Every organization faces an invisible crisis that silently drains productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage. The systematic loss of critical knowledge, decisions, and context that evaporates after every meeting, email, and conversation.

In our conversations with dozens of companies, we've witnessed the same pattern: organizations making identical decisions month after month, valuable insights that don't survive beyond the meeting room, and teams drowning in transcripts they'll never read. Research confirms that organizations struggle to preserve and leverage collective knowledge, with valuable insights lost due to siloed teams and employee transitions.

This isn't just inefficient - it's a fundamental breakdown in how organizations make sense of their world.

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Sense-making: The core of organizational intelligence

Karl Weick's pioneering work on organizational sensemaking reveals why this matters so deeply. Sensemaking is the ongoing, collective process by which people interpret ambiguous or unexpected events to create shared understanding and action. It's how organizations navigate uncertainty, cope with change, and adapt to new situations.

As Weick established, sensemaking involves several critical aspects:

• Enactment: Recognizing and bracketing relevant information from the environment

• Selection: Drawing on past experiences to interpret these cues

• Retention: Storing outcomes and applying them to ongoing interactions

The process is both retrospective - looking back to understand - and prospective, using that understanding to shape future actions. Most importantly, it's fundamentally social and narrative-based, with people creating stories to make sense of events.

Yet here's the paradox: The problem for sensemaking is not to decide what to do, but to understand what we have just done. Organizations are constantly struggling to make sense of their own actions and experiences, caught in what Weick describes as a "blooming, buzzing confusion" of continuous activity.

The breakdown of traditional approaches

What we've observed firsthand is that most organizations attempt to solve this with capture and summarization tools that fundamentally misunderstand the problem. After implementing these solutions, companies tell us they end up with:

• Isolated documents that sit unused in folders

• Long-format summaries that still overwhelm cognitive capacity

• Passive memory that requires manual effort to activate

• No actionable outcomes from captured information

The human brain simply isn't designed to interface with huge datasets. While we can create and retrieve vast amounts of information digitally, this doesn't mean our minds can actually use it effectively. We're creating information for the sake of creation, not for action.

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how sensemaking actually works in organizations. Sensemaking addresses the question: "What's going on here?" as teams try to make sense of situations so they can act on them. It's not about having more data - it's about creating meaning that drives action.

Our approach: Recall and activation

Our approach with Internode fundamentally reimagines organizational memory through two core principles: recall and activation.

Rather than generating more documents, we focus on:

1. Connected context

Every task, decision, and insight maintains its relationship to the broader organizational narrative. When you need information, you don't just get an isolated fact - you get the web of connections that give it meaning.

2. Short, actionable formats

We've learned that people need information they can process in seconds, not minutes. Every resurfaced insight is formatted for immediate understanding and action, with the option to dive deeper when needed.

3. Intelligent resurfacing

Internode doesn't wait for you to search - it proactively recalls relevant information when you need it most. When a meeting discusses a specific topic, past decisions and context automatically surface.

4. Execution-ready output

Every piece of recalled information includes deadlines, assigned owners, and clear next steps. This isn't passive memory - it's active organizational intelligence.

From data overload to Sense-Making excellence

The transformation we enable goes beyond efficiency metrics. When AI can remember and contextualize organizational knowledge, it becomes a powerful tool for preserving best practices, institutional wisdom, and nuanced information that might otherwise be lost.

Consider what happens in practice: During a strategy meeting about market expansion, Internode automatically surfaces:

• Previous expansion discussions and their outcomes

• Decisions made about similar initiatives

• Lessons learned from past attempts

• Relevant market research previously gathered

• Team members who have expertise in this area

All of this appears in digestible, actionable formats that enhance rather than overwhelm the conversation.

The future of organizational intelligence

As Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, recently emphasized, memory is not just a feature but a transformative force reshaping how AI interacts with humans. The organizations that thrive in the coming decade will be those that successfully augment human sensemaking with AI-powered memory systems.

Internode represents this future - where every conversation builds on the last, where no insight is lost, and where organizations can finally achieve true collective intelligence. We're not just capturing information; we're enabling organizations to become better executors by ensuring that the right knowledge appears at the right moment for the right action.

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Moving to intelligence

The goal of any organization is sense-making, giving meaning to collective experiences and turning that meaning into effective action. Yet most are trapped in cycles of forgetting and rediscovery, making the same decisions repeatedly while valuable insights evaporate into the organizational ether.

Internode breaks this cycle. By providing recall and activation rather than just capture and storage, we help teams build an interconnected living knowledge library that resurfaces insights precisely when needed, ensuring actions actually get done.

For leaders and investors looking to build sustainable competitive advantages, the question isn't whether to invest in organizational memory - it's how quickly you can transform your organization's relationship with its own knowledge. The companies that master this transformation won't just remember better; they'll think better, decide better, and execute better.

Internode helps teams capture and organize key takeaways from all communications, building an interconnected living Knowledge Library that resurfaces insights at the right time so actions actually get done. Learn more about transforming your organization's sense-making capabilities at LinkedIn.

The memory crisis in modern organizations

As Karl Weick - one of the most influential organizational theorist said: "An organization is, above all, a system of interrelated memories." Yet most companies today are failing to capture, preserve, and leverage these critical memories effectively. The result is a perpetual cycle of knowledge loss, repeated mistakes, and missed opportunities that could have been avoided.

The reality is that, as research indicates: people forget 50% of meeting content within just 24 hours. Within a week, virtually nothing remains from those crucial discussions that shaped strategic decisions. Meanwhile, organizations lose an estimated 20% of their institutional knowledge every year due to employee turnover alone, knowledge that took years to accumulate, vanishing in a matter of months.

This phenomenon, which we call "organizational amnesia," represents one of the most significant yet overlooked challenges facing modern enterprises.

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Traditional knowledge management

Most companies approach knowledge preservation through static documentation: storing meeting transcripts, maintaining project management tools, and filing away reports in digital repositories. However - in our opinion, this approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of organizational memory.

Memory is not a database. It's an active process of connecting past experiences to current needs. This is what fuels Internode and our mission. Static documents, no matter how well-organized, cannot recreate the context and interconnected insights that emerge from real-time collaboration.

Documentation typically captures facts and data points, but rarely preserves the actual memories and the "why" behind decisions, the evolution of ideas, or the resolution of disagreements that shaped final outcomes. When teams need to understand the reasoning behind past choices or avoid repeating previous mistakes, static files offer little help.

Our meeting-first approach

This is why we've chosen to focus on meetings as the primary source for building long-term organizational memory. Meetings remain one of the few places where teams create shared context and memories in real-time. Unlike documentation, which is often created after the fact, meetings capture the live process of thinking, debate, and decision-making.

The most important aspect of any meeting isn't just the decisions reached, but the clarity it creates for the team. Meetings surface disagreements, refine ideas, and ensure alignment on why something matters. Yet approximately 70% of meeting outcomes are never tracked after the session ends - ideas and commitments that are born during discussions often die before implementation begins.

