Every day, ordinary people are making decisions they’re not ready for. Not because they’re unqualified. Not because they lack data. But because decisions that involve other people — customers, users, audiences — require understanding those people. And understanding people is hard.
So we guess. We build models in our heads. We imagine how a customer will react to a price change, how a person will feel about a new interface, how a group will respond to a campaign. But those imagined people aren’t real. They’re projections, assembled from assumptions, pattern-matched from past experience, colored by our own fears and hopes. It’s our imagination of the world.
And when decisions are built on imaginary people, fear takes over. The decision gets delayed. It gets hedged. It gets made by a committee until the original bold idea is sanded down to nothing. Or it starts off too big of an idea, too heavy to balance and we’re surprised when reality doesn’t match the story we told ourselves in our head.
The best people make the worst decisions when they’re guessing about humans.
We’re finally at a point where the technology can meet the ambition. Large language models can conduct nuanced, adaptive conversations. Multimodal systems can synthesize different kinds of data into coherent understanding. Simulation environments can run scenarios fast enough to be actually useful.
The pieces exist. What’s been missing is the conviction to put them together in service of a single goal: helping people make better decisions about other people. That’s what we’re building.
Imagine a world where a founder can understand their customers as well as a company with a two-hundred person research team. Where a nonprofit can test messaging before spending their limited budget. Where a city planner can rehearse how residents will actually respond to a policy change. Where you can rehearse the conversation with your roommate about the dirty dishes.
Imagine a world where ordinary people, making consequential or inconsequential decisions, don’t have to guess. They can try.
That’s the world we’re building toward. Not a world of cold, probabilistic, detached predictions but a world of preparation. Where anyone can rehearse a situation.