The Working Garden

A garden keeper at a botanical garden in Kona, 2023. The paths were overgrown and the labels were handwritten. The garden was working — just not in the way that made it easy to navigate. Something about that stayed with me, because I'd spent years at Spotify building systems that had to work the same way. "Sunday morning cleaning music" is a mood and a tempo that someone can't quite articulate, and the recommendation system I built had to take that seriously. Imprecise, personal, half-formed signals were real information.

I left Spotify to work on what felt like the same problem from a different direction: the way machines forget how you think.

The fragmented corpus

Your vault works the same way. Half-finished tags, folders you made once and forgot about, links that meant something at 2am. Years of Kindle highlights and Apple Notes and voice memos accumulated across devices and seasons of your life, a corpus that can't talk to itself yet. Most tools that try to help with this ask you to become a better archivist first. Organize more, tag more precisely so the AI has something clean to work with. You've already been organizing. Those tools just can't read it yet.

The mess already has a shape

The half-finished tags, the abandoned folders, the 2am links. They're grips. Handles that your thinking grew on its own, pointing at what kept mattering to you even when you didn't have language for it yet.

Enzyme reads that structure and surfaces what I call catalysts. The questions your scattered notes were already forming around, phrased in the shape of what you kept returning to.

Working gardens

That Kona garden grew before the paths were laid. Enzyme works the same way. I built it for people who get inspiration from everywhere and can't help but create, but who don't see themselves as systematic enough to maintain a "second brain." Who probably shouldn't have to. The corpus already exists, scattered across years of unselfconscious capture, habit preceding intention. It just needs a way to talk back to you.

Enzyme is built by Joshua Pham — former Spotify ML engineer, bootstrapped in New York. Founding members are shaping what comes next in Discord.