This represents a massive loss of organizational intelligence. Without proper memory systems, companies experience the decision decay, where commitments made in meetings lose their perceived importance within days, and the reasoning behind strategic choices becomes lost to time.

Building a dynamic memory system

Creating effective organizational memory requires moving beyond storage to activation. It's not enough to capture information; you must recall and activate memory at the right time and place, without prompting, and at scale. Our approach centers on a six-step process that transforms raw meeting content into actionable organizational knowledge:

1. Capture context

Rather than simply recording transcripts, we focus on capturing the ideas, memories, and knowledge that emerge during meetings, including the reasoning behind decisions and the evolution of thinking.

2. Define actionable elements

Raw conversation is processed and distilled into clear decisions, action items, and reusable knowledge components that can inform future decisions.

3. Create interconnections

Information is linked across projects, timeframes, and team boundaries, creating a web of organizational knowledge rather than isolated data silos.

4. Surface relevant context

The system proactively resurfaces relevant historical context when teams are making related decisions, preventing the reinvention of solutions and repetition of past mistakes.

5. Reinforcement through integration

Memory is reinforced during future meetings, onboarding processes, workshops, and retrospectives, ensuring knowledge becomes embedded in organizational culture.

6. Continuous update and refinement

The memory system evolves continuously, with outdated information being updated or replaced to maintain relevance and accuracy.

The competitive advantage

Organizations that successfully implement these dynamic institutional memory systems gain significant competitive advantages:

Reduced knowledge erosion: When employees leave, their insights and reasoning remain accessible to remaining team members, minimising the typical knowledge loss associated with turnover.

Accelerated decision-making: Teams can quickly access the context and reasoning behind past decisions, avoiding lengthy re-investigations and enabling faster, more informed choices.

Improved consistency: With clear visibility into past decisions and their outcomes, organizations can maintain consistency in their approach while still adapting to new circumstances.

Enhanced onboarding: New team members can quickly understand not just what decisions were made, but why they were made, accelerating their integration into existing projects and cultures.

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The future of organizational intelligence

We strongly think that the companies that will thrive in the coming decades are those that recognise knowledge management as a core competitive capability. As business environments become increasingly complex and team compositions more fluid, the ability to maintain institutional memory becomes not just valuable, but essential.

Traditional approaches of storing static documents and hoping for the best are insufficient for modern organizational challenges. The future belongs to companies that can create living, breathing memory systems - ones that actively connect past experiences to present needs and surface insights exactly when they're most valuable.

The question isn't whether your organization has valuable knowledge and memories worth preserving. It's whether you have the systems in place to capture, connect, and activate that knowledge when it matters most.

Organizations that solve this challenge won't just avoid repeating past mistakes - they'll build upon past successes in ways their competitors cannot match. In an economy where intellectual capital increasingly drives value creation, organizational memory may well become the ultimate differentiator.

— Internode Team

Connect with us via LinkedIn to learn how Internode can help your team capture, connect, and act on the knowledge hiding in plain sight in your meetings.

This isn't hypothetical. It happened to us at Internode, and it revealed a truth about modern workplace productivity: We're suffering from a collective meeting memory loss, and it's costing businesses billions.

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The scale of meeting memory loss

Our experience isn't unique. Recent industry research reveals that while organizations spend roughly 15% of their collective working hours in meetings, only 11% of meetings are considered truly productive. In the United States alone, $37 billion is lost annually to unproductive meetings, with 24 billion hours wasted each year due to ineffective collaboration.

But here's what's even more concerning: these statistics only measure obviously unproductive meetings. What about the seemingly "good" meetings where decisions are made, ideas are shared - but then immediately forgotten?

The "Monkey Brain" Problem

We've jokingly referred to our human limitation as having a "monkey brain" – we simply cannot retain more than 5 pieces of information from any single meeting. This isn't a personal failing: It's a fundamental cognitive constraint that affects everyone from entry-level employees to C-suite executives.

Think about your last important meeting. How many specific decisions can you recall without checking your notes? How many brilliant ideas died in that room because no one captured them? How many action items got lost in translation between the meeting and your task management system?

The average employee spends 31 hours per month in meetings, yet we're systematically losing the majority of the value created in those rooms. It's like having a bucket with holes in the bottom - no matter how much we pour in, most of it leaks out.

Data vs. Knowledge

This realization led us to a fundamental question. A question that we are still figuring out: What's the difference between data and knowledge?

Most meeting tools today are data collectors. They transcribe conversations, record videos, and create searchable archives. But data without context is just noise. When you store a 2-hour meeting transcript without extracting the decisions, connections, and actionable insights, you've captured data – not knowledge.

Knowledge is different. Knowledge happens when you:

• Take raw meeting data and put it into context

• Connect decisions to the people responsible for executing them

• Link ideas across different meetings and timeframes

• Create patterns that inform future decisions

• Apply insights at the appropriate moment

We've mastered data capturing, but we're still primitive at knowledge creation. This is why companies can have hundreds of hours of recorded meetings yet still ask questions like "What did we decide about the Chicago office move?" or "Who was supposed to handle the vendor negotiation?"

The Hidden Costs of Meeting Amnesia

The financial impact goes far beyond the obvious $37 billion in wasted meeting time. Consider these hidden costs:

Repeated Decisions: How often do teams re-discuss the same topics because previous decisions weren't properly captured or connected? Our research suggests many decisions get made 2-3 times before they stick.

Lost Innovation: Ideas are fragile. They're born during collaborative moments but die quickly if no one advocates for them. How many breakthrough innovations have been forgotten in the span between a meeting ending and participants returning to their desks?

Misaligned Execution: When action items aren't clearly captured and assigned, teams work on overlapping tasks or, worse - nothing at all. One user told us about attending business meetings where transcripts were recorded but never reviewed – static data points gathering digital dust.

Compound Knowledge Loss: Unlike individual productivity losses, knowledge loss compounds over time. Each forgotten decision makes future decisions harder. Each lost connection makes pattern recognition more difficult.

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The Solution: Extending the shelf life of ideas

At Internode, we're working to solve this by automatically transforming meeting data into actionable knowledge. Our system doesn't just transcribe – it identifies decisions, assigns responsibilities, connects related discussions across time, and surfaces relevant context when you need it most.

But the solution isn't just technological; it's also philosophical. We need to fundamentally change how we think about meetings: from data-generating events to knowledge-creation sessions.

Here are immediate steps any team can take today:

1. Assign a knowledge keeper: Designate someone (rotate this role) to capture not just what was said, but what was decided and who owns what.

2. Connect the dots: After each meeting, spend 5 minutes connecting new decisions to previous discussions and existing projects.

3. Make ideas visible: Create a shared space where meeting insights can live and be referenced across your organization.

4. Review and resurface: Build time into your workflow to review previous meeting knowledge before making related decisions.

The future of meeting intelligence

We're entering an era where meeting intelligence will become as important as business intelligence. Companies that master the transition from data to knowledge will have a massive competitive advantage. They'll make faster decisions, avoid repeated mistakes, and build on previous innovations rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.

