How Nova works
What makes Nova unique?
Nova turns every conversation into a living operating model of your business. Dated, sourced evidence becomes a private, time-aware understanding of what is true now, what changed, what remains open, and what matters for the next decision. Before she answers, Nova prepares the relevant business context while keeping her judgment and personality in their own dedicated layers.
Nova is the name of our Second CEO. You can keep the name or choose your own. This page follows one conversation through her memory, briefing, and judgment system—and shows how that creates continuity no collection of disconnected chats or documents can provide.
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Every turn becomes business evidence
Each message you send is written to an ordered journal with who said it and when. That gives Nova a durable source for the facts, decisions, plans, and commitments that shape her understanding of your business.
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Meaning is organised, not merely stored
Nova identifies the role of each important statement: a fact, an assumption, a plan, a completed action, a commitment, or an open question. Each memory item carries its source, importance, confidence, and the dates that give it meaning.
Nova keeps both when something was true in the business and when she learned it. When the facts change, her current understanding changes with them while the history remains understandable.
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A private, time-aware knowledge graph
People, companies, decisions, and events become connected parts of one private business model. Their relationships carry time, so Nova can understand both the path that brought you here and the state of the company today. Each founder has an isolated graph; nothing is shared across accounts.
The graph is rebuilt in versioned generations when the extraction pipeline improves, and every node and relationship keeps a link to the message it came from.
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A focused briefing for each decision
Before Nova answers, she searches by meaning, by precise language, and through the relationships inside your business model. She brings the strongest evidence together with the most recent conversation and reduces it to the context that deserves attention now.
The result is a compact standing brief: the current situation, open loops and next steps, tensions, important numbers, missing information, and uncertainty. Every grounded statement keeps its link to the evidence behind it.
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Judgment kept apart from memory
The business principles Nova challenges you with come from a shared, read-only knowledge base that is written and reviewed separately from any user data. It carries two lenses, the operator who does the math and the coach who works the person, and retrieval deliberately draws from both. Your memory and that knowledge meet only in the reply.
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Identity and follow-through
Who Nova is and how she treats you is a separate layer that memory cannot overwrite. Open loops stay active across conversations until there is an outcome, which is how she can ask on Monday what happened to Friday’s proposal.
Her personality does not drift with the conversation.
Nova keeps her identity separate from memory, retrieval, and business reasoning. These cognition layers each have one job. Her memory can change with your business without rewriting who she is or how she treats you.
If you ask her to challenge vague plans, she still does it when you arrive tired. She can slow the pace without becoming a different assistant.
She remembers what happened, not what was supposed to happen.
Nova stores facts, assumptions, plans, and completed actions differently, together with where each item came from and how certain it is.
If you say you will raise prices on Monday, Nova remembers a plan, not a completed price change. She can ask what happened before using the new price in later advice.
- Founder · statement“I’ll raise prices on Monday.”
- AttributionThe founder said it.
- MeaningIt is an intention, not a completed action.
- TimeIt is planned for Monday.
- State · openIt opens a follow-up.
- Next conversationThe next conversation can ask what happened.
She knows what was true then and what is true now.
A personal knowledge graph connects people, companies, decisions, and events. Temporal reasoning tells Nova when something was true and what later replaced it.
If you moved from freelancers to agencies, future advice uses the new focus without erasing the old one. Last year’s conversations remain understandable without steering today’s decisions.
- Earlier · founder“We sell to freelancers.”
- Later · founder“We now focus on small agencies.”
- Earlier state · archivedThe earlier item is archived and leaves active advice.
- Current state · activeThe new item becomes active.
- Next conversationFuture advice uses the new focus.
She learns how to work with you.
Nova keeps business facts separate from what helps you think clearly. She can learn that you want direct pushback without turning every difficult week into a theory about your personality.
A week of avoiding sales stays a bad week, not a permanent label about who you are. “Protect my focus and challenge my assumptions” remains a useful instruction for how she should respond.
Promises do not disappear when the chat ends.
Long-term memory keeps commitments, unresolved decisions, and follow-ups active after the conversation ends. It is more than a saved transcript.
If you promise to send a proposal on Friday, Nova can ask what happened on Monday. Until you confirm the result, she does not quietly mark it as done.
The right context, not the biggest context window.
A chat does not remember everything forever. To answer, it receives a limited bundle of text called a context window. That bundle contains recent messages, instructions, and any information retrieved for the answer. When the conversation outgrows that space, older details must be dropped or compressed.
Even a very large context window can overlook an important fact when it is buried in the middle of thousands of less useful words. This is the “lost in the middle” problem.
Nova solves this with context engineering. She prepares a short, decision-specific briefing that combines current facts, connected evidence, recent developments, and the open work that deserves attention.
For a pricing decision, Nova can bring in margins and earlier customer objections without burying them in unrelated launch notes.
From a searchable second brain to a living operating model. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) searches a knowledge collection for useful passages and gives those passages to a language model before it answers.
Many second-brain and company-AI systems begin there—for example, an Obsidian vault containing many Markdown files. That creates a useful searchable library. Nova adds the layers a living company needs: source, time, meaning, relationships, current state, and follow-through.
A document system can retrieve the note that says, “We need to hire.” Nova can connect that statement to last month’s budget decision, the role you postponed, the person responsible, and the question that remains unanswered. The result is not merely a matching passage. It is the business context for the decision.
What is true about you is not the same as general advice.
Nova keeps what she knows about you separate from the business principles she uses to challenge you. Advice is stored with the conditions, trade-offs, and counterexamples that make it useful.
“Raise prices” can be sound advice in one situation and reckless in another. Nova checks the margins, customer response, and risk before treating it as a rule.
You can correct what Nova remembers.
You can correct, resolve, or delete memories and conclusions. Her understanding is useful because it can change when the facts change.
If Nova remembers six months of runway and you correct it to nine, future advice uses nine. The old number stops shaping active decisions.
The Nova difference
The conversation continues because the understanding continues.
Nova carries your business between the questions: what was decided, what changed, what remains open, and the evidence behind it. Each new conversation starts with more continuity, more relevance, and a clearer view of what deserves your attention next.
See the difference in a decision
Bring Nova one thing you cannot settle alone.
Three free turns. No signup. The public session is temporary and keeps no memory.
The full Nova also has voice mode. The iPhone app is where she is meant to live long term, so the same memory can stay with you away from your desk.
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