ememe origin story

an unpolished recounting & faq

I haven’t shared that much about ememe yet so here we go. It’s unedited and unprofessional because trying to write professionally takes me too long and I want to get back to building asap. This is also why there probably won’t be a website up for it for a while. I just can’t be arsed. This isn’t an official update or announcement, just some background for anyone who’s curious.

About the name and logo

It’s a blend of my name, emoji, memes, and memex. The short logo is three lines (≡). I chose it because I believe it is a blessed symbol. It’s everywhere when you start looking for it. In the I Ching it symbolizes heaven, perfection, and completion. In math and philosophy it symbolizes equivalence. The future I am most excited for is one that is egalitarian, where everyone has access to the opportunity and resources they need to live a happy, healthy and fulfilling life, and ememe is my drop in the bucket attempt to assist the materialization of that dream. The full logo is the same symbol five times to spell EMEME. It’s unique because you can flip it backwards or upside down and it stays the same, which to me symbolizes Truth. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” There are more meanings within it but I’m not going to explain them.

What is ememe?

I recently decided to frame it more as a research project than a business. I’m so much more creative when I can approach my work with a sense of play and exploration & feel much more freedom to just try things out, which leads to faster & happier development. It’s still a business and I hope it will make money at some point, but that’s not my focus. Right now my goal is to build my dream/ideal environment for learning things. I’m unhappy with the tools that exist and have ideas for my own. I want to redesign how search works, how organizing information works, the UX of watching YouTube videos and reading books and blog posts online. I hope that if I can solve this for myself, others might benefit from it too.

Where did it begin? Weren’t you building something else?

In 2023 I was part of the first hf0 batch based in San Francisco. Before the start of it I was staying up every night pouring over ancient manuscripts and books trying to figure out if magic was real and how it worked. I was drawn to it because everyone who was really dismissive of it hadn’t deeply explored it. I had a bunch of unanswered questions and I had a hunch that this was the type of domain that only reveals its secrets to the devoted (most sciences are like this). I discovered so many incredibly valuable practices and wanted to commoditize them to share the benefits and healing that come from a personalized spiritual practice, so I started building something like duolingo for religion/philosophy/spirituality.

I wanted a community to share and explore the esoteric secrets of the universe with by teaching and studying it with them, but quickly realized most people into this stuff are using it as a crutch for issues and not that interested in growth and escaping samsara or understanding how and why this stuff works, just in temporarily easing their suffering. Sure, you can make a lot of money off of them, but that doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning. It’s actually quite dystopian and demotivating. The part of the product that lit me up was the idea of making an education that had such a positive impact on my life more accessible to others, and through that making the world more enlightened, healed, and inspired. I thought if I could make something that helps people heal their issues, understand themselves better, and be more at peace, the subtle ripple effects might make the world a few basis points better. But it became clear that that wouldn’t be a good business model or product direction. Sadly I don’t think people can heal or change if they don’t want to. The [self-imposed] pressure and opportunity to make a lot of money made me approach the development from an angle I thought made others (shareholders and users) happy but didn’t bring me joy. I had to pivot. I thought if I was going to prioritize what lights me up over what makes money I might as well do it doing something I really wanted to do. It hurt—I threw away tons of work I was really proud of and denied myself of a lot of things I really wanted (revenue, pmf, love and adoration from users, etc.) but I learned about the sunk cost fallacy when I was young and vowed to never let it get in the way of my decision making, no matter how much it might hurt or not make sense to others.

I also reached the end of my explorations down this rabbit hole. I found the answers I sought and they were less exciting than I had hoped. I realized most things I’d want to use “magic” for are done a lot better and more reliably through modern methods. Ex: telepathy isn’t as valuable when facetime exists, it’s also less fun when you have no one to be telepathic with. I also wasn’t enjoying talking to people about spirituality all the time. Most people didn’t know or relate to it the way that I did, or approach it with as much rigor and truth-seeking. None (sans two) of my conversations granted me new knowledge and I got bored of having them. (I’m not anymore & it’s still a passion even though I’m not actively studying it).

