Joseph Ayinde - co-founder & ceo @ The Learning and Memory Lab

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Joseph Ayinde with us today. He's a co-founder and CEO at the Learning and Memory Lab. He's building a world where humans and machines can learn together. He's a polymath and Tar Heel. Can you explain what Tar Heel is, Joseph?

Yeah, uh, first of all, excited to be here. Let's bring the energy today., so yeah, Joseph Ayinde from North Carolina originally, Greensboro, North Carolina, small town, Tar Heel. I went to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Tar Heels, for my undergrad. So anyone who's a Tar Heel knows that once you're a Tar Heel, you're forever a Tar Heel. It's all really close to heart.

There you go, dude. So what are you building? Like, what brought you into that interesting company that you're running now?

Yeah, so, um, what am I building? Um, so right now I'm building Lucy, um, the world's first AI-native learning and development platform for humans and machines. Um, so how did I get here? Why did I get interested in learning and development, human learning, machine learning in general? Um, yeah, so ever since I was younger, I'm really interested in something called neuroplasticity. Um, it's our brain's ability to rewire itself due to experience. Um, and got drawn to that, um, and wanted to study science. I'm in my undergraduate, and started to learn more about how our brain works. Um, specifically one of the things I learned about was human learning and memory and the mechanisms behind that. Um, I took a class called the Science of Learning, um, in my undergrad my sophomore year. Um, and then my sophomore year summer I went to Australia. Um, I was the world's first undergraduate intern in the world's first computational neurosurgery lab of the Australian National Institute of Health Innovation. And there I was working directly under an MD PhD. Um, he had his PhD in computer science and his MD in neurosurgery., and he would perform these, like, crazy operations, like robot-assisted neurosurgery, all these different things, like neuromodulation. Um, and I got really fascinated by this intersection of, um, computers and the brain, um, and continued to study computational neuroscience. Um, like I said, learning and memory specifically, um, and started to study things like Alzheimer's and all these different, like, neurodegenerative diseases, um, just studying how, like, human— how memories form and decay over time in humans. Um, and then I started building some softwares on the side, some consumer learning softwares. Just for myself as a student at the time. My friends and my buddies would join on, they paid for it and everything. A couple of me and my buddies, um, so we're gonna start a lab, um, in undergrad. So, um, in undergrad, like, in America, usually, like, you join a lab, and, like, I'd already done that. So at the time at UNC, one of the big things was they didn't have a lot of computational neuroscience labs. So I'd mentioned how, like, I started dabbling my feet in this computational neuroscience, and I couldn't get out of it. Like, I started getting really interested, like, really obsessed with it.. And all they had was like wet lab neuroscience, just like working with like mice and like C. elegans and all these different like things. And like, it's cool, it's needed, but like it's not what I wanted to do. And I wasn't going to sacrifice that curiosity and just like join something for my resume. I'd rather just start something myself. And so started with my buddies. We ended up having engineers and neuroscientists around the world join the lab and built up the lab, filed for my first patent before I graduated and wrote many papers as well.. And so all of that, like, lab and productization I was doing in undergraduate funneled into what I'm building now on the Learning and Memory Lab. And as I said, we're focused on building a world where humans and machines can learn together. Even outside of the software that we're building right now, long term, we either want to build a hardware or partner with a hardware company to focus on something called human-machine memory integration. So moving past just like learning and memory into things like neurodegenerative therapeutics to help rehabilitate the ability to learn or remember people who lose that ability. So it's a little bit about myself and what I'm building. You can find us on our socials, which I'm sure will be linked under here. Let's take it away.

Yeah, dude, who are your parents? Why are you that way?

Yeah. So I like your question. So who are my parents? So we'll start with mom. My mom's just a regular lady. Her name is Rebecca Ann Goodman. She was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, grew up regular Southern girl. Now my mom works in medical imaging and stuff. So nothing crazy, just a regular woman. My dad, he's Nigerian. So my dad was born in Lagos. He grew up in London his whole life, went to boarding school and came to the States for university. And my dad's a go-getter. Right now, I remember my dad hit me up like a month and a half ago. He's like, have you heard of this thing called Claude? And my dad basically is a lead of like a whole healthcare system. I can't name the system just for information's sake, but basically manages all like the clinical documentation and coding management. And so he started building software a couple months ago. So my dad's like a go-getter. He's always been like, just push me to be like, just to push me to be like, push myself. And I remember like back times, like in first grade, second grade, my dad would teach me square roots. In like his office and I would go to school and I'd be like, hey, like, why am I not learning this? Like, my dad's always pushed me to be accelerated in school. So a little about my parents.

