Twenty years ago, I executive produced Who Killed the Electric Car? with my first wife, Tavin, who was pregnant with Zoe, our 2nd daughter, our co-executive producer Dean Devlin, and our friend Chris Paine, who directed it. Jessie Deeter, my college friend and extraordinary documentarian, produced it. It remains one of the proudest achievements of my life, and that’s a life that’s had a fair number of things to be proud of. I’ve owned nothing but EVs (mostly Teslas) ever since — four of them in a row, until last week, when an accident caused by the floods in West Hollywood wrecked the favorite one I’ve owned, a 2018, pre-nanny cam Model S Platinum murdered out black on black.

So I’m car shopping again, properly, for the first time in years. And — hold that thought, because something else is colliding with it…. And next week for five days or so, I’ll be road tripping in a petrol car for the first time since 2008.

The Hollywood Reporter marked the film’s twentieth anniversary this week, which is as good an excuse as any to say what the film was actually about, and why it mattered as much as it did. In the 1990s General Motors built a genuinely good electric car, the EV1, leased it to a small, devoted following across Southern California under California’s zero-emissions mandate, and then, once the mandate loosened, took nearly all of them back and crushed them. People loved that car. People love EVs — that was never the mystery.

The real story is that we caught General Motors crushing and shredding EV1s out in the Arizona desert — cars with real waiting lists, destroyed on purpose once the mandate that forced GM to build them went away. Without that footage, this stays a footnote nobody outside Detroit ever hears about. Automakers, the oil industry, federal and California regulators, and plain consumer indifference all played a part in killing it. We just caught it happening. Years later Rick Wagoner, the GM CEO who presided over the crushing of the EV1, called it the biggest mistake of his career. I didn’t need to hear him say it.

It mattered so much in 2006 because almost nobody believed electric cars were even possible. When I test drove a Tesla Roadster during production, my mind was blown. The received wisdom, inside Detroit and out, was that electric cars didn’t work, wouldn’t work, and that consumers didn’t actually want them — a story so complete that most people had no idea a car with real range and real devoted owners had already existed and been taken away from them, on purpose. An Inconvenient Truth came out the same year and did the work of making climate change impossible to ignore. We did the smaller, angrier job right next to it.

That’s the part that still matters twenty years on. The film got picked up by university classrooms across the country — environmental studies, political science, film programmes — and stayed there for years, shown to freshmen who’d never been told a technology could work perfectly well and still lose. A real slice of millennial and Gen Z climate and EV activism traces back to a dark lecture hall and ninety minutes of our film, including, it turns out, my own daughters. Isabella and Zoe grew up with it as ambient family history, the way other kids grow up with a parent’s old band posters — except this one actually did something. It helped make them who they are.

And yet most of the friends I have now have no idea I made it. Anyone who met me after the film — which, twenty years on, is nearly everyone — has no particular reason to know. It doesn’t come up over dinner. The thing that helped change how an entire generation thinks about cars and power and who gets to decide the future just quietly isn’t part of how most people around me understand who I am today. Which is truly odd. Here’s the actual thesis, twenty years on:

Art changes the world more effectively than war or politics ever manage to.

Politics moves people for a news cycle. War moves borders and grief. A film that lands in university classrooms and stays there for two decades moves how an entire generation thinks before they’ve even decided what they believe — that’s a longer lever than anything I’ve watched come out of Washington. Elon Musk has said, more than once, that Tesla exists because Detroit killed the electric car — the exact story we told. Al Gore told me something similar about what our film did that his couldn’t. We changed the world. Not alone, and without a trophy to show for most of it, but we changed it. Just a little bit.

I remember having lunch with Dylan Leiner from Sony Pictures Classics, pitching him at Cannes. Then I flew to Sundance with Dean, on his jet, with the wet film print no human had ever seen sitting in the seat beside us — there’d been an issue with the first print and we’d had to redo it. It was the literal first public screening of the film anywhere, an early rough cut, still drying, running temp music we’d change before the film went anywhere else. It got a standing ovation. I was astonished. I cried, Tavin cried, we were all mind-blown by the response.

