I built Praesto because I kept losing what I learned, and worse, what I was about to think.
For the last decade I have been the kind of student who never quite stops studying. I went through a Ph.D. in engineering, and I am working through an MBA at Wharton now. Different rooms, same quiet problem. A single line on the board, or one offhand comment across the table, could carry the real decision of the day, and I was usually too busy keeping up with my notes to notice in time.
For years I treated good note-taking as stenography. Forty pages a week, fingers racing to catch every word. When I opened those notes again, they read like a stranger wrote them. I had captured the lecture, but not my understanding of it.
The research has explained why for more than fifty years. Memory does not work like a recorder. Pulling a fact back out of your head, under a little strain, is what makes it stick. Re-reading barely helps. And understanding is built in the room, in the moment you wrestle with an idea, not afterward in a folder of notes.
So Praesto is not a recording tool. It is a tool for being fully in the class or the meeting while it happens. Yes, it captures the words, the slides, the diagrams, even your handwritten notes. But that is the floor, not the point. When you lose the thread, you can catch up in seconds and rejoin the discussion instead of sitting quietly lost. When a concept lands, a quick check tells you whether you truly got it, while the professor is still standing there and you can still ask. When your mind sparks a connection three weeks back, the material is already at hand, so you can chase the thought without dropping it.
Then, in the weeks after, Praesto turns what you heard into questions and brings them back until you know them cold. That is how memory is actually built: not by re-reading, but by trying to remember.
Frontier AI made this possible. My conviction is that these models should not think for the person in the room. They should help that person understand more, engage more, and stay present.
That is the work I want to spend the next decade on. If you sit in rooms where the conversation truly matters, I would love for you to try Praesto. Write to me anytime: [email protected].
Thank you for reading. I am glad you are here.