#explainingideaflow — Slack excerpts, 2022 → Feb 2026

Lightly cleaned excerpts from IdeaFlow's Slack workspace (dataset stopped Feb 2026). Excerpts are Jacob's own messages unless otherwise attributed. Reactions and side chatter trimmed. Links preserved where load-bearing. Processed from the private local archive at ~/code/ideaflow-slack-wiki/ — not everything in that archive is reproduced here; only messages carrying #explainingideaflow or its variants, plus the immediately surrounding context when needed.

Naming variants observed: #explainingideaflow (57), #explaining-ideaflow (2), #explainingideaflow- (1), and typo-variants.

2022

2022-05-11 — Rise of Superman

Source book: The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (Steven Kotler) and the Flow in Sports book. Jacob tagged these as foundational.

#explainingIdeaflow Ideaflow as a tool for capturing the fleeting beauty of the world — #missionStatement.

2023

2023 — capturing fleeting beauty

Jacob, #design:

Ideaflow as a tool for gathering and focusing sparks of motivation #explainingideaflow- — critical when not abundant #best — gestalt capture system → gestalt processing system for society

See http://gestaltexplanation.jacobcole.net/ for background.

2023 — the idea-capture app

Jacob, #general:

the idea capture app #Marketing #Explainingideaflow never lose another idea again

2023 — TFT as web surfboard

Jacob (#ts-user-feedback): #write tft as web surfboard @blog #explainingIdeaflow.

2023 — transcription aware of the lexicon

Jacob:

in transcription, concatenate multiword hashtags, iff they are in the lexicon #Tweak — e.g. if #explainingIdeaflow exists and you said "hashtag explaining ideaflow" it will not just do # #explaining ideaflow but greedily consume til #explainingIdeaflow

2024

2024-01-XX — Laurel Touby conversation (Gestalts, demand aggregation)

Jacob, after a conversation with investor Laurel Touby:

#Conversation with Laurel Touby — Gestalts, demand aggregation, and how can ai help you leverage your resources (e.g. that you've taken notes on) to advance your goals in life. https://www.loom.com/share/c06a0d28a079497ebca7145cc43fbe41 #ExplainingIdeaflow #Good

Bullet unpacking of the conversation (compressed):

• There's a reason people take notes — goals, health, travel, love, learning, self-growth (~20 categories).
• AI can help get these done with less friction.
• If you're fundraising, AI could suggest the top 3 people in your network to reach out to — your own knowledge base × the world knowledge graph.
• "Listen to conversation … take notes … put things where they needed to go. See patterns in what I'm looking for. See them across other users."
• Like having an assistant with me all of the time.

Related projects cited: Braintree / Pearltrees (#mindmappingSoftware #relatedproject). Demo: https://develop.ideaflow.app/shared/48dROzHrSd

2024-01-27 — #explainingIdeaflow graph

Jacob, to Cody Hergenroeder:

#explainingIdeaflow @Cody Hergenroeder https://ideapad.io/explaining-ideaflow/graph?snapshot=explaining-ideaflow-graph

2024-01-28 — Suggestion Board for the World

Jacob, #SuggestionBoardForTheWorld:

#explainingIdeaflow #SuggestionBoardForTheWorld https://www.loom.com/share/98a8f09fe732451fb602678f8802bd3a conversation with Agu

2024-01-29 — Laurel Touby Rough (feature list)

#Feature #good #ExplainingIdeaflow #vision

• auto tag notes
• Apple Notes import
• and all the proper names
• doing things with the data — automating things
• suggesting events, hints, reminders, people you haven't been in touch with
• "Know you're looking for a job similar to xyz where you used to work"
• "Potential investors for fund founders"
• "Meeting founder tech investor tag"
• "Want to know what your goals in life are"
• "Share across people — anonymize; others interested in travel have shared these notes about these places"

2024-02-XX — O(1) capture and recall

Phil asked what "O(1)" meant for the augmented output. Jacob: "augmented reading/consuming of information." Phil: "complexity estimate for users to interact with information they've put in Ideaflow, right? More conceptual than mathematical?" Jacob: "yeah. everyone would prefer to read well-organized entanglement than a bunch of messy notes."