From there we recut a few times, and finally had a proper Los Angeles premiere ahead of what became the widest theatrical release any film of mine has ever gotten — a different event entirely, cleaned up, rescored, red carpet and sponsor step-and-repeat, Summer Glau standing next to me for the paparazzi photographers, several of whom I’d later go on to employ at the Daily Mail. Then came Sony Pictures Classics and a genuine run at the festival circuit: a Special Jury Prize at Mountain Film in Telluride, an Audience Award in Canberra, nominations from the Writers Guild, the Environmental Media Awards, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. Most of what we didn’t win, we lost to An Inconvenient Truth — which is a respectable thing to lose to. No Oscar nomination, whatever I’ve apparently been telling people at dinner parties for twenty years — though the film is the reason I got invited to join the Academy in the first place. I already knew that too.

At the time I was also Vice Chairman of the Producers Guild of America — the guild for producers, helping lead its New Media Council — board seat, badge, award show committee dinners with starlets, the whole thing. Sadly, I let my membership in the PGA lapse at some point between divorces and moves in the subsequent years, and when I tried to rejoin, they wouldn’t let me back in. I still have the badge. Whether I find that frustrating, sad, or ironic depends on the day.

I’m proud of what we made — Tavin, who remains, all these years later, a genuinely good ex-business partner & wife to have; Chris, who created & directed it and lived inside this material longer than any of us; Jessie, my college friend who produced it and many many other films afterward; and me. Twenty years on, I think the film still holds up, which isn’t something I’d say about most of what I made in my 20’s and 30s. The original music supervision on the festival cut was all me, with a music editor watching the cut on the first flatscreen TV in my living room while I fed Zoe a bottle, which means I’m hopelessly partial to that soundtrack over whatever ended up in general release. Still love that RJD2 Smoke & mirrors track.

I live in West Hollywood now, which means I’m at some small film thing or other more weekends than not. Just Monday I went to a set of short film screenings at Petit Ermitage and fell in love with every one of them. But I haven’t actually stretched that creative muscle myself since The Electric Daisy Carnival Experience, the 2011 concert documentary about the dance music festival that I executive produced, which is fifteen years now and feels like it. Film is an extraordinary art form. I just found it a genuinely hard way to make a living.

There’s a scene in the sequel, Revenge of the Electric Car, where Elon is asleep on the factory floor, mid-crisis, trying to keep Tesla alive. My newest startup, Kimono, has felt like that some of these last few months — heads down, building, the kind of grind nobody sees from outside. Different company, different decade, same posture. EVs took twenty years to go from a radioactive idea to invisible infrastructure nobody thinks twice about anymore. I’m making the same bet with Kimono right now, while it’s still radioactive.

I could not have pictured, sitting in an edit bay twenty years ago, the Los Angeles I drive through now. There are more EVs on the road here every day — genuinely, visibly more, month over month, in a way you can watch happen from a stopped position at a red light. They aren’t a curiosity anymore. They’re just traffic. When I got my first electric car, a road trip meant real planning — where every charger was, how long each stop took, whether the next town had one at all, a spreadsheet before a suitcase. Now there’s a Tesla diner two minutes from my house, Superchargers pretty much everywhere you’d want one, and a road trip means picking a destination and letting the car tell you when to stop for coffee.

My reasons for staying electric aren’t political anymore either, which might be the real headline twenty years on. In 2008, owning an EV was a stance whether you wanted it to be or not — you were taking a side in an argument about oil and Detroit and who got to decide the future of the car. Today my reasons are economic, plus one that has nothing to do with money at all: I have a seven-and-a-half-year-old in San Diego I’m responsible for collecting every other weekend, three hours each way. And self-driving has become my must-have feature. It’s amazing — genuinely, not as a marketing line. Between that and the Superchargers, I have almost forgotten how to drive.

Which is a problem, because next week I have to remember. As I go looking for electric car number five, I’ve looked at the Rivian. I’ve looked at the Scout too, and I’m genuinely in love with it — but it isn’t ready yet, and the wait is too long for a man with no car. I’ve even looked, gulp, at Cadillac’s electric Escalade — proof of how far GM has traveled since the EV1. I’ll probably land back where I started: a new Model Y L, or another Model S, used — or if you have a Cybertruck you want to rent me for six months, I’m super game.

But that’s not the trip I mean.

