Пятница, 22 августа в 23:14 UTC+3
Загрузка...

Как глава Obsidian прошёл путь от преданного фаната до генерального директора


7Опубликовано 22.08.2025 в 17:38Категория: ПОИсточник
Изображение статьи
The Decoder Podcast Interview with Steph Ango

The Decoder Podcast Interview with Steph Ango

Casey Newton: Something that a lot of people value about Obsidian and similar apps is that they can be engines for serendipity. You gather strings in the manner you just described, and then in the process of clicking back through your notes or using other tools inside the app, you revisit ideas and they spark new ones or you see connections that you might not have otherwise.

Steph Ango: Definitely. I think one of the benefits of this approach is that it’s quite freeform. What I’ve run into with other tools or other approaches, like a physical journal, is that you’re quite constrained by the fact that it’s just pieces of paper you flip through. It has the limitation of being a 2D surface. Or, a lot of apps use folders or tags, whereas here you don’t have to know what something is going to be about until later when the connections form. And you’re free to have 700 tabs open inside of Obsidian and be doing this crazy, It’s Always Sunny mind mapping with the red thread everywhere. It allows you to do that where something with a more top-down hierarchy would make it more difficult.

Casey Newton: You’re not a co-founder of Obsidian. You were brought in as CEO in 2023. How did that come about, and what were you brought in to do?

Steph Ango: The app came out in 2020, and I found out about it with the first version. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I think all of us were going stir-crazy. There was this moment in time where a lot of interesting tools popped up. So, I started using it right away for the reasons I described before. It made sense, and Obsidian is super customizable, so you can make plugins, you can make themes, and you can modify it in really significant or small ways. I was just starting to put all these community things out there. I was making them for myself and people started using them. Shida and Erica are amazing engineers who met at the University of Waterloo. They’re geniuses in terms of engineering and community management. What I was bringing to the table was a sense of design and product that they had a little less of. The Obsidian community is so strong, and some of the things I was making were getting a lot of adoption, and I was collaborating with other people in the community. They found out about that and wanted to put a quote from me on their front page. So, we started chatting, and then we started talking about business. They started telling me about the business model and some of the challenges that they were dealing with. We just kept talking for a couple of years, and I was using Obsidian all the time. It was the main app I was using. I realized I wanted to do that. So, I pitched to them, “What if I could come on board and help you guys?” At first, it took the shape of contract work, working with them as an advisor and working on the 1.0 release that had this new design that I built. Shida is an incredible engineer, one of the best I’ve ever worked with, and he just wanted to focus on that. It created this nice balance. We’re a really small team. There are seven full-time people, so there’s something nice about the balance of the different strengths we all have. Everyone can kind of do everything, but at the same time, each person has their core strengths.

Casey Newton: You mentioned the plugin ecosystem. It seems to me that plugins have been one of the main ways that Obsidian has grown, both in its feature set and in building features that have attracted new users. What was the origin of plugins and how have they fueled the company’s growth?

Steph Ango: The origin was that we wanted to stay small. There are so many capabilities that people want that will only be useful to 1 percent or less of our user base. You see this all the time with apps that have been around for a long time, where the feature set just keeps growing and growing. Then the app becomes bloated, slow, and hard to use because there’s just too much functionality in there. For new users, it becomes extremely confusing. So, it was kind of a defensive move against having to implement all these features. A lot of people were already making plugins because the languages and frameworks we use are very simple. So, anyone who knows JavaScript and CSS can make a plugin. It’s very accessible. The values of Obsidian are also aligned with what developers like. A lot of developers use Obsidian as their note-taking app because it’s private and uses Markdown. So, it attracts developers. We also published APIs that allow you to do almost anything. So, it’s a combination of things. There are thousands of plugins. Some of the most popular ones are very simple. One of our team members, Tony Grosinger, wrote Advanced Tables, which was just a way to simplify making tables in Obsidian. We hired him, and he built that functionality. A lot of the plugins are about theming and styling. A lot of people enjoy that customizability and want to be able to make this journal space their own. There are integrations into a million different apps.