Interesting. And when did you first get fascinated about the brain? Why is it front and center in your life?

Yeah, why did I get fascinated by the brain? Excellent question. So the thing for me is that I've always, like, been interested in human biology. And then when I was younger, so I didn't mention this, but when I was younger, I went to a science technology school for my elementary. And whenever I was in first grade, I built a simple interface, like a little game for us. Because whenever you're younger, they give you a set of words each week to learn. It's like a spell. You got to spell them. You got to know what they mean. It's like a vocabulary list. And I built a little game on the iPod for me and my buddies to start remembering our words. And I basically had to do an interview on the local news. News station, like I had a bunch of other stuff. And so I really got fascinated with technology when I was younger. So just in general, like I wanted to study human biology, then always loved technology, but never wanted to study computer science because it was kind of boring to me when I was younger. Technology felt static almost, and I wanted to study living systems. But then machine learning got introduced to me and then there was a magic moment because computers felt alive. They felt like changing and adaptable, adapted like our brain.. But in general, the reason why I got drawn to the brain was reading. So I'm a big reader. When I was younger, like I said, I got introduced to neuroplasticity, all these different ideas about our brain, because I like to read. Like, when I was younger, I read books like Atomic Habits and productivity books, just like books to make you sharper. I've always been interested in personal development and not productivity, but life maxing. Just like every single thing, just trying to perfect. So the brain naturally got drawn to it. One— sorry, not to yap a lot, but one quick thing on the side is why the brain? Like, why not like the heart or the lungs or like a different part of the body? I always saw the brain as the highest order function of the body. Like, I remember even when I first started looking into medicine, like, I would see people go to the doctor and they get diagnosed with like certain things, but then in the end it would end up being like some type of neurodegenerative disease. And I would like think like, okay, like sometimes we just like we push on something that we see like a symptom, but we don't actually get to understand the root. And I think the brain, like, is like, I guess, the highest order function. And a lot of it, a lot of like, um, just diseases and disorders in general stem from that. Um, so I wanted to study it. Um, as soon as I got my hands on the ability to study it in uni, um, never looked back. Um, my curiosity sort of took over.

And why is LAMB, uh, LAMB Labs, sorry, .ai important? Like, why are Why is it revolutionary what you're building?

Yeah, a couple of reasons. The first reason is we're turning a corner in human history. So human learning has always been a catalyst for human evolution. We learn to walk, we learn to read, we learn these complex concepts that have even allowed us to leave our planet and come back. And so as humans, this ability to learn has pushed us forward. But now a new type of learning has been introduced outside of the human body, and it's machine learning. And a new type of intelligence is formed outside the human body. It's artificial intelligence. And so we're at a point in history where how we navigate this new type of intelligence and new form of learning can fundamentally change the trajectory of our species. And so that's the scale of the problem is massive. The two— why I wanted to build LamLab, like, why me, is because At that turning point, we have a couple of decisions. One, we have the decision to let the machine do— take its course and take over, and we kind of sit back and let it steer. Or two, us as humans can see this as a tool that we've built, just like any other tool, like the calculator, the printing press, electricity, any other invention that we've had in human history used as a tool to propel us forward. And for me, I think learning is one of the most personal things as humans. Like I said, we've learned to do all these different things that have pushed us forward as a society.. So it was one of the issues I thought would be most important to tackle in terms of machine learning. So at first I started doing research on the intersection of machine learning and human learning and then landed on this issue of learning and memory because I was inspired by— I don't know if you know who Demis Hadjis is. He's a cognitive neuroscientist, now famously the CEO of DeepMind. He studied the complementary learning system framework and defined it in his early career. And what it details is how memory and learning work together in the human brain to form long-term memory and expert human decision making. I got really drawn to these ideas of how human memory and learning work together. That's why I chose to found the Learning and Memory Lab, so I can help the world turn the corner and build a world where humans and machines can learn and remember together.

Right. And I believe it's called Cognition now. Are you fixing the memory problem, the attention problem? Like, what are you fixing that needs to be fixed for super intelligence to happen?