Zoe, my twenty-year-old daughter, is moving from Boulder to Los Angeles this week, and next week she, her seven-and-a-half-year-old sister Valentine, and I are driving the whole way together — five days on the road, swimming pools wherever we can find them, a stop at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, maybe some river rafting if we time it right — in a petrol car. It will be the longest I’ve driven a gas vehicle since 2008. Eighteen years is long enough to forget what an engine sounds like when it isn’t silent, what it’s like to watch a fuel gauge instead of a battery percentage, what it’s like to actually drive the whole way yourself instead of letting the car do most of it.

Twenty years ago we asked who killed the electric car and meant it as an accusation. This week the honest answer is nobody managed it, in the end. It just took the rest of us a while to catch up — and after eighteen years of it doing most of the work, I’m about to remember what driving used to feel like, somewhere on the road between Boulder and Los Angeles, with my two youngest in the car, one of whom exists in a world our film helped build and has no memory of the one before it.

Like this? Subscribe and share. Want to connect? Https://kimono.id/Titus-public

All week I thought the Fourth of July fell on a Sunday.

It didn’t. It was Saturday. I checked repeatedly, the way you check the spelling of a word that has suddenly gone strange, and each time the answer slid straight back out of my head. The date sat there on every screen I own, and my brain declined to hold it.

Hold that thought. I promise it pays off in a way you won’t see coming.

I have severe dyscalculia. People assume that means being bad at maths. It’s stranger than that. I don’t merely mix numbers up; I don’t *understand* them the way you do. Dates, sums, sequences, addition, subtraction, percentages – they will not stay still long enough to be held. And yet I understand accounting and numeracy well enough to have built and run small & large companies – tens, at times hundreds, of millions in revenue – managing P&Ls and tracking unit economics. It arrives sideways, like art or music: ratios feel like bending notes, and my synaesthesia renders accounting as something language doesn’t truly reach – felt more than read, seen more than solved, almost architectural or sonic. (You’ll notice the spelling. I am culturally British, American by passport. Both count.) I *see* whether a business works long before I could recite the arithmetic underneath it.
But sms or call me with a six-digit security code and I will ask you to repeat it. Eight times. And likely still fail.

Under federal law, I am a disabled person… and that is before you count the ADHD I share with all three daughters and cPTSD.

The world is not built for brains like mine. It runs on the assumption that numbers are a stable, shared language. For millions of us they are not. So we route around it – and I have been routing around it, with machines, since I was a boy. AI has made the routing easier; frankly, it lets me do things I never dreamt possible. Being mildly eidetic helped.

At eleven I founded a BBS: a bulletin board system, a social network before the term existed. Not long after came my first PIM, running on a pocket computer called a Psion – the scion, as it happens, of what became Symbian, the operating system that ran most of the world’s smartphones until Android arrived and swallowed the market whole. (For years I would have sworn Symbian begat Android. It didn’t. My brain files lineages the way it files dates – neurodiversity for the win.)

I didn’t buy it because I loved gadgets, although I did. I bought it because I could not remember a phone number. Or an address. And soon enough, not an email address either – this was the CompuServe era, when an email address *was* a number, a string of digits with a comma in the middle. For a dyscalculic child of the digital age, the universe had a sense of humour.

What I was assembling, though I couldn’t have named it then, was not merely external memory. It was an external processing and memory system – a second place to *think*, not just to store. The Commodore 64s and IBM PCs begat the Psion and its organiser kin, begat laptops and smartphones; the whole parade begat a forty-year habit of keeping half my mind in machines. Never a paper notebook – what would have been the point? Most people augment and extend their reach with technology by choice. Some of us do it to function.

Hold that thought too.

The company

Kimono, the company I founded in July 2024, turned two this week. I started it with two co-founders; both have since moved on – good humans, different paths, and real gratitude for what we built. My team is exceptional now, and we ship at a pace that would have read like science fiction eighteen months ago. That is the strange gift of this AI-extended-grasp era we’ve entered: a small team with good taste can now move like a large one.

It has been, without qualification, the hardest company I have ever started – and I have started rather a lot of them. Not because the technology is hard, though it is. Because for the longest stretch, almost nobody could see the world I could see. Three years ago, when I began describing an agentic future in which your AI would need to genuinely know your people – your relationships – in order to act on your behalf, the polite reaction was that I was early. The honest one was that I was nuts – or worse, building a glorified CRM.

