About

My first decade of paid work was payment systems and marketplaces for ticketing, travel and live experiences, mostly before Stripe existed. The companies are in my work history.

In 2013 I started Focus, a Mac app that blocks distractions so you can do deep work. It taught me what a good tool does: it gets you in and out quickly, so you stay in flow.

Since then I've followed one thread: software that helps people, and now machines, remember what they know and see how it connects. It runs from a web archive that classified pages with machine learning, through libraries like llm.js and Thinkable Type, to Think Machine, which turns notes and research into a 3D map of ideas you can explore and talk to. I still run Focus and Think Machine. The rest is on Products, Code and Blog.

Now

I build AI systems for companies, from idea to production: memory and knowledge systems, AI that runs on your own documents, and agents, including voice agents, that do real work. I work best with founders and small teams; see Let's work.

I work with Pressmaster, where I built the knowledge graph behind its AI Twin and the agent platform inside the product. I've also prototyped a confidential memory service for Tinfoil, which runs private AI in secure enclaves, and built AI for construction companies and for lawyers at Intelemodel.

Outside work

I've lived in more than a dozen places, from Alaska and Germany to New York City and Portland, Oregon, and today I live in Moline, Illinois, in the Quad Cities. I'm the father of two amazing girls, and I take long walks with my German Shorthaired Pointer. I play guitar and piano, write songs, and love woodworking: in Oregon I built a 200-square-foot studio on a hill in my backyard, overlooking Mt. Hood.

I love the history of information systems and computation, and the overlap of software and freedom. The web started out idealistic, then many of its networks were captured, as I wrote in Disintermediating Network Effects for Fun and Profit. This time I want AI that acts in its users' best interests. I'd like to write a series about how software can offer new answers to old political, social and economic problems, building on that essay, The Zen of Saito, Organizations 2.0 and The Future of Open Source Software.

Quick facts

• I built my first websites at about 12, then learned to program with mIRC scripts and C++.
• My first paid programming work was in 2003, while I was still in high school.
• In 2004 I started BlogCatalog, one of the biggest blog directories in the world, and later sold it.
• I wrote jsonfield for Django in 2009, eleven years before Django had one built in. It has about 51 million downloads.
• Two companies I led development for were acquired: GoTickets (by PrimeSport) and Goviva (by CAA).
• I maintained ImportJSON, which has more than 2,000 GitHub stars, from 2017 to 2022.
• I released llm.js, one interface to the major language models, in April 2023.

Elsewhere

• Email: [email protected]
• X / Twitter: @bradjasper
• GitHub: github.com/bradjasper
• Interviews, talks and demos: Videos