thoughts engineering™
About
A more human
computing company.
Why we're building Pearl.
Most computers are designed to be used. We are more interested in the ones that get kept — the notebook that goes everywhere, the radio on the kitchen shelf, the thing you would notice the absence of.
What we believe
A device earns its place in a room slowly. It does that by being present without being demanding: by knowing roughly what time of day it is and what that means for you, by staying quiet through most of it, and by being genuinely useful in the few moments it isn't.
Almost everything in computing currently pulls the other way. Attention is the thing being competed for, and the winning move is always to ask for more of it. We think that is a design choice rather than a law, and that it is possible to build something capable that simply doesn't want very much from you.
What we're building
Pearl is the first. It sits in the room and pays attention to you rather than to everything. It has opinions about very little, and memory for what matters — the thing you said you'd do on Sunday, the sketchbook you keep coming back to, the hour when you like the lamp on.
It is a small fabric cube with a single amber ring that is on when it's listening and off when it isn't. There is no screen. There will be other devices after it, built on the same idea.
Where we are
We're a small team working between San Francisco and Bengaluru. We build slowly and in public occasionally. If any of this sounds like your kind of problem, we'd like to hear from you.