Aboard is for tracking stuff — and for building the tools for tracking stuff with AI. | Image: Aboard
Aboard is not an easy app to explain. It used to be easier: at first, it was a way to collect and organize information — Trello meets Pinterest meets that spreadsheet full of links you use to plan your vacation. The company’s founders, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, are two longtime web developers and app creators (and, in Ford’s case, also an influential writer about the web) who previously ran a well-liked agency called Postlight. They did a bunch of interesting work on parsing websites to pull out helpful information, and they built a handy visual tool for displaying it all. “People love to save links,” Ziade says, “and we love to make those links beautiful when they come in.” Simple!
But now I’m sitting here in a co-working space in New…