portablemind
Our Story

Between ventures, we went deep on AI.

Our founding team had just exited our most recent startup. We had something rare: time and focus. We spent it studying everything happening in AI.

What we saw concerned us. Not just for ourselves — for everyone in our professional network. Developers were hitting vibe coding limits. But executives and founders were in a different kind of trouble: they'd seen the magic trick demos, some had even spent a week in Lovable or Replit, and they knew they needed to be taking advantage of something — they just didn't know what. How to introduce it to their teams. How to measure progress. How to buy wisely when every vendor claimed to have the AI potion.

So we started a happy hour.

We invited colleagues and taught each other. Developers, executives, founders — everyone brought what they'd learned. Once we had the basics down, building was the natural next step. Small experiments first.

Then we hit the wall everyone hits: agents that forgot between sessions, planning tools disconnected from building tools, nothing enterprise-ready. We'd built complex enterprise software for a living. These were engineering problems we knew how to solve.

Platform first.

We made a deliberate choice: build the platform before the application. Stable APIs, persistent shared memory, enterprise tenancy and security, agentic workflow orchestration. Let the foundation model vendors evolve AI at their pace — our job is the infrastructure that makes AI usable for real work.

The work management app you're looking at is the first application on that platform. But it was always designed to be more than one app.

What drives us.

We train people in our network pro bono. We build apps at cost for founders who can't afford enterprise development. We share what we learn because this change is too important for anyone to navigate alone.

Leadership

Who's building it.

Russell Holmes

Co-Founder

Backend architecture and engineering, and product technical leadership.

Russell Holmes on LinkedIn

Rick Koloski

Co-Founder

Technical strategy and product architecture, enterprise relationships, and roadmap leadership.

Rick Koloski on LinkedIn

Paul Pluschkell

Co-Founder

Sales leadership, customer success, services delivery, and business development.

Paul Pluschkell on LinkedIn

Three problems we solve

AI memory is ephemeral

Agents forget. Context evaporates. Knowledge isn't shared. The PortableMind Knowledge Server provides persistent memory and shared context.

Planning and building are disconnected

Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and code terminals don't talk to each other. portablemind gives each audience their familiar surface — connected to one source of truth.

AI adoption is disorienting

Magic trick demos impress executives but terrify organizations. Familiar surfaces serve as a Rosetta Stone — teams evolve through what they know, not by abandoning it.