I’m Daniel. Together with my co-founder Matt, we are building Inanimate - devices and a platform to transform any home or workplace into an agentic environment. 

This is the first ever Lab Notes.

It’s a record of our work as we build and ship Inanimate. It’s full of what influences, informs, and inspires us, and maybe (hopefully) you too.

You are receiving this because you signed up to our newsletter, and you are a legend.

We will send this out regularly. It will always be written by a human. When we recommend something, it will always be something we have read or used ourselves. The format is not fixed - we will experiment.

Enjoy!

Here’s what we’ve been working on this week.

Matt shipped a simple tool to create, share, and collaborate in text with markdown.

It’s got comments and tracked changes/suggestions. It’s for temporarily working together, so files are ephemeral and delete every 99 hours (which I found out the hard way).

Read more and try it out. Over 800 people already have!

We hosted our first in-person event near London’s Silicon Bridge last week.

It’s a space for founders and operators building at the deep tech frontier to meet and support each other.

We’re big believers in peer networks. Glad this space now exists.

We’ve been collaborating with agencies and freelancers as we bootstrapped Inanimate.

Now we’re starting our search for an Embedded Engineer to take on firmware, a Design Engineer to wrangle Cloudflare and build interactions, and an experienced Designer that cuts across all levels of product and experience.

Is this you? Get in touch - [email protected]

Our company name is now a registered trademark. Now we won’t need to change horses later in the race (like ClawdBot MoltBot OpenClaw did).

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Other than that, we are building new prototypes, sourcing components, and switching messaging protocols.

Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me this week.

Beyond retro-furturism, what should the future actually look like?

Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowan are calling for, and funding work defining New Aesthetics. 

It feels like Something Big is Happening and people are seeking ways to understand it.

Some answers exist in this nuanced piece on Tool Shaped Objects (“Consider Farmville”), the nature of work in the AI Era, and the point of doing pointless things.

Also: X articles have become a new medium, possibly driven by the $1M X competition for viral articles, fuelling the slopocalypse.

We have been playing around with Mandelbrot Sets - for work, honest - and Matt introduced me to Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a simulation with no sentient players, and it is a rabbit hole.

This implementation is particularly beautiful (make sure you zoooom). 

We are seeing a new form of technology journalism emerging that is high-quality, long-form, in-depth, video first and natively online.

Two types: live Bloomberg-style tech news from TBPN (US focus) and ETN (UK/EU focus), and documentary-style deep-dives from Sourceryy (skews VC) and newly launched Soon (skews frontier tech).

If Tomorrow’s World started today, it might look like this.

It’s rare for a car interior launch to get this much attention. But when it’s Jony Ive’s Love From working on the new Ferrari (and not the Apple Car), the world looks up.

The gorgeous work suggests we have reached peak in-car screens, and premium desires a return to control and the analogue.

Choose your own adventure - tech (Wired), design (Wallpaper), or cars (Top Gear).

What do you think? I’d love to know. 

Until next time,

Daniel