How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO

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Welcome to Decoder. This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast. I've had a lot of fun guest hosting a few episodes of Decoder while Neelai is out on parental leave this summer. Listen to either of the last couple of Monday shows. You know I've been doing a series with founders who are focused on productivity.

This is my third and sadly last time joining the show this time around, but I'm really excited about this episode because today I'm talking with Steph Ango, who is the CEO of Obsidian. Obsidian is a note-taking and productivity app that fits into a similar second brain space to Notion, whose CEO I interviewed here on Decoder last week. But Obsidian differentiates itself with a really unusual approach to...

its business. It still wants to be your entire personal knowledge base, so holding all of your notes and links and files and other information, but it works in a really different way. In Obsidian, files are markdown-based. They're stored locally on your own devices, and it's completely free to use. You'll hear Steph say he doesn't even know how many users Obsidian has or how sticky the software is. which is more or less unheard of among the startups I cover.

Obsidian does charge a subscription fee for access to certain features, including cross-device sync, version history, and the ability to publish your notes to the web. But it's still a model that feels... pretty old fashioned for software that's trying to keep up with the modern world. And so I wanted to ask him about those decisions.

Steph's role as CEO is also unusual because although Obsidian is still a very young, very small, and very flat organization, he's actually not one of the founders. He joined in 2023 when co-founded Shida Lee and Erica Hsu 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 decoder questions about organization and decision making were going to be really unusual for a decoder guest. And in one final interesting twist, I asked Steph why, when so many of his competitors seem to be racing to stuff their productivity products with AI features, it 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. Thanks, Casey. I'm glad to be here. What is Obsidian? How does it work? And who is it for? 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. There are 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. 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 mentioned something, I might form a link. So I might just say Decoder as a link.

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 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 Notes or Evernote or Notion or any other kind of similar apps out there

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. Citian gave you, and why did you feel like no other products had been able to make you feel quite the same way? 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 cluched together a few different apps to make something that kind of worked that way. There's a lot of wiki-based 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.

As soon as it came out, the founders of Obsidian, Ashida 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. 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 know, you get like super fans of Markdown and people who've never heard of it before.

you know, in the audience, I'm not sure who. I think we probably have like a lot of Markdown users in the Decoder audience, but for those who maybe have not seen it yet, how would you describe it? 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 hold your data for a long time and be able to read it maybe a hundred years from now or you're your 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 simplest formats that exist that give you that control over your data is going to be something that's more likely to persist over time. So that's one of our philosophies around that. Right.

so going back to your question yeah i was really excited about kind of the 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 because 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. 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 will 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?

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 is 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 is, like, 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. And 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 freeform 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 bring together these different ideas.

Or in my other hobbies, I'm into woodworking and I'm always learning new skills and new details, you know, 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 like digital place which is kind of weird because now you could have a connection between

a woodworking tool and, you know, a city that I went to in China and the concept of, you know, that Murakami was describing. Like all those things are just ingredients in this soup and you could start to come up with ideas that are, you know, pretty... that you just wouldn't have thought of otherwise. And maybe that's enlightening.

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. 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 you know 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, you know, it's always sunny mind mapping with the red thread everywhere. It allows you to. do that in a way that something that has a more top-down hierarchy makes it more difficult. We have to take a short break here. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. This is Casey Newton, and I'm talking with Obsidian CEO, Steph Ango. A lot of the CEOs running productivity companies like Obsidian are still founder or co-founder CEOs. But not Steph. He came in just a couple of years ago, and I really wanted to ask him about that. So you're not a co-founder of Obsidian. You were brought in as CEO in 2023. How did that come about, and what were you brought in to do? 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 but he was like, all right, what am I going to do with all this extra free time and 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.

obsidian is super customizable so you can make plugins you can make themes you can modify it in 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.

amazing engineers who met at University of Waterloo and they're 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 wanted to put a quote from me on their front page. And 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 of years and I was using Obsidian all the time. It was just like the main app that I had. 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 so

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 Shida 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. We're a really small team. I mean, we are seven full-time people.

there's something 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 lots of the long tail of random because we're only seven a lot of hats to be worn whether it's

accounting, legal, all these random things. And I had a lot of experience running a few startups, so that I think was helpful.

