools out there that have either gone out of business or been acquired by like private equity firms and different things where they kind of start tightening the screws and increasing the pricing over time. And you just kind of feel like you're locked in and you can't do anything about it.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mentioned, I used Rome, then I used Obsidian, then I used something called Mem. Now I use something called capacities. Obviously, I have a huge problem. I'm working on it in therapy. But I'm curious how sticky Obsidian is. It's free to get started, but I also imagine lots of people abandon their vaults after maybe only creating a few free notes. So what makes people leave and what makes people stay?”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And, you know, I think there's a little bit of that flavor in Obsidian. Obsidian is quite popular with a lot of younger people. And I don't know what it is. Like at that time, you have the energy and the desire to just kind of have control over your digital space. And Obsidian makes that easy. And so in that sense, we're maybe a little bit less prescriptive about what the interface should look like, even though I will say I think in general we're trying to make it a little bit more approachable so that we still retain that kind of infinite depth. It's like you're going to the beach. We want to make the like shallow waters a little bit more accessible for people who are coming into it. But then you can swim as far as you like, as deep as you like, into the complexity of obsidian. And finding the right balance between those two things is”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is because of the way the apps are architected. Same with things like theming and design and how much customizability there is as far as the user interface is concerned. I don't know if this will make sense to anyone who's listening, but the first thing that I ever did when I was 11, 12 years old is when WinAmp was coming out. And I was all about making themes and things for WINAP back then, which was like a music player that you could customize.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the most fundamental difference between obsidian notion is that Notion is a cloud service. So it's an app that interfaces primarily with a software as a service type cloud service. So you have to either be in your browser or on an app and you connect to a source of truth that's in the cloud. Whereas with Obsidian, all your data is local. So if you're not online, you're on the plane or something like that, you always have access to your data. And that difference essentially shapes a whole bunch of other things. Like, for example, it would be really hard for Notion to add plugins because they can't really make it so easy to run arbitrary code in their cloud-based platform. Whereas for Obsidian, it's pretty easy. There's kind of this fundamental split that occurs.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“However, you might want it recently. I interviewed Ivan Jow, the CEO of Notion for Decoder. You mentioned Notion as another product in this space that sometimes people might choose to use over Obsidian. And it strikes me that while your products do some of the same things, they're designed very differently. Like Notion is about pixel perfect polish and these like beautiful interface elements, obsidian by default can look a little bit more like a terminal. You take notes and markdown this markup language has more of this DIY, almost hacker ethos. Is that intentional? And do you think it affects the kinds of users you attract?”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using it, it's easy to make the plugins. We added the API very early on. And so if you have that itch, you can just like scratch it very quickly. If Obsidian's not working the way you want, you can pretty much change it very fast.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a combination of things. I think one, like I mentioned, the languages and framework we use is very simple for anyone to use. Anyone who's done any kind of web development would pretty much know how to build a plugin. So it's very accessible to a lot of developers. The values of Obsidian just as a pure note-taking tool are very aligned with what developers like. So we have just a lot of developers who use Obsidian as their note-taking app of choice because it's private and because it has this markdown format as the core way that you write text because it's so customizable, it attracts developers and then developers are using it all day long. We have APIs that pretty much allow you to do anything with the app that are published in there's a lot of documentation about that. So it's kind of that combination of a lot of developers are using.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Plugins, I think, were really the first thing that brought Obsidian to my attention. I'd been using Rome Research, which I do give credit for inventing a lot of the current note-taking paradigm. But thanks to plugins, Obsidian just developed much faster. And I'm curious what you did to attract those first developers. Was it as simple as you just had a really good API that was available quite early on or what is it that the company did?”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Styling, changing fonts and colors. A lot of people enjoy that customizability and they want to be able to make this journal space their own. There's a lot of plugins that have to do with integrations with other services. So, you know, if you want your calendar in there or something like that, you can do that. There's like integrations into a million different apps and things out there. If you want to be doing your tasks into-do lists in Obsidian, there's a whole bunch of plugins that help you with that. The cool thing about that is if your interest in Obsidian is because you want to do world building for your RPG tabletop, like DM group, you can do that and you don't have to have the entire calendar functionality inside of your obsidian. You can just use the plugins and things that have to do with that.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the most popular ones are very simple. They're things like someone who's on the team now today, Tony Grozinger, wrote this plugin called Advanced Tables, which was just a way to simplify making tables in Obsidian. So, I mean, we're just talking about something very basic, but rows and columns, it was kind of difficult to do earlier on, and especially if you're someone who wants to live completely in the Markdown world, they're kind of tricky to make. We ended up hiring Tony and he built that functionality alongside Matt. It was another, basically everyone who we've hired or work with was once a community plugin author or team developer. So it makes it really easy for us to start bringing the right people who are passionate about Obsidian on board. But yeah, there are plugins that are about deeming.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be in the core app, and some of them do end up becoming something we notice like 80% of the user base is relying on one plugin. For example, right now we're working on this thing called bases, which allows you to view your notes in a database type format. And there are a number of plugins that do something like that in the Obsidian community. So it's a signal to us that actually this is really important and it should come into the core app.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because it's built on web technologies like JavaScript and CSS, a lot of people know those languages and know how to build things for it. So you don't need to know Swift or you don't need to be a cross-platform app developer to know how to make a plugin. You can make something really simple in a matter of minutes or hours, depending on your level. I think the initial reasoning was this will allow us to not build everything ourselves, but then just how many creative things people came up with is always pushing the envelope of what our API should be able to support and how can the platform allow even more flexibility because now it's just obvious that, I mean, out of a few thousand plugins that exist, there's only a small proportion that really makes sense.