TLDR; I’m teaming up with my cousin, Lucy, to move faster and take engineering to the next level!

My cousin, Lucy, is someone I deeply admire. Growing up, we spent almost every Christmas together, and I was always in awe of her intellect and resilience.

The first time Lucy and I worked together was shortly after she graduated from Stanford in 2021 with a bachelor’s in computer science. At the time, I was building a health tech startup incubated at the Harvard Innovation Labs. I asked Lucy to help upskill the engineering team, and it was immediately apparent that her extraordinary talent and work ethic were second to none.

In 2022, Lucy returned to Stanford for her master’s degree in computer science with a focus on AI. When we caught up last month, I wasn’t sure she’d be interested in Polairis given how busy she’s been lately with her incredible endeavors as an artist outside of her day job.

But after a few conversations, Lucy was bought into the vision, and we were both eager to join forces given our complementary skill sets and shared excitement for building cool tech!

Adding Lucy to the team breathed new life into the startup.

Building a company can feel incredibly lonely and overwhelming at times. Before Lucy joined, I was moving along steadily, but I missed working with a team to achieve something greater than I could achieve on my own.

With Lucy on board, the difference has been night and day. Part of what makes our partnership so fun and rewarding is that we both care more about getting to the right answer than about being right — and we trust each other enough to be radically candid.

We all have moments when our goals feel unattainable, and we wonder if we’re better off quitting. But that’s exactly when to keep going because something — or someone — great is right around the corner.

I have no doubt that Lucy and I will do some of the best work of our lives together! 🙌

What’s New ✨

Some of the products I love most are extremely simple: Loom, Calendly, Grammarly, etc. They do one thing really well and do it better than any competitors on the market.

The Figma prototype I demoed in my June 3 update had a lot of bells and whistles. I wanted to boil down the product to a single essential feature to build and launch as a starting point.

This brings me to the latest iteration of Polairis:

• The Inspiration: Products like Google Docs and Figma make it easy to anchor real-time comments to the exact part of the file the comment references.

• The Problem: Most websites and many popular web apps have limited commenting functionality if any at all. A common workaround I’ve observed is to screenshot a web page, mark it up, and then share it over Slack or email to solicit feedback. Another alternative is to get an anchor link that navigates to a specific section of a page. However, screenshots are hard to organize and find later, anchor links are not always available, and discussions in Slack or email can easily get lost or buried.

• The Solution: Polairis v1 will allow you to pin real-time comments on any web page — making it easier to collaborate (or leave private annotations) on all kinds of things.

In the 3-minute demo below, I walk through some of what Lucy and I have built so far:

What’s Cooking 🍳

We’re heads-down focused on product development with the goal of launching a private beta soon. (We use Linear for project management and issue tracking, and I finally understand the hype around Linear’s UI.) My next newsletter will provide info on how to join the private beta!

This Week’s Ask 🙏

Is this a product you would use? If so, what would you be most excited to use it for? Please feel free to reply to this email with your thoughts!

That’s it for now. In case you missed it, you can catch up on the June 3 update here. Thanks for reading!

Nicole

Made with ❤️ from NYC. Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my previous Figma prototype, and shout-out to Lucy Z., Will C., Brian Y., Alex W., Abhinav N., Ann Y., Rebecca X., and Max Z. for keeping me sane last month!