For super intelligence to happen. I guess a couple of different questions there. So first, cognition. Yeah, have a little fun business story here. We'll sit back for it. So when I originally started my company post-graduation, so June of 2025, we named it Cognition. And the reason we named it Cognition is, I don't know verbatim, but the definition of cognition is something along the lines of the ability to form knowledge, transfer, and reason on it over time. And so that name was perfect because what we wanted to build was this product, like I said, in this world where humans and machines can learn together focusing on reasoning, learning, and memory processes. But there happens to be another company named Cognition. And so recently we actually just took our first investment a few weeks ago. I actually haven't publicly disclosed this anywhere, so you're the first guy. So yeah, we actually took investment a few weeks ago. And so at that time we have like now more of a long-term thinking. And so when we incorporated our C-Corp and everything, we decided, okay, let's go ahead and rebrand to our long-term vision., and our product now is actually called Lucy. It hasn't formally launched. It's an enterprise product that we're privately testing in beta with some enterprises. But yeah, so in short terms, Cognition was the original name of the company. Now that things have become more formalized, the Learning and Memory Lab is our incorporated name by law. But Lucy is the product the public would know us for and love.

Right.

And what are you fixing? Yeah, what am I fixing in super intelligence? The next question is, so what is the problem and pain point? So yeah, I mentioned AI-native learning and development for humans and agents. So we'll break this down. So first thing is, what is learning and development? So in Fortune 500 companies and all these large companies in the world, they have these departments called learning and development. It sits within HR. And the whole job of it is to make sure that the organization is learning at the rate it's supposed to be and to also try to optimize and increase the rate of learning within the organization at large. What ends up happening though in reality is 80% of it is HR. So 80% of it's just like making sure people are compliant, make sure people are up to date, make sure people aren't breaking rules and costing the company money or just the cost of the company, its name in general. And so this industry right now is around $400 billion being spent per year across Fortune 500. And the problem is around $97 billion of this is being quantified to be wasted due to retraining, lost learning, and just like inefficient systems in general. And so there's been a lot of technologies built on the digital side to try to digitize some of the content delivery. LMSs, I'm not sure if you're familiar with that term, like learning management systems, to try to basically systematize all this learning, conceptualize the rate at which these people learn individually and as a group, all this jazz, right? But it's not working. One in every $4 is lost. And so that's on the human side. Where my team comes in is at the sweet spot. So we've studied human learning and memory. So how humans form memories and decay and learn and how long-term memories form. We've also studied agent learning and memory. So the past like 2 months, we built an agent learning memory product. We scaled it to around 50 customers, 5K MRR, and we're working with all these customers and building this product. And so this intersection that we sit is human learning and machine learning. And so what our product solves now is on the human learning and memory side, we serve as L&D, AI-native L&D for humans. But there's a new type of employee that's joining companies and AI agents or machines in general. We can even think robotics and manufacturing and all this stuff. And so an issue is that how do we handle learning and development for these systems? We don't even have it under wraps for humans, the species that we actually kind of understand a little bit. Nonetheless, this form of intelligence and learning that we don't even quite understand yet. And so that's where we come in. And for these organizations, we focus on learning and development for humans and agents looking ahead, making them AI native, helping them get ready for this era of agents. And so what our platform looks like, Lucy, handles onboarding, training, reskilling, governed memory for agents. It's just a ton of offerings on our platform. And the reason that's so is because L&D, like I said, as a department covers around 40 to 50 functions. Throughout the workday. And so there's a lot of things that happen within the industry, which is why it's so hard to build technology around. So I'm going to circle back around to the pain point is that right now all these technologies that these companies are spending money on just are not helping. It ends up falling back on the person. A good example, I talked to this woman, she's an L&D exec, and she worked at a factory that was responsible for making the Pokémon cards. I'm not sure if you know what Pokémon is. It's like a card game. And basically her job with L&D was to come in and train the floor lead on how to train the rest of the employees in different languages because he had only spoken one language, but he was the expert on Pokémon and the cards and everything. She taught him about how to teach and pedagogy and andragogy, all these different ideas. And so what she said was they had a learning and content delivery system where every day the job of the employees was to look at it and to go over it. But what happened is at the end of each day, they just go back and ask a human, like how we all would, like, hey, how do I do this? Then he would end up getting taken out, taken out, taken out. So what they wish they would have had is like a companion where like the people on the floor could just talk to it like, hey, this is what I'm doing, this is what's not working. And then a video of the guy who knows how to do it gets sent to them in real time. They can look at it and learn by doing. So a more practical technology. And so what we've learned by talking to these executives and all these people that we're talking to now in this L&D industry is that they want something human. Because at the end of the day, if we build an agent learning and memory technology optimized for the biggest benchmarks and try to optimize for continual learning, persistent memory, all these crazy fancy ideas, at the end of the day, humans are using the system. So we still have to optimize for human learning and memory. So that's why we sent this intersection of human learning and memory specifically for learning and development for these enterprises.

