friendship and other feelings

Hi friends,

Alex, Shaw, and I have been working on a new project called folsom, and I’m eager to share it with you.

We’re in the midst of a global loneliness epidemic; the deeper I’ve dived into the problem space, the more fascinated I’ve become.

It’s not shocking to hear that human connection is key to happiness. Harvard researchers tracked men in Boston for 85 years and found that “it’s not career achievement, or exercise, or a healthy diet…one thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: Good relationships.” (shamelessly reusing the quote Saumya uses in this awesome post. And there are other studies less dominated by a single gender / race). Think of how much time and money and stress we spend on our careers, our achievements, our diets, our workouts. All are less important to our happiness than our relationships (at least above a certain threshold on Maslow’s hierarchy).

But what’s really shocked me recently is that a strong community — and not just a great life partner, for the record — is not only the most important thing for our mental health, but also for our physical health.

The US Surgeon General recently declared that feeling lonely is more deadly than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Not just for mental health reasons. For physical health. That’s insane!!!

Think of how far society has swung against cigarettes…imagine that level of attention focused on not letting people feel alone. And yes second hand smoke is a big negative externality to smoking, but what if I told you that having a depressed friend makes you six times more likely to be depressed than a happy friend (from a Framingham Heart Study cited in Robin Dunbar’s awesome book Friends). Feelings are contagious!! There are lots of other interesting studies and conclusions, but in my opinion this chart says it all.

On a personal level — this problem space resonates deeply. Last summer I struggled with whether to stay at Palantir or jump into the unknown. I loved so much of the job and the life I’d built at Palantir in NYC, but I felt this itch that there was more. I became increasingly convinced that for me to be as happy as I want to be, it wouldn’t be enough (for me right now — I don’t want to project on anyone else) to double down on rising up the ranks internally or start a b2b saas company that addresses inefficiencies in some business vertical or create LLM infrastructure that lets companies generate content more efficiently (all valuable endeavors that may solve much more specific problems and will probably be more immediately profitable than folsom). And look, the luxury to gaze internally and examine my dissatisfaction is a privilege I don’t take lightly, and I’m extremely grateful to my family and to Palantir for providing me with the space to listen to my intuition.

Long story short, I quit. I went to Bali for a few months to surf and code and more intentionally explore what makes me happy.

I loved a lot of the routine I built for myself out there, but i felt so detached from my friends. And making new friends, real friends, was harder than I expected. I felt really truly bored for the first time in a long time, and a loneliness bubbled up inside me after months of not feeling a deep connection with anyone around me.

I didn’t have the words to identify that emotion at the time, but after hours and hours talking with Alex and Shaw and exploring the research, I started to feel more and more clarity.

Surprise surprise, both for me as an Instagram scroller in Bali as well as for the general population, traditional social isn’t solving the loneliness problem. People are spending more time online, but that time is spent eating digital potato chips, junk food that tastes good in the moment but leaves us hungry for something more (yes, even you Threads).

But…I don’t blame the internet. Nothing about the servers and routers and user-facing javascript bundles mean that the internet has to be a tool of disconnection. That conclusion isn’t logical — the internet allows us to communicate more, not less. Learn more, not less. Understand more, not less.

The internet, AI models, the blockchain, new XR headsets all are just tools. I am convinced that with aligned incentives, the tools that currently pull us apart can be reforged to create stronger bonds between us.

The key is authenticity and vulnerability, and a business model that rewards connecting people to people, not to brands.

That’s why with folsom we’ve started with feelings, the foundation of the human experience.

folsom helps you identify, express, and share your emotions — privately or publicly — and interact with your friends’ emotions.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what matters most? Maybe it’s just me, but when I lose sleep at night it’s because I’m worried about how I made someone feel or how someone made me feel, not about whether a deal was won or lost.

We’re in the early early stages and have many iterations to go. But we have an alpha out on test flight, and its been so fun getting my hands dirty writing code and building features that people I care about can use. If you’re interested in trying out the alpha, or otherwise want to discuss the problem or solution space, let me know! And if you prefer more passively following along, feel free to add your number to our sign-up website here.

A little screenrecording of the current create feeling ux is below, blur is all my own :P

Just like with everything, there have been bumps in the road. There will be more. People I respect have told me that building in social is for naive first-time founders. Someone advocated the other day that we stick to b2b saas because building a home for feelings “sounds like an art project.”

But personally, I’m thrilled to be working on something that might make friends a little more connected and a little less lonely. If that sounds like an art project, then for my next chapter i’ll be an artist.

happy feelings (other ones are great too!) :)