The Working Garden

I heard that line during a retreat in 2023, at a botanical garden in Kona where 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" isn't a genre. It's a mood, a tempo, an expectation someone can't quite articulate, and the recommendation system I built had to take that seriously — had to treat imprecise, personal, half-formed signals as real information rather than noise.

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. And most tools that try to help with this ask you to become a better archivist first — organize more, tag more precisely, build a clean ontology so the AI has something to work with. But you've already been organizing. Just not in a way those tools can read.

The mess already has a shape

What Enzyme does instead is treat every trace you left as signal. The half-finished tags, the abandoned folders, the 2am links — those aren't evidence of a failed system. 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 — tags, links, folder patterns, even incomplete ones — and surfaces what I call catalysts: the questions, themes, and tensions your scattered system was already forming around. Not a summary of what you wrote. More like the shape of what you kept returning to.

Gardens, not lawns

The through-line from that Kona garden to this product is the difference between gardens that need tending and lawns that appear perfect. Communion with your past thinking, not control over it. I built this for people who get inspiration from a lot of different places and can't help but create, but who don't see themselves as systematic enough to maintain a "second brain" — and 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.