The question isn't whether you're having productive meetings - it's whether you're capturing and building on the knowledge created in those meetings. Ready to discover how many decisions you're actually making? Connect with us to learn how Internode can help your team capture, connect, and act on the knowledge hiding in plain sight in your meetings.

Interested in joining our ongoing discussion about the future of workplace knowledge and meeting intelligence? Follow our updates on LinkedIn where we share insights, research, and practical tips for transforming how teams collaborate and capture knowledge. Also we are opening our Discord channel soon, to talk more about the future of collaboration!

Over the past several weeks, we've been documenting our meeting behaviors while using Internode in production. What started as product development quickly became a fascinating experiment in organizational transformation. Today, we're sharing some results and specific recommendations that emerged from this process.

During our extensive user research, candidates consistently identified meetings as collaboration's primary bottleneck. Despite decades of technological advancement, meeting structures remain fundamentally unchanged. We're conducting the same types of sessions our predecessors held years ago, yet our digital infrastructure has created an illusion that more meetings equal better control.

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The problems we discovered

Before Internode's intervention, our meeting culture exhibited several problematic patterns. We conducted marathon 2.5-hour sessions that attempted to cover everything from strategic planning to technical implementation. These extended sessions suffered from the fundamental limitation of human attention spans - no mind can maintain meaningful focus for multiple hours.

Our conversations frequently lacked structure, with valuable insights disappearing into the void of unrecorded discussion. Action items emerged organically but rarely translated into concrete, trackable deliverables. Some team members found themselves trapped in sessions where their expertise wasn't required, yet social dynamics prevented early departure.

What the data revealed

Once we began using Internode systematically, the platform's analytical capabilities immediately surfaced patterns we hadn't recognized. The system identified conversation drift, measured speaking time distribution, and flagged instances where discussions became too abstract to generate actionable outcomes.

Most significantly, Internode's post-meeting analysis revealed that our supposedly "quick" daily stand-ups regularly devolved into feature demonstrations and architectural debates. The platform's coaching functionality provided specific feedback about who was driving these conversations off-course and suggested concrete interventions.

Eight implemented strategies, that made our meetings and culture better:

1. Meeting duration optimization

Internode's first major recommendation addressed our extended session problem. The platform analysed our engagement patterns and suggested breaking our 2.5-hour Monday marathon into more focused sessions. So we broke the long session into a 15-minute daily stand-up, a dedicated sprint grooming session, and a separate ideation meeting.

Result: Our Monday productivity increased measurably, with each session maintaining sharp focus throughout its duration.

2. AI-Powered agenda generation

Prior to meetings, each founder now submits key discussion points and action items through Internode's pre-meeting interface. The platform synthesizes these inputs into coherent agendas that prevent important topics from being overlooked while maintaining logical flow.

This systematic approach eliminated our previous habit of entering meetings with vague intentions and hoping productive discussions would emerge organically.

3. Real-time meeting performance analytics

Perhaps Internode's most valuable feature is its ability to provide immediate feedback on meeting effectiveness. The system tracks conversation patterns, identifies when discussions drift from agenda items, and suggests course corrections in real-time.

For example, when our daily stand-ups began incorporating technical demonstrations, Internode flagged this pattern and recommended establishing separate technical review sessions. This coaching functionality has proven invaluable for maintaining meeting discipline.

4. Abstract discussion into concrete deliverables

Before implementing Internode, our meetings generated many aspirational statements, like:

• "We should update the website"

• "The user interface needs improvement"

• "Marketing messaging requires revision."

These vague commitments rarely translated into completed work.

This conclusion really changed the way we talk about tasks during the meeting. Instead of website updates, we often specify it, like: "Balazs will revise the hero section copy and implement new CTA button design by Tuesday, 5 PM." Each task includes assigned responsibility, specific scope, and defined deadline.

Impact: Our task completion rate has improved dramatically since implementing this systematic approach.

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5. If you’re not needed - you can leave!

We introduced a new concept: permission to leave meetings when your contribution is no longer required. The platform's agenda analysis identifies which team members need to participate in specific discussion segments, enabling strategic entry and exit.

This addresses a critical industry problem - research indicates over 50% of meeting participants multitask during sessions because they're trapped in discussions that don't require their input. Our new approach allows participants to leave conversations, where they are not needed - while ensuring they receive summaries of any decisions affecting their work.

6. Enhanced context specification

Internode's transcription analysis revealed that our internal conversations often relied on shared context that wouldn't be clear to external observers or future reference. The platform began flagging instances where we used vague references like "the website task" instead of specific identifiers.

Now we systematically provide complete context. This specificity benefits both our AI analysis and human team members who might reference these discussions later.

7. Specialized meeting templates

Through usage analysis, we identified that our different meeting types required distinct preparation and summary approaches. Daily sync sessions need progress updates and blocker identification, while ideation meetings should capture creative insights and exploration paths.

The platform now provides specialized templates for each meeting category:

• Sync meetings: Progress, obstacles, next actions

• Creative sessions: Ideas, concepts, strategic possibilities

• Client communications: Key decisions, Commitment tracking

8. Designated leadership

We’ve identified that leaderless meetings consistently produced suboptimal outcomes. Without designated facilitation, conversations drift when participants go off-topic, important agenda items get skipped, and group dynamics prevent necessary interventions.

We now assign specific meeting leaders who bear responsibility for maintaining focus, ensuring agenda completion, and managing time allocation. This role rotates among team members but remains clearly defined for each session.

Broader applications

While our results demonstrate Internode's effectiveness, many underlying principles can be implemented manually in any team, even without using Internode.

Immediate implementations: Reduce meeting durations by 25-50% and observe results. Create detailed agendas before every session. Convert general discussions into specific, assigned deliverables. Establish clear meeting leadership roles.

Strategic changes: Allow relevant participants to leave early when appropriate. Implement different preparation approaches for different meeting types. Provide specific context rather than relying on shared assumptions.

Looking forward

Our commitment to self-experimentation continues as we approach Internode's public beta launch. We're testing additional platform recommendations and will share results as they develop. This ongoing process ensures that every feature we release has been validated through real-world usage by demanding users: Ourselves.

The transformation we've experienced reinforces our conviction that meeting efficiency isn't just about time management - it's about fundamentally improving how teams collaborate, make decisions, and execute on shared objectives.

We're actively seeking beta users who want to experience these improvements firsthand. If you're interested in implementing Internode within your organization, please contact us directly through LinkedIn or respond to this newsletter. We'd welcome the opportunity to demonstrate these capabilities and gather your feedback as we prepare for broader release.

Best regards,
The Internode Founding Team

P.S. Our documentation of this transformation process will continue throughout our beta phase. What specific meeting challenges would you like us to address in future experiments? Your input directly influences our development roadmap.

The reality check that changed everything

When you're building a startup, you learn quickly that your grand vision needs to meet reality. You can't accomplish everything at once - you need to start small, move fast, and deliver value immediately. So we stepped back from our ambitious goal of creating a comprehensive organizational intelligence platform and asked ourselves: What's the smallest, most valuable thing we can build right now?

