Your Dark Materials

A little more about our name. When a company takes a name from literature, whether a product line or the company name itself, it gives us a window into how the people who build the company think. "Anduril," named after the "Flame of the West" that is used to defeat evil in The Lord of the Rings, is a precise, maybe a little too on-the-nose name for a defense company. "Optimus," Tesla's humanoid robot named after a character in a kids cartoon, tells you all you need to know about Elon Musk's cultural milieu. "Ansible," named after the FTL coms system in Rocannon's World pisses me off because a) it's a great name and b) I think I'd really like to work with founders who read LeGuin. "Palantir" has always puzzled me as a name, because while naming your company after a surveillance device that corrupts and misleads its users is certainly a choice, it seems kind of...hostile to the customer base? and depends on a bet that the Pentagon boys haven't read The Two Towers with anything like a critical eye.

We've certainly read our Tolkien, but we're (well, 33% of the team anyway) (It's me, i'm the problem, it's me) bigger fans of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials (he had us at Armoured Bears), and it's through this lens that I think about what Rover is and what we're trying to do.

For the non-Pullman-pilled: A central conceit of the world of His Dark Materials is that everyone (humans, anyway) has an accompanying daemon, an externalized bit of that person's self, that is visible to others and can independently communicate with others and their human. Your daemon is a part of you, external, inseparable—essentially, it's your soul, if your soul had a name and maybe looked like a beautiful golden monkey.

Seen in this light, what makes Rover different than all of the other AI agents out there is this: Rover is not trying to make you more productive. We're not here to write your emails for you. We're not here to talk to your kids so you don't have to. Instead, Rover is a thing that can hold all of your thinking in a single place, so that you never forget something important. So that you can think more deeply. So that you never have to start from zero.

Now, will having all of those things make you more productive? Probably! And there's certainly nothing wrong with that. But we're not doing this to simply solve the problem that you want something to book a flight to London for you.

We're doing this because we believe that the real, lasting things don't come from squeezing out efficiencies but from producing epiphanies. We want to help you think deeply, to understand more, to make new connections and gain insight. In the end, that's the best productivity hack: Not "How can I do this thing better?" but "Why am I doing this? What could I do instead?"

Rover is of course not your soul, or anything like it, but it does have some attributes of the daemon, mainly that it knows you and can help surface ideas and connections from things you know but may have forgotten. And perhaps its most important quality is this: Everything that Rover knows or infers about you, every bit of information you give it, is completely yours. Rover stores everything locally, on your machine, in markdown files that are easily read by you and by LLMs. You can change them yourself—read them, rewrite them, throw them away. Like your memories and thoughts, Rover is your own.

To strain our analogy a bit more: The [SPOILER!] essential horror in the books is intercision—severing a person's daemon from them in order to extract value for a third party. Because, really, isn't that basically Meta, Google, etc.'s business model? Collecting all the things that make online you, keeping them separate from you and selling that to others?

The big online platforms all run on our severed daemons. It's time to take yours back.