179: The Philosophy of Obsidian, With CEO Steph Ango  🔗 **Source:** [179: The Philosophy of Obsidian, With CEO Steph Ango](https://share.snipd.com/episode/8b760b81-85ea-415a-b50d-de60869b6633) ## Highlights - **Notes As Personal Wikipedia** - Obsidian treats notes like a personal Wikipedia built on Markdown files to keep data durable and portable. - Links create structure instead of rigid folders, and markdown ensures notes remain usable long after the app exists. Transcript: Steph Ango Well, first of all, CEO is a very highfalutin title for a company with like seven, eight people. So, you know, we're a note taking app, where the probably the main differentiator is that it works a little bit like Wikipedia. So when you're writing, you make links. So I'm talking to you right now, it's say, in my diary for today, I was on the Cortex podcast with Mike. And each time I mentioned something, whether it's a person, a place, a podcast, a book, a concept, I can make that a link just the same way that when you're browsing Wikipedia, everything Is a link. And what's nice about that is the structure comes from those links. So rather than organizing your things with folders and tags, which you can certainly also do in Obsidian, if you're that kind of person. You can navigate and browse your ideas through links. And that's kind of the basic concept. Then you kind of get into some nerdier topics about how the data is stored. You know, we use markdown files, which are very durable. It will live long beyond the life of Obsidian. Or if you have been using another app, it's very easy to import. ([Time 0:01:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f82dd25e-9b6d-40a2-8dc2-74b8af69b551)) - **From Minimal Theme To Joining Obsidian** - Steph built the popular Minimal theme because Obsidian's UI felt unfamiliar on macOS and she wanted a more native feel. - She started as a community creator while running another startup, gradually porting her TiddlyWiki workflows into Obsidian. Transcript: Steph Ango So at the time when Obsidian launched, it was March 2020, which was also an important moment for everyone in the world. And at that time, I was running my previous startup Lumi, which was essentially a manufacturing marketplace, a B2B platform. And I don't think I've ever had a job. And even now I kind of feel like I don't because it's so fun to work on Obsidian every day. But I had always been running my own startups. And when Obsidian came along, it fit very naturally into what I had been doing, which is note taking with Markdown and trying my best to use this kind of Wiki link type of format that I described. At the time, I was using another tool called Tiddly Wiki, which is still around. But this idea, now it's become so widespread that I almost feel like going back into what the world looked like 10 years ago seems very archaic. But all of the wiki software that existed back then was primarily designed around publishing something like Wikipedia. So there was like MediaWiki, which is a big old piece of PHP software that runs a lot of wiki software out there. But there was a couple of apps, including TiddlyWiki that were doing it like that, more for personal use. And I didn't really love how it worked, but it kind of had that basic functionality. And when Obsidian came out, it instantly just made sense because it was doing a lot of what I was doing with TiddlyWiki, but with a much nicer UI. You know, the search was good. It had some of these intuitive features that now we're used to seeing in almost every app, like a command palette, you know, I can quickly get into whatever note I want to. And so, you know, my old system was like TiddlyWiki with a bunch of CSS and hacks on top of it. Porting over to Obsidian was super, super simple, even in like the first version that came out. ([Time 0:03:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1752090d-5280-433b-b9b1-7e6a4609963a)) - **Capture First Structure Later** - Capture chaos quickly and add structure later using links and front matter instead of forcing organization upfront. - Use daily journals, progressive summarization, and metadata (front matter) to surface important content over time. Transcript: Steph Ango Somewhat, yes. I think my method of note taking is based around the knowledge that I'm going to be lazy or busy or something's going to be happening at the time where I need to take a note often. So I'm very much used to the idea of like chaos and laziness is the norm in terms of how I'm taking notes. I might be, you know, walking down the street. Suddenly an idea comes up. I need to put something in there quickly. So there's a whole kind of category of notes that is just like the stuff. And it could come at any point. I've been working a lot on this tool, Obsidian Web Clipper, that lets you grab things from the web. And so maybe something catches my eye and I want to quickly save that from a website, for example. So to me, all of those things kind of go into the mess of notes. And I really only use a couple folders to stay organized. I have clippings for those things that come from the web that I didn't create. I have references, which are things like books or people, any proper noun that exists in Wikipedia, like something that exists in the world that's not one of my ideas. Have essays that i'm writing or articles that i'm publishing that have a name and that name will evolve over time as i'm writing the piece i have these quick notes that i'm writing throughout The day and then i have a method of kind of progressive summarization of my diaries so you know, if I'm journaling every day or every couple days, then once a week, once a month, I'll try To summarize what happened in that period of time. Then every six months, I try to summarize what happened every month. And every year, I try to summarize everything that happened every year, using each kind of previous level of kind of zoom to inform the high levels. So all of this is