I'm building Praesto because I kept losing what I learned. And worse, I kept losing what I was about to think.
For the last decade, I've been the kind of student who never quite stops studying. I went through a Ph.D. in engineering, and I'm working through an MBA at Wharton now. Different rooms, same quiet problem in both. A single line on the board, or one off-hand comment from 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. The faster the conversation moved, the harder I worked to keep up, and the less I was actually thinking.
For years, I treated good note-taking as high-fidelity stenography. Forty pages a week, fingers racing to catch every word. By the time I opened those notes again, the writing on the screen felt like a stranger's. I had captured the lecture, but I had not captured my understanding of it. The same thing happened in meetings. I would walk out with a clean transcript and a quiet sense that the most interesting thread had passed me by while I was busy typing the last one down.
The research has been telling us why for more than fifty years. Human memory does not work like a recorder. Every time you reach back into your head to pull a fact out, under a little strain, just before you would have forgotten it, the connection gets stronger. Re-reading your notes barely helps. Trying to answer a question without them is what actually does the work. And the part of your mind that catches the half-formed question, the connection two slides back, or the assumption nobody has named yet, that part needs room to breathe. It cannot run while you are transcribing.
Praesto is what happens when you build a tool around those two truths, instead of around capture and replay. It listens to your lecture or your meeting so you don't have to. It quietly gathers the words, the slides, the diagrams, the math, and even your handwritten margin scribbles, and threads them all back to the moment they happened. Then, instead of leaving everything in a folder you'll never reopen, it gently turns that material into questions, brings them back at the right time, and invites you to do the one thing that actually builds memory: try to remember.
And here is the part I care about most. Praesto gives you back the bandwidth to think. When your professor says something that sparks a connection three weeks back, Praesto already has the transcript, so you can follow the thought instead of dropping it to type. When someone in a high-stakes meeting makes a claim that doesn't quite land, you have room to ask the question that goes one layer deeper, because the surface layer is already being captured for you. I built this partly because, as I get a little older, the creative thoughts I want to chase don't wait around for me to finish my notes. I suspect I'm not the only one.
There is a quieter argument for the product, too. Attention in a classroom, or in a boardroom, is a precious resource. Every minute a person spends transcribing what was just said is a minute they aren't spending thinking about what was just said. We've made an unspoken trade, where intelligent and curious people do the work of a stenographer so they have something to refer to later, and they pay for it with the part of the room that was actually worth being present for. Praesto exists to take the stenography off the table, so you can be fully there.
The reason this is even possible now, and wasn't five years ago, is AI. Frontier models can listen at the granularity a human ear can. They can hold the full context of a two-hour session, and when you ask, they can go a layer deeper on the one thing you care about, in the moment you care about it. I've built Praesto as someone who uses state-of-the-art AI tools every day, with real conviction, not hesitation. The bet underneath the product is simple. The right way to use these models is not to replace the thinker in the room, but to clear the runway in front of them, so they can go deeper, faster, and still stay with the group.
The product is small today. The list of ways to make it bigger is long. But the bet behind it, that the right tool for a curious mind is one that runs the science of learning and the muscle of frontier AI quietly in the background while you stay present with whatever is in front of you, is the bet I want to spend the next decade making good on.
If you're a student, a researcher, or anyone who sits in rooms where the conversation truly matters, I would love for you to try Praesto. And if you teach, lead, or host those rooms, I would love it even more if you wrote to me about what the people in front of you actually need. You can reach me anytime at hello@praestologica.com.
Thank you for reading this far. I'm glad you're here.