When Evan Sharp first looked up the word inspiration, he discovered it means — literally — to breathe in spirit. He'd built Pinterest, a platform where over half a billion people come each month to collect images of who they want to become. But what struck him wasn't the scale. It was the longing underneath it. While people were finding their people on Twitter, on Pinterest they were finding themselves. All those vision boards and saved images — what were they, really, if not the soul trying to remember something it had forgotten?
That question — what have we forgotten? — eventually led him to walk away from it all.
Two Journeys, One Arrival
Evan Sharp grew up the son of park rangers, studied history at the University of Chicago, and landed in architecture school at Columbia. A library that closed at 4pm forced students to hoard images on their laptops. That frustration became Pinterest. But even as the platform grew to touch hundreds of millions of lives, a deeper reckoning was taking shape in him: I came of age into my adolescent powers and was never really initiated into them. I feel like that's true as well for technology. We built these unbelievable superpowers. But the process of initiation — of being held by elders with wisdom and belonging — never happened.
He left. He spent years studying Tibetan Buddhist texts. He tended gardens. He cataloged hundreds of rituals from the world's wisdom traditions. And he arrived at a conviction that would have been unthinkable in Silicon Valley: The wisdom traditions we do have — they are the only ultimate technology on earth.
Biz Stone arrived at the same threshold from a completely different door. He grew up on government cheese outside Boston, in a household he describes as violent, working since age eight. He dropped out of college to apprentice with an art director he loved. Left Google before its IPO — walked away from a fortune — because he'd rather follow a friend than stay for stock options. He co-founded Twitter and one afternoon accidentally invented the follower count, never once considering what a number next to someone's name would do to people.
Years later, called back to a company in crisis, he offered five words that changed everything: We serve the public conversation. That word — serve — was deliberate and quietly radical. But the deepest thread in Biz's life isn't about platforms at all. Looking back across every improbable leap, he finds one pattern: Each time, I found a person I really liked, that I thought I could learn from, and maybe I could help them a little. Every single time — it was about the person.
What They're Building Now
Today, Evan and Biz are building together — a company called West Co. and its first app, Tangle, where the daily question isn't what's happening? but what's your intention?
The app asks you not what's trending, but what threads of meaning run through your life. Parent. Storyteller. Healer. Seeker. It nudges you toward your own declared intentions and invites the people closest to you to support that becoming. One colleague used it to realize what her soul was actually calling her to do — and quit her job to be present for her daughter. Biz used it to make sure that every drive to school became a chance for real connection with his son, and that every time his boy wanted to play basketball, the answer would be yes.
But what makes West Co. truly unusual isn't the product — it's the culture underneath it. Each morning, the team lights a candle at an ancestor table. Silence precedes meetings. Ceremonies mark the changing of seasons. Their resident scholar of ritual doesn't teach mindfulness-as-productivity. She teaches what humans have learned, across millennia, about living a meaningful life. Her counsel: Slow down. Take a breath. Think about what you're really doing. And don't break things — especially when those things are humans.
The Conversation
This call is an invitation to sit with two people who helped shape the architecture of modern attention — and who are now asking whether that architecture can be redesigned around something deeper. Not engagement, but intention. Not followers, but intimacy. Not what's trending, but what's sacred.
Evan carries a question he first asked at a gathering not unlike this one: What is all our power for? Biz carries an answer he's lived more than theorized: The most valuable thing we have is our lifetime. The way you honor that gift is to live it a little more on purpose.
Between them — the philosopher-builder and the builder-who-followed-love — there is a conversation waiting to happen about what technology owes to the soul, and what the soul might teach technology, if we're willing to slow down long enough to listen.
