(2025-08-18) Obsidian's CEO On Why Productivity Tools Need Community More Than AI

Casey Newton: Obsidian's CEO on why productivity tools need community more than AI. Today I’m talking with Steph Ango, who is the CEO of Obsidian.

Obsidian is a note-taking and productivity app that fits into a similar “second brain” space to Notion, the CEO of which I interviewed here on Decoder last week. But Obsidian differentiates itself with a really unusual approach to its business. It still wants to be your entire personal knowledge base (PKM) — to hold all your notes, links, files, and other information — but it works in a very different way.

In Obsidian, files are Markdown-based, stored locally on your own devices, and completely free to use

Obsidian does charge a subscription fee for access to certain features, including cross-device sync, version history, and web publishing. But it’s still a model that feels decidedly old-fashioned for software that’s trying to keep up with the current world, and so I had to ask him about those decisions.

he’s actually not one of the founders. He joined in 2023, when cofounders Shida Li and Erica Xu brought him in based on his experience with his former startup, Lumi. He was also a huge Obsidian fan.

What makes Obsidian unique is that it sort of works like Wikipedia, in that the core unit is a link between your notes. So, if I was to write about my experience today in my journal, I’d say, “I was on the Decoder podcast with Casey,” and each time I mentioned something I might form a link out of “Decoder.”

over time, your web of knowledge becomes greater and you have more nodes in your Obsidian.

When you joined the company in 2023, you said, “I can’t overstate how life-changing Obsidian has been for me. It has fundamentally improved the way I think. I want to see what happens if more people gain that superpower.” What do you feel like is the superpower that Obsidian gave you, and why did no other products make you feel quite the same way?

This idea of thinking about the world like your own personal Wikipedia was really powerful. I had kind of kludged together a few different apps to make something that kind of worked that way.

how it made me think differently, I think once you have this concept of links and ideas that can be networked together, you can start to form more complicated, complex, or interesting thoughts than you otherwise could. (digital garden)

Even though I’m the CEO of Obsidian, I see it as a means to an end. I like to write, so I write a lot of short essays on my blog.

I have this essay called “Pain Is Information.”

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”

I was going through a painful time

what I like about Obsidian is it gives you this place to approach it in a very freeform way and connect different concepts you might be thinking about.

For me it’s in this philosophical realm, but for other people it might be with biology or language learning. My partner speaks Chinese, and I’ve been wanting to learn Chinese, so I’m starting to bring together these different ideas. I’m into woodworking and I’m always learning new skills, new details, or new tools that I might want to use, and I’m doing research about that. All of those things can coexist inside of this digital place, which is kind of weird because you could have a connection between a woodworking tool, a city I went to in China, and the concept Murakami was describing, all those things are just ingredients in this soup,

Something that a lot of people value about Obsidian and similar apps is that they can be engines for serendipity.

Definitely. I think that one of the benefits of this approach is that it’s quite freeform.

you don’t have to know what something is going to be about until later when the connections form.

The app came out in 2020, and I found out about it with the first version. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I think all of us were going stir-crazy.

I was just starting to put all these community things out there. I was running a different startup at the time, and I was just putting these things out there because I was making them for myself and people started using them.

Shida and Erica are amazing engineers who met at the University of Waterloo. They’re geniuses in terms of engineering and community management. What I was bringing to the table as a community member was a sense of design and product that they had a little less of.

we started chatting, and then we started talking about business. They started telling me about the business model and some of the challenges that they were dealing with. We just kept talking for a couple years, and I was using Obsidian all the time.

When I sold my previous startup, Lumi, I started to think what would be my next thing.

So, I pitched to them, “What if I could come on board and help you guys?” At first, it took the shape of contract work, working with them as an advisor and working on the 1.0 release that had this new design that I built. Shida is an incredible engineer, one of the best I’ve ever worked with, and eventually, he just wanted to focus on that. It created this nice balance

You mentioned the plugin ecosystem. It seems to me that plugins have been one of the main ways that Obsidian has grown

plugins are what allow us to stay small because there are so many capabilities that people want that are fairly narrow and will only be useful to 1 percent or less of our user base.

because it’s built on web technologies like JavaScript and CSS, a lot of people know how to build things for it because they know those languages

the creative things people come up with are always pushing the envelope of what our API should be able to support and how the platform can allow even more flexibility.

right now we’re working on this thing called Bases, which allows you to view your notes in a database-type format, and there are a number of plugins that do something like that in the Obsidian community. So, it’s a signal to us that this is actually really important and should be in the core app.