The next part of my journey was inspired by exploring my answers to the question “what would I do if magic was real and I was really good at it?” It’s fairly similar to the question Paul Graham recently tweeted about: “if I had 10X the agency I have, what would I do?” I think these types of questions are fantastic for figuring out what you really want and what you should do with your life.

My gut response to this was “take over the world, duh.” Not because I want to rule the world but because I didn’t really like the idea of trump, putin, or xi jinping doing it, & thought if I tried hard enough I could come up with something better. I saw it as “taking one for the team.” Plus, reluctant leaders are usually better than the power hungry egotistical ones. I thought about the operational overhead of ruling the world and decided I would need to upgrade the tech to do it well. There’s no way I could do it over email/paper/slack/discord/???/etc. I needed something totally new. So I began prototyping.

I read a lot too. I learned that the most efficient way to coordinate, especially at scale, is not some perfectly designed system of meetings/documents/software, it’s actually nothing, it’s automatic. Which you can only get if you start early enough aka design the culture children are raised in. It’s how most nations and religions do it and why some prosper and some don’t. I don’t know what the best one is but I think it has yet to come. Anyway, here was my world domination plan, it’s very simple:

1. Educate the kids. Give them the tools and knowledge they need to create the best lives for themselves and others.

2. Wait. (old people die eventually, children inherit all the power eventually)

Ok, hypothetically, I’ve figured out how to become the ruler of the world, what now? Tbh I don’t actually want to rule the world, I just want everyone to be ok and the future to be bright. I’m just one person and can only have so many ideas and solve so many problems in a day, so a system where people are more empowered to solve their own problems is much more sustainable and robust. I’d want society to flourish without my direct involvement because one day I won’t be here. As ruler of the world I wouldn’t make any rules because I don’t want to have to enforce them (is it possible to even do this without the threat of violence? litigation and imprisonment are both types of violence). If I have to make rules I’ve messed up step 1 of the plan. Implementing solutions is better than making rules. For example, rather than declare something like “it should be a human right to be able to exit a country at any time” I’d make a service that could take people to an airport, and if they’re denied entry from everywhere just ship them to Pitcairn or something. or instead of “everyone should get rid of their nukes” I’d coordinate an effort to send them all to mars. I feel like humanity is trapped in a local maxima so most of my work would be focused on exploring breaking out of that. ie: what would a new renaissance era look like and how do we get one? what are the high impact low effort problems to solve? I want the world to be full of more art, love, happiness, health, knowledge, achievement, technology, and fulfilling experiences. I’d probably also try to eradicate mosquitoes and diseases and fund research and throw cool parties and have lots of kids and wear cool outfits. I can do these things as a founder though. I don’t need to become the leader of the world. No one is forcing me to. Plus I don’t think the world would be very welcoming to someone trying to run it, especially not some rando. Most of what I want for the world will happen on its own in due time. And there are so many downsides to that job, I probably wouldn’t enjoy it very much, so I should probably change my answer.

The answer I settled on was “become hyper educated and competent so I can solve lots of problems for myself and others and build lots of my fun ideas and learn everything I’m curious about.” And like I mentioned before, this is achieved much more easily and reliably through non-magical means.

I figured I could achieve this by coding and designing a tool for myself that I could use to learn things and organize and coordinate projects. Eventually I want to use it for everything from automating fruit and vegetable delivery from around the world (strawberries from japan, blueberries from maine, etc) for my future kid’s lunch boxes, to sending generated emails to get quotes from fallback suppliers if one I was using burned down and was in the news while I was asleep. In the near term I’ll use it for curating lists of books, papers, and blogs to read so I can build it better, and making 12hr YouTube playlists of music festival sets for uninterrupted flow states so I can build it faster.

