Why I Founded a Start-Up (Despite Being a Technophobe)

By Anthea Roberts

Let me be honest: I was never a “tech person.” My kids can confirm this, having spent years helping me figure out the TV remote. But early last year, I stumbled upon something that captured my imagination—a form of AI that wasn’t about deterministic codes but was instead about leveraging thinking itself. It was a type of intelligence you could interact with in everyday language, and it felt like the dawn of a new era of exploration.

That’s how Dragonfly Thinking was born. It was an idea that felt both unexpected and completely natural.

I’ve always been fascinated by the process of thinking itself—what psychologists call metacognition. My work has often focused on helping people think better, especially when faced with complex and contested issues. I wondered: could AI help us synthesize across silos and domains? Could it assist us in seeing the world through multiple lenses, like a dragonfly with its compound eyes, integrating countless angles into one cohesive view?

In some ways, creating AI tools felt like a radical departure from the writing and research I’d been doing. But in another way, it seemed like a natural extension. With Dragonfly Thinking, I wanted to see if AI could not just mimic human thought, but expand it—offering new vantage points and capabilities.  Could it help us to navigate complexities we often struggle to make sense of on our own?

The journey hasn’t been straightforward. Founding a tech start-up has meant a lot of unexpected twists and turns, new challenges, and quite a few moments of “what did I get myself into?” It reminds me of the Programmers’ Credo: “we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.”

Yet each unexpected challenge has taught me something new about both AI and myself—whether it was navigating the unfamiliar terrain of tech start-up culture or unravelling the complexities of human-machine collaboration. This path has opened doors to conversations about how AI thinks, how we think, and what happens when we think together. It’s made me intensely interested not just in collaboration between humans but in partnerships between humans and machines.

This newsletter is my way of sharing what I’ve learned and the questions and reflections I continue to have, by myself and with my co-founder and team mates. We will be exploring how AI tools can enhance our cognitive capabilities, what partnering with AI means for knowledge work and creativity, and how we deal with issues like blind spots and biases in human+AI interactions. In this newsletter, we will share insights on where AI can take us, how we can integrate AI into our work and lives, and reflections on what it all means.

So whether you’re an AI skeptic, an enthusiast, or just someone curious about how we make sense of AI and our complex world, I invite you to come along for the ride. Let’s explore what it means to think in this new era that has been likened to the cognitive industrial revolution. There’s plenty of unknown ahead, but that’s what makes it exciting—and I’d be thrilled to have you join me as we take a dragonfly’s-eye view of this uncharted terrain together.