Welcome to Decoder! This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. I’ve had a lot of fun guest-hosting a few episodes of Decoder while Nilay is out on parental leave this summer. If you listened to 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 during the break, but I’m very excited about this episode. 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, the CEO of which 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 — to hold all your notes, links, files, and other information — but it works in a very different way.
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In Obsidian, files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use. You’ll hear Steph say that he doesn’t even know how many users Obsidian has or how sticky the software is, which is more or less unheard of among startups I cover.
Obsidian does charge a subscription fee for access to certain features, including cross-device sync, version history, and web publishing. But it’s still a model that feels decidedly old-fashioned for software that’s trying to keep up with the current world, and so I had 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 cofounders Shida Li and Erica Xu brought him in based on his experience with his former startup, Lumi. He was also a huge Obsidian fan.
So I really wanted to ask him about that, too, because I suspected his answers to the big Decoder questions about organization and decision-making were going to be pretty unusual for a Decoder guest.
And in one 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 didn’t seem like Obsidian was all too eager to follow suit. His answer, I thought, was pretty illuminating.
Okay, Obsidian CEO Steph Ango. Here we go.
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