My team interviewed 100+ researchers and scientists across the world over the last year. Different fields. Different countries. Different problems. We expected to hear about incremental improvements they wanted. Better filters. Faster search. Cleaner interfaces. That’s not what we heard.
Every single team told us the same story: they want to do state-of-the-art discovery. They want to push boundaries. They want to find what nobody else has found. Instead, they spend months reinventing what already exists.
Not because they are lazy. Because the existing tools make discovery impossible.
Google Scholar surfaces what’s popular, not what’s relevant. PubMed matches keywords, not problems. Databases are organized by field, which is exactly wrong when the answer is in a different field using different words.
Right now, hundreds of pharmaceutical companies are solving the exact same protein folding problem. They want to look into each other’s work. They want to know how their competitor solved the problem. But digging into the years of research of sixteen other companies is harder than just solving it yourself.
To understand what competitors are doing, you need to search thousands of patents written in ambiguous language. You must monitor dozens of relevant journals and track conference presentations. Parsing regulatory filings is also necessary. You need to maintain relationships with academics who may have insights, and hire consultants who specialize in competitive intelligence. Finally, all of this information must be filtered through people who understand both the technical problem and what to look for.
This costs real money and takes real time. Months, maybe years. And at the end, you might still miss it. The required patent might use different terminology. The key paper might be in an unexpected journal. The solution might be hiding in a different industry entirely.
Did you know that Gorilla Glass came from cookware research?
Corning spent a century developing durable kitchen glass brands Pyrex and CorningWare. Pyrex can survive thermal shock, while CorningWare can safely move between extreme temperatures, from freezer to oven.
This wasn’t just portfolio development. It was decades of research into one fundamental problem: how to make glass withstand extreme stress without shattering.
In the 1960s, Corning’s research led to Chemcor, a chemically strengthened glass made through ion exchange. The process was innovative: immerse glass in a hot potassium salt bath, let larger ions replace smaller ones. This creates surface compression, making the material incredibly strong. Corning tested it for phone booths, prison windows, and automobile windshields. But then, Corning shelved it as the market wasn’t ready.
Forty years later, Steve Jobs approached Corning. He needed a glass screen for the iPhone that was scratch-resistant, thin, and nearly unbreakable. Nothing on the market came until Corning’s team recalled an old innovation: Chemcor.
They pulled research from the 1960s, applied their decades of institutional knowledge of glass durability, slightly modified the composition, and optimized the ion-exchange process. Within months, Gorilla Glass was born.
The connection wasn’t obvious. Cookware and smartphones belong to different domains. In Cookware, it’s about surviving temperature extremes in kitchens. The other must survive drops from pockets.
But the underlying challenge was identical: how do you make glass strong enough to withstand stress that would typically cause catastrophic failure?
And that’s how most breakthroughs actually happen.
But here’s the issue: this translation almost never happens by design.
A materials scientist studying battery corrosion would never find the specific 2,000-year-old Roman harbor archaeological report detailing the exact alloy composition they need using a simple Google Scholar search. PubMed will never show them how the Romans accidentally discovered concrete that grows stronger over time through crystalline reformation, the mechanism that could make modern batteries last decades.
The probability of these collisions is epsilon, nearly zero.
And yet, this is how our global innovation system runs today: on random collision luck.
Imagine what we could achieve if we stopped relying on luck and started designing for those collisions.
One early adopter of Slate shared that he found ideas for his cosmetic problems in the paint industry. They never would have found it. Different journals. Different vocabulary. Different conferences. The system is designed to keep them separated.
This is universal. Every team told us the same thing: the search cost exceeds the research cost. It’s cheaper to solve problems from scratch than to find out how someone else has already solved them. That’s completely backwards.
And it’s getting worse. Every new paper makes it harder to find the right one. Every new patent makes prior art more invisible. Every new database adds another place to search.
Knowledge should have zero marginal cost in an ideal world.
Instead, every solution costs the same as the first solution because finding existing solutions is structurally difficult. Every research team wants a breakthrough discovery. The tools give them a duplicative reinvention.
We shipped Slate v2 yesterday. I would say it doesn’t search but translates. It understands problems structurally, not lexically. It reads across every field and surfaces the agricultural paper when you’re working on drug delivery. Not because you searched for it. Because it recognized they are the same problem wearing different words.
I did not set out to build a more efficient search engine. I am building a system that understands problems, not just the keywords.
Search engines assume you know what you’re looking for. But breakthroughs come from finding what you didn’t know to look for. They come from answers filed under someone else’s questions.
This is what the 100+ teams told us they needed. Tools with actual depth. Systems that understand meaning, not just match text. Slate v2 is the foundation in this direction. This is just the start. We’re replacing how research knowledge gets organized.
The goal isn’t faster search. It’s collective sight.
Right now, human knowledge exists in isolated pockets. Chemistry over here. Biology over there. Materials science in the basement. Each discipline has its own way of describing solutions. The boundaries between them are almost impregnable.
But one must cross these boundaries to discover breakthroughs.
Until now, the crossing was accidental, random, and rare.
I am making it systematic.
For every corporate researcher who’s ever had that sinking feeling three years into a project when they discover someone else already did it. For every team that’s burned millions and months reinventing what exists. For every specialist who knows the answer is out there but has no way to find it. I am making the accidental discovery inevitable.
