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About Obsidian

The project

Why build yet another note-taking app?

Like the cliché goes, we started Obsidian because Erica couldn't find anything that can satisfy her need to build a personal knowledge base. She has tried all kinds of software from TiddlyWiki to TheBrain; nothing felt right though.

Quarantine finally gave us the chance to start making it. After thinking about it some more, we decided on the three most fundamental directions of Obsidian:

Although we call it a personal knowledge base or your "second brain", we also like to think of it as an IDE for your notes. You can think of an IDE as a powerful frontend that tries to understand your code, such as where are functions and variables stored, what are their types, and by doing so make it super easy to navigate code and get suggestions as you type.

In this sense, with most of the current note-taking apps, working with notes feels like writing code without syntax highlighting, code autocomplete or Git integration. All the things that programmers have been taken for granted for decades. That's pretty sad, don't you think? Today's knowledge workers are facing new challenges all the time, and they deserve better tools.

Yep, that's why we're building "yet another note-taking app".


The team

Shida Li
@Licat

Licat Licat

Co-founder of Obsidian.

Shida makes Obsidian work, work well, and work fast.

Previously made Dynalist and interned at Dropbox and LinkedIn. Made popular Minecraft mods too. UWaterloo 17' Software Engineering.

Erica Xu
@Silver

Erica Silver

Co-founder of Obsidian.

Erica has been writing plain text journals in ResophNote since 2017. She started Obsidian in 2020 to build the perfect note-taking app™ for her notes.

Previously made Dynalist and interned at Quizlet. UWaterloo 16' Computer Science.

Stephan Ango
@kepano

kepano kepano

CEO of Obsidian.

Who's that guy...?

That's kepano, he fights for the users.

Liam Cain
@liam

Liam Liam

Long-time user of the app; big fan! Not sure how I wound up on the About page 🤔

Johannes Theiner
@joethei

joethei joethei

Johannes writes code and reviews new community plugins.

Before joining the Obsidian team, Johannes already created quite a few community plugins and been a huge help in the community.

Matthew Meyers
@mgmeyers

mgmeyers mgmeyers

Former software engineer.
Future therapist.
Full-time Obsidian user.
All around human.

Sandy
Office cat #1

Sandy Sandy

Docile and vocal, has a very soft meow.

Blaze
Office cat #2, on leave

Blaze Blaze

Extremely energetic and dog-like. He plays fetch and is always wagging his tail!