Somebody who’s on the team today, Tony Grosinger, wrote this plugin called Advanced Tables, which was just a way to simplify making tables in Obsidian. We’re talking about something very basic, but rows and columns were difficult to do earlier on, and if you’re someone who wants to live completely in the Markdown world, they’re kind of tricky to make.

basically everyone we’ve hired or worked with was once a community plugin author or team developer.

There are integrations into a million different apps out there

The cool thing about that is if you’re interested in Obsidian because you want to do world building for your RPG tabletop group, you can do that and you don’t have to have the entire calendar functionality inside of your Obsidian. You can just use the plugins that have to do with that.

I’m curious what you did to attract those first developers. Was it as simple as having a really good API that was available early on?

One, like I mentioned, is that the languages and framework are very simple for anyone to use.

a lot of developers use Obsidian as their note-taking app of choice because it’s private and it uses this Markdown format as the core way to write text. Because it’s so customizable, it attracts developers and then developers use it all day long

we added the API very early on

Recently, I interviewed Ivan Zhao of Notion for Decoder. You mentioned Notion is another product in this space that sometimes people might choose over Obsidian. It strikes me that while your products do some of the same things, they’re designed very differently. Notion is about pixel-perfect polish and beautiful interface elements. Obsidian, by default, can look a bit more like a terminal

I think the fundamental difference between Obsidian and Notion is that Notion is a cloud service.

With Obsidian, all your data is local. So, if you’re not online — if you’re on a plane or something like that — you always have access to your data. That difference shapes a whole bunch of other things.

For example, it would be really hard to add plugins to Notion because it can’t make it easy to run arbitrary code on its cloud-based platform, whereas with Obsidian, it’s pretty easy.

It’s the same with things like theming, design, and how much user interface customizability there is. I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone who’s listening, but when I was 11 or 12 years old, there was Winamp, Winamp 2 was coming out, and I was all about making themes

I think there’s a bit of that flavor in Obsidian. Obsidian is quite popular with a lot of younger people, and I don’t know what it is. At that time, you have the energy and the desire to have control over your digital space, and Obsidian makes that easy

As I mentioned, I used Roam, then I used Obsidian, and then I used Mem. Now I use something called Capacities. Obviously I have a huge problem. I’m working on it in therapy. But I’m curious about how sticky Obsidian is

We actually don’t know how many users Obsidian has. We don’t know how sticky it is because we don’t have any analytics.

We’re not trying to be Notion. Notion has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it’s amazing, especially on the collaboration side. It has a lot of advantages that make the app better for certain things. We’re just a small team. Our focus is to keep making the tool better and stay small, as long as we’re making enough money to stay afloat.

With Obsidian, your data is there. I think the feelings of freedom and security are paradoxically quite sticky because even though you have all your data, you could just… Personally, I’m constantly editing my Obsidian files not in Obsidian. I will use code editors and other tools to do mass modifications to hundreds of files. You can run Python scripts on your data. You can kind of do anything because they’re just files at the end of the day.

We’re not trying to take over the world. We’re not trying to be the next Microsoft. That makes it a lot easier to make long-term decisions that we feel are better for ourselves or for our users. It’s the tool that we want to use all day long. So, it’s okay if people leave. And different people have different brains and different approaches to thinking, so maybe they should leave. Maybe that would be better for them.

Was I just using these tools incorrectly, or do you think that productivity tools can sometimes be counterproductive for people?

trying to spend a lot of time walking in nature, doing woodworking, cooking, and other activities that I find restorative. Then, that makes my Obsidian time feel more rewarding, productive, and useful because — productive is not the right word. I just have things to write about. I have a life that I’m trying to dissect. “Oh, what happened today?” or “What problem am I trying to solve?” And if you don’t have those other things going on, then you don’t have something to write about, and you’re now in the space massaging something.

There are a lot of people who keep trying new apps and nothing sticks for them or they get caught up in the organization and beautification of their notes. I think that can happen in any app. I hear about this, in general, and I don’t know what the cause is. My sense is that it has nothing to do with the apps unless they’re literally trying to engagement-bait you in these weird ways.

