YouSaid · the spoken record

Shida Li

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

  1. “So, going back to your question, yeah, I was really excited about kind of the principles, all of those different things coming together and to the point of how it made me think differently, I think once you kind of have this concept of links and ideas that can be networked together, you can start to form more complicated or complex or interesting thoughts than you otherwise could. I don't know other people, but I can only have like two or three different ideas in my mind at once. But if you can start to create these little building blocks of ideas, you can combine them in interesting ways and your ideas become like these little Lego blocks that you can interchange and mix together and start forming some really interesting and complicated thoughts.”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Hold your data for a long time and be able to read it maybe 100 years from now, or your kids' kids, your legacy, whatever it is, maybe none of their notes matter at all. Maybe they'll be curious. But what if that data could be preserved over the long term? We think that going back to some of the... So that's one of our philosophies around that.”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Basically, the oldest kind of files that we have going back to the 60s are plain text files. And Markdown kind of takes that idea of a plain text file, which is just raw text and allows you to add basic formatting to it. So if you want some text to be bold or some text to be a heading or a table or a list, it allows you to essentially use simple characters like punctuation marks to indicate what's going to be bold or italic, for example. But the power of that is that the data is stored in this very, very simple format. So we kind of have this view around your data that if you want to be able to”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Me, it made sense also because the way that the data is stored is in this very durable format that people can own, which is called Markdown. You get super fans of Markdown and people who've never heard of it before. In the audience, I'm not sure who.”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, I mean, I've been writing notes, journaling for, I don't know, over 20 years, and I've used a lot of different apps over the years. I think this idea of thinking of the world like your own personal Wikipedia was really powerful. And so I had kind of clutched together a few different apps to make something that kind of worked that way. There's a lot of Wikibased software that already existed, but most of it was designed around publishing a full wiki to the web as opposed to using it for your own personal notes. So as soon as it came out that the founders of Obsidian, Sheeta and Erica, they had already kind of put in the level of polish to it that was not there in this kind of glued together prototype that I had. So it was instantly something that made sense to me.”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “When you joined the company in 2023, you said, I can't overstate how life-changing Obsidian has been for me. It has fundamentally improved the way I think. I want to see what happens if more people gain that superpower. What do you feel like is the superpower that Obsidian gave you? And why did you feel like no other products had been able to make you feel quite the same way?”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Track some of the interesting interviews I've listened to on that podcast. And so over time, your web of knowledge becomes greater and you have more different nodes in your obsidian. But fundamentally, when you open the app, it works a lot like Apple Nodes or Evernote or Notion or any other kind of similar apps out there.”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “I guess obsidian is a note-taking app if you want to really boil it down. A lot of people use it for writing their thoughts, journaling. A lot of people are students who like to track their progress through school, do their research notes, their authors, book writers, big fans of RPG games love to use it. It's kind of the idea that makes obsidian unique is it sort of works like Wikipedia in that the core unit is a link between your notes. So if I was to write my experience today in my journal, I'd say today I was on the decoder podcast with Casey and each time I mention something I might form a link. So I might just say decoder as a link. And it's okay if that link is not pointing to anything yet, but later down the road I might create a note for decoder because I want to”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “He joined in 2023 when co founders Sheeta Lee and Erica Shu brought him in based on his experience with his former startup, Lumi, and he was also a huge Obsidian fan. So I really wanted to ask him about that too because I suspected the answers to the big Dakota questions about organization and decision making were going to be really unusual for Dakota guest. And in one final interesting twist, I asked Steph why when so many of his competitors seemed to be racing to stuff their productivity products with AI features doesn't seem like obsidian is all too eager to follow suit. I thought his answer here was pretty illuminating. So that's Obsidian CEO Steph Ango. Here we go. Steph Ango, you are the CEO of Obsidian. Welcome to Decoder.”

    2025-08-18 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT