Why did we decide to build Capacities?

Knowledge work can be overwhelming. There must be a better way, so we decided to do it ourselves.

Mar 13, 20242 min read

Everything started at university in Germany. Michael and I studied computer science and electrical engineering and realized this big divide between the technologies we were learning about and the technologies we were learning with.

It struck us how unnatural most processes were: exchanging files, monolithic large documents, presentations, etc. We knew that there must be a better way. Today’s technologies are so powerful. We knew we could build something simple and intuitive yet powerful and versatile. Something so natural that all friction and issues magically disappear, something that does not force us into adjusting our thinking to it but something that is an extension of ourselves.

All solutions out there did not meet what we had in mind. Some where based on traditional principles; they inherit a lot of biases from computer architectures: Folders, files, tables, and hierarchies. Others were complicated to get started with, had overwhelming degrees of freedom, or required commands and special syntax. They were not simple enough.

We decided to start from scratch. We threw away all assumptions about computers and how we work with them. We started with the human being in the center and got inspired by our natural way of interacting with our environment. That’s where everything started.