Brendan Michaelsen shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Brendan, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What is a normal day like for you right now?
Most mornings begin with a long run that serves as a rolling stand-up with myself. It’s where I clear the mental cache, notice the unresolved threads from the day before, and rehearse the hard conversations I’ll need to have with clarity and care. After that, I carve out a protected block for deep work. Lately it’s been research sprints on AI architectures—probabilistic routing, retrieval schemes, and evaluation methods that actually lower cognitive load for people seeking help. I’m less interested in “more” and more interested in “lighter”: how to compress the mental effort it takes to find a next step, especially when someone is stressed or overwhelmed.
By early afternoon I’m with our small-but-mighty dev team. We ship in tight loops: safety and moderation tooling, performance improvements on slower connections, clearer language in moments that matter, and experiments that make the experience feel more like guidance and less like a maze. User feedback is our telemetry for care. A sentence that lands the right way, a page that loads faster on an older phone, a resource that appears exactly when someone needs it—those are quiet wins we try to stack. Evenings are for review and reset. I scan metrics, jot down notes for tomorrow’s experiments, and send a few thank-yous to teammates and partners who moved the needle. It’s a simple rhythm—listen, design, build, learn—repeated with intention.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Hello! I’m Brendan, co-founder and CTO of Our Wave. My job is to turn empathy into infrastructure – technology that feels like a handrail when the path is steep. We build survivor-centered spaces for sharing stories, asking questions, and finding resources, and we do it with the same care you would bring to a hospital or a home. Safety and privacy are not features to toggle on; they’re the constraints that shape the whole system. That means careful language choices, conservative data practices, and an architecture that privileges consent, control, and clarity.
What makes our work unique is the way we combine trauma-informed design with pragmatic engineering. We iterate publicly with our community and partners, we measure what truly matters—time to clarity, friction in moments of distress, the reliability of next steps—and we keep refining until the experience feels lighter. Right now we’re expanding resources across more countries, improving moderation signals so conversations stay constructive, and prototyping AI that reduces the cognitive effort it takes to ask for help.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
Neglecting the invisible maintenance breaks bonds long before anything dramatic does. Relationships are kept alive by micro-rituals: the passing joke that says “I remember you,” the check-in that doesn’t ask for anything, the “thinking of you” text sent with no scoreboard in mind. When those disappear, the structure of a relationship remains—numbers in a phone, meetings on a calendar—but the feeling collapses.
Restoration rarely begins with logic. You can’t debate a connection back into being. You rebuild the rituals first. You put warmth back into the room with small, repeatable acts of presence: a weekly note, a coffee that doesn’t have an agenda, a shared habit that only exists because you both show up. At Our Wave we try to encode this into product decisions—gentle prompts that make it easier to return, language that invites rather than demands, spaces that reward small acts of care. When we get that right, people don’t just reconnect with each other; they reconnect with the parts of themselves that know how to give and receive care.
What did suffering teach you that success never could?
Suffering taught me an empathy that can’t be faked. Success makes you admirable; suffering makes you human. When you’ve carried something heavy for a while, you develop a quiet radar for other people’s invisible battles. You stop judging pace, output, or polish, and you start noticing courage, effort, and the small recoveries that cost more than they look. That changes how you lead. Design reviews become less about winning an argument and more about protecting the user’s energy. Deadlines are still real, but so are mental health days and the difference a single kind sentence can make. Product language softens, error states become more humane, and teams move faster because people feel safe enough to say what’s real.
Suffering also rearranged my ambitions. I still love elegant systems and shipping quickly, but the north star moved from “what’s possible” to “what’s helpful.” In practice that means picking defaults that reduce anxiety, building for older devices on slower networks, and choosing clarity over cleverness even when it costs a bit of pride. The paradox is that outcomes usually improve when people feel seen. Throughput follows trust.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
We are underestimating the economics of attention and cognition. Many products still optimize for productivity – as if more dashboards, insights, and nudges will magically produce more understanding—while ignoring the reality that our attention is not scaling with compute. The scarce resource of the 2030s isn’t GPUs; it’s focus. This next wave of durable companies will compete on cognitive compression, not just data access. They’ll make decisions disappear by offering one good next step at a time, with defaults that encode wise constraints and interfaces that don’t ask you to keep the whole state machine in your head.
I think about this daily at Our Wave. A survivor doesn’t need another panel with ten filters; they need a short path to the right resource, expressed in language that honors their agency. Time-to-clarity should be a first-class KPI. What reduces friction? Which words lower the heart rate? What can the system responsibly infer so the person doesn’t have to? When we treat attention as precious, we design like good hosts—anticipating needs, removing clutter, and making it effortless to do the next right thing.
Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. What are you doing today that won’t pay off for 7–10 years?
I’m investing in an internal “making engine” – a personal system that turns brain sparks into artifacts on a reliable schedule. I capture ideas in messy, living notes; when one keeps tugging at me, I shape it into something real and public, at least once a month. Sometimes it’s an article, sometimes a prototype, sometimes a presentation or a visual explainer, but the loop is always the same: I learn, I make, I share. Between those larger releases, I run short build cycles. Shipping prototypes to our internal team becomes the metronome. The measure of progress isn’t what I’ve read or planned but instead what exists in the world that didn’t exist before.
Over years, this practice compounds. Each artifact sharpens intuition, attracts collaborators, and becomes a tiny node that provides a reference to make all future builds better, more informed, and more valuable. The risk, of course, is endless tinkering—polishing drafts in private while calling it progress. I counter that by naming quarterly “shipping sprints,” telling a few people what I’ll deliver, and letting the accountability do its work. None of this pays off immediately, and that’s the point. It builds a reputation for reliability, a body of work that teaches faster than any course, and a network that finds you because you left a trail. What could you finish in the next two weeks that your future self would be grateful to have shipped, even if it’s imperfect?
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.ourwave.org
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanmichaelsen
Image Credits
Erica Holmsen
