Interview
How Glasp helps users visualize their knowledge – and share it with the world

Imagine if you could organize all your ideas, the things you find online, and your notes from different platforms, in one place. Now, what if you could share that information easily with colleagues, family members, or friends at any time?

That is the vision of Glasp, a startup founded in 2021 by Kazuki Nakayashiki and Kei Watanabe in San Francisco, California. Glasp is a social-first tool that people can use to highlight and organize quotes and ideas from across the web without switching back and forth between screens. It also allows users to share and access other like-minded people’s learning.

“We believe that everyone in the world has unique experiences and knowledge that they collect throughout their lives. But people usually don't take notes or share their knowledge with others, and so it's a loss for human society,” said Watanabe. “We'd like to see people using Glasp to share their knowledge with other people and for future generations.”

Glasp, which stands for “Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof," is a web-based tool. Unlike simple note-taking or web-collecting apps like Obsidian, Evernote or Google Keep, its extension-based platform allows users to quickly capture online content to their Glasp page, which can easily be shared with anyone. Highlights can be tagged, searched for, linked to, and shared on various other platforms, including Twitter, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.

Both Nakayashiki and Watanabe are Japanese but have experience studying and working in California, including at the same large tech giant where they met. That is why they made the choice to launch Glasp as an international startup focused on the American market and based near Silicon Valley, offering their product in English.

“We thought starting a company and doing business here made sense, to get more users and to spread our mission and vision,” said Nakayashiki.

JETRO played a role in helping Glasp, including connecting Nakayashiki and Watanabe to a mentor who provided useful advice and pushed both founders to stay focused on the fundamentals, and not get distracted by hacks or shortcuts. JETRO has also helped introduce Glasp to potential accelerators and startup events.

As a new tool in a crowded space, it can be hard to stand out or get users to try something different. Glasp has so far relied on direct outreach and word-of-mouth to reach users, not spending anything on marketing over the last year. It’s worked well, as they’ve grown to 500,000 users since launching in 2021 and have gotten positive feedback from those who have tried the platform.

“One of the advantages of Glasp is that your highlights are public by default,” said Nakayashiki. “It means we have a social aspect built into our product, and we could use that to tap into product-led growth.”

Currently, there are two tiers, a free version and a paid tier, which gives users additional features and the ability to make their highlights private. Already, they’re looking to add new features, such as the ability to write blog posts directly from Glasp or integrating AI to better connect various pieces of knowledge.

For example, Glasp allows users to make an AI Clone, called a Digital Me. The tool works like a chatbot based on their learning and knowledge, and users can even share it with others. Digital Me can answer requests related to a user’s knowledge and interests and even make suggestions.

“With AI clones, users can ask, in natural language, what they know through what they’ve collected,” said Nakayashiki.

One area that Nakayashiki sees significant potential in is in the business-to-business sector. Glasp could help businesses and large organizations maintain collective knowledge despite employee turnover.

“Companies are losing billions of dollars every year because, especially in Silicon Valley, people leave their jobs after just two to three years,” said Nakayashiki. “If a company uses our product, then after employees leave, new employees can access their knowledge and notes, and that could be beneficial.”

In order to reach enterprise customers, Glasp needs to expand its offerings and provide B2B-specific offerings. That will require investment. So far, Glasp has raised money from Goodwater Capital and CyberAgent Capital and is actively looking for more investment in order to scale and attract new users. They’re also looking to expand their network and experiment with new outreach plans and targets.

“Maybe we can add more tiers, like professional or enterprise,” said Watanabe. “We can also have an advertising system in our product as well, since it’s social.”

It’s clear that Glasp has potential and offers users something novel and unique compared to existing platforms, but standing out in a market with so many similar tools will be challenging. Another issue is balancing the founder's desire to provide a useful tool to as many users as possible for free while also making the paid tier attractive, or finding other revenue models, in order to achieve profitability.

“We want to keep as much as possible for free, to stick with our mission and vision,” said Nakayashiki. “I think sharing is caring, so sharing knowledge is empowering others.”

One reason that Nakayashiki is so focused on this is that, for him, Glasp’s vision is deeply personal. After a serious health crisis when he was 20, which left his body partly paralyzed for some time, he wanted to work on something that he believed in and that would outlast him.

“I wanted to leave something for other people, so that I could feel a sense of contribution,” said Nakayashiki. “That is why it’s our mission to democratize access to people's learning as a digital legacy.”