How the head of Obsidian went from superfan to CEO

Welcome to Decoder. This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and co-host of the Hard Fork Podcast. I've had a lot of fun guest hosting a few episodes of Decoder while Ne is out on parental leave this summer. And if you listen to either of 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 this time around, but I'm really excited about this episode because 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, whose CEO 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, so holding all of your notes and links and files and other information, but it works in a really different way.

In Obsidian, files are markdown based, they're stored locally on your own devices, and it's completely free to use. You'll hear Steph say he doesn't even know how many users Obsidian has or how sticky the software is, which is more or less unheard of among the startups I cover. Obsidian does charge a subscription fee for access to certain features, including cross-device sync, version history, and the ability to publish your notes to the web, but it's still a model that feels pretty old-fashioned for software that's trying to keep up with the modern world. And so I wanted 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 twenty twenty three when co-founders Shida Lee and Erica Shu brought him in based on his experience with his former startup, Lumi, and he was also a huge obsidian fan. So I really wanted to ask him about that too, because I suspected the answers to the big decoder questions about organization and decision making were gonna be really unusual for a decoder guest.

And in one final interesting twist, I asked Steph why when so many of his competitors seem to be racing to stuff their productivity products with AI features, doesn't seem like Obsidian is all too eager to follow suit. I thought his answer here was pretty illuminating. So that's obsidian CEO Steph Ango. Here we go. Steph Ango, you are the CEO of Obsidian. Welcome to decoder. Thanks, Casey.

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