And who's your co-founder? Why are you guys a good duo?

Yeah, so I have two co-founders. So one of them is public, the other one is— we aren't so public right now. Yeah, at this stage, just for particular reasons, because our research is very particular. I'll get to that later. But my co-founder who is public is Shashik Srinath. So, yeah, we met in organic chemistry class, which is crazy as hell because it's like some random ass class in undergraduate. And he saw I was building, I was researching and stuff, and he wanted to join on. At the time, he was a sophomore and I was a junior, and he had just finished up his freshman year summer at Apple and Oracle. Because his dad is a system architect at Apple, so he's always been fascinated by technology. He's a scientist as well. So we got really drawn, started working and hacking together, just researching, like, not really building projects, just researching. And he's done— Keshav has exploded while I've worked with him. Like, ever since I've worked with him, he's worked at Charles Cormier Medical School, Stanford Neurosurgery Epilepsy Unit, MIT now, and I'm working with the epilepsy neuroscience right before he went full time with us. And a bunch of other people, a bunch of other— like, any big medical oncology unit in the country, he's worked with building their digital twins because he's basically pioneered this whole digital twin arena for agents and humans. So Kashav Saxena, he's my co-founder, one of them. He's super cracked guy, works across the board. One thing about us as co-founders is like, we don't have like, oh, this guy does tech, this guy does sales. No, everyone works across the board. Everyone's a Swiss Army knife. Yeah, it's a bit about Kashav. Actually, a little fun fact about Kashav. So we all are also versatile outside of tech. So Keshav actually throws a 93-mile-per-hour fastball. He's actually played for the Netherlands youth national baseball team. And he also walked onto the UNC Chapel Hill football team as an undergraduate as well. So we're all very versatile and fun guys on top of all the tech and science that we do.

Man, that's crazy. How do you take care of your brain on a daily basis? You're at the gym right now. People might have noticed the background noise and chaos. But what's your protocols to take care of that brain of yours?

Yeah. Hey, that's the protocol to be present, be alive, be integrated. Even if I'm talking to you, if someone says hey to me, I say hey. I'm not living in a simulation. Everything is integrated reality. So the biggest thing for me is just staying grounded. And there's no secret formula. I'm still learning. This is the first month I've been officially working for myself on salary and everything. And even that's been an adjustment. How do you go about your day? How do you keep yourself accountable? How do you keep yourself responsible? How do you motivate other people within your team psychologically to stay motivated when they aren't motivated? Like all these little different things I'm learning. I'm an avid reader, I'm an avid writer. So that's how I stay grounded, is just doing and forming these habits daily that push me forward 1%. The biggest thing is it's a marathon and you can't get too caught up in the highs or the lows. It's staying level and treating each day as an opportunity just to get better.

Any routines of yours? At what time do you get up? Do you supplement? Any weird routines that you exert?

Peptide maxing. So routine-wise, yeah, I actually am a big routine head. My parents will tell you, this is one thing about me, is even when I was younger in sports, I played youth soccer at the highest level in the United States for Development Academy, and I always have these extreme routines, like rigid, like working out, what I was eating, everything. Even when I got to college, like, I was rigid on it. Like, I competed with myself, like, hey, I need to eat the right things. Like, I want to have the most energy. Like, I take electrolytes every day, for instance, just so I can have like maybe 30 more minutes of energy each day. Every little thing I see is like optimizations. I guess I told you earlier, I'm really into that personal performance optimization area, longevity area as well. So routine-wise, sleep by midnight up at 5:00 AM every morning. And that's one of my routines. I used to stay up till like 4:00 or 5:00 AM, get up at like 8:00 or 9:00. But now I'm in this longer game. I'm transforming from being like hacking on projects, making money to building a sustainable business.. And having customers I report to every day, like having teammates that I report to that rely on me. So forming a reliable schedule is one thing. Two, also just like what I'm putting into my body. So not like using money, all these resources I have now as a tool to just like do things that I should be doing for myself. Like go get the smoothie I need to get, go get these meal preps I need to get, like go do all these things to optimize even more and feedback and reinvest in myself. I'm big on like YouTube and like learning from others as well. And like one of the big things I see from my mentor is I look up to is like reinvesting, like never try to pull out and never try to cash out at this stage. Like just reinvest, reinvest, reinvest. What's the next thing I can reinvest into to get an edge? A good example would be content. So one thing is just last week we started doing content across all platforms like LinkedIn. We already did LinkedIn, sorry, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, all these different places. And it's all automated and none of it's AI. Like, it's one thing about automated is I have different people who play different roles and do different parts, but all I do is really just show up., and that takes some money off my plate, right? Every single month. But how I see that is like, okay, I'm reinvesting into my business through this content. So it's little things like that where like you're putting money down with like, hey, I could spend this on something flashy, something fun, like a new bag, a new Birkin, or I could put this back into my lifestyle and what I'm building and see it 10x, 100x. And that's what I've done in my lifestyle so far. And I've already seen like the compounding effect.

