About the studio
Firstness, Inc. is an independent studio. We design and build our own products, each an answer to how we reimagine the skills we had before AI, and imagine the new ones it makes possible. Each starts from the same hunch: that play, curiosity and being present will matter more, not less, as AI takes on the rest.
The hunch has a philosopher behind it. Charles Sanders Peirce held that every inquiry begins with a guess, and gave the name firstness to a quality as it first appears, before it settles into fact or habit. The studio is named for the quality, and Conjecta, its first product, for the guess.
The founder
Parham Pourdavood founded Firstness in 2026 to build the tools he wanted for his own thinking. Before that he studied cognitive science at UC Berkeley, spent four years modeling brain dynamics in the UCSF Brain Imaging and EEG Lab at the San Francisco VA, and from 2020 to 2026 was an AI research and data science consultant to Human Energy, a nonprofit in the San Francisco Bay Area.
His research spans neuroscience, AI and the philosophy of technology, with a focus on biosemiotics, the study of how living systems make meaning from signs. With the anthropologist Terrence Deacon he has studied how large language models take part in cultural evolution, and his recent papers look at how technologies from written script to language models reshape perception, and at whether an AI's constitution carries a culture of its own. Peirce is the thinker he keeps returning to. Away from the work, he composes for piano and plays classical guitar.