I'm Sam, a software engineer. I've been working with folks in sensitive industries for years, and it turns out that lots of people (with the privilege to) care about their data, want to own their software, and control their internet experience — this is true from the Fortune 500 to individuals figuring it out on their own.
Today's internet sort of serves me, a software engineer with 15 years of experience, but I still find a lot of it very frustrating. I have 3 computers, 2 iPads and a phone. Not sure about you, but I generally want to spend less time on a computer. Still, I want the internet to do a lot of stuff - shopping, research, tell me about cool shit on bringatrailer.com — but I really just want to get on with my life, change my oil, buy a record, and make dinner for my wife.
Heyo is about telling the internet what you want to do. Maybe you want to share that with other people, maybe you want to post an update to your slack. Maybe you want to text yourself that you aren't crazy. Maybe your work needs to remind itself that everything is ok.
Now, I mentioned earlier that it's people with the privilege to care that tend to be concerned with privacy. This is twofold; first because privacy is a pretty vague concept to most people, second because having a good handle on your own virtual privacy takes either time and expertise, or money. Because of these reasons, privacy is most often relegated to a sort of currency. You can give up some of this vague thing in exchange for using a vast swath of the internet. You give up some more of it so that the government can make you (ostensibly) safer. Give up a little more and then you get a free coffee on your birthday.
I like coffee, but that particular company doesn't make a very good espresso so I'll keep making my own anyways. And I know a thing or two about how the interwebs work, and have a pretty good idea about what the future of the internet will be (spoiler, agents will be consuming more and more of it). I want my internet future to be like the one I grew up with; weird, fun, enlightening but also mixed with the super-productivity I'm used to today. Well, agents put a lot of tools in our hands that previously required a lot of capital to take advantage of. Heyo is intended to be a toolbox. You can use the toolbox that I host, you can host it yourself, or you can run it on your own machine. You can use a bunch of different model providers, you can bring your own keys, or you can run the model on your own hardware. It's whatever, let's make the internet nice again, together.
Sam