Cody:

"O(1) capture and recall is how I've been phrasing it to myself on the product level."

(Relates to the earlier Joe Henke framing from this thread: "First build a medium for thought, then there are things you can build in world with it.")

"It shows how Ideaflow is a whole frame to represent and track and augment all collective human intellectual effort. Also, would love to expand more on how I see our mid term vision a lot as Joe put it this morning. First build a medium for thought, then there are things you can build in world with it #explainingideaflow"

2024-02-15 — end-to-end support system for the creative process

Jacob, #explainingideaflow:

"Reducing intelligence to generation is like reducing software to print() statements." This is what http://Ideaflow.io is building: an end-to-end support system for the creative process. http://gestaltexplanation.jacobcole.net @IdeaFlowGraphs

2024-02-27 — high-quality thinking on the Internet

Jacob:

How can we create a space for high-quality thinking and writing on the Internet? #explainingideaflow

Joe Henke (response): separating the raw "notes" graph (bullets) from the "semantic" graph (garden). Sometimes you want the exact prose (pathos); sometimes you want to interact with content as directly as possible (logos).

2024-02-27 — backlinks mental model

Jacob:

#explainingideaflow — an insight about why backlinks shouldn't be subordinated in our new product from Taylor, derived from graph view https://www.loom.com/share/90978ee76192423d85cf7e55fd049618

Taylor Mitchell: "In most outliners, when you 'expand' a node, you're showing its children. This is different from graph database explorers, where when you 'expand' a node, you're showing all related nodes, not just children. In the new product, that's the behaviour we're introducing …"

2024-03-XX — ultimate CEO dashboard / collective brain for a company

Jacob:

We could call our app the ultimate CEO dashboard — and collective brain for a company.

2024-03-XX — Team Humanity

Jacob — user story:

We are just building an übertool/dashboard/collaboration platform to house, track, and support all the thinking that happens online in really large, multi-tiered organizations like Alphabet or Verizon … One such organization happens to be the entire planet earth's, ie Team Humanity. Which, whether we are conscious of it, or not, is a team/corporation. But right now, since we don't think of it as such, and we don't use IdeaFlow tools, it's not a very efficiently run organization. But if we have this tool, team humanity can move more efficiently towards its OKRs. Like getting everyone's needs met, and working together to discover/cluster everyone's needs.

2024-03-22 — best pitch

Jacob, #explainingideaflow #best #pitch:

Now, what I'm actually building is a massive-scale collective cognition system for humanity. But one of the pieces it takes is a personal knowledge management system. You can tell it anything and it organizes it into a structure that makes sense and you can find it again. I'm running a seed-based startup in the Bay Area and we recently launched and I'd love to show you guys. It takes just a second.

(What is it?) It's called… I don't really understand. Well, it's like Obsidian, but AI-powered and better ergonomics. Like, Obsidian is very hackery and complicated. Imagine Obsidian, but optimized for quickly capturing new thoughts and with a much simpler organizational paradigm, but also power.

Same thread:

graph database for your brain

And later:

Tool to discover the path of wisdom and empower people to act on it? Build a neocortex for the global mind/brain; for the Internet? — this covers suggestion board — supporting you in acting on your goals — organizer of information that comes into your life — system to track and coordinate all human scientific and practical endeavor — human activity — align the world to the path of wisdom #explainingideaflow

2024-03-28 — the actual bicycle for the mind

Jacob:

#explainingIdeaflow The actual bicycle for the mind — https://www.loom.com/share/65b35692499e4bfcbcf718c23a7851a5

2024-03-28 — Contacts + conversation notes

Jacob, #userstory #explainingIdeaflow #pitching: Contacts populated by taking notes on conversations. Draft 1 https://www.loom.com/share/1ad59d3260a541ecb4b4c807c5dca075 · Clean version https://www.loom.com/share/37b4d5887bd14987a374e7060a5871d5 · cc Ridhi Kantelal.

