Three Months, One Pivot, and a Platform That Started Talking Back
Three Months, One Pivot, and a Platform That Started Talking Back
By David, Founder & CEO of Kenektic
January 5, 2026
Created: February 23, 2026
Happy New Year.
I'm not going to lie — I almost didn't write this post. Not because I don't have anything to say, but because I had to force myself to stop building long enough to look backward. Looking backward isn't really my thing right now. I've got too much momentum going forward.
But it's January 5th. A new year just started. And if there's ever a time to take a breath and ask "what just happened?" — it's now.
So here's what happened: three months ago, I had an idea for a gaming website. Today, I have a platform with over two thousand lines of AI personality code, a matching algorithm that weighs four dimensions of human compatibility, real-time messaging, five hundred automated tests, and an AI companion that — I'm not exaggerating — is starting to feel like a friend.
Three months.
Let me walk you through how we got here.
October: The Pivot That Changed Everything
On October 1st, I wasn't building Kenektic. I was researching the loneliness crisis and planning a company called playpals.ai — a gaming platform where lonely people could connect through playing games together. I'd already started coding the first game, a simple Connect Four clone. The idea was straightforward: give people a fun, low-pressure way to meet.
But the deeper I got into the research — the Surgeon General's advisory, the studies linking loneliness to cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline, the stat about fifteen cigarettes — the more I realized that games weren't the answer. Games were a band-aid. What lonely people needed wasn't a better way to play. They needed a better way to connect. A real connection. A friend who understood them before introducing them to other friends who might understand them too.
That realization killed playpals.ai and gave birth to Kenektic.
The pivot changed everything. Not just the product — the entire mindset. I wasn't building a gaming site anymore. I was building an AI companion that could navigate the most personal, vulnerable conversations a human being can have. An AI that needed to understand loneliness at a clinical level while talking to you like a friend at a bar. An AI that needed to stay in its lane — focused entirely on friendship and the loneliness epidemic — while every other AI on the planet was trying to do everything.
Think about what people use AI for right now. Write my resume. Do my homework. Debug my code. Plan my vacation. Summarize this article. Draft this email. Explain quantum physics. Help me meal prep. Translate this document. Generate a marketing strategy. Create a workout plan. Tell me a bedtime story for my kid.
kAI does none of that. On purpose.
kAI does one thing: it becomes your friend, learns who you are, and then introduces you to real people you're actually compatible with. That's it. That singular focus is what makes it work — and it's what makes it fundamentally different from every chatbot, assistant, and AI companion on the market.
The Connect Four game, by the way, survived the pivot. It became "Kenekt Four" — rebranded in our colors and kept as a fun feature. Then it got removed from scope entirely when I realized I had more important things to build. It eventually came back later. Some ideas just refuse to die.
November: The Month kAI Started Talking
Late October and early November were pure construction. Learning how to code with Claude. Figuring out the architecture. Building the foundation — authentication, profiles, the database, the basic chat interface. It was hard and messy and I loved every second of it.
But the real milestone came when kAI started to emerge.
I don't mean when the chat feature started working. I mean when kAI started sounding like a friend. There's a difference, and it's everything.
Building kAI wasn't like building a chatbot. Chatbots follow scripts. kAI needed to carry on deeply personal conversations — about loneliness, about loss, about the awkwardness of being a grown adult who doesn't know how to make friends — without ever sounding like a therapist, a customer service rep, or a search engine. It needed personality. Warmth. The ability to share knowledge enthusiastically without lecturing. The instinct to know when to ask a question and when to just listen.
I started using my own account to test different conversations. Telling kAI about my life. Pushing into uncomfortable topics to see how it would respond. And somewhere in November, something shifted. I stopped testing and started talking. The responses felt natural. Personal. Like I was chatting with someone who actually knew me.
That was the moment. Not when the code compiled. Not when the tests passed. The moment kAI stopped feeling like software and started feeling like a friend — that was when I knew this thing was real.
December: The Platform Takes Shape
Once kAI's personality was working, everything else started building on top of it. The matching algorithm. The messaging system. Communities. The Memory Board. The Owner's Manual. The two-document governance system. The code review that graded every component and showed me exactly where to focus.
