And welcome to Protolyst, a paradigm shift in knowledge management.
What we are about
Keeping track of knowledge is hard. Most of us are still using systems for collecting and organising information that haven’t changed much since digitisation. Some have found databasing systems or connected knowledge platforms, but all of these systems rely on remembering where information is located, or diligently pruning and organising to follow the linked connections to re-stumble upon the past discoveries. And when they’ve been found, the insight or “aha” moment is often buried somewhere within a page, or a collection of pages.
Genius is born from 1000 small insights.
Collected, collated, and considered to deliver understanding greater than the sum of their parts. The problem is, the human brain is fantastic at seeing patterns and synthesis of new ideas from their constituent parts, but absolutely terrible at accurately remembering the raw data needed to feed into this process.
Unlocking this capability is our goal with Protolyst. We are an insight-first platform for collecting all of the “aha” moments you find across conversation, blog posts, articles, podcasts, video, and reflection.
In any one of these, we find if the source is high quality, they usually inspire 5-8 “aha” moments or insights. Rather than leaving these buried within a document or meeting notes, Protolyst let’s you capture, contextualise, and collate why that information is valuable to you.
Whether it’s 6 hours or 6 months later, that information can be linked where its needed; providing a spring of synthesised bite sized ideas we call Atoms; the starting point for Genius.
Where we come from
Protolyst (n)
- Proto – “first, original, earliest”
- lyst – from catalyst – “something that precipitates an event”
Together meaning: to take the first or earliest ideas and catalyse new understanding.
We started building Protolyst as an internal tool to help us support Deep Technology startups, those start ups working with cutting edge inventions or discoveries and trying to find a place in the market for them.  Anything from quantum computing to synthetic biology, AI to advanced materials.Â
The teams we worked with were exceptionally capable, but always suffered from a surplus of information.  An idea from a customer here, a snippet from a competitor’s technical briefing, a note in a recent publication. There’s a famous quote from Shawn Carroll, “Startups don’t starve, they drown.”Â
Key insights and learning continuously fell through the gaps or were buried in the noise, and when building a highly technical, highly risky startup every drop of information counts; but only if organised.
Where we are going?
We’re in early Beta.  Version 0.9.1. We’ve been piloting with a few select teams and knowledge management aficionados.  There’s a lot of work still to do, we are are excited to share our progress so far in building what we hope is a powerful approach to knowledge capture and creation.
We are excited to have you join us.
Come chat to us in the forums!
The Protolyst Team