inherently messy. There's just like stuff coming in from all different places. And what really helps me is one, the concept of links, because I can always trace back where was the starting point of when I had the original idea, I can always click back and back and back To where did that start? I am linking a lot intentionally. And the other thing that I really enjoy about Obsidian Markdown is what's called front matter. So there's this structured content that you can put at the top of a Markdown note that gets formatted in a nice way that allows you to enter structured information like dates or a true Or false or a status drop down or a link to another note. And that's how I start to create a little bit more structure over time. So if I'm watching a movie, for example, and I want to store a rating about that movie, I would store that in the front matter, the properties of the note. And using these different tools, you know, links, front matter, I can find my way back to anything very easily without having to have too much overhead at the moment where the idea comes To me. ([Time 0:11:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9d3b7591-a592-49d6-80b5-5a5bee77766f)) - **Evergreen Notes As Building Blocks** - Create small reusable 'evergreen' notes as building blocks that you can link to like Lego pieces for bigger ideas. - Turning recurring phrases or concepts into linked notes makes retrieval and combination far easier. Transcript: Myke Hurley Is your basic rule for something should be a linked piece of text? When you're writing a sentence, like is the instinct that a word that you're typing or a phrase that you're typing is something that should be linked? Because the way, if I'm understanding the way to try and explain how Obsidian works, you're essentially creating these links that aren't necessarily linking to something else directly. It's not like a hyperlink, but just by creating a linked piece of text anytime that you reference it again in the future you can always kind of find every place that you've selected it Steph Ango Essentially like a wiki as you say yes and you don't even need to create that note yet so if i was typing today i spoke to mike i could make mike a link and making a link is very easy in Obsidian. All you do is type this double brackets notation around a piece of text. And that link can exist as unresolved is the term, but it just exists. It's known within the Obsidian app that there's a reference that doesn't yet have a note. And so to answer your question, pretty much any time I'm mentioning the name of a place, a person, a book, a concept, I will make it a link the first time in the note. I don't make it a link for every single mention of that thing within the note, mostly because it's just too much work and not necessary. There are different kinds of things that are links in my system that may not be for other people. For example, I have a note for every day. So every day has a timestamp. And there I can view anything that happened that day or was linked to to that day, which is really fun because sometimes things dates could be in the future in the past and then connections Can exist later on like 10 years later I find out oh something happened on that same day that I did that other thing and you just kind of find those connections way later another concept That I really like is evergreen notes it's a little tricky to explain but it's basically a concept. You can think of an idiom as an evergreen note. It's just an idea that you can formalize into a sentence, and then that sentence becomes a link. On the homepage of Obsidian, we show an example of that, which is, I think, therefore I am, from Descartes. So that idea, if it has meaning to you, can become almost like a meme inside of your own knowledge base where I keep coming back to this idea. So you make it a note. And the nice thing about that is it creates a building block that you can build off of and combine with other ideas. It's a little bit of a shorthand or shortcut, just like an inside joke might be to kind of reference a whole world of ideas that are hidden behind that link. ([Time 0:17:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/00b8b234-b603-4463-a5e8-1a03e545a485)) - **Weekly Fresh To Do List** - Keep task management lightweight by writing a fresh weekly note of tasks and recreating the list each week. - Roll over only truly necessary items and discard recurring fuzzy tasks to force prioritization. Transcript: Steph Ango But what are you using for yourself? Yeah, I do use Obsidian, but my task management is very lightweight. I just, I have an article. It's sort of trying to be provocative because I feel like people really overcomplicate task management. But I just create a note once a week that says a list of things that I want to do. And I come back to it throughout the week. I'll check things off that list. And then the next week I start a new weekly note and I write a new to-do list. And I try not to look at the past week's to-do list. I just try to write it from scratch. And usually that automatically filters things up to the top that needs to be top of mind. And then I might look at the previous week and roll over anything that didn't get done. And at that moment, I might also toss out some things that I thought I needed to get done, but it turns out it's not really that important. So it's very simple. ([Time 0:23:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb2bbdab-d4e6-4750-94a8-2b830d30e7c5)) - **Design Company To Avoid Meetings** - Obsidian's team largely avoids email and scheduled meetings to protect uninterrupted focus and support diverse personal schedules. - They rely on asynchronous tools and reminders, keeping calendar use minimal and intentional. Transcript: Steph Ango Basically don't use email and don't use a calendar. Wow. I have an email inbox. I will check it every day, but most of the stuff that goes in there is a bunch of notifications from various