At the start of 2026, I gathered the Imbue team and spoke about how both our CEO Kanjun and I became disillusioned with Imbue—and how we found our way back, more excited than ever about who we are and what we’re building.
I want to share that story with you.
Let me set the stage: It’s early 2025, and the Singularity is in full swing. It seems like every day a new model comes out, or a new product, that totally changes the landscape. Ideas from even a few months ago seem antiquated or obviated, and we can all feel that pressure bearing down on us.
Will we ever ship a product? Will anyone use that product? Will anyone like the product? Are we, as a research company, capable of making something that has users?
These questions worried all of us, and Kanjun and I were no exception.
So we did what many people naturally do when stressed: we entered fight mode. We doubled down on decisions. We tried to be “efficient,” to “focus” people on the “right” things, to “optimize” our “product development process” so that we could “win.”
We sprinted—we all sprinted—toward shipping Sculptor. We put in a lot of late nights. We worked hard. We added lots of features (and bugs), and, ultimately, we did ship something.
And not only did we ship something, we actually got more attention than we expected. People downloaded the product and tried it, despite its complexity and bugs. And many people even continued using the product week after week!
To be clear: this was a huge win! Most startups never ship anything. Of the startups that ship, the vast majority do not end up with daily active users. This is a 95th+ percentile outcome, especially for the first product we’ve shipped into the world.
But shipping Sculptor in early October was just the beginning. There was still so much more work to do: metrics to create, user interviews to conduct, bugs to fix, performance issues to address, regressions to add tests for, Discord message to respond to, Sentry alerts to silence. It was stressful.
So again, we doubled down. We had “stability” weeks, spent time bug fixing and refactoring,, all while trying to ship a backlog of new features just to keep up with the ever-changing landscape.
And we did make things better. Sculptor today is far better than the Sculptor we shipped in October. We have dedicated users, even in spite of those bugs. I’m really proud of what we built, and excited for where it’s going.
But this story actually isn’t about the product. It’s about us, as a company.
In all of this stress and sprinting and focusing, we lost sight of the forest for the trees. We forgot why we were here. And we got a bit burned out.
But most importantly, we lost something along the way. Fun Fridays just weren’t as fun anymore. There was something missing from team dinners and lunch conversations. There was something that felt off about our meeting structure and our processes. Things just felt off.
During our holiday break, and leading up to it, it was hard to put our finger on exactly what was missing.
Was it that we didn’t know what the mission was? Was it that we needed to “transition to being a product company”? Was it just that the office felt empty when people were out and sick? Or was it simply a manifestation of the uncertainty about the future, given how much was changing in the outside world?
Funny enough, Kanjun and I both independently came to the same conclusion.
We realized that we’d lost our way. The Imbue we’d been building had lost something core and special and important about it. Imbue is about so much more than just making a product and making money. We are not a normal startup, and we never have been.
We’d been falling into the default startup patterns and startup behaviors: teams of engineers with managers working toward feature roadmaps, processes for triaging customer support tickets, defining metrics and KPIs, even doing user interviews.
These are all fine things, but they’re not what matters.
When we saw things moving fast in the world, it made us stressed and more narrowly focused on what was right in front of us, on the familiar patterns. When new competitors launched, or existing competitors launched new features, we worried: do we have enough features? How do we compare?
But what we should have done is zoom out, take a step back, and remind ourselves: why are we actually here? What is the point?
We’d forgotten that Imbue is not just about what we’re building—it’s also about how we’re building. We want Imbue to be an example of a different way to be: as individuals, as a group, as a company.
The whole reason we started Imbue is because we want to increase human agency in the world, to give each person more ability to author their lives. And that begins with how we work here, in everything we do.
We believe that it is better to grow together, to be kind, to think good, and to have fun. To build a world with more humanity, more openness, more agency, more liberty, and more play.
We believe that this way is better. We believe that, over time, it will win.
Every day I see you all build cool things, whether they’re side projects or features or bug fixes. I believe that together we can redefine what it means to do meaningful work in the era of AI, both for each of ourselves, and as an example for the broader world.
I want to make Imbue radical again. And the way we’ve been working hasn’t delivered on this.
If we’re going to show the world that we can empower people, it starts with each one of us. We want to show that it’s not just possible to have everyone joyfully working and growing together and deciding what to work on themselves and being empowered; we want to show the world that this is the superior way of being.
Imbue is an experiment. It is a question: what happens if we give people agency and control and choice? And support them in working on the things that they are most passionate about, and in the way that they are most suited to work on those things? What does that world look like?
Imbue exists to answer that question—so we should all start living it.
It’s now possible to ship projects much more quickly than ever before. I experienced this first-hand over the break hacking on things, and I think we’ve all seen this in the world and broader landscape as well.
There’s a massive opportunity for us here. If we really lean in to using the tools we’ve built, like Sculptor, I think there’s a whole new way of engineering that can let us ship more, smaller open software projects, rather than focusing on one top-down product.
We want you to be able to propose projects that you would be the DRI for. These should be projects that you think would impact our mission of making tech serve humans, and to have a way for some of those projects to become real. We want project DRIs to be fully empowered to make (or delegate) every decision related to their project. We want all decisions, all responsibility to be owned by you.
We’re doing this because we believe smaller teams working on projects built and shared in the open will do a better job toward accomplishing our mission. We want to be building projects that are used by as many people as possible, and that help promote this vision of what we want to see in the world:
- Empowering people
- Catalyzing agency
- Democratizing power
- Promoting an ecosystem of open software, open agents, and open data
We want to build an ultra-high agency culture and organization, together.
We want to do this for lots of different reasons: just to learn if it is possible, and what it looks like, and because we think this is a more effective—and more fun—way of being in the world.
But the core reason we want to make Imbue ultra-high agency is because we cannot run it any other way. It’s just not authentically who we are as leaders, and we refuse to do that any more.
Fundamentally, what Kanjun and I both realized over the break is that we already know what kind of culture and company and products and projects we want to build and see in the world. No one is stopping any of us from being the company that we want to see. We can just do that today.
Today is a new year, and it’s a new dawn for Imbue, and for all of us.
What does that mean in practice? That’s for us to figure out, together.
If you’re interested in joining our team to create a company and world that stands for radical human agency, we’re hiring!