Tech Innovator Parker Klein on Enhancing Memory and Connection through Digital Platforms
Join us on ‘The Main Thing’ podcast for a wisdom-packed session with Parker Klein, the tech entrepreneur who’s changing the game with his ingenious platform, Twos. Parker, a San Diego native and Vanderbilt alum, sits down with me to share his journey from working with tech giants to bravely venturing into the world of startups. In our conversation, we unravel the threads of wisdom that have influenced Parker’s pursuit of improving how we remember and connect in our digital lives.
You’ll get an insider’s look into how Parker’s work with Qualcomm, Trustwork, and Google shaped his vision for Twos. Discover how his platform is not just an app but a life-enhancing tool for productivity and memory. So tune in, and let’s uncover the wisdom that makes Parker Klein one of the wisest individuals I know, and perhaps find a spark to ignite your own wisdom journey.
Prior to co-founding Twos and launching the eponymous app, Parker developed 4 of his own applications designed to improve people’s self-awareness and help them remember their lives. Parker studied computer science at Vanderbilt University.
When not programming, Parker enjoys reading biographies and books on philosophy. He also loves walking and running on the Tampa Riverwalk.
Parker Klein joins from Tampa, Florida.
Resources
Learn about Twos App – the best place to write things down
Check out the Twos App YouTube channel.
Episode 95 featuring Clay Davis
Parker’s personal website
Credits
Editor + Technical Advisor Bob Hotchkiss
Brand + Strategy Advisor Andy Malinoski
PR + Partnerships Advisor Rachel Bell
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Episode Chapters
[0:03:40] – Much to love about Tampa and the Tampa Riverwalk
[0:04:17] – Why our host Skip loves the Twos App
[0:05:40] – The inspiration that sparked Twos App
[0:07:50] – How we’re connected; Clay Davis
[0:08:48] – Find out how to unlock 17 add’l minutes of Parker’s wisdom
[0:09:48] – Parker shares his Main Thing
[0:11:56] – Absent this wisdom, Google might just stress you out
[0:12:33] – Can fear get in the way of our creativity?
Full Transcript of This Episode
0:00:01 – Announcer
Wisdom. It’s an incredibly valuable asset, someone say, more precious than gold. It’s attractive, appealing, admirable. Conversely, a lack of wisdom is the basis of immaturity, blind spots and bad decisions. Wisdom, it can be gained over time, but it can’t be rushed. But wisdom can be shared. That’s precisely what we are here to do right now, today. We are here to hack wisdom, to distill it, to understand it and to process it.
Why? To get better at life. Welcome to The Main Thing. This is your new 9-minute podcast. I’m your host, Skip Lineberg, and I’ve set out to interview the wisest people I know. We’ll see what we can learn from each one when they’re faced with an incredibly difficult, soul piercing question.
0:01:00 – Skip Lineberg
Welcome to The Main Thing Podcast. I’m your host, Skip Lineberg, coming to you today from Parkwood Studios. In just a moment, you’ll hear from our special guest, who’s a bright, talented young entrepreneur, tech-savvy, product developer, coder and app builder. What wisdom will he bring, this young person who’s passionate not just about technology but also about helping us all improve our lives, and that aligns perfectly with the mission of our podcast helping folks get just a little bit better at life.
But first, a warm welcome to our first-time listeners. I’m so glad to have you here with us. To learn more about all the wisdom offerings available to you, just head over to our website, the main thing podcast dot com. Once there, I encourage you to sign up for our wisdom newsletter. It’s an excellent supplement to our podcasts. A special shout out of gratitude to our newest patron, JD, from West Virginia. Thank you, JD, for your encouragement and for helping to keep this pipeline of wisdom flowing.
Now for our special guest. He’s a company founder and technology innovator. Parker Klein is from San Diego, California, and he studied computer science at Vanderbilt University. While in school, Parker taught himself to program mobile apps and websites to start building a half-private, half-social platform to remember and share information. It’s called Twos. As he began his corporate career, Parker worked as a software engineer at Qualcomm, a startup called Trustwork and a little place called Google. All the while, Parker was developing four more of his own applications designed to improve people’s self-awareness and help them remember their lives.
Two years ago, Parker left his job at Google to work full-time on Twos and to pursue his passion for helping people become more productive, helping them remember their lives and connect with others. When not programming, Parker enjoys reading biographies and books on philosophy, and he also loves walking and running on the Tampa Riverwalk. Parker joins us today from Tampa, Florida.