It didn’t help, by the way, that every one of us carries somewhere between three and fifteen phone books across our computing devices – a mess of duplicates, dead entries, munged records, and doppelgängers – so we can never find the number to text someone when we’re running late. Or to wish them a happy birthday.

I reread Kimono’s founding document this week – written in 2023, before the company even had its name. It opens with a claim I would still defend under oath: *the only universal quality of the contact data on your devices, networks, and platforms is that it’s wrong.* And in the “what this is not” section sits a parenthesis that reads rather differently now: *not a digital assistant – at least not yet.*

The road from there was not straight. The first thing we actually built was, candidly, a poor man’s OpenClaw before OpenClaw existed – too early, and honestly not very good; nothing like what Peter Steinberger later shipped to GitHub. But we could see the future clearly enough to almost build it. Sometimes you are right – just early. So we pivoted – not away from the vision, but down to its foundation: the people layer underneath every agent anyone will ever ship.

This week, two years in, we shipped Ask Kimono– and its agentic harness, Homunculus— wrapping multiple frontier models into one system that works on your behalf. Yes, it fixes your address book — but that is not what it is.

What it is: a privacy-first, user-sovereign-focused platform that knows everything about you and your people — who you know, what you know about them, what you’ve forgotten — so that you, and your agents, can answer the only question that matters: who can help me with this? Not just where someone works; LinkedIn can tell you that. Who in your actual life — across every platform, every device, every message thread real time when it matters— and the connection, the expertise, or the context you need right now. Your agents — Perplexity (my favourite), Claude, and ChatGPT included — will be able to draw on that graph directly when we ship our MCP later this month. On your instruction, revocable at any moment, private by design.

The full story of what shipped – and what’s coming behind it – deserves its own post, and it gets one later this week. The short version: we’ll be in the App Store in late summer or early autumn, we’re adding users to the beta every day right now, and there are 6,000 people on the waitlist – so if you’re game to test and help, join them. We are looking for intrepid souls to help test as we march to the store later this summer or early fall.

Now notice the shape of the thing. The BBS at eleven. The Psion. The PIM’s (personal information managers), TripIt – forty-odd years of external processing and memory. A man who cannot hold six digits has spent his whole life building machines that think and remember alongside him, and Kimono is simply the finished thought: the same system, at last, for everyone. Depending on how you count – and you already know how I feel about counting – it is my twentieth startup, if you’ll grant me the BBS and the computer lab I ran out of my dorm room and a few other edge cases. Cut me some slack on counting. The through-line is real.

Twenty beginnings. Some became Razorfish and Schematic; some became lessons. I built this last, hardest one in parallel with my divorce – (technically the dissolution of a domestic partnership and custody battle), which made everything more complicated and, given a massive income imbalance, much more unfair. Years and years of it, beginning in 2023, or was it 2022…. thank God its over now. Partway through, I parted ways with my attorney(s) who had failed me in ways both expensive and repeated – and I chose to finish the fight myself. In pro per. Disabled. Dyscalculic. I researched, drafted, and filed my own appeal to the California Court of Appeal – with AI as my paralegal, my clerk, and my second pair of eyes, and every citation verified by the human whose name is on the brief. The man who cannot read a calendar wrote an appellate brief. When I tell you this AI-extended-grasp era changes who gets access to justice, I am not theorising.

I don’t recommend running a startup in parallel with a divorce. But together they sharpened the only durable skill I own, and it isn’t grit. Resilience is the practised art of beginning again.

I learnt that somewhere specific. Hold that, one more time.

The Fourth

On the Fourth, Valentine – the youngest of the three daughters I have brought into this world – and I went to a water park and rode every slide. Every single one. We ate hot dogs and chicken tenders and fries. She wore the bikini we bought two years ago in optimistic anticipation of a growth spurt that has now, in earnest, begun. A small thing, a swimsuit finally fitting. It undid me slightly.

That evening we hiked to the top of the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook and watched the fireworks break across the whole basin – 360 degrees of Los Angeles going off at once. Snuggled in sweatshirts, she – who hates to hike – said: wow, Dad, that was worth it.

Later, lying in bed listening to Fast Car her favourite and – Coldplay by way of Sierra Eagleson’s cover of Viva la Vida, we agreed it was the best Fourth of July ever. Listen closely to what that last one is about – a king who lost his kingdoms and lived to sing about it – and you’ll understand why it was the right lullaby for this particular weekend. It and the one two years ago are two of the happiest memories I own, on a holiday that carries, for me, a great deal of freight.

