"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Herbert Simon, scholar and pioneer in computer science, 1971. He wrote that before the internet, before email, before the phone in your pocket. Attention is the currency in our digital age. Memory is not!
Every AI tool I use forgets my business the moment I close the tab. Pricing, who I sell to, the problem I actually solve. The model itself remembers nothing between sessions, so every new tool means re-explaining the company from scratch, like onboarding a new hire every morning who forgets it all overnight. Running a business, that's a non-starter. So I built two things.
The Brain: one record of the business that plugs into any AI tool. Pricing, positioning, products, who it's for. Write it once, never explain it again.
Ella: the PA on top. Not an agent that does everything. The industry keeps selling that promise, and I don't want it. The best assistants never did everything. They knew the business, knew you, and put the right thing in front of you before you knew you needed it. That's Ella. She keeps the Brain current, handles the repetitive, and guards your attention instead of flooding it.
The DJ version of this: no DJ remembers 50,000 tracks. The great ones carry a crate, curated, that travels with them from room to room. The skill was never knowing every record. It was knowing which one to drop next, for this room, right now. An agent that does everything is a DJ playing every track at once. The one you actually want reads the room and hands you the next record.
Ella and the Brain is in beta now. If you run your own business, join the founders beta at ella.optimizelabs.ai.
🎵 Ella Fitzgerald — Mack the Knife, Live in Berlin 1960 She forgot the lyrics mid-song, read the room, improvised, and won a Grammy. Full playlist and archive at niccjohnson.com/drop.