Hello World.
Four months ago, KNOWIDEA was nothing more than an idea shared between two founders sitting in different corners of North America. Today, as we close our first four months of operations, it feels like the right moment to pause and reflect on what has already been a remarkable journey.
One thing the University of Waterloo taught me is to measure life in short bursts rather than distant horizons. Instead of viewing a year as one long block, you break it into four-month chapters. Each chapter becomes its own story.
By that measure, KNOWIDEA has just finished its first. And what a chapter it has been.
Two months into operating, we crossed $500,000 in ARR driven by enterprise contracts across two continents, spanning mining, manufacturing, consulting, and financial services.
Behind those numbers are countless nights where one day bled into the next, weeks that felt like hours, and moments where none of us fully grasped how fast we were moving.
In a very short period of time, we've had the privilege of working with some of the largest organizations in the world. Today, our active pipeline sits close to $1M, all within the first quarter of the year.
For a company this young, that's surreal.
Even more surreal: this has been accomplished by just two full-time founders and a small founding team of builders. But there's a reason this team operates the way it does.
From day one, everyone who joined KNOWIDEA was told the same thing: this is not a job for the faint-hearted. There are no predictable hours or comfortable routines here. This is a mission, one that demands intensity, urgency, and obsession.
As I write this, my co-founder Brian, one of our founding engineers, and I are running on one to two hours of sleep across the past 40 hours. We spent the night preparing for a 6:00 AM client call. That level of intensity isn't the exception here. It's the baseline.
KNOWIDEA is a remote-first company, built entirely on trust between two founders who launched this without ever having been in the same room. One of my favorite moments captures that perfectly.
Brian and I were at a conference in Miami. Midway through dinner, we both started laughing because we had just closed a deal with one of the largest companies in the world.
As absurd as that sounds, the company had already been running for months. Deals had been closed. Systems had been built. Clients had been onboarded. All of it was built on nothing but trust. That night, we wrote something on a piece of paper that has since become the foundation of how we think about KNOWIDEA.
We each wrote down three words that define who we are.
Mine were: Audacious. Extreme. Child-like.
Audacity is the word that best captures what KNOWIDEA represents. From the very beginning, we dared to challenge an industry dominated by companies with hundreds of millions in funding. We chose the harder path because it's the only one that lets us build something fundamentally different.
Brian was: Passionate. Unbothered. Persistent.
Together, these six words are the cultural DNA of this company. And for anyone who wants to be part of KNOWIDEA, as a client, investor, advisor, partner, or team member, these are the six traits we look for:
Audacious. Passionate. Unbothered. Persistent. Extreme. Child-like.
Child-like doesn't mean immature. It means holding onto a child's curiosity and the stubbornness to keep searching for the truth, no matter what. These six values are the foundation of everything we're building.
So as we close KNOWIDEA's first Waterloo "term," I'm deeply grateful for the relationships, the milestones, the mistakes, and the lessons each one taught us. To every client, investor, advisor, and team member who has been part of this journey: thank you.
\- Yatharth & Brian