other systems. So I'm pretty aggressive about clearing it out once every couple months. But there will be multiple days where I go without checking email. For me, email is mainly a method of communicating with my grandparents and my parents. I mean, it's also why Obsidian, the team and the structure is designed the way it is. We don't have meetings. We don't have a sales team. We don't have anything that would require me to have emails. It's sort of like it's designed around the idea of we don't have to have emails. So the work is, it's kind of the opposite of how the majority of people might work. For us, the team and the company is constructed around making it possible that we don't need emails and calendars. Okay. Myke Hurley I couldn't imagine living without a calendar because I know I would not do all of the things that I do because I collaborate with a lot of people and it tends to be through structured times. So when you say no calendar, do you really mean you never use a calendar? Steph Ango For me, calendar is just to remember that I have a dentist appointment. We have no scheduled meetings at Obsidian. So we have a one meeting a year that is an offsite. We usually go somewhere in the world, you know, for a week with the team. So I know that I'm going to have that at some point. I know that I'm going to have a couple of doctors appointments. No, no, no. Technically a calendar does exist and we will put events in there for the team. And I have some here and there. Like, if I have a dentist appointment, I will put it into like the calendar app. I am much more a user of the reminders app, the Apple reminders app. So there are things like an electrician is going to come on Tuesday to fix this problem that we have. And I will typically basically just use Siri to create a reminder that that's going to happen. But I put the reminder at the moment that I will need to remember that information. So maybe I need to know like the evening before or the morning of that that thing is happening. And that thing might exist in the calendar if I remember to do it, although most of the time it doesn't. I mean, for you, your work, it would be kind of impossible to do without a calendar because you're scheduling things with everyone all the time. But we don't need to do that. So I don't currently have that need. By the way, I worked for 15 years with a calendar all the time. So this is a conscious choice of me removing calendar. ([Time 0:26:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/22f2437a-6099-42f1-96a1-aee2fe1b87c7)) - **Collaborate Asynchronously By Default** - Favor asynchronous collaboration: use chat channels for project updates, public 'ramblings' for informal sharing, and status posts as a heartbeat. - Let ad hoc meetings happen only when cross-team complexity requires synchronous work. Transcript: Steph Ango Everybody's doing and where necessary kind of like working together? So the way the Obsidian team functions is we intentionally made certain choices and they're probably not going to work for everyone. They might not be desirable for everyone. There's certain things, depending on the scale at which you're operating, that it's just probably impossible to do it without meetings to some extent. So this is not like a recommendation. It's just a, here's how we designed it. We primarily use Discord as our chat interface, kind of similar to Slack or other tools like it. And throughout the day, we are constantly talking on there. So we have channels that are around certain projects or certain capabilities or certain things like, you know, customer support or things like that. So there are conversations that are going on throughout the day. People are in widely different time zones. So we try to have a workflow that is compatible with asynchronous work. So there are times where two people might be collaborating very closely on some particular feature. And so asynchronous conversation over chat might sort of materialize out of thin air and people kind of know where everyone's time zones are. And so that happens naturally. But then there's also a lot of asynchronous discussion that happens where throughout the day people are posting status updates about what they're doing. It's just kind of broadcasting like a heartbeat of what's going on. So, you know, I'm working on this thing. I'm running into this problem. It's not meant for anyone to reply to. It's just to verbalize what is currently going on. And sometimes it helps kind of as a rubber ducking to just be talking into the ether and just, oh, okay, now actually I have these different approaches that I'm thinking of. And people might jump in with some thoughts or ideas along the way. ([Time 0:41:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0914ace7-fa92-49cf-8b3e-d83ff71bdd5c)) - **Service Revenue Keeps App Free** - Obsidian sells optional services (sync, publish) while keeping the core app free and offline-first to respect user ownership. - This user-funded approach enables independence from VC pressure and freedom to prioritize product values. Transcript: Myke Hurley But you have some optional paid tools. And these seem like things that would bear some cost to them. And then you obviously make money from that as a business as well. Do you feel like this business model works for Obsidian? Yeah. Steph Ango Yeah. Like you said, the app is free. So there's no features of the app that are blocked. There's no like gated capabilities. There's no like maximum number of notes or something like that. You don't even have to sign up for an account. You can just download the app and start using it. What is paid are our services. So we have sync service and a publish service. And those are optional. You can also just use Git or Dropbox or any number of different tools out there. So our goal with our syncing and publishing services are to make them the best that we can for the use case of Obsidian. And we charge for those. And that's been