Why Livo

I’m Ken Jones. I started Livo Enterprises because I came to believe technology had its relationship with people backwards, and the tools finally exist to turn it around.

I spent the first half of my career building software and leading the people who build it, in whatever language the job needed. For the last fifteen years my attention moved from the code to the data: business intelligence, which is the work of figuring out what systems know, what the numbers mean, and what a person can actually do with them.

Those two halves each left me with a conviction.

From building software: devices should learn how to work for people, not the other way around. We’ve spent decades teaching humans to accommodate machines. Every menu to memorise and every format to convert is the machine winning. It was tolerable when there was no alternative. There is one now.

From working with data: people should own the information technology gathers about them, and share it on purpose, directly, with the people they choose. I’ve seen how much systems know. Very little of it is in the hands of the person it describes.

For a long time I thought of those as separate ideas. They’re the same one, and it’s about who is in charge. Owning your data is having a say over your past: what you’ve made and what you keep. Technology that adapts to you is having a say over your present: where your attention goes and what you’re made to learn. I wrote more about that in The thread I didn’t see until I wrote it down.

I will not rearrange my life around a system that should be serving me.

The name

Livo, to me, means life, and living it well. That’s the test for everything the company makes. Does it make someone’s days simpler? Does it leave them more room for the things they enjoy? Does it leave them in charge? If a product can’t say yes to all three, it isn’t a Livo product.

The first product

I wanted a way to keep my family’s photos, video, voices and stories that had a real chance of surviving across generations. Not as a feed on someone else’s server, but as something you hold and hand on. Nothing worked the way I thought memories should be kept, so I built LivoCapsule.

I built it without learning the programming language. I described what I wanted to an AI, in English, and held it to the engineering discipline I’d used for years. For the first time a tool met me in my own language, on my own process, which is the first conviction applied to the building instead of the using.

What comes next

I expect these ideas to keep developing, and the company will follow where they lead. If you hold the same beliefs, or think I’ve got something wrong, I’d like to hear from you: [email protected].