I’m Jared Psigoda. I’ve spent 17 years building companies, most of them in China, across video games, live streaming, and blockchain. Now I’m building Renji Labs, a privacy-first AI company, starting with Kaiary: a private place for families to keep their memories.
Residual Self is where I build the next one in public. From zero. Real numbers, real decisions, real misses, written down as they happen.
What you’ll find here
• The Build. The honest journey from zero to (hopefully) somewhere. Actual growth numbers, the calls I’m making, and the ones I get wrong.
• China. Seventeen years operating there, played as depth, not yesterday’s headlines. What it taught me about building, and what the West keeps getting wrong about it.
• Virtual Worlds. Two decades building inside virtual economies, from gold farming to game publishing to blockchain to AI. What’s signal and what’s a bubble, from someone who has watched it rhyme four times.
• Privacy. Why I run my own AI servers instead of handing your data to Big Tech, and why that is the whole point.
If you build things, think about who owns your data in the AI era, or just like watching someone go from zero in public, you will feel at home here.
The newsletter is free.
What I’m building: Kaiary at Renji Labs. Private AI for your family’s memories, running on our own servers, not Big Tech’s. If you’re a parent, come take a look.
