Keel
A way to live, crafted by you.
You did not lose your drive, you lost your structure. You are capable, you are not lazy, and you cannot work out why the things that matter most to you are the things that never get done.
Start with KeelSomeone wrote your job description. Nobody wrote one for your life.
Every structure you have ever been given was built around a role. PathCraft builds systems that start with the person in them.
The default
You have always been designing your life.
From the first interview you ran the same checklist. Build a career that makes you valuable. Earn enough to recover from the hours that career costs you. Collect the certificates that open the next door.
The questions that make a life yours never made it onto the list. What you actually care about. Who you want to be while you are doing the work. What a good week looks like, rather than a survivable one. Those questions get a crisis a year instead of a plan.
Life design is not new. It was simply handed to you as a to-do list. Ask the best-case question first and most of that list either gets covered anyway or stops mattering.
Kindred
Your way, crafted together.
Your way, but not on your own. You are building something nobody around you quite understands. You do not want a team. You just need people who can speak the same language.
Help shape KindredCompact
Business goals, crafted with those who share them.
You started this with a reason, and for a while everyone in the room shared it. Hiring is how a company grows and it is also how the reason thins out. Holding the two together is a structural problem, not a culture one.
Start a conversationBefore anything is built
Everyone's direction is a fingerprint.
Direction is the part nobody hands you. A role comes with objectives, a course comes with a syllabus, and both are somebody else's answer to a question about your life. We start with yours, and we find it in what has already happened to you rather than in what you say you want. Two people with the same job, the same salary and the same five-year plan will come out of that with nothing in common. That is the point. Everything built on top of it holds, because the thing underneath is only true of one person.
What holds on a bad day
Consistency is built underneath the day.
The people who keep going are not working harder than you on a bad morning. They are working from something that does not ask how the morning went. Structure turns a direction into actions small enough to survive a week that goes wrong, attached to things already in your day so that turning up costs almost nothing. Willpower then does the job it is good at, which is starting. It stops being asked to do the job it fails at, which is continuing.
How you check
Speed is not the same as progress.
Motion produces a strong feeling of progress and almost no information. Telling them apart takes three things, checked on a cycle: what you actually covered, what other people have already learned about the same problem, and what somebody outside your own view can see that you cannot. Directions move while you are working. Yours will, and the useful moment is the one where you notice and move with it, rather than the one where you find out a year later. Every product here runs that check on a loop, because a system that cannot tell you it is wrong is not a system.
The CraftMe
Built by you, owned by you.
Underneath all three products is a single artefact. It holds your purpose, the values you actually live through, the directions those values point in, and the behaviour underneath them.
You build it once, assembled out of your own history and written in your own words. It stays yours. In Kindred it is what lets someone in a completely different field understand where to work with you. In Compact it is how you can tell what a new person is actually pointed at.
They bring it with them and they take it when they leave.
The architecture
One artefact, one loop, three surfaces.
The bottom layer is the CraftMe. One person's purpose, values, directions and behaviour, assembled from their own history and held in a structure that reads the same for everybody. It belongs to the person who built it. That is an architectural decision rather than a policy position, and everything above it depends on the decision holding.
The middle layer is Life Design. Direction before effort, structure before willpower, progress over motion. It is a loop rather than a programme, so it runs continuously and it produces the evidence of whether it is working as a by-product of being used.
The top layer is three surfaces onto the same loop, at three scales. Keel runs it for one person. Kindred runs it between people whose work has nothing in common. Compact runs it across a company. The artefact is the same artefact throughout, which is why a person compounds rather than restarts when they move between them.
The commercial consequence is that the record travels with the person and never with the employer. That costs a familiar kind of lock-in, and it buys the only thing that makes any of it worth trusting.
Keel
Keel is live and being rebuilt with a small group running it now.
Kindred
Kindred is not yet live. The mechanism is settled and the shape is not. We are choosing a small number of people to decide what it becomes.
Compact
Compact does not yet exist. We are in the research phase, talking to founders and people leads about what actually breaks. It will be built with three or four purpose-led companies as design partners, scoped properly and worked on together.
Start where you are.
One question, answered honestly, is the first line of a CraftMe. It is also the most useful thing you can send us.
A word from the founder
I'm Jake. Teachers did not like me, working in Canary Wharf forced me to be someone I wasn't, and FinTech start-ups had me waking up at 05:30 just to get people paid faster. I designed systems that put me in the centre of my work, and you're looking at part of the journey.
Jake Tansley
The co-founder ask