working great. But also because we're small and we want to be, you know, stay the size that we are and we don't have any investors breathing down our neck, we're not trying to become the next Microsoft Or something. We're not trying to take over the world. So it works, you know, it's profitable. And as long as we are able to keep the lights on and keep the team paid and keep having a chance to work on this, I don't see that stopping anytime soon. ([Time 0:44:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/76eeb6b5-7508-48f9-9626-21f1bbfffc32)) - **Made Commercial License Optional** - Obsidian removed the enforced commercial license after discovering companies used it widely without paying, accepting lost revenue. - The change removed billing friction and encouraged broader workplace adoption while relying on optional paid services for revenue. Transcript: Steph Ango Yeah, well, a good example of that is previously we had one of our revenue streams was the commercial license. So when Shida and Erica launched Obsidian, this was the only revenue stream that existed because sync and publish didn't exist. But there was terms in our user license that said, if you're using this for personal use, it's free. But if you're using it for use within a company of two or more people, then you have to pay for the commercial license, which is $50 a year. So that was true for about four years of Obsidian's life. And then last year, we actually made the commercial license optional. So we said, anyone can just use it. If you want to buy a commercial license, you can to support the project, but you don't have to. And so that was a shift that came from a necessity because essentially what we realized was since you can download the app and don't have to sign in the commercial license was purely a Honor system thing and it was inspired somewhat by another app called sublime text which i love that has a very similar model but the problem is that there was no way to enforce that and We knew that there were companies with thousands of employees using Obsidian that were just not paying and kind of just skirting the terms of service. And so we decided to just make it optional because it was more reflective of the reality. And so we left probably millions of dollars on the table making that choice. But what it enabled was that there were all these people who wanted to use Obsidian for their work notes, but were afraid of breaking the license. So we just said, let's just remove that constraint. Anyone who wants to use it is free to use it. And the hope just being that because people will then use it, they will share it with their friends or coworkers, and eventually that transfers into sync or publish revenue. But we have no way of measuring this because we had no way of measuring how many people were not paying us for the commercial license before. ([Time 0:46:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/831d985a-5ca1-4364-b0d4-83c38f923d0f)) - **Plain Text Meets Both Anti AI And AI Use** - Current AI trends both push users toward Obsidian for private, no-AI note taking and pull them in because markdown is ideal for LLM workflows. - Plain-text files make Obsidian both resistant to vendor lock-in and compatible with AI tooling. Transcript: Steph Ango There's a few big things. One is AI is, you know, taking over everything these days. And people are switching to Obsidian both because they want to use ai and because they don't want ai which is kind of confusing obsidian has no ai features in it so a lot of people who are Kind of trapped in other ecosystems are finding themselves like swamped in all this ai junk that is like polluting all of the interfaces and they do not want AI in their note taking. And so they're switching to Obsidian because Obsidian is private. It has no built in AI features. You can just use it and not be bothered by all of that. And I think it's becoming quite popular for that reason because of AI infiltrating everything in other tools. At the same time, because Obsidian is just based on plain markdown files, and all it really does is it looks at a folder on your computer and turns all of those plain text files into something More like easy to read and easy to write. And AI is extremely good at dealing with plain text files. People are finding that they're connecting existing tools, whether it's like Cloud Code or Codex, Cowork, or there's all these different tools that exist that are generating a ton Of markdown files. They're using Obsidian as a way to view and interact with their agents, their AI-created workspaces, or to just collaborate with LLMs. ([Time 0:53:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29548f1b-4b4c-4e00-a68e-3251a0be9035)) - **Use AI To Save Caloric Energy Not Replace Understanding** - Use AI to amplify human effort but avoid delegating fundamental understanding; keep control of core knowledge and decisions. - Apply AI where it reduces energy cost, like translating documentation or automating repetitive pipelines, then have humans refine results. Transcript: Steph Ango There's an essay I wrote a few years ago called Don't Delegate Understanding. And it's about the idea that if you start to take advice for granted or suggestions or recommendations for granted, as opposed to understanding them from scratch, you're sort of building Up this shaky foundation on which you're making decisions at this higher level that are not backed by an understanding of the underlying things. And I think I'm just very lucky to have been born with a lot of curiosity. I get really fascinated by all kinds of things. Like I mentioned, I have an appointment with an electrician coming over to fix this thing. If the electrician is here, I'm absolutely going to spend time trying to like learn what's going on. I'm not an electrician, but I want to understand how my house works and how these outlets are connected and all this different stuff. And if at every turn you kind of outsource