We did what any smart team does - we talked to users. Dozens of them. Startup founders, enterprise leaders, engineers, project managers. We asked about their biggest collaboration challenges and daily frustrations to see where can we start our journey on changing the way people collaborate.

The answer was unanimous: meetings.

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The $40 Billion problem nobody talks about

Here's what's happening right now across corporate America:

• 50 million meetings happen every single day in the US

• The average professional spends 392 hours per year in meetings

• Meetings consume about 15% of total work time

• 70% of these meetings are considered unproductive

According to Atlassian's research, this translates to a $40 billion annual loss in the US alone. We're literally burning money in conference rooms and Zoom calls.

Why meetings are broken (but essential)

During our interviews, we discovered a paradox: People hate meetings, but they can't stop having them. Why? Because meetings serve a critical purpose. They're how humans sync their brains, where ideas collide, decisions get made, and teams align. Face-to-face collaboration is irreplaceable for creative problem-solving.

But here's where things go wrong:

Knowledge evaporates. Just think about it: Do you remember your last meeting? What were the action items? Who was responsible for what? All those valuable discussions, brilliant ideas, and decisions vanish the moment everyone logs off.

No accountability. Tasks get mentioned but not tracked. Responsibilities are vaguely assigned but never followed up. The same issues resurface meeting after meeting because nobody remembers what was decided.

Too many people, too little value. We invite everyone "just in case." Half the room is checking email while pretending to listen.

The documentation nightmare. Large companies literally hire people whose sole job is to prep executives for meetings, take notes, and track action items. That's how broken this system is - we need human middleware just to make meetings functional.

The current meeting culture

Think about how much has changed in the last 20 years. We've revolutionized how we communicate (Slack), manage projects (Jira), and store information (Notion). But meetings? They're essentially the same as they were in 1950, just with video cameras.

We've accepted meeting inefficiencies as inevitable. We treat lost knowledge, forgotten tasks, and wasted time as the cost of doing business.

But what if they don't have to be?

Rethinking meetings from the ground up

This is where our pivot comes in. We're not just putting a band-aid on bad meetings - we're reimagining how meetings should work in the age of AI. Our first product fundamentally changes how your team collaborates:

Automatic capture and connection. Insights, decisions, and action items get captured automatically. We connect these insights across time and meetings, building a living knowledge base that grows smarter with every conversation.

Intelligent task tracking. No more "wait, who was supposed to do that?" Our system automatically identifies tasks, assigns them to the right people, and tracks progress without anyone lifting a finger.

Meeting intelligence. Should this meeting even happen? Could it be an email? Are the right people invited? Our platform helps you make these decisions before wasting everyone's time.

Real-time enhancement. Eventually, we'll be there during your meetings, surfacing relevant past decisions, suggesting agenda items based on project status, and ensuring every minute counts.

Why this matters now

We're at an inflection point. AI can now understand context, extract meaning, and connect dots in ways impossible just a few years ago. We finally have the technology to solve the meeting problem - not by having fewer meetings, but by making them actually work. This isn't about replacing human collaboration. It's about amplifying it. When humans come together to solve problems and make decisions, none of that valuable thinking should get lost.

The road ahead

Our ultimate vision remains building an organizational intelligence layer that transforms how companies make decisions and collaborate. But we're starting with meetings because that's where the pain is most acute and the value most immediate.

In the coming weeks, we'll release our beta. It won't be perfect - no MVP ever is. But it will be the first step toward a future where meetings actually move work forward.

We're not just building a product; we're starting a movement to fix collaboration culture. If we can save even a fraction of that $40 billion being wasted on bad meetings, if we can give people back even a few hours of their week, if we can ensure that brilliant ideas don't disappear - that's a future worth building.

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Join us in reimagining Collaboration

If you're tired of meetings that go nowhere, if you've watched great ideas die because nobody wrote them down, if you believe collaboration should be better - we want to hear from you.

We're looking for beta testers ready to challenge the status quo. People who believe that just because something has always been done a certain way doesn't mean it should continue. Want to be part of the solution? Subscribe to our newsletter for updates and early access to our beta. Drop us a message if you want to see what we're building.

Because it's time meetings started working for us, not the other way around.

— Istvan, Sean, Balazs

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The enterprise trap we almost fell into

When we started Internode, we fell into the enterprise trap - bringing methodologies focused on thorough planning, extensive documentation, and polished deliverables into our startup environment. We initially tried to apply these same approaches to our young company, and it nearly killed our momentum.

We found ourselves spending weeks perfecting processes, creating elaborate flowcharts, and building comprehensive systems before shipping anything to users. This approach works in large organizations with established markets and predictable timelines, but for a startup trying to find product-market fit, it's a recipe for disaster.

The wake-up call came when we realized we were optimizing for perfection instead of learning.

The human brain limitation

Here's a fascinating insight that fundamentally shaped Internode's development philosophy: humans can only hold approximately three pieces of information in their mind simultaneously. This cognitive limitation isn't a bug - it's a feature we can design around. This realization led us to completely restructure how we approach product development. Instead of building monolithic features, we break everything down into small, interconnected elements that can be iterated quickly. Each piece must be valuable on its own, not just a component waiting for other parts to be useful.

The wrong way to build an MVP

Here’s the classic car analogy, that perfectly illustrates where we went wrong:

The wrong approach

Building a car by starting with the chassis, then the engine, then the wheels, and finally the outer shell. You spend months creating components that can't provide any value until the entire system is complete. When you finally test the "car," you discover fundamental flaws that require rebuilding everything.

The right approach

Start with a skateboard. It gets users from point A to point B (solving the core transportation problem). Then iterate to a bicycle, then a motorcycle, and eventually a car. Each step provides immediate value while teaching you about user needs and technical constraints. The key insight: every iteration should solve the core problem, just at different levels of sophistication.

We know it sounds logical, but when you’re deep in the process, juggling multiple environments, projects, over 10 tasks, and upcoming deadlines your body and mind can easily switch back to safety mode because quick, iterative design is outside their comfort zone.

How we applied this to Internode

Our current alpha version looks nothing like our final vision. It's slow, it has bugs, and honestly, we weren't confident about showing it to users. But that discomfort was exactly the signal we needed to push forward.

Instead of waiting for perfection, we conducted user interviews with eight real users using our imperfect MVP. The results? It was the most valuable two weeks we've spent as a company. The feedback we received wasn't just helpful - it was transformational. Users highlighted problems we never anticipated and validated assumptions we weren't sure about. Most importantly, we could implement changes within hours or days, not weeks.

Our new blog post philosophy

We applied this same thinking to our content strategy. Initially, we spent three to four days creating elaborate processes for blog posts - optimizing distribution, creating visual assets, establishing review cycles. We were building a content factory before we knew what content worked. Quality isn't always the most important metric - time to value often matters more.

Now? This blog post took roughly one hour to write. Here's why that matters:

• Speed to value: We can share learnings immediately while they're fresh

• Lower stakes: Less time invested means we're more willing to experiment

• Feedback loops: We can test different approaches weekly instead of monthly

• Reduced perfectionism: Focus shifts from polish to value delivery

The sprint model that saved our sanity

We've embraced a sprint-based approach where every week must deliver tangible value to users. This isn't just about development cycles - it's a fundamental shift in how we think about progress.