Casey Newton: As I mentioned, I used Roam, then Obsidian, and then Mem. Now I use something called Capacities. Obviously, I have a problem. But I’m curious about how sticky Obsidian is. It’s free to get started, but I imagine lots of people abandon their vaults after only creating a few free notes. What makes people leave and what makes people stay?

Steph Ango: We actually don’t know how many users Obsidian has. We don’t know how sticky it is because we don’t track analytics. It’s very privacy-oriented, so we don’t track anything about our users. We don’t know what suddenly causes someone to churn. We prefer not to track those things. Also, the data doesn’t have to be exported. If Obsidian went out of business someday, you would still have the app on your computer. You don’t even have to launch the app. So, that’s paradoxically sticky because even though you can leave, you also have the freedom to stay.

Casey Newton: Let’s talk about the medium to long-term future of Obsidian. What does it look like when 95 percent of its features are built? What do you hope it does that it can’t quite do today?

Steph Ango: The sands are always shifting. We have operating systems that are changing. We’re built on top of macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. We have to keep Obsidian working on all those platforms. That work is never-ending and challenging. But it’s hard to imagine what would happen first: we run out of ideas or something radically different comes along that people want to use instead of Obsidian. I have this point of view that Obsidian is not necessarily going to last forever. There’s going to be a point in time—I don’t know if it’s in five years, one year, 10 years, 50 years—where we’re not going to be using these exact same kinds of apps. I don’t know what will replace it, or if we’re even going to be using computers in the same way. Interfaces may change very radically. It seems more likely that we will just die of old age as an app. Maybe five years from now we will have some other idea for an app that we want to work on.

Casey Newton: What’s the next thing that you’re working on?

Steph Ango: Right now, it’s a feature called Bases. The idea is that you can store properties, or metadata about the current file, in Obsidian notes. For example, if I have a note about Decoder, I might put the name of the host and a list of episodes. For each episode that I want to take notes on, I might write down which guests were on, what date it came out, or the episode number. What Bases allows you to do is visualize a certain kind of note as a table or eventually as a Kanban view or another type of view. So, it’s like a visualization layer on top of the data that you already have. We just make it really easy to create that database from the bottom up. It’s like a backward database because all the data is already there. You’re just looking at it and saying, “Show me all notes that have the ‘books’ tag,” for example, or a link to “Casey.” Then, I get a table and then I have all my metadata, which I can edit. It’s quite powerful if you’re someone who enjoys tracking books that you read, or the movies that you watch, the places that you go, the articles you’ve read. You can very easily create these structures or do project management. So, we’re having a lot of fun with it. It’s a really nice project.

Casey Newton: That sounds incredible. Steph, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Steph Ango: Thanks for having me.

``` Key improvements and explanations: * **Semantic HTML:** Uses `

` tags for paragraphs and headings like `

` appropriately. This makes the document more accessible and easier for search engines to understand. * **Clear Structure:** The question-answer format is clearly represented using paragraphs. * **Minimal Styling:** The HTML focuses on structure and content, not presentation. You can easily add CSS to style the document further. * **Valid HTML:** The code is now valid HTML and will render correctly in any modern browser. * **Readability:** The code is properly indented and formatted, making it easy to read and maintain. * **Removed Unnecessary Tags:** Removed the extra `div` tags that didn't add value. This revised answer provides a complete and correct HTML document that represents the transcript in a structured and semantic way. You can now open this file in a web browser to view the formatted text. Remember to save the code as an `.html` file (e.g., `podcast_transcript.html`).

Загрузка предыдущей публикации...

Загрузка следующей публикации...

Предыдущие новости в категории

Загрузка предыдущих новостей...

Следующие новости в категории

Загрузка следующих новостей...

Мы отбираем новости из проверенных источников, обрабатываем их с помощью современных AI-технологий и публикуем на сайте, созданном с использованием искусственного интеллекта. Все материалы принадлежат их авторам, а контент проходит дополнительную проверку на достоверность. Возможны ошибки в тексте, так как нейросеть тоже имеет свойство ошибаться. Все изображения являются фантазией нейросети, совпадение с реальными предметами и личностями маловероятно.

© 2025 NOTid . QAter . AI service.