He is building a notebook that doesn't just hold your ideas. It thinks alongside them.
CEO & COFOUNDER — IDEAFLOW INC. · PALO ALTO, CA
Most people open a blank notebook and feel a little alone. Jacob Cole spent years deciding that the blank page should answer back.
Cole runs Ideaflow, the self-described "intelligence amplification company." The pitch is small enough to fit on a sticky note and large enough to keep him up at night: a notebook that augments your intelligence as you type. Capture a fragment here, a half-thought there, and the software does the connective work humans are bad at - remembering, linking, surfacing the idea you forgot you had.
That single idea has since branched into a product family. There is Ideaflow Notes, the personal notebook. There is Base, a team knowledge layer that quietly pulls context out of Slack threads, meetings, and documents and hands it back the moment it is useful. There is a Meetings tool and an experimental Agent-First Web. The connective tissue is a conviction Cole repeats often: software should be the bridge that lets AI become a true extension of the mind, not a separate thing you go visit.
It is a deceptively gentle ambition. Cole is not trying to replace the thinker. He is trying to make sure the thinker never works alone again.
A future where nobody feels alone with their ideas.— Jacob Cole, on the Ideaflow mission
Plenty of note-taking apps were dreamed up over coffee. Ideaflow was dreamed up over a research problem at the MIT Media Lab, where Cole worked on collective intelligence - the study of how groups of minds, or minds and machines, can think better together than any one of them could alone.
His path there was unusually wide. He studied at MIT, with stints touching electrical engineering, computer science, and English literature, and he was a UROP researcher inside the Decentralized Information Group and W3C - the web-standards world seeded by Tim Berners-Lee's circle. He also studied at the University of Oxford, where computer science sat next to philosophy. Before founding anything, he built front-end systems at Politify, led technology development at Bainbridge Capital, and served as a venture partner at Outliers Fund.
The throughline is not a resume. It is a temperament. Cole is the kind of founder who will move from a discussion of François Chollet's theories of intelligence to Daoist non-attachment to attachment theory in psychology without changing his tone of voice. On the podcast "Explorations Beyond," he spent more than two hours doing exactly that - language as a programming system, how complexity emerges in intelligent things, the nature of self, Buddhist principles applied to ordinary life.
It would be easy to file that under eccentric. It is more accurate to call it the operating thesis. If you believe intelligence is something you can amplify, you have to first decide what intelligence is - and Cole has clearly been arguing that question with himself for a long time.
Investors and advisors who put weight behind Ideaflow:
Advisors include Marty Weiner (former CTO, Reddit) and John Devadoss (founding director, Microsoft Digital Consulting). Bar lengths are illustrative, not dollar figures.
"We want to be the bridge that enables AI to become a true extension of our minds." Not a tool you visit - a layer you think through.
The point of a shared brain is social as much as technical: superconnectors empowered, intellectual soulmates found, nobody stranded with a thought.
Cole frames intelligence amplification as on the critical path to unlocking global collective intelligence. Big claim. He builds like he means it.
Run the numbers and Ideaflow looks like a lean, deliberate company - founded in 2015, roughly thirteen people, reported revenue climbing toward the low millions by 2024. That is not a blitzscale story. It is a patience story, which fits a founder whose other hobby is non-attachment.
What makes Cole worth watching is less the metrics than the angle. The crowded "second brain" category is full of apps that store. Cole is building one that participates. The difference sounds small until you use the word he uses - augment - and notice he means it as a verb that happens while you type, in real time, not as a feature you toggle on later.
There is a quiet contrarian streak in that. The industry default is to bolt AI onto an existing product and call it copilot. Cole's bet started from the opposite end: design the human-AI relationship first, then build the product around it. The notebook is downstream of the philosophy, not the other way around.
Whether the bet pays off is an open question, and Cole would likely be the first to hold it loosely. But the through-line from a Media Lab research question to a shipping product is unusually clean. He decided what he believed about minds, and then spent a decade building software that acts as if it were true.