Joshymar Graham

I'm a 2x founder and product manager, and I study how technology changes what people want, trust and do. I treat every project as an experiment. It starts with a question, then I build the smallest thing that can answer it, and then I write down what happened.

How I got here

I started with research. In 2018 I led a team of seven that built three augmented reality apps, and we partnered with iHeartRadio to put AR filters in front of more than 10,000 people at their events. Watching what people actually did with them got me hooked on why people want what they want, so I studied consumer psychology at UC Davis.

My first product work was as a consultant. At Worqflow Solutions I led the launch of an AI tool that let a recruiting team ask questions of their data in plain language instead of writing SQL, and 95% of the team used it.

Then I co-founded HERE Passport and led product. The idea underneath it was that your reputation should travel with you. We ran 312 interviews and more than 4,000 surveys, and the clearest thing people told us was that they wanted to go places with their friends. That changed the whole roadmap.

After that I went deeper on product. I was the product manager at ThreadShare, an AI tool that turns AI conversations into decks and documents. On contract with Share the Cork, I took an app for sharing wine club tastings from an idea to a spec engineers could build in ten weeks. Along the way I finished an MBA in product management at UC Davis.

Sac Tech Week asked a different kind of question: whether a tech week can work in a secondary city. I help run it, and I built its calendar in two weeks.

All of it led to Vivify, which I co-founded with two engineers: Curtis, a senior engineer with 11 years at Nike, and Jcari, a senior engineer with 8 years at LinkedIn. The three of us had spent years building apps by hand for small businesses, and every one took months. Vivify is what we built so that nobody has to wait that long.

Where I'm heading

The question I'm working toward is how technology can strengthen human agency and growth. My work so far has been about trust, sharing and access. The next experiments are about helping people steer their own lives.

Humans are no longer only at the mercy of evolution. We steer it now, through what we learn, what we value and what we build, and that makes us responsible for where it goes.

The experiment I most want to run next is a life navigator. It would help a person see where they are and choose where to go next.

What I read

My reading goes in layers.

• Where we came from. Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, Cosmos by Carl Sagan, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
• Why we are like this. 1984 by George Orwell, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
• How to act on it. Atomic Habits by James Clear, Mastery by Robert Greene, Deep Work by Cal Newport.
• What could be. Fiction, for fun: Dune, Isaac Asimov, and LitRPG, where AI guides people through everyday life.