2024-03-XX — quick capture, quick sort

Jacob:

#explainingideaflow Quick capture, quick sort. @Cody mock jack's UX idea for folders on mobile (can do with tags).

2024-04-XX — split view (external vs personal notebooks)

Jacob:

Two different user stories: browsing the external web, and browsing your own thoughts/commentary on it. But they are fundamentally the same kind of structure. There's a reason the memex had two screens. I wonder if we would be less confused about the global vs personal stuff if we baked in a split view explicitly into our markup. Left side = browsing external stuff, right side = your personal notebooks.

#explainingideaflow

2024-05-23 — an idea flow for every community

Jacob:

"create an idea flow for every community" #explainingideaflow. Have a chat feature just for messaging and/or a Slack bot. Have a superconnector.network-style chat interface for each community and globally.

2024-XX — conversation-notes demo

Jacob:

I was just helping a guy at a Founder meetup import all of his conversation notes from Sublime Text into old IdeaFlow. And I realize that there's really no tool where you can take conversation notes naturally on one side, and it builds a knowledge base for you on the other side that's awesome. #mewUseCase #explainingIdeaflow

2024-10 — Open source knowledge graphs

Jacob:

#explainingIdeaflow — starting the open source movement for knowledge graphs, e.g. Open Supply Chains.

2024-10-XX — Alex Kayyal quote (Lightspeed)

Jacob, citing Alex Kayyal, Lightspeed Ventures (former MD Salesforce Ventures):

"What I think you're doing is really cool. Sort of what Google did for the Internet but for information not on the web but in people's minds." #~AlexKayyal #supportingQuote #ExplainingIdeaFlow

2024-12 — debate outlines

Jacob, #explainingIdeaflow #debateoutlines: "time sensitive use of Mew to make a debate outline" — https://www.loom.com/share/ad19fdd406964818bdbbcdc3a0805a27

2025

2025-04-23 — Saanya Ojha tailwind tweet

Jacob, #explainingIdeaflow #pitching #vc #tailwind:

On this fine Friday, allow this VC to pitch you a business idea born out of personal frustration. I'm a dedicated DAU (only because we don't yet track Hourly Active Users), and yet these models barely know me. At this point, I feel like a traveling salesman from the 1800s, lugging a little suitcase of context from one AI to the next …

(Quoted from Saanya Ojha's LinkedIn post; Jacob framed it as a VC themselves articulating IdeaFlow's thesis.)

2025-04-XX — ideaflow.blog

Eden Chan:

Soft launching ideaflow blog! Primarily for managing all the content for #explaining-ideaflow and the expansion pack of projects / past writing (eg. content from jacob's google docs) to potential collaborators. https://ideaflow.blog

2025-05 — Charlie Munger seamless trust (Eden)

Eden Chan, quoting Munger, tagged #explaining-ideaflow:

"A seamless non-bureaucratic web of deserved trust" as "the highest form that Civilization can reach." Characterized by "totally reliable people correctly trusting one another." This contrasts sharply with bureaucratic systems, which carry "so much dysfunction and evil." Such a web yields "enormous efficiencies" … The Japanese manufacturing success is cited as an example. https://mew-edge.ideaflow.app/charlie-munger-archive

2025-05 — notebooklm insights pipe

Eden:

Pro tip: you can dump it into this explaining-ideaflow node and then copy-paste everything as text into NotebookLM to generate even more insights — https://mew-edge.ideaflow.app/g/all/24d3f0ba/ed8473dd

2025-06 — user-story self-reference

Jacob, #ExplainingIdeaFlow:

Also, I often say, man, I'm writing all this stuff down and I hope someday AI can process it all and make sense of it and tag it and surface all my tags and stuff because on this thread I'm going to say #usecase. Tons of my friends have said this. We are actually building that software!