Instead of asking "Is this feature complete?" we ask:
"What's the smallest valuable thing we can ship this week?"

This mindset change has been transformational:

• Feature requests get addressed in days, not months

• User feedback gets implemented immediately

• We test and iterate 2-3 times per week instead of once per month

• The entire team stays focused on user value, not internal perfection

Advice for Fellow Startup Founders

If you're building a startup and waiting for your product to be "ready" before showing users, you're making the same mistake we almost made. Here's what we've learned:

1. Ship the skateboard version:
   It doesn't matter if it's not pretty - does it solve the core problem?

2. Force yourself to lower time-to-value:
   If a feature takes more than a week to ship, break it down further.

3. Embrace imperfection:
   Perfect is the enemy of shipped. Ship early, get feedback, iterate.

4. Weekly value delivery:
   Every seven days, your users should see something new and valuable.

5. Use the three-piece rule:
   If you can't explain your feature in three simple concepts, it's too complex.

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What's Next for Internode

We're not just preaching this philosophy - we're living it. Every week, we're shipping improvements based on user feedback. We're creating consistent content that shares our learnings in real-time. Most importantly, we're building a product that solves real problems for real people.

This monthly update is part of that commitment. We're sharing our journey, our mistakes, and our discoveries because we believe other founders can benefit from our experience. The bottom line: In the startup world, speed beats perfection, and feedback beats assumptions.

This post represents our thinking as of July 2025. Next month, we'll probably have learned something that changes our perspective - and we'll share that too.

Want to follow our journey? We're always testing, always learning, and always sharing. Follow us for more real-time insights from the startup trenches.

— Internode Team

What’s the paradox? It's harder to make something small out of something big than it is to make something big out of something small.

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And this single insight explains why:

• Why 99% of startups fail

• Why enterprise software sucks

• Why the most successful builders seem to know exactly what to work on next

The Folding Problem

We were having discussion with a founder last week who'd just raised a lot of money. Beautiful deck, incredible vision, team of PhDs. But six months post-funding, they're still architecting the platform. When we asked what users could actually do with their product today, the answer was: nothing. This is what we call the Folding Problem:

In poker, you can fold a small bet when you realize you're beat. But when you've already pushed all your chips to the center of the table betting on a massive, interconnected system, folding becomes existentially impossible. You're pot-committed to complexity. We, at Internode also had to face the brutal truth:

Most builders are terrible at managing the spectrum between atomic and cosmic.

Picture a spectrum. On one end, you have the atomic, the smallest possible thing that creates value. On the other end, you have the cosmic: the grand vision that changes everything. The magic happens in the middle. But here's where it gets interesting: the middle isn't a place.

The best builders we know, the ones who've built products that millions of people actually use, they're constantly dancing between atomic and cosmic. They're thinking in decades while shipping in days. They're building cathedrals one brick at a time, but they know exactly which brick to place next. In our experience, shifting between “atomic” and “cosmic” thinking is extremely challenging especially for us technical founders. All too often, we found ourselves talking only about our vision and deep technical solutions, yet never actually shipping anything. This became a major issue, until our two-week retreat in Lake Tahoe, that helped us break the cycle and change our mindset.

Why MVP is a Lie

Let's be honest: MVP has become the most abused acronym in tech. Everyone thinks they understand it, but most people use it as an excuse to ship mediocre products. The real MVP isn't about building the minimum. It's about building the meaningful minimum. There's a profound difference!

A minimum product is the smallest thing you can build. A meaningful minimum is the smallest thing that creates a complete emotional experience for your user. One is about you. The other is about them.

When Uber launched, they didn't build a "minimum viable transportation platform." They built a magical experience where you press a button and a car appears. That's not minimum that's meaningful. This is why enterprise software is universally terrible. When you're selling to committees instead of individuals, when you're building for procurement processes instead of human experiences, you lose the ability to start small and meaningful.

Enterprise buyers insist on feature matrices they need to tick every box. So you end up cobbling together a Frankenstein’s monster of half-baked features nobody really wants. You optimize for the sale, not the experience. The result? Software that costs millions and makes everyone’s life worse. We all know which products fall into this trap (ahem, Teams).

Here's the thing that not many people talks about: leadership involvement is both essential and toxic. You need visionary leadership to maintain the cosmic perspective. But too much leadership involvement in day-to-day product decisions creates the exact opposite of what you want. We've seen this pattern dozens of times. CEO has a vision. Product team starts building. CEO sees early version and says, "But what about this other thing from the vision?" Product team pivots. CEO sees that and says, "Wait, but we also need this other thing."

Pretty soon, you're building everything and completing nothing. You're trapped in the middle of the spectrum, oscillating between atomic and cosmic without ever creating anything meaningful.

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The Internode Insight

As technical founders, we fell into the same trap and it was hard to spot, let alone escape. Internode is a bold concept with the power to transform how we interact and work. But we made the classic mistake of trying to build everything big right out of the gate. In our previous post, we explained how we shifted from a tech-centric approach to a human-centric one and how it changed everything. The very essence of Internode - and of us as founders - has since evolved for the better.

The irony is that if we’d begun with something ridiculously small yet meaningful, we’d have learned faster, built better, and likely reached our cosmic vision sooner. At the time, though, starting small felt like a betrayal of that vision it seemed as if thinking too small was somehow wrong. That psychological trap kills most ambitious projects: we conflate “starting small” with “thinking small.” Yet the best builders think cosmically and start atomically.

Users love quality. They also love completeness. But quality and completeness are often in tension with speed and learning. This creates another paradox: you need to ship fast to learn fast, but you need to ship quality to create meaningful experiences:

Instead of asking: "Should we prioritize quality or speed?",

Ask: "What's the smallest thing we can build that feels impossibly good?"

Instead of: "Should we build more features or polish existing ones?",

Ask: "What's the one thing that, if we made it 10x better, would change everything?"

The Airbnb Insight

Brian Chesky tells a story about the early days of Airbnb. They were obsessing over the platform, the payments, the reviews, the scaling challenges. But they were failing. Then they decided to focus on one thing: the experience of the first 10 minutes after a guest arrives. They called hosts. They talked to guests. They optimized that one moment until it was magical. Everything else, the platform, the payments, the reviews, they built around that one meaningful moment. They started atomic and built cosmic.

The Framework

So how do you actually do this? How do you dance between atomic and cosmic without losing your mind? Here's the framework we are integrating at this moment:

• Start with the atomic experience: What's the smallest possible thing that creates a complete emotional experience for one specific person? Not a user. A person with a name and a specific problem.

• Build it impossibly well. Don't build the minimum. Build the meaningful minimum.

• Find the cosmic connection. How does this atomic experience connect to your larger vision? What does it teach you? What does it prove?

• Build the next atomic experience. What's the next smallest thing that builds on what you've learned? What's the next meaningful minimum?

• Repeat until cosmic. Keep building atomic experiences that compound toward your cosmic vision. Each one should be meaningful on its own and essential to the whole.

