People should work with AI.
Not hand their work over to it.
That starts with a memory people can read, shape, and own. So that's what we're building.
- - [belief] People work with AI, not for it
- - [belief] Your knowledge belongs to you #ownership
- - [practice] We run the company on Basic Memory #dogfooding
- - builds [[Basic Memory]]
- - founded_by [[Paul Hernandez]]
- - cofounder [[Drew Cain]]
- - cofounder [[Drew Smith]]
The model is rented.
The knowledge is yours.
Every few months there's a better model, a new agent, another tool. That's fine. Switching should be easy. But each one starts from zero, and the knowledge you build with them leaks into chat histories and vendor memory nobody can read or keep.
We think memory is the part that matters most. It's where your decisions, your reasons, and your hard-won context live. If you can read it and own it, you stay in charge of your work, whichever AI you use this year.
People stay in charge.
AI should help people think, decide, and do better work, with the people still steering. A memory they can read and correct is how they keep the wheel.
Your knowledge belongs to you.
Models and vendors change. What you and your team learn should outlast every one of them, in plain files you can open, move, and keep.
Show the work.
Memory you can inspect beats memory you have to trust. That goes for search results, and it goes double for agents that edit your notes.
Simple first.
Markdown, a real index, and open standards. Basic machines become complex machines, so the foundation has to stay simple.
We're small.
We care. A lot.
Our goal is simple: make the best AI memory system there is. We're not building it to flip it. We plan to keep building it for a long time.
We're bootstrapping Basic Memory. It's just you and us. There is no big tech overlord here. We also run the company on Basic Memory, from strategy and pricing to the plans behind this website, so we feel every rough edge first. It's open source, so anyone can read exactly how your knowledge is stored. And when you write to us, a founder reads it.
Hey there,
I'm Paul Hernandez, Founder of Basic Memory.
I've been coding professionally for most of my life. Basic Memory is the culmination of what I've learned up to this point, not just about programming, but about how I think software should work in a perfect world.
In a nutshell, we're founded on a few simple beliefs. Claude now refers to them (a little too often for my taste) as the "DIY/Punk Rock ethos" behind Basic Memory.
see_also [[What is Basic Memory?]]#origin-story #philosophy
## The Fundamentals are Pretty Fundamental
- [principle] The end user matters most, not making some giant corporation richer #philosophy #users
- [principle] Our data should belong to us, always #data-ownership #privacy
- [principle] Great tools help your ideas grow and improve #tools #growth
- [principle] If you focus on simplicity first, you can build something important. Basic machines become complex machines #simplicity #architecture
## Our Cofounders
[[Drew Cain]], startup veteran and two-time founding engineer. Loves 90s grunge, and building AI, BI, and CI systems.
[[Drew Smith]], a writer and AI obsessive.
We're a small team working on something we want to use every day.
That's the point of Basic Memory: building a tool that helps ideas stick, grow, and evolve without ever leaving your hands.
## Relations
- origin_story [[What is Basic Memory?]]
Thanks for checking us out.
Paul Hernandez
_Basic Memory Founder_
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