Our north star.

I grew up in a world that no one before me did. I was the first generation to ‘grow’ up with the internet. In elementary school, both of my parents were on Facebook. When I got into the 7th grade, I got an iPhone 4 and joined Instagram and snapchat. 

As I grew, I became a computer programmer and released my first app at the age of 13. When I was 16, I left high school to chase ‘something’. I just knew that the world of startups and software was big, beautiful, and far away from the rural home where I didn’t want to be. 

My adolescence was spent learning about, and building parts of the internet. I went in search of this beautiful ‘world changing’ software that would heal everything I was scared about. And I come back empty handed. 

Growing up in the early 2010’s, when the golden giants of Silicon Valley roamed, there was no question that the internet was arriving. But what it would leave in its wake wasn’t known. 

The product and app launches that once were a source of joy have become a source of anxiety. How is this product going to hurt people or kids? Who are the invisible gig workers making less than minimum wage to do this service for me? How is this piece of software I’m building going to bulldoze over small businesses? 

I don’t think that change is bad, and I think software has disrupted our world in a way truly unseen before. But I struggle to see that disruption as a fully good thing. The internet created and killed this idea that machines would care for us. Machines would hold our hands, be there, connect us to friends. Now, our beloved phones and laptops deliver us new forms of data mining, cybersecurity threats, and unknown impacts on our mental health. 

When I think truly, deeply, about what I was looking for when I left home, I was looking for what everyone else was: a digital savior that meant humanity as we are wouldn’t have to travel through the world alone. 

Our world is terrifying, and cruel, but it’s not unfeeling. And that collective need for something to hold our hands, and stick with us as we continue to grow and evolve lives within me today. It exists within all of us. 

Close your eyes and imagine what it’s like to download something without fearing that it’s going to tell your boss everything you’ve ever typed, or sell all data about what you tell to it to a data broker. Imagine software that’s with you no matter what you go through, and that you can truly confide in. 

And when people ask what the end goal of Astra is, I struggle to come up with an answer any simpler than this: to figure out what building software that cares about someone looks like. 

Outside of the limits of venture capital funding, outside the limits of foundations and donors, what would it look like to truly build software that cares about someone? 

I don’t know. Let’s find out together.