I’m really excited about our announcement today – Rise is now available to anyone who wants to try it. Getting to this Public Beta state took us 2,5 years of building, polishing, talking, redoing and lots of debating. I hope you want to try it out! For me personally, working on Rise is more than just building a nice little app. Next to working with an awesome team on fun technology, which is a ton of fun, I have this feeling to contribute something useful. Let me explain: I don’t really think we have the luxury to take it easy. I believe there are a bunch of challenges that we all have to deal with in some way, and I also believe the only way forward is by progression. By inventing new stuff. Solving our problems by figuring out a way to do things better and smarter. And while I’m also a sucker for really pretty software, the existence of these big problems are the reason for me to work on Rise. I see two ways to make big progress: either you work on a vertical building block (like Eleo for batteries to help with that transition, or my friends at Cradle who are using AI to advance protein design which could help build more resilient ways to grow or create food) or you work on a horizontal building block, which is something that could help in any industry. Rise is such a horizontal building block. I see so much wasted time and wasted potential, simply because of scheduling issues. I’m dreaming about inventing new ways to work together, fuelled by smart software (which can be pretty as well). Where we combine the power of emerging technology to replace the current habits we have when doing things, just like Excel replaced the need for bringing a physical calculator to work, or the cloud allowed us to instantly share documents that would previously take days or even weeks to arrive. Our principle of building a tool that allows you to adopt a better way of working without changing your working habits, is something that we figured out along the way. I have come to grow into that more and more, and I feel it’s a really powerful idea – there is only so much willpower you have. Anything we can do to eliminate the need to tap into that is a win. I am personally no where close to done. There is a lot we want to build and try out in this space, and I hope you want to join us for that, starting with this beta!