that understanding of how things work, it's very easy to be sort of like covered in parasites that are making it seem like it's easy. Essentially, whether it's through for financial reasons or control or power, extracting your time, your money, when simply understanding how the system works would give you much More control and would help you make better decisions. Use AI in my own note-taking practice, or we don't really use it that much for programming at Obsidian, is that we want to have a really, really firm understanding of our code base, our Ideas, our knowledge. Where AI, I think, is useful is it can lighten the load for complex tasks that otherwise would take a lot of energy. ([Time 0:58:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/552a7e5a-f27d-4b5f-9a79-895ce6d6e05b)) - **Manage Plugin Risk With Beta Rollouts** - Accept the trade-off of extensibility: allow plugins/themes but use staged rollouts and beta (catalyst) testing to catch breakage. - Keep modifiability because it empowers users even though it increases edge-case regressions. Transcript: Steph Ango Yeah, this is another one where you're talking about trade-offs. And I think there are two major kinds of tools. There's the tools that work a specific way and don't let you modify them. And you have to adapt your brain to that tool. And the benefit of those tools is that they're going to be more stable, they're going to be more prescriptive, and maybe that helps you have a more predictable way of using it. But you have to adapt to that tool. Obsidian is the opposite. Obsidian adapts to you, you can shape it, it's a piece of clay that you can modify in whatever way you want. You can build plugins. You can download plugins. You can modify entirely the way it looks. And you can 100% shoot yourself in the foot with that. You can get lost. All the buttons have disappeared. And that happens all the time. People are like, I downloaded the latest update and now I have no buttons. What's going on? And it's like, oh, I guess there's this one theme that was like expecting this one thing. And yes, that is the trade-off. And we can never fully control that because no one has to ask us permission to make a plugin or a theme. Anyone can just do it. And so it's somewhat impossible for us to test all the edge cases. What we do is we have a rollout strategy where for every update, it goes through these different stages before it goes to a public release. And usually every update spends somewhere from a few weeks to a month in this stage we call catalyst, or it's like a beta basically. And that allows us to hopefully find these edge cases before the update goes out to everyone. But yes, it's certainly a problem, but it's a conscious choice that we're making that we want the tool to be extremely modifiable. ([Time 1:05:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1338a12e-262e-4a7d-8d1e-6fa7e79bd708)) - **Collaboration Is Next While Staying File First** - Collaboration features are the next big focus, leveraging Bases to create shared views (Kanban, galleries) without forcing centralization. - Obsidian aims to enable simple sharing like grocery lists up to complex collaborative workflows while preserving privacy and file-first design. Transcript: Steph Ango Yeah, they're still the same core things that are on our manifesto. We want to keep democratizing the app. We want to make it as easily accessible and private and easy to modify for everyone. So those are all the axes that we're always working on. As far as making it more open and democratic to people, I think a big area that we're working on and thinking about is collaboration. That up until now Obsidian has been very siloed as an app. Like it's an app for you to manage your knowledge or even in the work context, it's for editing your local markdown files on your work computer. So this has been a big request from the community. How do you, I mean, as simple as share a grocery list with your partner, for example, to, you know, more complex workflows. So that's on our mind. There's a lot that we can do with bases, which is the kind of database functionality on top of Markdown that I described earlier. So people want to be able to do some more things like Kanban and calendars and things like that. So we have some things in mind for that. These are all like relatively near term, like things that are on our radar. When I'm thinking long term, like 10 years, I have no idea what is going to happen. I don't know how we're going to be using computers. I don't know if anything that we're doing is still going to be relevant. I do feel pretty strongly that we will continue to have things like Markdown and plain text. I think that is not going to be going away anytime soon. But our relationship as to how those things are created might change pretty radically. We'll see. We've created a team structure and working environment that allows us to be very flexible and fast when the time comes. At the beginning of the year, we put out this thing called Obsidian CLI, which was a way for you to interact with Obsidian purely programmatically. So through the command line, very geeky, but it turned out that a lot of people who were using Obsidian to automate things like task management were asking for this capability for a long Time. People who are developing plugins and themes wanted to be able to debug them or work with their AI agents to help build the app like Vibecode, a new plugin, for example. And then there were lots of people who wanted to use these open claw type of things that are coming about and have them write to Obsidian. And so since our principle is we want to stay private, we want to avoid having all these bells and whistles, like invading your personal space. You know, why don't we create this way that programmatically you can interact with the app from outside of the app. ([Time 1:07:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/039d64fc-5397-458f-9835-e8a21dd04990))