So lock in and get ready. Over the next nine minutes, you will discover why Parker Klein is one of the wisest people I know.
0:03:28 – Skip Lineberg
Parker Klein, welcome to The Main Thing podcast!
0:03:32 – Parker Klein
Thank you, Skip … my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
0:03:37 – Skip
Hey, have you been out on the Riverwalk at Tampa this morning yet?
0:03:40 – Parker Klein
I have. I ran along it around nine Awesome.
0:03:44 – Skip
Yeah, awesome. I’m a huge fan of the Tampa Riverwalk. Back in the last four months of 2018 and the first four months of 2019, I was based in Tampa working with the project team to building a new product, and I would travel to Tampa every week. Our office was right near the Riverwalk, two blocks over, and so that was part of my daily routine.
0:04:09 – Parker Klein
Love it. Great weather yeah.
0:04:11 – Skip
Tampa … San Diego. Flip a Coin. Who has the best weather most of the year?
0:04:15 – Parker Klein
Did you know I’m from San Diego.
0:04:17 – Skip
That’s right. [Laughter]
I love your app. We’re going to talk a lot about Twos App. What I love about it is I just write things down. That’s the promise of your product, your brand. Just write things down. But in doing that there’s an offload from my brain getting it down. I don’t have to worry about it anymore. Is that part of the psychology behind your app?
0:04:46 – Parker Klein
Absolutely. There are so many benefits to writing things down and that’s really what we hope to help people with. A lot of tools these days can be overly complex or just maybe not built for little things like captioning anything that you want to remember. We really want to help people offload their minds. We’re not as good at remembering things, so we’re really just focused on writing things down, helping people to remember things. And then since we’re breaking the information up into these pieces, you can actually share some things and not share some things.
0:05:29 – Skip
Take us through your path, how your brain works, why you’re fascinated with these things, what you studied and then what eventually caused you to say I’m going to build my own thing and I’m going to found a company around it.
0:05:40 – Parker Klein
Yeah, absolutely so. The majority of it happened when I went to school, at Vanderbilt for college. So you’re in Nashville, yeah. So I started doing computer science just because I realized that you can really build anything in a lot of ways just with your time and energy. It doesn’t cost you much.
I was sitting at a Padres game in San Diego with my dad over the summer and I was already writing a lot of things down.
I’d write things on note cards, I’d write things in Google Docs, Apple Notes, and I just thought I’m setting goals. I’m accomplishing things. I’m learning things. But even the person that I’m sitting right next to, my dad, doesn’t know any of this stuff. I’m not really talking to him about what I’m doing on a day-to-day or my goals and aspirations. That’s not something that we talk about much.
And so I thought: wouldn’t it be cool to have a platform where you can write anything down privately, like any of your goals, any of your thoughts, experiences? I thought that was gold.
So I just started learning how to program in order to build Twos. I was just learning the different technologies that I knew I would need, building test applications in order to eventually build Twos. I did that my whole senior year. So I had basically gotten to the point where I felt comfortable to start building Twos at the start of my senior year and spent my whole senior year developing the MVP for Twos. And I launched it maybe a month before graduation.
0:07:29 – Skip
Folks are like I got to pause right now because I want to go look at this thing that they’re talking about. Where should they go?
0:07:35 – Parker Klein
You can search in the App Store twos T-W-O-S. You can also use it on the web. T-W-O-S app A-P-P dot com.
0:07:51 – Skip
Awesome. Let’s talk about how we’re connected. This will recognize a former guest of the Main Thing podcast, Clay Davis from Episode 95.
0:08:00 – Parker Klein
Clay went to UNC Chapel Hill with my cousin. So I went to visit my cousin one year while he was in college, got to hang out with Clay. He was a roommate of Clay’s so I got to hang out with Clay for a while and Clay’s been on family trips with us so it’s just been this natural friendship and he’s just the most genuine, generous kind of person. So indeed he is. I love to be around him. I love any opportunity to speak to him as we’ve experienced.
0:08:40 – Skip
Yeah, for sure. That’s awesome, Clay. Thank you for connecting Parker and I. It’s been a great connection.
0:08:48 – Announcer
One. Nine. Two. 192 extra minutes of wisdom. That’s what you get, when you become a patron of The Main Thing Podcast.
