Hatching Growth #16 – Building for Centuries: Our Mission, Legacy, and “Legacical Thinking”
Glasp’s note: This is Hatching Growth, a series of articles about how Glasp organically reached millions of users. In this series, we’ll highlight some that worked and some that didn’t, and the lessons we learned along the way. While we prefer not to use the term “user,” please note that we’ll use it here for convenience 🙇♂️
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Most startups optimize for speed: fast growth, fast iteration, fast pivots, fast wins.
We don’t.
Glasp was never meant to be a product that burns bright and disappears. It was meant to be something that lasts — something that preserves not just information, but human experience, human learning, and human thinking for generations to come.
In this episode, I want to share the philosophical foundation behind Glasp, why we’ve never pivoted our core product in five years, and why we focus not on quarterly outcomes but on something we call “legacical thinking.”
1. The Problem We Care About: Human Knowledge Is Disappearing
Every person accumulates a lifetime of:
ideas
insights
struggles
discoveries
lessons
intellectual journeys
But 99% of that knowledge stays locked in their head, and disappears the moment they’re gone.
This is a massive loss for humanity.
Our mission is simple:
Preserve the world’s learning, thinking, and lived knowledge — and make it accessible to future generations.
That’s the foundation of Glasp. Not as a tool, but as a public archive of human thought.
2. Why We Have Never Pivoted in 5 Years
In the startup world, pivoting is normal. Expected, even.
But Glasp isn’t “another app.” It’s a place where people entrust their:
highlights
ideas
reflections
reading trails
learning history
parts of their identity
If a platform like that pivots irresponsibly — or shuts down — it would betray users who believed their intellectual legacy would endure.
That’s why:
Pivoting our core product is irresponsible.
Shutting it down is unacceptable.
Permanence is part of the product.
For five years, the core hasn’t changed:
what you highlight
what you learn
what you think
what you leave behind
…should stay preserved, discoverable, and connected.
Everything else — YouTube Summary, AI features, digital clones — is built around this core, not in place of it.
3. The Philosophy Behind Glasp: “The Greatest Legacy for Future Generations”
Glasp’s name comes from:
Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof
This idea was inspired by a 200-year-old text by Kanzō Uchimura: The Greatest Legacy for Future Generations.
He wrote that there are four types of legacies one can leave:
Money
A business (a living enterprise)
Ideas and thought
A noble life — the example of how you live
The 3rd and 4th resonated with us:
Most people don’t write books.
Most people don’t intentionally record their worldview.
Yet their experiences carry extraordinary value.
Technology now makes it possible to preserve these at scale. Glasp is an attempt to do exactly that.
4. Our Guiding Principle: “Legacical Thinking”
We coined a term for our long-term orientation: Legacical Thinking
Thinking not in years or decades, but in centuries.
It means:
Building something that could still make sense 300 years from now
Designing systems that don’t require pivoting away from their purpose
Creating a place where people’s intellectual traces won’t disappear
Prioritizing permanence, continuity, and stewardship over speed
A legacy platform cannot behave like a disposable startup. If you want to preserve ideas for future generations, you must build with a future generations mindset.
5. Why Longevity Matters More Than Growth
“Long-lasting” isn’t a feature — it’s the foundation of the mission.
A platform that encourages people to leave their:
thoughts
insights
struggles
interpretations
reading trails
…must:
not vanish,
not change its core purpose, and
not discard people’s history in the name of business optimization.
This is why we design Glasp with the intention that:
It should be a platform that does not die — even when the founders do.
Startups often define success as growth. But for us, true success is continuity.
If Glasp is still useful, still accessible, still preserving thought 300 years from now, then it will have achieved its purpose.
A Word from Steve Jobs That Resonates Deeply with Us
Steve Jobs once said:
“I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now.”
He then added:
“That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel… They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.”
This perfectly captures what we aspire to with Glasp. Not a quick-growth startup — but a company that still stands for something a generation or two from now.
That is the essence of legacical thinking.
6. Why Glasp Talk Exists in This Philosophy
Glasp Talk — our long-form interview series — is not content marketing.
It’s part of the system. We talk to people from different worlds to capture:
the way they think
the way they see the world
their lived philosophies
their accumulated wisdom
These interviews become a record, a trace of their intellectual life at that moment — something future people can learn from.
It’s slow, manual, low-growth… Yet it compounds, because thinking and learning are timeless assets.