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? Well, in a way, plugins is what allows us to stay small because, you know, there are so many capabilities that people want that.

are fairly narrow that will only be useful to one percent 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. 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 like you don't need to be a cross-platform app developer to know how to make a plugin you can make something really simple you know in a matter of

Minutes or hours depending on your level. So 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 to 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.

It's a signal to us that actually this is really important and it should come into the core app. What are some other plugins that have just been really, really popular or maybe took the app in unexpected but successful directions? Some of the most popular ones are very simple. They're things like someone who's on the team now today, Tony Grissinger, 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 so We ended up hiring Tony, and he built that functionality alongside Matt. Basically, everyone who we've hired or worked with was once a community plugin author.

team developers so it it makes it really easy for us to start bringing the right people who are passionate about obsidian on board but yeah there are there are plugins that are about deeming styling changing fonts and colors a lot of people enjoy that customizability and they they want to be able to make this like 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 and to-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. Plugins, I think, were really the first thing that brought Obsidian to my attention. I'd been using Roam 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? Yeah, 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 you know has this markdown format as 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 like those

a lot of documentation about that so it's kind of that combination of a lot of developers are using it it's easy to make the plugins we have we added the api very early on and so if you have that itch you can just like scratch it very quickly. If Obsidian is not working the way you want, you can pretty much change it, you know, very fast. However you might want it.

Recently, I interviewed Ivan Zhao, 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. differently. Like Notion is about...

pixel perfect polish and these beautiful interface elements. Obsidian, by default, can look a little bit more like a terminal. You take notes in Markdown, this markup language. It has more of this DIY, almost hacker ethos. Is that intentional? And do you think it affects the kinds of users you attract? Well, I think the most fundamental difference between Obsidian and 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, if 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 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 like 11 12 years old is when Winamp was coming out Winamp 2 and I was all about making you know themes and things for Winamp back then, which was like a music player that you could customize. It really whipped the llama's ass. I have to say that. Absolutely.

You know, I think there's a little bit of that flavor in Obsidian. Obsidian is quite popular with a lot of younger people. 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 that like Shallow water is 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 quite challenging, is something we're always working on. As I mentioned, I used Roam, then I used Obsidian, then I used something called Mem, now I use something called Capacities. Obviously, I have a huge problem. 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? 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, you know, 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 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 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 vault 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 like you can kind of do anything because it's just files at the end of the day

Yeah, and just briefly, so every file that is created in Obsidian is a markdown file that can be opened up in basically any text editor. Yeah, so it's not a database that is like... in the cloud it's not a database that is on your computer somewhere that other apps can't access it's literally just a bunch of files that that you can move change with any app so

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. And we're not trying to be like Notion. Notion is... raised hundreds of millions of dollars. They, you know, I think they're an amazing, you know, 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 you know making enough money to stay afloat we're not trying to take over the world like we're not trying to be the next you know microsoft so it makes it a lot easier for us to take these like make these long-term decisions uh 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, you know, maybe that would be better for them.

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. 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?

Well, I think they can sometimes be designed with anti-patterns that are explicitly about that. Like some companies have metrics that they track like... number of you know 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 and drop a note like inside of your daily note or something like that you should be able to do that and not get you know

sucked into this thing that's like trying to engage you. There are a lot of people who keep trying new apps and nothing sticks for them and 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 it

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 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 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.

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. And then... 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...

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. I don't know. This is probably more of a question for a psychologist to solve. But I do see it, and I don't know what the answer is necessarily. We have to take another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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Welcome back. I'm talking with Obsidian CEO, Steph Ango. Right before the break, he was getting really into the weeds with me about how Obsidian actually works. That made the perfect opportunity for me to jump into the classic decoder questions and ask how he works. All right. Well, let's ask the decoder questions. You've mentioned that you have seven full-time employees. How is Obsidian structured? That sounds like a pretty flat structure, I would guess.

