Kinsome

With a roadmap that's bursting at the seams and a big deadline looming in early September, we've been eager to continue adding muscle for our summer sprint. With that in mind, we're pumped to add yet another Williams College Eph to our corner for this crazy stretch. While he'll be returning to some little company called Google afterwards, Tanner Love will be an invaluable addition for us in the time we have him. Having started his career at Google before taking a core engineering role at another Consumer Social startup (AC Momento), Tanner's been able to hit the ground running and will undoubtedly serve as a great sounding board for Michael Gerbush and the rest of the team this summer. Welcome aboard Tanner...We hope all the Kinsome perks don't spoil you too much before you get back to slumming it at Google! #ephs

What are the chances that we'd not only add a team member from the best college in the world, but also one from the best high school out there? Well, we've defied all odds with the addition of Junior Software Engineer, Joe Webster, who spent formative educational years at The Roxbury Latin School. Originally from Boston, Joe left to attend Vanderbilt University. After exploring several career paths, Joe continued his education at Launch School, an online program specializing in web development and software engineering. Joe is fascinated by generative AI and its potential but is cautious about the rise of generative AI companions intended to replace human interactions. Consequently, he joined Kinsome to develop software that leverages generative AI to strengthen and enhance real-world relationships rather than replace them. Joe is particularly excited about using this technology to improve the bonds between grandchildren and grandparents, a crucial yet often overlooked connection in the U.S. market. In his free time, Joe enjoys pickleball, skiing, and traveling, particularly to U.S. national parks.

The Kinsome office is starting to fill up as we add full-time team members and interns, so we wanted to highlight our new additions one-by-one: First up is Ina Ocelli, who joins us from the best higher ed institution on the planet (Williams College). Ina is double majoring in Computer Science and Economics. She is passionate about using technology for positive impact and has explored this through internships and research positions in Data Science and Machine Learning. Her projects include using machine learning for language dialect classification and developing translators for underserved languages. Of equal importance to us, Ina's interest in Kinsome is personal. Growing up, her family was spread across Greece, Italy, and Albania, making it challenging for her and her siblings to maintain close relationships with their grandparents. She wishes they had a platform like Kinsome back then to bridge the distance and foster stronger connections.

As I stewed over a particularly annoying piece of feedback to my last post, the record playing in our office seemed to taunt me: "If you can't be with the one you love, honey..." Despite very different context, Stephen Stills was siding with our naysayers' claims: “Grandparent-grandchild bonds can only be built in-person.” Really?!? So if your parents/in-laws live far away, start saving up because plane tickets are your only hope. And if they live internationally, maybe spend your limited resources elsewhere and adopt some local surrogate grandparents for your kids (ie "love the one you're with").  And if there is some condition that keeps you, your kids, or your parents from traveling, best to just forget you have family elsewhere! ( ☝ that’s all sarcasm) Come on.  Even the most ardent tech critics can hopefully acknowledge that it can play some role in relationship building.  In the remote vs in-office work debate, for instance, even those who vote "in-office" don’t argue that Zoom, Slack, and Google docs aren’t valuable collaboration tools that supplement in-person communication.  No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  While several factors have led to frayed extended family bonds, the most obvious one is the growing physical distance that often separates non-nuclear family members.  But the root causes for that growing separation are often positive: compared to bygone eras, people move away from family to chase better economic opportunities, to create lives and raise families with people from other regions/countries, and generally to experience more of the world, which hopefully instills more empathy and understanding for other cultures.  It’s hard to argue these aren’t incredibly positive developments, even if one consequence has been the strain placed on familial ties. So unless you believe that everyone should move back to their hometowns or that family bonds aren't worth it to begin with, I don’t really get it.  Should we be shifting our roadmap to focus on teleportation if we want to support family connection for those who live far apart?  My cofounder Mike is a wicked smart software engineer, but my powerful Product Manager senses tell me that probably wouldn’t have the right risk/reward tradeoff.  (Note: I want to be clear that I'm a huge fan of teleportation as a concept, so my commentary here is only questioning our ability to deliver on that dream) None of this is to say that in-person connection isn’t critical, or that we shouldn’t strive to see family whenever possible.  But with all due respect, we think it’s asinine to argue that tech can’t help build up the foundation for strong family bonds between those visits, particularly for the millions whose lives have brought them away from extended family for very worthwhile reasons.  When it comes to family, at Kinsome we think you should love the ones you love, whether you can be with them IRL or not. (photo of my FiL and my youngest playing via Facetime)

More musings on my failed exploits as a builder, and how it informed our positioning of the role Kinsome plays in strengthening grandparent/grandchild bonds: Long Distance Love: Building Bridges that Last https://lnkd.in/eWnhKzE6

At Fluent, our commitment to family wellbeing continues to drive our work. From partnerships with Google on digital wellbeing to acclaimed documentaries like "Family Strong," we've always prioritized strengthening family bonds. We're excited to continue this work through our collaboration with Kinsome , fellow advocates for strengthening human connection. Discover more about our work together in this blog post by our Senior Child Development Researcher, Amy Warren. #FamilyWellbeing #DigitalWellbeing #TechForGood