What do other kids think of you?

It's a great question. So that's changed. So if you look at me, I have an interesting backstory. I have like 9 lives. So my freshman and sophomore year of undergrad, I was actually in a fraternity. I was in Sigma Chi Alpha Tau. If you look at University of North Carolina and do some research, it's actually one of the largest fraternities at the school. I think I was like only the third ever African American to ever be in that fraternity. One thing about me is I'm mixed. My mom is white, my dad is African. So it's a very weird mixture. I see. All I have to say is that growing up, very social kid, in a lot of different friend groups, played a lot of sports, always was in all these different groups. And then there's this point in college where I got 2 years in and I was like, shit, dude, for lack of better words, I've been through the girls, the parties, the money, the everything. At that time, I had just gotten a gig for Scale AI. I was making $3K a week in school, just like cash loading me, just doing what I wanted to do with my boys and realized that, okay, in 2 years I'm graduating and the world is fucking changing. And if I don't fucking lock in, then I'm going to be average. I'm going to be median and realize, okay, I wanted to build a business. I wanted to build this Labs, then cut, left the fraternity, left everything. And I had this big social aura and lifestyle that in this this one area and left it. Just locked. Everyone knew I went off socials. You can look at my IG. I used to be all over. People would see me popping all this stuff, like lifestyle, vibing, Big Joe, but then stopped that and went off. And then now it's like a reintroduction. It's like a rebirth of— I spent 2 years in monk mode just grinding on my lifestyle while I was in college. I didn't have that much to lose. There was very little that I was risking. Such a— the only thing I'm big on is calculated risk. And I knew that I wanted to start a company. One thing I also knew is that my dad's Nigerian and that if I didn't get something going before I graduated, that he was going to say, get your ass to medical school. So I knew I had to start building, building, building. And so I started this building in sophomore year, got some grants from the government for my first company, built that up and learned a shit ton. Watched every fucking Y Combinator video on YouTube, was in every fucking Reddit Discord group about how the fuck to build a company, made every fucking mistake possible that a founder could fucking make at my age and learned so fucking much to the point where when I graduated, I had the opportunity to bet on myself, which I did. And within, like, I think 6 weeks of moving to the— actually, no, within 4 weeks of moving to the Valley, we got funded.

There you go, dude. Who do you look up to nowadays? Last question.

Yeah, great question. So a couple. Honestly, like a few different people. I know that's a boring answer, but obviously like Jensen Jobs, Gates, I would say weird people, like even like the founders of Reddit, founders of the app, the app, Replit. Like, I'm interested in all these very unique stories, founder stories. So I'd say a variety of people. But when I was younger, the main person I would say was Steve Jobs, just because his passion and obsession for being better and also being relentless, like that archetype is like who I like kind of am as a person. So I would say Jobs is my first inspiration in the business world.

I love that, dude. I love that. Yeah, you're brash and you don't have a filter, right? Like, that's good. You have like unparalleled energy. I love that. Definitely would bet on you. So let's have like a conversations after the podcast, where can people find out more about you, Joseph?

Yeah. So on IG, my team runs our IG. You can find me at josephallende.business or josephallende. And then on LinkedIn, just search up my name. I'm on X, it's josephallende_. And then on YouTube, you can search up my name and hopefully we can coordinate. Charles put a link in the description because I don't know my YouTube handle by heart yet. I'm not built like that. Yeah.

There you go, dude.