“Every useful company stands on rails that were once somebody’s stubbornly useless research. I invest in useful for a living. This essay is about the stage before useful, who works on it, and who pays for it, so that the next generation of useful companies has something to stand on.”
A Substack post came to me this morning. And I have been thinking about it lately.
Hope you all are doing well and enjoying the summer. I am in between a lot of places, and I recently got some time to think. I have been really grateful to each of you for supporting the project from the beginning.
Big kudos to Virginia and Samantha for continuously challenging me and asking me to go deeper.
We faced a few blockages in restarting Nooks recently because of a few operational issues. This made me pretty upset, and rather than trying to go against the tide again, I am thinking of building the app and then relaunching. By then, I plan to raise pre-seed funding to make these operational issues easier to fix so that we can reach out to more parents, institutions, and neighborhood businesses. We need a better way rather than trying to do it all ourselves.
For the last two months, I have been working full-fledged on the software. With my experience, I was in tech as a developer and then a tester before our daughter was born. I think neural networks and complexity learning, which amazed me during my engineering days, can be fully applied to Nooks. And we can build it the way just the way we do Nooks. And that's a lot to apply to.
So Nooks have really become a project that we are actively researching and building. If any of you have read yesterday’s lab note, it might be clearer that we want to give tech a new direction, beyond what we have known until now. If any of you are in tech and know Nooks—or have participated—it would be wonderful to brainstorm and work with you. As parents and teachers and as a space partner, you know what direction we want to give to Nooks.
I started homeschooling my daughter last year, and she is a middle schooler now. After having a few conversations with Virginia and Samantha, who is also a homeschool mom to two boys and has been in this homeschooling thing longer than I, we really do think there can be ways to incorporate things for homeschoolers and kids who have an independent schedule.
The more I think about it, the more I am compelled to build Nooks as malleable nodes with a memory layer that is strictly privacy-oriented. And I do think that would change how care is perceived. Of course, this is just my imagination and design thinking, combined with the real experience of running Nooks for all these years in various neighborhood places. But I would love mentorship, guidance, and brainstorming from people in this field.
So, until the end of summer, I am planning to work on the first version of the app, launch it to a few people first, and work on the operational insufficiencies.
We want to give anyone—a teacher or a parent or a space partner—who is aware of the philosophies and has a space the power to host Nooks. The software will act as the guide; human interaction, observations, and clues will shape the most important design decisions we take. Each Nook, after a certain number of sessions, is malleable, depending on the approval of the parent, teacher, and space owner.
I am trying to write it in a way so that it’s understandable to everyone.
More technical language and drawings are on GitHub and in our lab work.
I really do think this is our moment, and we can build the models that might change how care is perceived.
Ending the newsletter with a note that came in my inbox from Joe Hudson.
“True experimentation is actually quite rare. Most only iterate where it already feels safe—the A/B test, the side project, the experiment we’re fairly sure will work. Companies can build a culture of safety for bigger risks, and the best ones do. But if you’re anywhere near the bleeding edge, it won’t always feel safe to try something new. To succeed, you have to become comfortable with the feeling of failure and discover that you can move through the fear in seconds when you stop fighting it."
tanaya v.s.
Will keep you updated as the chapter unfolds. I am deeply grateful for all the support and trust.
With gratitude
-Tanaya V.S
Reference
The opening quotation is from “Against Usefulness” on Substack. Read the original post.
The post is ending with Joe Hudson's newsletter, Art of Accomplishment.
Note: I have no affiliation with either organization. I am sharing the essay and an excerpt from the newsletter because they prompted this reflection on what we are building.