Many of you continue to say we want to hear more from these wise guests. That’s precisely what patrons of our podcast get Exclusive access to bonus episodes, called the whole thing. These 30-minute special shows bring you a deeper dive into our guest’s wisdom. Less editing, more laughter, less time limits, more stories.
Unlock those 192 extra minutes of wisdom for yourself for as little as $9 per month through the Patreon platform. And when you become a patron, you also get access to wisdom essays, behind the scenes glimpses and access to special patron only wisdom gatherings.
Head over to Patreon. Go unlock your 192 extra minutes of wisdom.
0:09:48 – Skip
Parker Klein, what’s the main thing you’ve learned in your lifetime so far?
0:09:55 – Parker Klein
Skip, the main thing I’ve learned in my lifetime so far is: everything’s going to be okay.
0:10:03 – Skip
Ooh, that is so important. Yes, everything is going to be okay. Yeah, I believe that.
Tell us more about that. Why did you pick that, what does that mean to you in your life and how to use that wisdom to guide you throughout your day?
0:10:23 – Parker Klein
It helps me not worry and stress as much. It originated with a former girlfriend. Actually, the former girlfriend that came up with the name, Twos, with me. I started to realize that a lot of the things that we would worry about or be stressed about would never happen.
In college it was worrying about how an exam’s going to go, or how a friend might react to something, just to kind of calm her nerves and just figure out, like, what can we actually do, like what’s inside of our control, what’s not inside of our control, and we don’t really know what the result’s going to be.
But we can focus on just doing our best. Like how can we best prepare, how can we best work, do whatever we need to do, and just let the rest of it go.
Because it’s usually going to be okay in some ways, and sometimes it’s not in the short term. But usually in the long term, there’s something to be gained from it … there’s something to be learned. You can usually find something to be grateful for at some point.
0:11:41 – Skip
Yes, I agree, Parker. Your main thing … everything is going to be okay … would you share with us a recent personal example of when you had to lean on that?
0:11:56 – Parker Klein
Sometimes Google will put restrictions on the application that we’re putting out and maybe like an API version or some version of the program and you need to upgrade a bunch of things and make sure that the application is compliant to their requirements. Sometimes this can be very challenging and you can feel like am I ever going to figure this out? Am I ever going to be able to make another release?
0:12:27 – Skip
Right, but when we’re locked on that problem, when that is like your sole focus, it really can restrict you, can it?
0:12:33 – Parker Klein
Oh, absolutely, and I think that that’s like the fear and the worry and where you’re getting hung up on that and you’re spending less time solving the problem and figuring out like what can I learn to? Or like being creative, like a lot of times, if you’re just being fearful or you’re worrying or stressing, you’re not being open to new possibilities.
0:13:01 – Skip
Parker, I love your main thing: Everything is going to be okay. It just shines a spotlight on the fact that the obstacle, the struggle, the dilemma that we’re wrestling with isn’t permanent, it isn’t forever and eventually we will get through this. I would say eventually we’ll look back on it and smile about it because we’ll have that wisdom, that perspective, having grown and learned through that experience that it was valuable.
0:13:27 – Parker Klein
So I think that aspect of it is very important – allowing things to play out even if you’re stuck in the middle of it. Just having that trust, that faith that everything will be okay in the end and that we will learn what we need to learn from this.
0:13:41 – Skip
Parker, thank you for coming on today and sharing your main thing. I’m going to tell you, it is so simple, it is not to be undervalued or dismissed. This will be one of my favorite main things ever because, like your app, Twos App, it’s simple. Tthere is power, there is beauty, there is tremendous value in simplicity.
0:14:02 – Parker Klein
I appreciate that. I had to tell myself this, when I said this was going to be my main thing, because you know, that is kind of a odd … or it could be odd. A lot of people could say, it’s too simple or it’s not true.
0:14:17 – Skip
Or … it’s a toss-away.
0:14:19 – Parker Klein
Yeah.
0:14:21 – Skip
But everything will be okay. I think we’ve taken it apart and built out the true essence of it.
0:14:29 – Parker Klein
Thank you.
0:14:30 – Skip
Parker, thank you so much and I hope we speak again soon. I know we will, but so long for now.
0:14:46 – Parker Klein
So long. Thank you so much for having me.
0:14:50 – Announcer
Wow, that goes by incredibly fast, doesn’t it? Time flies when you’re hacking wisdom. I hope you’re left wanting more. Sync up with us again next time, on the main thing, for nine more minutes of wisdom.
Transcribed by https://podium.page