I have a rough idea of the companies I want to build in the future, the scifi books I want to write, and projects I want to work on over the course of my life, however long it is. Most of them require PhDs I don’t have and won’t get. I was really bored and overburdened in school as a student (it’s more fun when you’re not enrolled) so going back to school isn’t the right move for me. I love bouncing around and diving deep when I am called to. The way I teach myself things is significantly faster, cheaper, and more fun than going to college imo. I’ve been doing it since I was very young and it’s my greatest passion and something I hope to spend my whole life doing.

The journey so far

“Can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs” I say over my continent of crushed eggs, zero omelets in my hand.

I started development a little bit before announcing it on X in March of 2024. Before 2025, ememe development was a lot of sprints towards dead ends. I was using and loving the browser UI I made and thought distribution was “the hard part” so maybe if I launched a social media feature or two around the browser, people might be more inclined to use and share it. I made a Twitter clone in ememe-os style for sharing commentary and links to what you’re reading but no one really used it & it wasn’t very good. I didn’t share the second thing I built because I didn’t want to have to moderate it or market it & it wouldn’t have been entertaining unless people were posting regularly. The point of both was to get people to download it and be introduced to the strange design language I was using, and then stay for the browser(s). But these side quests were distractions & didn’t help me answer the existential questions: do people like using my weird reading/learning browser/os? Is it useful? Do I like it? To know the answer to that I first needed to build it, even though it would take a lot longer therefore not be as immediately gratifying as the short term projects were supposed to be (they weren’t).

I think my prefrontal cortex developed when I turned 25 in December and I finally looked at the mountain I was avoiding and decided it was time to start the trek.

I also let go of a lot of fear that was holding me back. Fear that I wouldn’t be cool on X because my development timelines are longer because I’m working alone & making mistakes, fear that I’ll get bullied by the tech bros if there’s a bug in prod, fear of massive public failure and embarrassment. Having to explain that it’s not a real browser/os bc those take a lot of time and i want to make it good first :3 Rome wasn’t built in a day (only because they didn’t have ememe). The first versions won’t be that great and there will inevitably be bugs. I know I’m going to get absolutely flamed in the hacker news comments when I launch this but that’s canon. What helped me overcome a lot of fears was recognizing that they don’t matter, and for the ones that do like “what if no one uses it” I have so much power to overcome them. I’m in control of making the product good and making & updating plans for distribution, marketing, and monetization when the time for each comes. I can talk to users to figure out what I need to improve. I can spam TikToks to get my 100th or 1000th user if no one is downloading it. To quote david deutsch “Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble.”

Fun Fact

Ememe actually began as an emoji programming language within a minimal CLI. I figured the only way I could build technology to run the world a as one person was to have AI write most if not all of the code. Just like how chemicals and compounds can be represented by SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System) which makes them easier for computers to interact with, I wanted to make a UI language that would make programming faster and easier for both developers and computers using unicode smiles aka emojis :) My hope was to build the real everything app by making dynamic type-safe & privacy-conscious on-the-fly UIs super easy for LLMs to generate through this language/system. I spent some time trying stuff out but unfortunately, given my current skill level I thought that I would run out of capital before I could finish it (it could take years to get right), so I pivoted to something more doable that would also give me the tools to learn everything necessary for building this and many other fun weird ideas in the future.

The Future

I don’t want to share what’s coming this year because I don’t want my overfunded and uninspired competitors to cargo cult my words. What I am creating is impossible to copy because it is so uniquely mine. It is impossible to see or understand without the full picture which is only a result of my unique path, passions, wants, needs, tastes, inclinations, ideas, and execution. It will take some time for me to communicate this vision and I think it’s better to do this through product.

The End!

Thank you so much for reading and for your patience waiting for me to launch publicly.

Also I want to share my deepest eternal gratitudes to HF0. I don’t think I’d be able to Founder Mode™ this hard without their support, encouragement, and belief.

ttyl, xoxo, emma