You’ve mentioned that you have seven full-time employees.

At Obsidian, we have one meeting per year, so my time is very —

We use Discord and our Slack equivalent to chat as a team all the time, and we’re in there consistently talking. But in terms of synchronous meetings, it’s quite rare

We have two people who are working on community related things full time — essentially customer service and plugin review

Then, we have three full-time engineers, me, and then Erica, who works on marketing, community, and other things. I suppose I’m the only person who’s a trained designer, so I end up doing a lot of UX design, marketing related things, and our web-facing stuff.

I wrote a couple of years ago about how I had spent years linking and tagging all my notes, reviewing them on a pretty regular basis, and still not feeling like I was getting a ton of insights from that process

Obsidian has a few different revenue sources. One is Obsidian Sync. You probably want to use Obsidian on multiple devices, so a phone, iPad, or computer. Because the files are local to your device, you need a way to keep those versions in sync. You can totally sync your files using Dropbox, iCloud, or Google Drive. There are many different services out there, but we make our Obsidian Sync service. We think it’s the best one because it’s totally integrated into the app, and it has a few features like version history.

Publish is another service where you can take your notes in Obsidian and make a website out of it.

It’s been profitable pretty much since day one. Since I think even before Sync launched — the donation program, Catalyst, was the first thing that launched — so it’s been profitable for five years.

*How do you make decisions at your company? Do you have a framework?

We have this manifesto that you can look at. In a way, I think that is our most powerful driver because it describes our values, which are to make this app that’s super private, super customizable, and durable around these files that hopefully you’ll be able to own for the rest of your life*

I think that whether it’s through plugins or through just general complaining from the compute community, we kind of know what the biggest gaps are. So, we always have a general idea of what we want to work on next.

But there’s also a self-motivated aspect to it. Because our team uses it all day, someone will become an advocate or champion for something.

Because the organization is so flat, we can make decisions very easily. It’s also very easy for one person to go off and prototype something for a few days and show it to the team and say, “Hey, solve this problem. Help me get this polished so we can release it.”

Let me end on a few questions about the future. Virtually every major company that’s making a productivity tool is incorporating some generative AI feature or integrating an AI plugin or API. What is the Obsidian view on AI and productivity tools? Will you add features like that?

So far, there are no AI options built into Obsidian except in Web Clipper, which is intentional because it lives outside of Obsidian itself. In Web Clipper, we have a feature called Interpreter that allows you to put in a bunch of prompts or questions at the time you’re capturing a webpage, like if you want to fill in metadata about that page or say who the author is.

I think the fear I have with AI is that I don’t want it to replace thinking in my own use, the insights that I’m going to gather with a summary generated by AI.

Now, there are tons of people using AI with Obsidian. Because of the plugin architecture, AI is by far the most popular category of new, up-and-coming plugins right now. There are a lot of plugins that people are making using AI. A lot of the LLMs are very knowledgeable about Obsidian and its API. You can just go into Claude and say, “Hey, make me an Obsidian plugin that this or that.”

it’s happening faster than we can keep up with because AI makes it so easy to make plugins

We’re not comfortable with the idea that our users’ data could be stored in OpenAI servers without their consent.

Let’s talk about the medium to long-term future of Obsidian. What does it look like when 95 percent of its features are built? What do you hope it does that it can’t quite do today?

*I have this point of view that Obsidian is not necessarily going to last forever.

There’s going to be a point in time — I don’t know if it’s in five years, one year, 10 years, 50 years — where we’re not going to be using these exact same kinds of apps. I don’t know what is going to replace it, or if we’re even going to be using computers in the same way.*

What’s the next thing that you’re working on?

ight now, it’s a feature called Bases. The idea is that you can store properties, or metadata about the current file, in Obsidian notes. For example, if I have a note about Decoder, I might put the name of the host and a list of episodes. For each episode that I want to take notes on, I might write down which guests were on, what date it came out, or the episode number. What Bases allows you to do is visualize a certain kind of note as a table or eventually as a Kanban view or another type of view. So, it’s like a visualization layer on top of the data that you already have. We just make it really easy to create that database from the bottom up.