Most builders fail at this because it requires two skills that seem contradictory: the ability to think big and the discipline to start small. It requires the vision to see the cathedral and the humility to lay one brick at a time. It requires saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to great execution. It requires disappointing stakeholders who want everything so you can delight users who want one thing done impossibly well.

The best builders we know are constantly refining their ability to find the meaningful minimum. It's the difference between building products people have to use and building products people can't live without. We'd love to hear about your experience!

You can contact us at any time on LinkedIn to share your thoughts!

— (Istvan, Sean, Balazs)

- The Founders (Istvan, Sean, Balazs)

The Tahoe Experiment

The three of us traveled to Lake Tahoe and locked ourselves in a cabin for two weeks. As a fully remote team, we thought an intensive in-person session might help us tackle our biggest challenges as founders. Those two weeks felt like a complete startup journey compressed into 14 days: emotional highs and lows, strategic pivots, personal growth, and the exhilarating rush of building something new.

At the beginning of our trip, we got rejected from an accelerator. For a moment we sat in silence, dealing with disappointment, questioning our previous decisions. Had we been wasting time on the wrong vision? That afternoon on the cabin deck, we asked ourselves the hard questions. Why did our pitch fall flat? How come we put so much effort into something and didn't get the desired results?

We had met with many exceptional engineering leaders worldwide who all got excited about our technology, but they struggled to see how they'd actually use Internode in their daily work. Then it hit us: We had been pitching an AI technology, not a real solution to a human problem. In our excitement about deep tech, we'd lost sight of the people we wanted to help.

That realization stung, but it also set us free. When you're the leader, builder, and first user as a startup founder, facing this truth was a breakthrough for us.

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Putting Humans First

We literally pushed our laptops aside and revisited our user interviews. Scanning through the words of our first interview candidates, we began listing the everyday pains people face in workplace collaboration. We focused on finding the first step of productizing our technology. We wanted to find the core problem that everyone faced and what our users would be most excited about. We also conducted online calls and interviews to get more feedback on our business model and product ideas. After hours of discussions, testing prototypes and workshops, a clear pattern emerged.
We had something to start with.

The atmosphere in the cabin completely changed. We weren't building technology anymore - we were building a product, laser-focused on users. Sitting around the hot tub that evening, we brainstormed three product ideas that could use the exceptional tech foundation we'd spent the previous months building. It was a humbling experience, to say the least.

As founders being successful previously in our careers, we thought we knew what was best. But we needed this failure to see that we were building the wrong thing. Our excitement returned, but this time for simplifying instead of adding features. This shift to a human-centered approach cleared our heads, aligned our team, and set us up to build an MVP.

Building Something Real in 10 Days

With our new purpose, we dove into building our minimum viable product. Turning our big vision into something tangible in two weeks seemed impossible, but in retrospect, we created a working MVP in just 10 days. It was tough for us as perfectionists, since the first MVP was clunky, slow, and ugly and lacked any security. Yet in just 10 days, we’d generated more value for customers than we had in the months since our April kickoff.

There were embarrassing moments. Our first demo took nearly 20 minutes to generate output. We looked at each other anxiously, would any user wait that long? When we finally got our deployment pipeline working, we were extremely happy. It might sound silly, but for us it meant the difference between a project and a real product we could put in users' hands.

Building the MVP wasn't just about code, planning or design - it was about something much more: rebuilding ourselves as a team. Late nights debugging turned into deep conversations about what we want Internode to stand for. That night, we talked about our vision of helping teams make better decisions and how that mission needs to shine through every design choice we make.

The Power of Retros: Learning About Ourselves

We all acknowledge the mistakes we made in the past. From now on, we need to focus on avoiding them and consciously building Internode. Having an open discussion and agreeing that we’ll succeed only if we take full ownership, identify our missteps, and actively prevent them from happening again was crucial.

Through these personal retrospectives, we uncovered weaknesses and rediscovered strengths. More importantly, we created a space where calling out our own shortcomings wasn't seen as failure, but as growth. It was heartening to see us back each other up. This level of trust and mutual support has been one of the week's greatest outcomes. We grew not just as a company, but as people.

Perhaps the most profound lesson from this week is the value of saying "no" to distractions, to unnecessary features, even to good ideas that just aren't great right now. Anything that didn't serve that goal had to be reconsidered or dropped. And you know what? Saying "no" was hard at first, but quickly became liberating. We saw immediate improvements once we adopted this focus. Our sprint planning became sharper - we set clear, quantifiable goals and stuck to them.

This philosophy also extended to work-life balance. We realized that focusing on what matters meant not only saying no to unnecessary work, but also knowing when to step away and recharge. One afternoon, we all said "no" to building for a couple of hours and went on a hike along a scenic mountain trail. That break - that deliberate refusal to grind non-stop, paid dividends. It reinforced that every "yes" is a trade-off, and every well-placed "no" protects our energy and attention for what truly matters.

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Looking Ahead: A New Chapter Begins

As we write this from our homes, there's a sense we're closing one chapter of our startup story and beginning another. The emotional rollercoaster from accelerator rejection to technical breakthroughs bonded us in unexpected ways.

We came home with a working MVP, clearer vision, and stronger team. More importantly, we're carrying a new mindset: one that balances our passion for deep AI technology with unwavering commitment to solve real human problems.

The early-stage startup journey is often portrayed as relentless optimism and quick success, but the truth is it's messy, humbling, and incredibly human. In those two weeks, we felt despair, hope, frustration, joy, doubt, and confidence. We learned to check our egos, embrace brutal feedback, trust each other deeply, and celebrate small wins.

To fellow early-stage founders and everyone following our journey: we hope sharing our real experience gives you a window into what this path is actually like. It's not easy, but it's worth it.

– The Internode Founders

First of all, thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Here are some updates about what we have been doing in the past month:

March was a pivotal month for Internode, focused on expanding our reach through partnerships, product demonstrations, pitching, and blog content releases. Our core priorities remain finalizing our MVP, enhancing our content strategy, securing additional design partners, and preparing for upcoming fundraising initiatives.

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Highlights from March

• Successfully tested all MVP components in a controlled environment

• Began collaborations with our first two design partners, creating customized features for their specific needs

• Launched the Internode blog to share company updates alongside "Perspectives" – our platform for sharing knowledge about the AI technologies we're implementing

• Successfully deployed and tested the Internode Content Strategy (ICS)

• Gained over 100 new followers across our platforms following the ICS launch

• Established relationships with 6 potential design partners to help refine our MVP

What's Next for Internode

• Launching our redesigned website in early April

• Preparing applications for accelerator programs that align with our vision

• Developing the complete end-to-end version of our MVP

• Actively seeking at least 5 additional design partners to test our current MVP

• Releasing our development board publicly to gather feature recommendations and problem-solving insights

• Continuing to build traction through our content platforms – incorporating feedback to create and launch Internode Content Strategy v2

How You Can Help

We welcome your feedback on our new website and on all our blog post. Your insights are valuable to us! Please contact us or reply to this newsletter with your thoughts.

