It is 9am in Barcelona. You have just finished a video call with someone in Chennai — a 1:1 that ran until 9:55. You made notes. You captured the action items. And you promised yourself you would follow up on a specific thing in two weeks, when the project reaches a certain milestone.
By your third meeting of the morning, you cannot recall what that thing was.
Not the action item. You have that. The context. What this person is actually worried about, underneath the professional framing. What they did not say, but that you noticed. The texture of the conversation. The thing that told you: pay attention to this.
That is gone. Replaced by the next meeting, and the one after that.
I am the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Wall Street English, a language education company operating across multiple countries. My working day spans Barcelona and Chennai — a 4.5-hour time difference that makes almost everything asynchronous by necessity. I manage a team of people across two continents, each navigating different contexts, pressures, and timelines. Most weeks, I also interact with teams in Korea, hong Kong, Germany, Italy and, most weeks, somewhere else in the world.
For most of my career, I managed this the same way everyone does: notes in Notion, bookmarks I never revisit, meeting summaries that capture what was said but not what mattered. Calendar entries that remind me a call happened, not what I understood from it.
It worked, loosely. Until it did not.
The Senior Leader’s Specific Problem
The context-switching cost is not evenly distributed. It is highest for the people who are, structurally, the connective tissue of an organisation.
A senior leader is not primarily an executor. The value of the role is in holding context across people, decisions, projects, and time zones simultaneously — and being able to connect them in ways that individuals cannot. This is what strategy actually means at the level of day-to-day work: not documents, but the ability to hold enough threads to make decisions that account for what is true simultaneously in multiple places.
When you lose context — between a Chennai 1:1 and a Barcelona leadership meeting, between a project you reviewed last month and a decision that turns on it today — you are not slower. You are structurally worse at the thing your role requires.
The usual solutions address symptoms, not the problem. Notion becomes a graveyard of notes with no relationships between them. Bookmarks are captured and never opened. Meeting summaries are accurate records of what happened; they do not preserve what you understood or why it mattered. The longer the gap between capturing something and needing it, the more the tools fail.
The Tipping Point
The moment I knew something needed to change was not dramatic. It was a 1:1 where I arrived without context on something discussed three meetings ago — something the other person remembered clearly, had been thinking about, and expected me to have held. I had not.
In that moment, I realised I had been relying on my own memory to do the work my role increasingly demands. Senior leadership at scale is not compatible with unaided human recall.
Nick Zervoudis had once shown me that a second brain could be a serious professional tool, not just a personal productivity experiment. I had noted the idea. I had not acted on it.
After that 1:1, I did.
What I Decided to Build
The thing I built is not an app. It is not a SaaS subscription. It is a connected knowledge system: a structured vault of notes, relationships, and context, with an AI layer that can query and reason over everything in it.
I called it Cerebro because it acts as my second brain.
What that means in practice, what it demanded to build, and what it actually changed — that is what this series is about.
Credit: Nick Zervoudis — the person who first showed me that a second brain could be a serious tool, not just a note-taking system.
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