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in a way, plugins is what allows us to stay small because there are so many capabilities that people want that are fairly narrow, that will only be useful to 1% or less of our user base. And you see this all the time with apps that have been around for a long time where the feature set just keeps growing and growing and growing, and then the app becomes uploaded and slow and hard to use and there's just too much functionality in there. And for new users, it becomes extremely confusing. So I think initially it was kind of this defensive move against having to implement all these features and just basically say, here, you go do it.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned the ecosystem of plugins, and it seems to me that plugins have been one of the main ways that Obsidian has grown, both in its feature set, but also in building features that have attracted new users. So what was the origin of plugins? And how have they fueled the company's growth?”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“nice about the balance of different strengths that we all have. Everyone can kind of do everything, but at the same time, each person has their core strengths. And I think for me, it's around design kind of consolidating what is the true essence of obsidian and trying to communicate it out to the world. And then a long tale of random, because we're only seven, a lot of hats to be worn, whether it's accounting legal, all these are like random things. So, and I had a lot of experience kind of running a few startups. So that I think was helpful.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when I sold my previous startup, Lumi, I started to think, you know, what would be my next thing? I was thinking about building something else, you know, starting a new company. And I just was spending all my time in Obsidian using the app. And I was like, this is, I just have so much fun using this tool. Basically, I pitched to them, you know, what if I could come on board and help you guys? At first, it took the shape of just contract work, working with them kind of advisory and working on the 1.0 release that had this new design that I built. And eventually they were really more interested in continuing, like Sheeta is an incredible engineer, one of the best I've ever worked with. And he just wants to focus on that. It created this nice balance where really small team. I mean, we are seven full-time people. There's something.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are amazing engineers who met at University of Waterloo and their geniuses in terms of engineering and community management, I think what I was bringing to the table as a community member was a sense of design and product that they maybe had a little less of because of how the community of obsidian is so strong Some of the things that I was making were getting a lot of adoption and I was collaborating with other people in the community and they found out about that and you know wanted to put a quote like from me on their front page and we so we started chatting and then we started talking about business and they started telling me about the business model and some of the challenges that they were dealing with. We just kept talking for a couple years and I was using obsidian all the time. It was just like the main app that I had”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The app came out in 2020, and I found out about it pretty much in the first version. So it was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I think all of us were going stir crazy. And I think that there was this moment in time where a lot of interesting tools popped up because everybody was like, all right, what am I going to do with all this extra free time that I'm hanging out at home? I started using it right away for the reason I described before, which was just like it made sense. And Obsidian is super customizable. So you can make plugins, you can make themes, you can modify it and really significant ways or small ways. So I was just starting to put all these community things out there. I was running a different startup at the time. And I was just putting these things out there because I was making them for myself and people really started using them.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. And I think that one of the benefits of this approach that I'm describing is it's quite freeform. Like I think what's difficult, what I run into when I've used other tools or other approaches in the past, whether it's like a physical journal, you're quite constrained by the fact that a physical journal is pieces of paper and you have to kind of flip through them. It's like got that limitation of being this like 2D surface or a lot of apps kind of have a concept of folders or tags. Whereas here you don't have to know what something is going to be about until later when the connections form between each other. And you're free to have 700 tabs open inside of Obsidian and be doing this crazy. It's always sunny mind mapping with the red thread everywhere. It allows you to.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seems like something that a lot of people value about obsidian and other apps like this is that they can be engines for serendipity, where you gather a bunch of string in the manner that you just described, and then in the process of clicking back through your notes or using other tools inside the app, you revisit ideas and they sort of spark new ideas or you see connections that you might not have otherwise.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bring together these different ideas. Or in my other hobbies, I'm into woodworking and I'm always learning new skills and new details, new tools that I might want to use. And I'm doing research about that. And all of those things can coexist inside of this digital place, which is kind of weird because now you could have a connection between Woodworking tool and a city that I went to in China and the concept of that Murakami was describing. All those things are just ingredients in this soup and you could start to come up with ideas that are pretty, you know, you just wouldn't have thought of otherwise. And maybe that's enlightening.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. So that idea was really interesting to me because I was going through quite a painful time and I was thinking about when you touch your hand on a stove that gives you a signal that that's probably a bad idea, but that's information. And so I was starting to kind of think about information and pain and the relationship between those things. You can see how like these ideas are just forming and kind of out of thin air, out of different inspirations that I'm going through. What I like about Obsidian is it gives you this place to approach it in a very free-form way and connect different concepts that you might be thinking about. Now for me, it's kind of in this like philosophical realm, but for other people it might be biology or language learning or something else. My partner speaks Chinese and I've been wanting to learn Chinese and so I'm starting to kind of like”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. There's things along the lines of projects I'm interested in. For me, even though I'm the CEO of Obsidian, I kind of see it as a means to an end. So I like to write. I write a lot of short essays on my blog. And a lot of the essays came from just sort of marinating in Obsidian where I can kind of debate with myself whether an idea is good or not. So I have this essay that I wrote called Pain as Information. I was going through like a pretty tough time a few years back and I read this book by Murakami. What I talk about when I talk about running. And it's sort of this autobiographical story about running and in it I came across this quote that was I'm just trying to remember this on the fly, but it's something like, you know, when you sign up for a marathon, you know that you're signing up for pain. But then the question.”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would love to hear about an example of when you feel like you were able to do that in Obsidian. You've written online about your note taking practice. You described it for us a minute ago talking about how you sort of keep a daily journal and as new characters and ideas come in, you'll sort of link them. And those are kind of build over time. I'm curious about that next step of is there a time when all of that added up into something that let you make something that maybe you wouldn't have otherwise”
2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT