Suggest edit — Jacob Cole

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confidence: high
related:
- wiki/themes/jacob-origin-story.md
- wiki/themes/vision-for-the-world.md
- wiki/projects/ideaflow.md
sources:
- raw/transcript.md
title: Jacob Cole
type: entity
visibility: public
---

# Jacob Cole

The author of the vision. Founder of [[IdeaFlow]]. The "Speaker 2" of the otter.ai transcript.

## One-line summary

A technologist-philosopher who used a debilitating RSI injury as the seed for a comprehensive vision spanning [[Sparks of Motivation|attention capture]], [[Collective Intelligence|civilization-scale coordination]], and [[Super Conscious State|contemplative cultivation]].

## Quick facts (from this transcript)

- Built things from childhood — Lego Mindstorms, robotics, web dev in middle school
- By high school, had **hired 19 friends** to work on startups and websites
- Developed severe RSI in junior year of high school
- Got into MIT and a few other schools; chose MIT
- Studied **English and Computer Science** at MIT
- Worked on **voice recognition interfaces** for two years at MIT — building hands-free systems
- Hosted intellectual salons; people he introduced raised **>$200M in venture capital together**
- Built knowledge-graph schemes for matchmaking; first customer was [[Silicon Valley Bank]]
- Spent a year at Oxford; met a quantum-computing PhD TA who became co-founder of an open-source knowledge-graph project
- [[Tim Berners-Lee]] became one of his research advisors
- Took his last year off to start the company
- Got angel funding (incl. [[Naval Ravikant]]); raised VC; now shipping enterprise product → [[IdeaFlow]]

## Family

- **Father**: yoga teacher and **sleep scientist**. His father's first teacher teaches at the [[California Yoga Center]] in Mountain View
- (Mother mentioned only in passing as also somehow involved in education — David's mother is a kindergarten educator; Jacob's mom said "see one, do one, teach one" as her favorite educational principle)

## Where he is now

- Lives in a house, somewhere in the Peninsula (per the conversation context — Stanford bike-through-golf-course distance, with [[Harrison]] in San Mateo)
- Has roommates, including someone named Dana
- Hosts cowork sessions
- Bikes are mostly up-for-grabs in the garage; trash goes out Monday nights

(These domestic details are included only because they appear in the transcript and color the picture; nothing important hangs on them.)

## Body

- **Repetitive strain injury** since junior year of high school — has been managing it for years
- Multiple **ligament injuries** in the body, possibly related to slightly anomalous connective tissue
- A **wrist injury** mentioned in the moment ("I've got a wrist injury, so I'm only going to do one hand properly")
- Has done extensive PT, acupuncture, qigong, yoga, meditation
- Practices [[Iyengar Yoga]] regularly at the [[California Yoga Center]]

## Practice

- Deep [[Qigong (Arms-Up Position)|qigong]] practice
- Iyengar yoga
- Daily contemplative practice
- Has had paradigm-level "downloads" during meditation
- Considers the [[Super Conscious State]] practices the highest-leverage thing in the world

## Methods of capture

- Voice-first thought capture (uses Whisper extensively, considers Willow comparable but not differentiable)
- Knowledge-graph storage of [[Sparks of Motivation|sparks]]
- This very wiki, on WikiHub, is his project for capturing the vision in graph form

## What he's building (this conversation)

The full project list scattered across the conversation:

- [[IdeaFlow]] — the company
- [[manifestos.world]] / Vision Charter
- [[World Issue Tracker]]
- [[World Progress Bar]]
- [[Empowerment Algorithm App]] — secret open-source local-LLM feed filter
- [[Healing Arts Grant]]
- [[Alumni Funder]] — Kickstarter for student projects
- [[Accretive Collective Action]] family — Kickstarter for boycotts, pledges, voting
- [[NVC Video Prize]] — $1,000 bounty
- [[Journeyman Model]] — apprentice/journeyman/master pipeline
- The LLM wiki itself — *this wiki*

## Influences (from the transcript)

- [[Doug Engelbart]] — patron saint
- [[Jack Park]] — mentor, Engelbart colleague, knowledge-graph cancer cure
- [[Tim Berners-Lee]] — research advisor
- [[Marshall Rosenberg]] — NVC, "consciousness is unbelievably high"
- [[Ken Wilber]] — integral theory, stages of society
- [[Robert Kegan]] — adult development
- [[Naval Ravikant]] — angel investor; "as soon as inspiration strikes, pursue it"
- [[Nick Bostrom]] — *Deep Utopia*, post-instrumentalism
- A friend (likely [[Harrison]]) — coined "[[Wu Wei Disclosure|wu wei disclosure]]"
- Buddhist, Taoist, Tibetan Buddhist, Indigenous Amazonian, Zulu, Kogi traditions referenced throughout

## Where to read his stuff

- **Idea list / brainstorms**: per the conversation, he has a long-running public document of ideas (not URL-confirmed in this transcript — likely related to but distinct from [[manifestos.world]])
- **manifestos.world** — Vision Charter
- **yoga.jacobcole.net** — the book *Religiousness in Yoga*, with Jacob's six-page excerpt
- **This wiki** — the LLM wiki he committed to making the night of this conversation

## Communication style (observed in transcript)

- Drops a lot of frameworks fast — David explicitly says "you can unpack them for years"
- Cross-disciplinary by default (physics → meditation → software → indigenous tradition in successive sentences)
- Comfortable with metaphysical claims, but careful to flag when something is speculative
- Strong taste for software-engineering metaphors applied to spiritual / collective concepts (see [[Merge Conflicts as Metaphor]])
- Sees his own life-arc as the **organizing structure** for the vision — pain → cultivation → integration → outward expression

## Related

- [[Jacob's Origin Story]] — the full life-arc
- [[Vision for the World]] — the full vision
- [[IdeaFlow]] — the company