Some of that freight is lighter than the rest. For the years I worked for the Beach Boys — I engineered *Summer in Paradise*, their last studio recording, and the first record ever made on Pro Tools, then all of sixteen tracks — the Fourth of July meant two concerts a day.

They are at the Hollywood Bowl this very weekend, as it happens, still playing the holiday. Some traditions hold.

Here is where every thread ties off.

The date I cannot hold

The Fifth of July is my sober birthday. Thirty-four years – since 5 July 1992.

All week my brain refused to hold the Fourth, filing it again and again on Sunday. The Fourth fell on Saturday. The Fifth – the single most important date of my life – fell on the Sunday. My brain wasn’t confused. It was pointing. My own independence day, landing every year on the morning after everyone else’s, in the year the country turns 250.

The short version: after a wild final night of sex, drugs, rock and roll – and a moonlight motorcycle ride on Mulholland Drive, retrospectively not the worst but a solid entry in the collection of bad choices I was becoming expert at – I decided to change my life.

For a week. I decided, at first.

Five days later – after a detox I should absolutely have been in hospital for – I walked into my first log cabin meeting. I never left. I have never hidden my sobriety, and over the years many in music, film, and tech have come to me for advice, counsel, and fellowship. Always happily granted.

That is where the resilience actually comes from. Not the boardroom – the folding chair. Sobriety is the art of beginning again, practised daily, for thirty-four years. Every startup, every reinvention, every hard season since – the company nobody believed in, the divorce, the long years of being early – has drawn on that same muscle.

People are often surprised at how open I am about my sobriety, and about my disabilities. I learnt where the surprise comes from in a courtroom.

During my divorce I asked for one accommodation: accounting support for the financial portions of the case – the disclosures, the schedules, the arithmetic a family court runs on. Numbers, as you now know, are the one language I cannot speak. Two different family court judges – not one, two – refused. And worse than refused: the request was met with something closer to mockery, recast as a tactic – my errors read as dishonesty rather than inability. One judge remarked, more than once, that I had “chosen to revoke confidentiality,” as though dyscalculia were something to conceal. Something shameful.

Here is the part I cannot get past. Both judges held that I needed no support at all – whilst penalising me, ruling after ruling, for precisely the deficits the support would have addressed. You cannot be fine and punishable for the same condition in the same courtroom. And yet.

Just like sobriety used to be: the thing itself treated as the disgrace, the honesty about it treated as the confession.

Fuck that. Shame is a tax levied on honesty, and I stopped paying it thirty-four years ago.

The stigma is the disorder; the condition is just a condition. I am a founder with dyscalculia, ADHD, dyslexia, and cPTSD, thirty-four years sober, on my twentieth beginning, running a company whose entire premise is that trust survives transparency. I could hardly argue otherwise about myself. So I intend to speak about disability, and about sobriety, far more often. Consider this essay a beginning.

Because here is what sobriety is actually about – not the not-drinking, which is merely how it starts. Sobriety is about choosing life. I explained that to Valentine over breakfast this morning, and she considered it with the gravity only Valentine can summon, then announced: We have to get you a cupcake. As I write this, she is upstairs making me a bag & card to celebrate.

So this year I counted my independences – counting not otherwise being my strength. A country’s: 250. Mine: 34. A partnership ended – and in its place, bizarrely, a cold peace with Valentine’s Mother that, given the circumstances, counts as progress. A company, two years grown and finally seen. A little girl in a bikini we bought on faith, two years early – now upstairs with markers and a black paper bag full of stuffies she’s “giving me” for the day, celebrating the day her father chose life.

Newfound hope for the future. Deep gratitude for the past. A calendar I still cannot read – which, this week, cost me only a day.

We’re going to eat our cupcakes now.

Everyone in the Bay was building claws last week…
— I raced home & rewired my smarthome instead.

I spent this week in the Bay Area. Every event, every dinner, every hallway conversation was full of people building claws — Claude, Cursor, wrappers on wrappers, agents that call agents. The ambient energy was frantic and familiar. It reminded me of 1996, when everyone was suddenly building websites, most of them terrible, all of them consequential. I know because I was there — I founded Tag Media around that time, building NASA’s website among many others, before we were acquired by Omnicom and merged into Razorfish. We were inventing the internet. A history that is now repeating.

