A lifelong tinkerer who never wrote code
Jake Schumer grew up loving computers and has been taking them apart and putting them back together his whole life. But aside from a few dalliances with code camps and courses, he never actually built anything before founding Macrify. He wasn't a developer. He was a lawyer who paid very close attention to how technology was changing the world around him.
A lifelong supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jake has always been interested in a particular tension at the heart of software: the same tool can be used for freedom or for control. The internet was founded on open principles, and it flourished because of them. There is still an enormous amount of excellent free and open-source software online — much of it relied upon by the very for-profit companies that compete against openness.
But at some point, the advantages of closed systems for those companies made the gradual enclosure of the internet undeniable. Today, the two dominant modes software operates in are simple to describe. Either it locks you into a system and charges you a subscription, or it uses an algorithm to keep you coming back — to content, to a feed, to an advertisement. For a long time, the cost of building and running good software was simply too high for anyone to compete with the quality the for-profit giants could ship.
Software is about to flow like water
We believe AI represents a genuine opportunity to break free of the profit-driven, mass-surveillance, lock-in systems that dominate our daily lives. The cost of developing software is collapsing — and as it does, software will begin to flow like water, molding itself to whatever the individual actually wants.
Why are you at a desk? Sometimes a desk is right. But sometimes you really don't need one.
For-profit companies will still be the primary way most people interact with software, and that's fine. But we no longer have to be grateful for the privilege of paying tens, hundreds, or thousands of dollars a year for licenses to software we don't even enjoy using. Those companies aren't only going to have to compete with each other anymore.
More and more, they're going to have to compete with free. They're going to have to compete with individuals who don't operate on a lock-in basis, but on a customer-satisfaction basis. Macrify wants to drive that change — and we intend to do it by competing with them head on.
Our product is your success
Macrify provides software — but that isn't the end of the story. Just as an attorney's product isn't a motion, Macrify's product isn't an app. Our product is your success, whatever form that takes.
Some firms would rather stay with the traditional legal software players — Clio, Smokeball, and the like — and Macrify will support that completely. We'll show you how to get more out of those systems than they're feeding you, and we'll build software that lets you get what you want out of them without bending your workflow to fit their preferences.
Or, if you'd rather, we can help you build from the ground up to be self-sufficient: local AI and software you own outright, running against your own database, with the backups, reliability, and security to stand on its own.
No matter what, we will never sell you something you can't easily take with you.
Everything we build is meant to be portable to another system. Independence isn't a slogan here — it's a constraint we hold ourselves to.
Automation, with or without AI
We're keenly aware that many people have conflicting feelings about AI — moral, spiritual, and practical. We take that seriously. In fact, we started by building programs that don't use AI at all in their actual operation.
If you're opposed to AI for any reason but still want to explore what automation can do for your practice, we are ready and willing to help. Long before there was AI, there were word macros — and with today's tools, those are easier to set up than they have ever been.