I've spent my whole career on one question: how do you help people grow — and do it at scale, by meeting them where they already are?

It started in service — AmeriCorps, then the Peace Corps. Then in civil rights and inclusion work, where the job underneath was always the same: create the conditions for people to learn, unlearn, and become who they're capable of being. Somewhere in there I got interested in scale — not technology for its own sake, but as the only way to do this work for more than a handful of people at a time.

That took me to Mentor Collective, where students answered a few questions about what they needed and got matched to a peer who'd actually lived it. That's where I learned what matching can do — not pairing people with any support, but the right kind. Then to a teletherapy company, where I watched the same thing again: a short survey, a matched therapist, care that met people on their phone instead of asking them to climb a wall to reach it.

So I couldn't stop noticing where people had started going. They were bringing whole-person stuff to AI — decisions, relationships, the things you used to take to a friend or a notebook. I was doing it too. And it helped — until I noticed I was outsourcing the thinking instead of doing it. Taking the first answer. Skipping the part where you actually work something out. Once I caught it, I started using AI differently — to think things through instead of around — and the difference was real. More clarity. A stronger sense of being engaged with myself.

So I built it. I market mental health for a living, so I know exactly where the clinical line sits — and that Kinva isn't therapy and shouldn't pretend to be. Most people aren't in crisis. They're just navigating everyday life with nowhere good to think it through. So Kinva is thought partners matched to how you actually think, built on cognitive scaffolding instead of clinical framing — so you can keep using AI for the hard stuff without handing over the one skill that matters most: thinking it through yourself.