Every structure you have ever been given was built around a role. PathCraft builds systems that start with the person in them.
The default
We all remember the autonomy that came with being asked "what do you want to do when you're older?" but that question comes with the same checklist as everyone else. Build a career that makes you valuable. Earn enough to recover from the hours that career costs you. Collect the certificates that open the next door.
The questions that make your work yours just never made it onto the list. What you actually care about. Who you want to be while you are doing the work. What a good week looks like, rather than a survivable one. Those questions get a crisis a year instead of a plan.
Life design is not new. Work just got the version where someone else filled in the checklist for you. Ask "what means enough to me to work every day to solve it?" and most of the list gets covered up or stops mattering anyway.
A way to work, crafted by you.
Free
The things that matter most to you are the things that never get done but you show up for your manager's Zoom meeting. You did not lose your drive, you just never had structure for the work that's yours.
Start with KeelYour way, crafted together.
In-App Purchases
It's easy to collaborate when everyone around you has a job description but when the work is yours it feels like you're on your own. You're not bad at communicating, you need people who can speak the same language.
Help shape KindredBusiness goals, crafted with those who share them.
SaaS
The first four of you synergised because you started for a reason. If your next hire is based solely on 'are they good at what they do?' then 20% of your team is misaligned.
Start a conversationBefore anything is built
Direction is the part everyone hands you but no one knows you well enough to get right. A role comes with objectives, a course comes with a syllabus, and both are somebody else's answer to a question about what you want. Work built on borrowed direction holds right up until it doesn't, and it's the first thing you want to drop. Often, it's the last thing you can. What's already happened in your life is a better source than any of that. PathCraft helps you find your North Star there instead, and what you build on top of it holds, because the reason you're doing it is actually yours.
What holds on a bad day
The people who perform at their best don't just "want it more". They've already settled why they're doing it, so the work doesn't rely on asking "are you feeling up for it this morning?" The structure carries them on the days the reason alone can't. School gives structure, and your boss gives you structure, but they only ask for what they need from you. As soon as the work is yours, you need to build the structure yourself. PathCraft provides the infrastructure to turn a personal direction into consistent action.
How you check
Activity produces a strong feeling of progress and potentially no information. Telling noise from signal takes three things: reflection on what you've actually done, what other people have already learned about the same problem, and what somebody outside your own view can see that you cannot. Goal posts move while you are working and progress stops for however long it takes you to find out. Every PathCraft product runs that check on a loop, because a system that cannot tell you it's wrong is not a system.
Your CraftMe
Your CraftMe starts with the reason, decided from what you've actually lived. It carries the way you want to operate and who you want to be while you do it. What comes out the other end is a profile built to mirror you working at your best, the thing everything else points back to: your goals, your habits, the people you work alongside, and the opportunities worth chasing.
Meaning: A reason why, decided from the life you've lived.
Mode: The way you want to operate, decided by the characteristics you value.
Method: The disciplines you're drawn to, informed by what you excel at.
Meaning: A reason why, decided from the life you've lived.
Mode: The way you want to operate, decided by the characteristics you value.
Method: The disciplines you're drawn to, informed by what you excel at.
You build it once and carry it everywhere, through community, solo work and employment, and it stays yours the whole way. In Kindred it's what lets someone in a different field know how to work with you. In Compact it shows what a new hire is actually pointed at. In Keel it becomes your daily behaviour.
Keel
Keel is live and being rebuilt with a small group running it now.
Kindred
Kindred is not yet live. The mechanism is settled and the shape is not. We are choosing a small number of people to decide what it becomes.
Compact
Compact does not yet exist. We are in the research phase, talking to founders and people leads about what actually breaks. It will be built with three or four purpose-led companies as design partners, scoped properly and worked on together.
One question answered honestly is the most useful thing you can send us.
A word from the founder
I'm Jake. Teachers did not like me, working in Canary Wharf forced me to be someone I wasn't, and FinTech start-ups had me waking up at 05:30 just to get people paid faster. I designed systems that put me in the centre of my work, and you're looking at part of the journey.
Jake Tansley
The co-founder ask