This week, somewhere around day three, probably over bad conference coffee, I coined a new phrase:

The antebellum period — the years before the American Civil War — wasn’t a time of ignorance. People knew something was coming. They could feel the tectonic pressure. They just kept building the old structures anyway, because what else do you do when the rupture hasn’t arrived yet? You optimize the plantation, you expand the railroad, you print the pamphlets.

That’s us. Right now. Everyone knows the next wave is going to break differently — ASI, AGI, reasoning models that can actually run companies, tools that make today’s “AI-powered” apps look like AOL keywords. And yet here we all are — building claws, training on vibes, shipping dashboards.

- Guilty.

What matters in every pre-rupture system isn’t what’s being built, but who captures the value. The real leverage sits with whoever controls the memory, the context, and the rights to act on what gets produced — not the agents doing the work, but the systems that own their output. This isn’t about better tools; it’s about who owns the layer where labor compounds.

The difference is: some of us are building infrastructure that will survive the rupture. And some of us are just decorating the antebellum house.

> “Everyone knows the next wave is going to break differently. And yet here we all are — building claws, training on vibes, shipping dashboards.”

> — Titus, March 2026

— — -

Meanwhile, back at the Manor house

I raced home from the Bay last night — not to decompress, but to update my Claude Cowork setup with a new outpost skill so I can text it further instructions from wherever I am. Which, honestly, is a perfect microcosm of where I’m operating right now.

Kimono has shipped more code features and updates in the last 60 days than in the entire six months before that. Combined. That’s not a marketing line — it’s the kind of number that makes you stop and ask what changed. The honest answer: the tools changed. Not just what we’re building with, but how we’re building. AI-native workflows compound in genuinely nonlinear ways.

60 days of shipping = more than the previous 6 months combined.

• 200 lapsed users reactivated in 10 days.

The reactivation campaign is a story I keep telling because it’s proof of concept for Kimono’s entire thesis. I ran an entire marketing campaign — ideation, segmentation, copy, sequencing, execution — using Airtable, ActiveCampaign, and Claude Cowork. No agency. No growth team. Just me, a well-structured contact database, and a sufficiently stubborn disposition. 200 lapsed users came back in 10 days. I’m pushing to connect Kimono to Topmail.so to make it even better.

That’s not AI hype. That’s a Founder doing what used to require a team of five plus interns, in a fraction of the time. The tools aren’t replacing the judgment — they’re compressing the distance between the judgment and the output.

— — -

Even the Catastrophic Stuff Got Fixed

Our head of AI, Sutha, found a bug recently that could generously be described as “existential.” A 32-bit integer primary key on our busiest table — a 2.1-billion-row time bomb, from some early engineering choices, left for someone to find. Someone being Sutha, at 5 PM on a Friday, staring at an AWS RDS console that wouldn’t tell him anything useful. It got solved. He wrote it up on Substack, and you should read it — not just for the fail/bug, but for the broader argument he makes about what AI agents are doing to managed cloud infrastructure. Short version: AWS might be Novell NetWare, and the CNE certifications are being retired as we speak. Food for thought, even if I’m not sure I agree. Amazon was early in AI and might have a plan, but RDS sure doesn’t show it today.

When your debugging loop runs at the speed of your discovery loop, the whole character of engineering changes. You stop sitting on problems. You stop accumulating technical debt like sediment. Things get solved because the cost of solving them has collapsed. Sutha’s piece is the CLI argument in long form, and it’s one of the sharpest things written about infrastructure this year.

🦞 🏯 🔧

— — -

I Also Reprogrammed My House

This one is partly personal indulgence, partly a data point I can’t stop thinking about.

Some of you know I spent time at Samsung leading smart home initiatives and led, amongst others, the teams behind the smart fridge and the FRAME TV with Yves Behar. That era left me with a fairly elaborate Matter-over-Thread smart home setup. It’s either a blessing or, depending on the week, a sophisticated form of domestic suffering that may have contributed to my second divorce

I have Claude Co-work re-programming my Matter-over-Thread smarthome with my new Homey… you should see the new automations with my Frame TV, ecobee, and lightswitches, plugs, and the aquarium feeder when I’m out of town.

