About us
We built this because nothing else worked for how our brains actually operate.
selfActual isn’t a product we dreamed up in a whiteboard session. It’s the thing we needed and couldn’t find.
How it started
Two people, coming at the same problem from opposite ends.
Brad
The protocols were there. The apps weren’t.
Brad came out of the distributed identity and data movement of the late ’90s. The values were right and the protocols were everywhere. What never showed up were the apps people would actually use.
Years later, digging into how people collaborate after the pandemic, it became clear that knowing ourselves and each other is what makes working together work, even when a teammate happens to be AI. The first question was the old one: who owns the data?
Jay
An AI that knew its operator.
Jay came from the other direction. He needed the AI he worked with every day to actually know him, so he built a way for it to: a model of the person running it. He put that into ECHO, a prototype built on GitHub.
Peanut butter, meet chocolate.
Put together, it was clear how powerful the system could be, and that there was only one way anyone would trust it: put it in the hands of the person it’s about. selfActual takes the ideas and standards from those early days, including Solid pods, and puts them to work for people, and for the teams and organizations they belong to.
Founders
Jeremy “Jay” Wright
Co-founder
Jeremy built the first version because his brain needed it. Not a product — survival infrastructure. Something that could hold the context he couldn’t hold and catch the patterns he couldn’t see from the inside. The method that fell out of that became the foundation of selfActual.
He’s spent 25 years at the intersection of human behavior and digital systems. He wrote the first business book on social media before the category had a name, and taught at seven universities — Stanford, Cornell, LSE among them — without a PhD, because the work spoke for itself. He doesn’t go looking for insights. He builds something real and pays attention to what falls out.
Autistic. The system behind Talia started as his own survival infrastructure.
Brad Topliff
Co-founder
Brad has spent 25 years making complicated systems make sense to people who don’t think in code. From the Apple Newton team to sixteen years bringing human-centered design into engineering-driven companies, the throughline is the same: build the right thing before the world is ready for it, then wait for it to catch up.
He designed selfActual’s vault, its behavioral layer, and its architecture — then built the whole production system himself, with AI as his engineering team. He couldn’t have built it without AI. And AI couldn’t have built it without him.
Identified his ADHD later in life, as the parent of a high school junior with inattentive ADHD. She is the model for the Talia student.
Team
Evelyn So
Experience design
Shapes how selfActual feels to use, from the first conversation to the website. Runs much of our customer research.
Advisors
Honoria Starbuck, PhD
Education
Teaches at UT Austin, with a PhD in curriculum and instruction and a master’s in instructional technology. A longtime SXSW EDU advisor. Keeps Talia focused on what helps students, and on how to show that it does.
Andy Dale
Identity and data architecture
Worked on the identity and personal-data standards that came before the W3C’s Solid. Now helping us architect the vault, and put back some of what those standards left out.
Anshar Seraphim
Cognition and reasoning
Researches how minds work and how AI should reason about them, from neuroscience to auditable reasoning. A partner in Spectrum Think Tank. Advises on the science behind how selfActual understands people.
Why this, why now
Every AI company is racing to add memory and personalization. None of them are building the center — and they can’t. The platform that models you has every reason to keep what it learns. A self-knowledge layer that actually belongs to you can only be built by someone who doesn’t compete with the platforms it connects to.
That gap isn’t closing. It’s our company.
We believe self-knowledge compounds — over a career, over a lifetime — but only if you own it. We believe in the power of the individual, at scale. Everything we’ve built over the years pointed here.