• Investors: We're seeking strategic partners for our upcoming funding round

• Experts: If your organization struggles with data overload and you believe Internode could help, please contact us to share your thoughts

• Design Partners*: If you're interested in experiencing Internode's impact on your workflows and gaining early access to our research and insights, we'd love to connect

*Design partners are the pioneering users and teams who help us refine our problem space and shape our solutions as we prepare our product for market. We're looking for companies or teams of up to 15 people who face challenges with disconnected tools, excessive sync meetings, workflow visibility issues, time-consuming reporting processes, and team sync difficulties.

Thank you for your continued support!

Feel free to reply to this email or message us on LinkedIn.

— The Internode Team

In our previous post, we introduced Internode and our mission to transform how people collaborate. As founders of Internode, we've spent our careers in domains with extreme complexities, like space technology, engineering systems, and military projects – where collaboration mistakes have serious consequences.

Nevertheless, the cracks in modern collaboration are consistent across all industries. Teams struggle to maintain healthy collaboration frameworks, leading to wasted time, duplicated efforts, endless meetings and critical errors. According to Gartner, 47% of digital workers report difficulty finding essential information needed to perform their jobs effectively. To prevent collaboration from breaking down, we are naturally tying to fill these cracks with new tools, emails, sync meetings, rules, inefficient practices, and additional tasks. Many people accept these methods, thinking this is the best we can do as this is peak human collaboration.

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Why is this happening now?

Our corporate environments have become increasingly intricate over the past three decades. While we've advanced from floppy disks to cloud storage, our collaboration methods haven't kept pace with technological advancements. This growing disconnect explains why so many professionals feel overwhelmed by information yet starved for real actionable insights. We believe that we’ve reached a breaking point in human collaboration, where project complexity exceeds human limitations to such an extent that the only way to manage it is by injecting extra documentation, meetings, and time-consuming busywork.

The science behind:
Working Memory Limitations (WML)

At the core of our collaboration challenges lies a fundamental human limitation: our working memory capacity. Working memory is the brain's active processing system – the mental workspace where we manage information. Research consistently shows that most adults can only hold 3-5 meaningful items in working memory at once. This biological constraint made sense for our ancestors but creates significant bottlenecks in today's information-rich environments. One hypotheses suggests that the reason for this “limitation” - is that it would be biologically too expensive for the brain to have a larger working memory capacity.

Although digital computers have larger working memory limits but lack the creative problem-solving abilities that make humans essential to complex processes. The ideal solution leverages both human creativity and computational power – a principle that guides Internode's approach.

“No matter how powerful and sophisticated a computer system or piece of software may be, people remain integral to design, information production, and construction processes.”

Why this matters more than ever

Today's projects involve numerous touchpoints across complex hardware integrations and real-time data streams. Human involvement remains crucial at every step; thus, technology and culture must evolve together. Simply upgrading tools isn't enough; teams must be willing to challenge old practices and embrace innovative solutions.

At Internode, we've dedicated significant time to researching these collaboration challenges and developing solutions tailored to address them directly. We’ve conducted multiple interviews with professionals across different industries to identify common challenges teams face. Based on our in-depth research, we are refining our approach to meet these needs and solve real human challenges. Our solution leverages cutting-edge technologies like Knowledge Graphs and AI-driven retrieval systems while prioritizing human experience - reducing busywork and enhancing high-impact contributions.

(The whole research documentation will be shared separately in a later post.)

The six collaboration gaps costing your team

Through the interviews we've identified six critical collaboration gaps:

1. Version Hell: "Which document is the latest?"
   Multiple team members updating files simultaneously leads to confusion.

2. The Ghost Hunt: "Where is that critical document?"
   Important information hides across various platforms - email threads, Slack channels, local drives, forcing hours of searching.

3. Data War: "Why do our numbers differ?"
   When departments use separate systems, discrepancies arise that snowball into distrust and poor decision-making.

4. Permission Purgatory: "Can someone grant me access?"
   Strict security protocols create delays that hinder project timelines.

5. The Sync Dance: “Are all these tools even integrated?"
   Disconnected systems require manual data entry, which is error-prone and exhausting.

6. Spreadsheet Spaghetti: "Who updated this mess the last?"
   Spreadsheets used for large-scale data aggregation become tangled webs without a single source of truth.

Don't accept the status quo

Humans are naturally adaptive. But sometimes, this adaptability leads us to accept inefficiencies that shouldn’t be normalized. Ask yourself: Is the way we collaborate truly the best we can do, or is it simply the way things have been done before? Here’s a popular one-minute video that we came across one day and all of us founders resonated with it. The video show exactly why we should question the status quo.

With Internode, knowledge finds you!

Internode is an AI-enhanced, next-generation collaboration platform that collect various structured and unstructured data sources of an organization, turning it into actionable digital knowledge to address collaboration challenges and decision-making bottlenecks.

1. Eliminate Lost Information: Our system identifies missing information hidden in private chat discussions and surfaces it to the right people.

2. Automated Data Preparation: Our system automatically cleans, standardizes, and validates both structured and unstructured data, eliminating manual preprocessing—which typically consumes 60–80% of data analysis time.

3. Contextual Permission Management: Instead of relying on static access controls, permissions adapt to the context of the information, ensuring the right people have access at the right time without requiring manual approvals.

4. AI-Powered Information Retrieval: Our system understands the intent behind searches, delivering relevant content even when the exact document name or location is unknown. Internode intelligently connects the right information to the right person at the right time.

5. Supporting Decision-Making: By seamlessly capturing and structuring 90% of an organization’s data, Internode transforms fragmented information into actionable insights. Our AI-driven approach ensures that teams have real-time access to critical context, reducing blind spots and enabling faster, more accurate decision-making.

While this vision may seem ambitious, consider how quickly we adapted from manual saves to auto-save features in cloud applications. Cultural shifts may take time, but once a better way is recognized, it quickly becomes the norm. With a precise solution we can stop information to be lost in private channels, keep all neccessary team member in the loop automatically behind the scenes and connect the right information to the right people at the right times.

Take action today

While we continue building our technology, here are immediate steps you can take to improve collaboration: By addressing the previous inefficiencies directly - you can free yourselves up for more meaningful work, accelerate innovation, and reclaim precious time for what truly matters.

1. Identify Your Biggest Bottleneck: Focus on the task that consumes most of your time - whether it’s searching for files or waiting for approvals.

2. Quantify the Cost: To get a clearer picture of its impact, estimate how many hours per week (per person) your identified bottleneck wastes.

3. Implement a Quick Fix: Consider simple standards like naming conventions or centralizing documents on one platform to significantly reduce wasted time.

4. Educate & Advocate: Share your findings with colleagues. Recognizing common pain points helps shift mindsets toward viewing them as solvable issues rather than inevitable frustrations.

5. Stay Curious: Keep an eye on emerging tools and practices that could streamline your processes. Even small improvements can build momentum for larger changes down the road.

Ready to bridge your collaboration gap?