7. Where We Are Now: Exploration Toward the Next 300 Years
We’re in a phase we call:
Exploration
Research
Re-centering
Second Founding
We’re asking:
“What pieces are missing for Glasp to truly preserve a person’s thinking?”
“How can AI help people express, store, and pass down their ideas?”
“How can digital clones become a continuation of a person’s intellectual legacy?”
The answer isn’t to rush, pivot, or chase trends. It’s to think with legacical depth:
What would make Glasp still meaningful to someone living in the year 2400?
8. What We Gain From This Approach — The Strengths of Legacical Thinking
Legacical thinking isn’t just philosophy — it’s a practical advantage that shapes every part of how we build.
1. We Don’t Get Fooled by Short-Term Trends
Long-term thinking protects us from chasing hype. We don’t pivot because of temporary noise.
At the same time, we respond quickly to real platform shifts — technologies that fundamentally change how people capture, express, or share knowledge.
Because our direction is stable, distinguishing noise from true change becomes easy.
2. Product Direction Becomes Clear and Consistent
We evaluate every idea, feature, or direction with one question:
“Does this help people preserve, express, or pass down their thinking in a way that still matters centuries from now?”
This gives us:
consistent product strategy
coherent feature prioritization
a clear yes/no decision-making system
It keeps our product vision unbroken.
3. Our Use of the Four Resources Becomes Stronger
In Hatching Growth #14, we talked about the four fundamental resources that every organization must allocate wisely. For us, these are:
Content
System
People
Finance
Legacical thinking strengthens how we use all four.
Content
We invest in content that compounds — knowledge that endures, scales, and becomes part of humanity’s shared intellectual record. Not disposable content… but content that will still matter a decade or a century from now.System
We build systems and infrastructure that last. Systems that preserve knowledge safely, reliably, and permanently — not temporary hacks or one-off features that don’t accumulate value.People
We use human talent for what humans are uniquely good at: creativity, insight, judgment, exploration. Anything that can be automated should be automated. People should think — not grind.Finance
We use capital to strengthen continuity and long-term stability, not to chase short-lived growth hacks. Finance is directed at durability, not hype.
In this sense, legacical thinking transforms philosophy into an operating manual.
It gives us a clear, durable framework for how we allocate every resource we touch.
4. Our Founding Story Spreads Organically
Very few products sell a philosophy. Very few companies have a mission that people want to talk about.
But Glasp’s story — preserving human knowledge and building for centuries — spreads naturally. It resonates because it’s rare, meaningful, and hopeful.
A strong philosophy becomes organic marketing.
5. We Know We Are Contributing to Humanity
Most startups build features. We’re trying to build something that moves society forward — even if only a little.
We want to:
reduce the loss of human knowledge
help people discover others’ thinking
connect learning across generations
preserve what would otherwise be lost forever
This gives our work a deep sense of purpose.
Steve Jobs captured this perfectly:
“What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us… Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow.”
This is exactly how we feel.
Humans feel joy when they add something to the flow of humanity
We believe that one of the deepest forms of human joy comes from this feeling:
That across the vast history stretching from the beginning of the universe to this moment, one has added something — however small — to the ongoing story of humanity.
To contribute to that long, unbroken chain of progress…
To know that your existence added something to the world…
To feel that your life was part of the great flow of history…
This is a universal human desire.
And in that context, we believe something important:
A person feels their life had value when what they learned, built, or accumulated helps someone else — even after they are gone.
But most people never get to experience that directly, because their knowledge dies with them, invisible and inaccessible.
Glasp changes that.
By preserving your ideas, your learning, your experiences, your reflections — and making them available to others — Glasp lets people see that someone out there learned from them.
That what they lived, read, struggled with, and thought about… actually helped another human being.
And perhaps, when someone sees that, they can say to themselves — before their final day:
“My life had value. I left something behind. Someone learned from me.”
That is what we are building.
Final Thoughts: What We’re Really Building
We’re not building a tool. We’re not building an app. We’re building a platform for human legacy.
Something that helps people:
learn
preserve
share
and ultimately pass down their ideas, their thinking, and their life’s intellectual work.
And that kind of product cannot be built with a short-term mindset.
It requires legacical thinking — the belief that some things deserve to last for centuries.
If this resonates, you are already part of the world we’re trying to build.
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That's a long-term mindset for sure, guys!
Legacical Thinking - I've been searching for a term to describe this for awhile. Not sure this totally hits the mark for me, but I'll give it an A for effort. Maybe it just needs time to get into daily use. - Anything is better than 6-7