(In the same thread, Jacob: "Everyone uses ProseMirror. We could offer GraphMirror.")

Extended vision in the same thread:

All my Slack messages that I send should end up in a non-privileged place in my thought stream, ultimately — but everything is in a stream. It all gets a timestamp, but it should be hidden from my main timeline by default. Everything I ever write or produce should end up in my thought stream.

2025-06 — mew hosting every website's backend

Jacob:

Some vision for mew as a centralized organized database that hosts the backend of every website. https://www.loom.com/share/84d4c988669d40a0a5ff5a467302ac31 — #ExplainingIdeaFlow #bizdev

2025-06 — #memex #ai

Jacob:

#memex #ai — https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/this-obscure-80-year-old-machine-might-be-the-key-to-unlocking-the-full-potential-of-ai-today #cool #explainingideaflow

2025-07 — Semantic Web why-now

Jacob, #ExplainingIdeaFlow #whyNow #SemanticWeb: linked Kurt Cagle sharing Kingsley Uyi Idehen's Semantic Web essay on LinkedIn. The underlying why-now: LLMs finally close the "markup burden" gap that killed the 2000s Semantic Web.

2025-10 — notebook for our minds

Jacob:

One key to this whole project is that we built a really cool frictionless text editor kind of like Obsidian that's actually good for taking meeting notes (almost! if we give it a little bit of love). But it also serves as a legitimate place to hold structured data on people etc, and bidirectionally links into systems of record on them, and hide complexity. It's a notebook for our minds. #explainingideaflow

2025-10 — hypergraph store for LLMs

Jacob, #paperidea #explainingideaflow:

It helps language models — https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1976409349476995158 — do this equipping them with a hypergraph store.

2025-10-21 — meeting-notes first time in history

Jacob:

Tejas and I just took the first well-organized meeting notes that were ever taken in human history because there was never a structure that could properly well-organize them before. Including connections added and citing exactly where relations were created from. #explainingideaflow #meeting #best — https://www.loom.com/share/7dcd477bb5954e0b894bd16781e01f16

2025-10 — the God data structure

Jacob:

#Quote #explainingideaflow — GPT-5 with no prompting just produced this relationship map as well. It just did exactly what we're saying here. It did all the things we're saying … without structured data output, you know? But it has it implicit in the answers. It just had no medium — medium where it could express all the things it notes. Hmm. That's, uh, that's a good line.

Ultimately, we're creating the God data structure. Our God data structure should be able to contain everything in the world. (Eg. Google Maps paths and regions, category theory etc.) #RearchitectingTheWeb — building the Gopher backbone.

2025-XX — Slack-bot as idea harvester

Jacob, #explainingIdeaflow:

Our Slack bot listens to conversations and builds a database of ideas from across the company, and suggests connections to others who have related ideas. It also can harvest the unstructured Slack information as a knowledge base.

Follow-ups in the same thread:

• Public curated lists of information beneficial to the world.
• Export all of your networks (LinkedIn, texts, contacts, email) and search it all from one place; form an alliance among friends to query the best intro path to anyone.

2025-XX — xkcd 3175 joke

Jacob, #explainingIdeaflow: https://xkcd.com/3175/ #lol

2026 (early) — continuing cadence

The tag remained active through Feb 2026 across #biz, #random, #codys-corner, #learning-everyday, #mew-product. See the private local archive at ~/code/ideaflow-slack-wiki/ for the long tail.

Notes on what's not in this file

• Customer / sales thread content tagged #explainingideaflow — intentionally kept in the private archive. If any public usage is needed, paraphrase rather than quote.
• Early years (2015-2021): the #explainingideaflow tag was less used; the relevant framings from that period live in Jacob's Google Docs and pre-Mew artifacts (e.g., http://gestaltexplanation.jacobcole.net/) rather than Slack.
• Notestream / Thoughtstream captures: not yet ingested. See the deferred item in log.