Last week, I reprogrammed the whole thing. Not just tweaked — rebuilt the automation logic, restructured the device mesh, rethought the whole architecture.

It took an evening. With AI assistance. Something that previously would have required a dedicated weekend and Stack Overflow fury-scrolling.

That’s the antebellum tell: the thing that used to be a project is now a Tuesday. The question is what you do with all those recovered Tuesdays.

— — -

What Kimono Is Actually Building Here

All of this — the contact reactivation, the shipping velocity, the cowork setup, even the house — is a live proof of concept for what Kimono is building. We’re not just a privacy-first AI platform. We’re infrastructure for the moment when your data stops living in a dozen fragmented silos and starts working for you.

The infrastructure question isn’t abstract — it’s the whole game. The “Plaid for PII” framing gets at it. Plaid didn’t replace your bank — it made your financial data *interoperable*. Kimono does the same for identity, relationships, and personal data. In a world where everyone is building AI-powered everything, the question of who controls the underlying data becomes the question. We have a strong opinion about who that should be.

Kimono sits at that layer — not just an interface, but living, evolving memory. The continuously updated graph of who you know, what matters, and how it all connects. In a world of stateless tools and disposable outputs, the advantage shifts to systems that remember, that carry context forward, and that can act on it. That’s the infrastructure — not just generating answers, but owning the layer where relationships, data, and decisions compound.

In addition to our growing user community, Kimono now has a generalist AI chat. DM me to join. It’s early, it’s good, and it’s a taste of what’s coming. We have 4k on a waitlist for the product, but we prioritize chat members who are smart and contribute.

Our first prototype, a digital business card replacement, is Kimono.ID is infrastructure, not decoration. Your data, working for you — before the rupture arrives. See it live and connect with me: kimono.id/Titus-public and join the waitlist.

— — -

I Lost an Argument & I’m Telling You About It

A week ago, Sutha, Alek, and I had a proper debate about whether Kimono should build an MCP — a Model Context Protocol integration, for the non-technical readers. My position: MCP, obviously. It’s the hot thing, everyone’s building them, they’re flashy and demonstrable and easy to explain at a conference. VC’s are asking…

Engineering voted unanimously for CLI. Command line. Machine to machine. The quiet pipe that nobody talks about at conferences and everybody actually uses.

I didn’t go quietly. I stayed up late with Claude, Perplexity, and OpenAI — yes, all three, at the same time, like some kind of insomniac AI council — trying to build the case that I was right. Marshaling arguments, running scenarios, looking for the angle that would flip the vote.

I sent a concession text the next morning.

Here’s why it matters enough to put in a blog post: CLI — machine-to-machine, agent-to-agent, silent API infrastructure — will be at least half of Kimono’s revenue within the next year. Not the chat UI. Not the consumer app. The pipe. The part that other systems call when they need verified identity data, relationship context, and permissioned personal information without asking a human to click anything.

That’s the antebellum argument, right there, inside our own Slack. The visible, demonstrable, conference-friendly thing versus the infrastructure that actually moves the money. Sutha and Alek saw it first. I needed a late-night AI tribunal to catch up.

The good news is: I’m now the CEO who listens to his team and only loses arguments once per topic. That’s the bar I’m setting for myself, and I’m keeping it.

— — -

So, What Do We Do in the Antebellum?

Build infrastructure, not decorations. Move faster than you think is appropriate. Don’t confuse the tools that exist today with the ceiling — we’re still in the foothills. And pay attention to who owns the data underneath all of it, because that’s where the next war gets fought.

The claw-builders in the Bay were full of energy, and I don’t mean this as a dig. Some of them are building the railroads. Some are painting the parlors. It’s not always obvious which is which from the inside.

I think I know which one Kimono* is. We’re building the thing that survives the rapture.

More soon. 🦞

— — -

Titus

Richard D Titus is the founder & CEO of Kimono. A serial entrepreneur he also previously served as Controller, Future Experience at the BBC (iPlayer, Mobile service), co-founder of Razorfish (LA), founder of Schematic, and the ex EVP of product experience (Frame TV & Smart Homes) at Samsung Electronics. He writes here and at rxdxt.substack.com and is [@richardtitus]on X, and @rxdxt on Instagram and most other places (if not ).