In the upcoming weeks, we’ll delve deeper into each collaboration challenge and demonstrate how people in all industries can reclaim valuable productivity hours through innovative solutions, make better - more informed decisions and explore how AI can unify teams across departments.

So, what’s next?

• Join our early access program:
  Sign up at Internode to be among the first to experience our platform and news.

• Follow our Journey: Connect with us on LinkedIn for weekly insights and updates on our development.

• Follow Perspectives: Our platform for sharing stories and insights to help everyone understand the foundations of AI!

• In case of any questions: Contact us at contact@internode.ai

Let's transform how teams collaborate in complex environments – together.

— The Internode Founding Team

We've completed an exceptionally productive month, successfully achieving many of our planned milestones. Now, we are entering a phase where we can share more about our solution and upcoming initiatives. Our primary focus remains on finalizing our MVP, refining our content strategy, looking for design partners* and preparing for the kick-off of fundraising in the near future.

Highlights from the past month:

• We have launched the alpha MVP version of Internode, which is capable of ingesting data, creating AI agents, and building a dynamic knowledge graph.

• We are refining our military solution, tailoring it for real-world DoD requirements.

• We are preparing our pitch deck for fundraising in March.

• We are ready with our content strategy and already published our introduction post on LinkedIn and our blog. (Link to post)

• We engaged with numerous founders in the same AI space to share knowledge and establish connections.

What's next for us?

• Refining our pitch deck to prepare for the fundraising kickoff.

• Expanding our blog to document Internode's progress.

• New MVP features: Merging knowledge graphs, Developing research agents

• Productization: Seeking design partners to validate real-world applications.

• Releasing Perspective: Our dedicated platform to share more knowledge about the AI technologies we are using and implementing.

How you can help:

We are seeking feedback on our new website and introduction post. Your insights are valuable to us! Please contact us or reply to this newsletter with your thoughts.

• Investors: We are seeking strategic partners for our upcoming funding round!

• Experts: If you are addressing complex collaboration challenges, we would appreciate the opportunity to discuss it.

• Design Partners: If you are interested in testing Internode's impact on your workflows and gaining early access to Internode's research and insights, please contact us!

Design partners:* Design partners are the first few users and teams we enlist to help us refine our company's problem space and help us shape the solutions as we gear up our product for market. We are looking for companies or teams, up to 15 people who always find themselves bogged down by disconnected tools, endless sync meetings, not knowing what others are working on, having to spend significant time on creating reports, and syncing with other people and teams.

Please feel free to reply to this email or message us on LinkedIn!

Thank you!

— Internode Team

Many professionals, especially in complex industries like aerospace, space, defense and robotics are grappling with outdated collaboration practices that consumes time, energy, and creativity. In these areas the ability to prioritize the right ideas, track roadmaps, and maintain product quality can mean the difference between success and failure. The root cause is that we have reached a breaking point in human collaboration, where we attempt to bridge the gap between project complexity and our cognitive limits through activities like meetings, busy work, keeping everybody updated. Is this what we envisioned decades ago when we created computers to assist us with our tasks to create a better future?

At Internode, we believe there’s a better way to work together.

Despite technological advancements over the past few decades, collaboration methods have often lagged behind. Currently, nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need and we waste prescious time on redundant tasks - time that could be spent on meaningful work. This inefficiency is particularly concerning in high-stakes environments where precision is critical.

Do you remember the feeling of building something truly extraordinary, pushing the boundaries of what's possible? We, the founders of Internode, do - and it does not include sifting through Excel sheets and emails, sitting in endless sync meetings, comparing documents to find the most up-to-date version, or spending hours just to make a single well-informed decision. We've spent our careers operating in domains where complexity is the norm and decisions have life-altering consequences. Internode was born from a deep conviction that there's a better way. We believe that organizations, especially those tackling the most complex challenges, deserve a new operating system for intelligence – one that empowers teams to move from reaction to prediction, from managing complexity to mastering it.

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We have identified several key problems in our current collaboration methods:

Lost in the Chaos: Information overload & disorganization

In fast-paced work environments, teams struggle to keep track of the latest versions of critical documents. A single misstep in version control can lead to outdated files, lost edits, and duplicated work. At the same time, vital information is often scattered across multiple platforms - email threads, Slack channels, shared drives - forcing employees to waste valuable time searching for the right file. When information is fragmented and difficult to locate, decision-making slows down, productivity suffers, and frustration grows.

Siloed & Mismatched Data: Trust & access issues

When different teams and departments operate in isolated systems, data inconsistencies are inevitable. One team’s numbers may differ from another’s, leading to confusion, misaligned strategies, and distrust in the data. The problem is further compounded by access restrictions that create bottlenecks, where team members spend more time waiting for permissions than actually using the data. By the time access is granted, the information may already be outdated, slowing down workflows and causing unnecessary delays.

Inefficient Workflows: Tools that obstruct rather than assist

Despite the promise of seamless digital collaboration, many teams find themselves bogged down by disconnected tools. Information doesn’t flow smoothly between platforms, requiring manual copying, pasting, and data entry - introducing errors and wasting effort. Spreadsheets, often used as makeshift databases, become sprawling and unmanageable, making it difficult to track changes or trust the data. Instead of enabling productivity, these inefficiencies turn simple tasks into tedious coordination efforts, preventing teams from focusing on meaningful work.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! Computers, cloud computing, and other technologies promised us greater freedom and efficiency - helping us overcome many limitations. But we've reached a tipping point where we now spend more time preparing and maintaining our work than actually doing it!

Our vision: A new operating system for intelligence

At Internode, we envision a world where organizations operate with unparalleled clarity and agility. Our mission is to provide organizations tackling intricate challenges with a new operating system for intelligence - one that connects the right people with the right information at the right time. We set out to build Internode: to capture the dormant knowledge, make it accessible, and to empower teams to make faster, more informed decisions. Our mission isn’t about pushing yet another software product - it’s about making collaboration more human-centered so people aren’t held back by busy work or data chaos. We believe that new emerging technologies like AI, TGNN, RAG and many more will provide the key to this solution and a start of a new era of human-computer interaction.

Our solution: Engineered Organizational Intelligence (EOI)

Internode is an AI-enhanced, next-generation collaboration platform that collect various structured and unstructured data sources of an organization, turning it into actionable digital knowledge to address collaboration challenges and decision-making bottlenecks. It enables seamless synchronization, so you can focus on your work instead of managing file versions. Collaboration becomes proactive, with tools that guide you rather than just store your work. Permissions adjust effortlessly, removing bottlenecks that slow progress.

Yes, the problems are tough - however, real solutions exist and they’re closer than you think. Accepting inefficiency doesn’t have to be the norm, we can design better systems together. Imagine collaboration working so smoothly you never think about it - that’s our goal. Equipped with the right insights and tools, your organization can navigate complexity without missing a beat. This isn’t just about technology, it’s about changing our approach to collaboration itself.

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As we embark on this journey toward redefining collaboration in complex industries, we invite you to join us in shaping this vision into reality.

Follow us on LinkedIn to stay updated on our progress and our discussions on the steps toward building a better future.

— Internode Founders