What we wished we'd had.
Two friends who grew up online, and a blocker built to protect your attention instead of competing for it.
Reed & Colton ↓
I grew up in a time when technology was just beginning to become accessible to families in the United States. I remember the spirit of excitement everyone seemed to share, saying that technology was going to open doors! It was going to make life and work so much better, so much easier.
While it's true that it did open doors, I think it's fair to say that some doors are better shut. I received my first laptop for Christmas in fifth grade at around 12 years old and quickly discovered how dark the internet can be. I was given free access to the wild west of the internet, allowed at such a young age to discover beauty, violence and darkness and everything in between. There was no talk of boundaries back then. We were all overexposed and underprotected in the burgeoning digital world.
It wasn't until college that I realized that the ways I was interacting with technology was hurting me. So, in a moment of courage, I made sweeping changes and replaced gaming and late night scrolling and streaming with activities I considered more wholesome. I started getting up early to practice yoga every morning, ate healthier, spent more time with friends. I started traveling.
It was around that time that I met my friend Colton. We were studying abroad in Spain and instantly hit it off. We had so much in common, including how we felt about technology. Since then, we've had countless conversations about the difficulties of growing up with technology, about the pressure we were feeling every day trying to maintain a balanced lifestyle when it's so easy to get pulled back into digital habits. And then... Eureka! Let's solve this problem. Ward is a product of our friendship and the protection we wish we'd had growing up.
After college I moved to Hawaii. I was pretty anti-tech by the time I moved, practicing yoga and meditation every day, work trading on a farm, using a dumb-phone for several months. I was reclaiming my time, my attention. I felt so grounded and whole after so many years of struggle. I felt like myself again.
Words can not describe how excited I am to bring Ward to you, your family, your friends. What a gift it is to know this is going to give countless people their time back! Reclaim your attention! Stop letting corporations profit off of your time, your energy, your one wild and precious life. If I can do it, then certainly so can you :)
With tremendous gratitude and hope,
I love technology. I'm infinitely optimistic about the future and what it holds. Having grown up with the internet, I've always felt like something of a native to it. But at various points in my life, I've found myself craving quiet.
I've tried going off the grid for weeks at a time. I've even considered checking into a monastery for a while. Not for any particular religious reason. Just for the quiet.
As a kid, I was exposed to plenty of things online that I probably had no business seeing. As an adult, I've become more and more concerned about how I spend my time. I don't want to waste it, and I especially don't want to spend it doing things I don't particularly enjoy to begin with.
That's ultimately why we built Ward. We wanted to give people a little more freedom over how they use the internet, without having to give up what makes it worthwhile, and to support worthy causes in the process.
I'm honored to have built this application with one of my best friends, Reed, whom I met while studying abroad in Spain over five years ago.
We spent plenty of nights doing things we probably shouldn't have been doing, only to find ourselves having conversations about the problems with hedonism the next morning. Since our time in Spain, I've only seen Reed once in person. He's in Hawaii, and I'm here in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. We spent that visit off the grid, trout fishing and staying in a cabin on a stream in Southwestern Virginia. It was very different than Spain.
Without technology, we wouldn't have been able to stay in touch, much less build this application together. But I will say, it's fitting that all these years later, we've ended up building something to help others with self-restraint.
We've put a lot into this, and we sincerely hope it's useful to you.
More than anything, I hope it helps provide you with some quiet.
Colton is a technology leader whose work has involved natural language processing and building machine learning applications in healthcare, localization, and clinical research, with a particular focus on language access and accessibility.
He's a polyglot, an avid Linux user, and generally enjoys tinkering with things. Outside of technology, he's fond of literature, heavy metal, teaching languages, lifting weights, hunting, and fishing. He spends a lot of time behind a computer, but is generally happiest when he can get away from one for a while, preferably somewhere in the mountains.
We're not here for your attention. We're here to protect it.
Start on a good day.
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