Oboe

October 24, 2024

Today we’re introducing our new company, Oboe.


Oboe’s mission is to make humanity smarter.


Technological progress is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. We’re increasingly surrendering more of our agency over to machines, as AI reaches new levels of ability and enables our species to be more productive than ever before.


Yet despite this progress, we humans seem to be getting less intelligent. We’re less informed, less focused, less invested in our intellect. Our IQs have been dropping for decades, our standardized test scores are at historical lows, and our attention spans continue to plummet.


Today, so much of our focus is spent on making machines smarter. At Oboe, we believe it’s time for machines to make humans smarter.


Every day, billions of people around the world struggle to attain knowledge, from K-12 students to those pursuing higher education degrees, from employees upskilling for work to curious people just wanting to learn new things. For most of us, learning is daunting. It’s intimidating to even start, and it remains expensive, inefficient, and generic.


It’s time to change that. Between the advent of LLMs and the seamless integration of technology into our lives, education can now be redefined for future generations, ensuring that machines are not the only ones getting more intelligent.


At Oboe, we’re building products aimed at empowering those billions of people to learn exactly what they want to learn, ten times more efficiently, effectively, and affordably than ever before. Our vision for the future is one in which knowledge is much more easily attained, not only because it can be, but because it should be.


To help us achieve this vision, we’ve raised $4M in funding from our favorite investors, business leaders, and product builders including Eniac Ventures, Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss, and Matt Lieber.


We’re currently hiring the core team—in particular, a product designer. If you or someone you know is based in the NYC area and is interested in joining us, please reach out at jobs@oboe.fyi.


For everyone else, sign up here if you're interested in beta testing Oboe once it's ready, and follow us on X @oboelabs and Threads @oboelabs.


Much more to come,

Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano