Idam Obiahu / about
A short version.
I'm Idam. I build tools for taste, memory, music, and cognition.
Currently co-founder and CTO at Kyma, where we're building taste-graph infrastructure for the curation economy — agentic music discovery, mashup-as-discovery, and a network where humans become the new algorithm.
Before Kyma I was a senior software engineer at Roblox, before that Pinterest, before that Google Search. About 8.5 years writing production code on consumer-scale systems — social graphs, search, recommendations, discovery, music infrastructure. The through-line was always the same: people don't lack content, they lack good filters.
On the side I run Kai, an autonomous AI co-founder running 24/7 on my own machine — connected to Telegram, scheduling its own work, learning my preferences, executing real tasks. Kai writes, ships, monitors, and occasionally corrects me. The architecture is the experiment; the question is what changes when a builder has a peer-grade collaborator that never sleeps.
What I'm interested in
- Taste as a property right. Most platforms treat taste as an exhaust byproduct. I think it's the substrate of the next generation of consumer apps.
- Curation as labor. Curators do real work and don't get paid. The economic story of the next decade is fixing that.
- Memory systems for humans and agents. Both fail in the same way: not from lack of information, but from inability to retrieve at the right moment. Memory is a routing problem dressed as a storage problem.
- The physics constraints behind discovery. Music has a 600–1800x preview-cost differential against images. That single asymmetry explains more about why music discovery feels broken than any algorithm-bashing essay ever has. See the essay.
Where to find me
- Email — idam@kyma.stream
- LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/idamo
- GitHub — github.com/idamo
- X — @frostloreofnewt (mostly listening)
If you're a curator who wants to be one of the first five on Kyma — get in touch. If you're working on memory, taste, or anything adjacent to discovery-as-physics-problem — also get in touch.