Yeah, we have two people who are full-time working on community-related things, sort of customer service and plugin review, essentially. One of the ways that we scale is that we have 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.

who works on marketing and community and other things. So over time, 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, you know, web facing stuff. But I've also in recent years.

taken on more i've picked up a lot of engineering skills and have been enjoying like collaborating more on the technical side as well well it sounds like you're giving yourself a lot of tasks i would you know be careful of that it's okay i was running this previous startup that was 45 people it was like a lot of it was a very different thing i was in meetings all day long every day you know 10 hours a day and now obsidian we have one meeting per year

So my time is very goals. What's that? I said goals. You just made a lot of people very jealous right now. 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

Everyone's a user of the app, and everyone 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. Got it. We've mentioned that Obsidian is unique in a lot of ways. There's no signup requirement. You can download and use it for free. You guys don't even know how many users you have. People can create an unlimited amount of notes. How is that sustainable?

for you guys? Well, there's a few different revenue sources that Obsidian has. One is our sync. product you know 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

You know, 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. And then we also have a couple essentially donation programs which are Catalyst and our commercial license where we have users who want access to the beta versions or want to support us you know 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 breakeven, so we don't really end up making any profit from that. But the thing is, because the team is small, we don't need mountains of cash to pay for that. It's just us and some computers. So it's not like there's a big amount of expense, you know, so it works. Is it profitable? Yes. Yeah, it's been profitable since pretty much day one. So 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.

Let me ask the other big decoder question, which is how do you make decisions at your company? Do you have a framework? Yeah. Well, so we have this... manifesto that you can look at if you go to obsidian.md 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

A 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.

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. But I think... there's also a self-motivated aspect to it which is because our team we're using it all day we we also

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. you know there's other people on our team who use android or who use linux and like or who use obsidian in a slightly different way and it kind of becomes your mission internally is 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 it's 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 like kind of solved this problem like help me get this polished in a way that we can release it so that makes it really really fun and because we don't have investors or any any kind of like top-down pressure telling like 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. Let me end on a few questions about the future. Virtually every major company that's making a productivity tool is incorporating some type of generative AI feature or integrating an AI plugin or an API. What is the Obsidian view on AI?

productivity tools. Will you add features like that? So far, there's no AI options that are built into Obsidian except in Web Clipper, 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 like, if you want to fill in metadata about that page and you want to say like who is the author or let's say you're saving i don't know products because you're doing research on

you know, 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 a summary generated by AI.

Now, there are tons of people using AI with Obsidian. Like, because of the plugin architecture, AI is by far the most... popular category of like new and up and coming 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 there's a mountain of plugins that is growing really quickly that we need to review. And it's 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...

principles that I described that are in our manifesto on our website, which is it would have to be private. So whatever options we build in, we're not comfortable with the idea that our users' data could be stored in OpenAI servers without their consent, you know?

I think a lot of tools out there are just kind of defaulting to this feeling of, hey, there's this arms race. We've got to put AI into everything. Let's put a little magic button everywhere. I don't think that that's us. We want to give users... confidence that their thoughts are theirs, things are not going to be used in terms of training the next LLM. That being said, I do think AI can be really powerful for certain uses.

The question is, 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 forever. So let's talk about kind of the...

medium to long-term future of Obsidian. What does it look like when, let's say, 95% of its features are built? What do you hope it does that it can't quite do today? The sands are always shifting. Like, we have... operating systems that are changing we're built on top of mac os windows linux ios android like we have to keep obsidian working on all those platforms so i that that work is sort of never ending and

That 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 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, 10 years, 50 years, but like...

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. 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 uh we want to work on or something like that but it's hard to imagine just running out of

things to work on. Yeah. And what's the next thing that you're working on? Right now, it's 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'm if i have a note about decoder i might you know 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 it came out what was the episode number and what bases 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 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 have 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.

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 about it. All right. Well, if you want to send me any of those notes that you did take about me, I can take a look and let you know if there are any errors.

Yes, no problem. Just don't get too obsessed with tweaking the fonts and everything. I'll try not to. I'm always at risk of doing that. So, Steph, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Casey. It was great. I'd like to thank Steph for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this show or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line.

You can email the team at decoder at the verge. They really do read every email or hit me up directly on threads or blue sky. I'm at crumbler on threads and Casey Newton over on blue sky. Decoder also has a TikTok and an Instagram. Check those out at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. And if you like Decoder, share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. The show is edited by Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.