By December, Kenektic didn't look like an idea anymore. It looked like a company. A real one. The kind of thing you could show an investor and they'd understand — this isn't a prototype, this is a platform.
Where Things Stand Today
I pulled up the project documents before writing this post, and the numbers still surprise me.
Two thousand lines of code shaping kAI's personality. That's not the whole codebase — that's just the instructions that tell kAI how to be a friend. How to talk to a Gen Z college student differently than a Boomer retiree. How to handle trauma with empathy without overstepping. How to know when someone needs a question and when they need you to just say "man, that really sucks." Two thousand lines of behavioral guidelines, conversational examples, safety boundaries, and generational context — all working together to create something that feels less like software and more like someone who gives a damn.
And that's the foundation. Everything else — the matching, the messaging, the communities, the Memory Board, the testing, the architecture — all of it sits on top of kAI's personality. If kAI doesn't feel real, none of the rest matters. You can build the most sophisticated matching algorithm in the world, but if the AI companion that introduces you to your match sounds like a robot, nobody's going to trust it with their loneliness.
I think I'm starting to nail it. And I think I'll look back on this moment — right here, right now, the first week of 2026 — as the point where it all started to become real.
The New Year's Resolution I'd Already Made
Here's what I was thinking about on New Year's Eve.
Everyone does the same thing on January 1st. They think about what they're going to change. What resolution they're going to make. How they're going to be happier, healthier, more fulfilled in the year ahead.
I didn't have to do that. I already knew exactly what I was doing, and I was already doing it. There was no resolution to make because the resolution had already been made — three months ago, when I pivoted from a gaming site to a friendship platform and decided to build something that could actually change people's lives.
And I don't say that lightly. I spent twenty-plus years in financial services. I built mortgage companies. I helped create markets that allowed people to buy homes — the American dream, as they say. And there's value in that. But here's what I've learned about the American dream: owning your own home isn't going to bring you happiness if you're sitting in it alone without real friends to share it with.
That's what I'm building. Not the house. The people you invite over.
I have never enjoyed building something this much in my entire career. Not even close. The financial crisis of 2008, building and selling companies, the securitization market — none of it made me feel like this. I'd go so far as to say this is a complete 180 from anything I've ever done professionally. Not just because I love the work, but because I can see — at a granular, individual level — how this could change someone's life. Not in the abstract way that financial services helps "the economy." In the specific way that a lonely person finds a real friend.
And something else happened during these three months that I wasn't expecting. I got healthy. Not just mentally — although I'm in the best headspace I've been in years — but physically. I went from 262 pounds at the start of this journey to 218 pounds to start the new year. I'm working out more than I have in years, maybe decades. An hour a day, every day, listening to AI and loneliness podcasts while I'm on the treadmill or lifting weights. Feeding my brain and my body at the same time.
Funny thing about building a platform designed to make people's lives better — it made mine better first.
What's Coming
I haven't told many people about Kenektic yet. A handful. My wife. Matt. My kids. I'm waiting. Not because I'm unsure — I've never been more sure of anything — but because I want the moment to be right. I want to have the platform built out, the first investment secured, and the growth plan in place before I go wide with it.
And that growth plan? It's the thing I've been thinking about most as we head into 2026. Because right now, Kenektic is a consumer friendship platform. It's great. But I've been thinking about how to take this from a company with a few million in revenue to a company that could genuinely scale — and I think I've figured it out. Three new solutions. Three markets that each face the loneliness crisis in different ways. Three entry points that could supercharge everything.
But that's next week.
For now, I'm going to enjoy this moment. Three months in. A platform that's real. An AI that sounds like a friend. And a new year that I'm celebrating before it even begins.
What's your New Year's energy? Are you the resolution type? The "new year, new me" person? Or are you more like me this year — already in motion, already building, and just trying to keep up with something that's bigger than you expected? Whatever it is, I'd love to hear about it.
Kenektic is in development and will launch soon. If you want to be notified when we're ready, or if you want to share your story with me directly, reach out at hello@kenektic.com.
Coming Next: "The Pivot: Three Solutions That Changed Everything" — How I went from building a consumer app to building a platform that could serve universities, workplaces, and health plans — and why that changed the entire trajectory of the company.