Steph Ango — better known online as kepano — is the CEO of Obsidian, the private, local-first writing app built on plain-text Markdown files. His route to the job is unusual: he is not one of Obsidian's founders. He was a superfan — a designer and entrepreneur who used the app from its first release in 2020, built some of its most popular community tools, and was then brought in by cofounders Shida Li and Erica Xu to run the company. His own catalog stretches back further: Winamp skins, a sunlight-powered dye company, a venture-backed supply-chain startup, a 152-episode podcast, and a body of deliberately short essays that culminated in "File over app," the closest thing the note-taking world has to a manifesto.
From Winamp skins to sunlight dyes
The earliest entries in his project catalog are Winamp skins — Rusty Heaven (2002), devASTATE (2003), and Impulse (2004), a freeform skin for Winamp 5. On Dialectic he described squeezing animations into twelve pixels of slider as formative: the constraints were where the creativity came from. His education is in biology and industrial design; the Los Angeles Business Journal described his background as biology and chemistry.
In 2008 he met Jesse Genet, then an industrial-design student at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Together they acquired a 1950s-era light-sensitive dye formula and modernized it into Inkodye — a vat dye that prints photographs onto fabric using sunlight. Their December 2009 Kickstarter raised $13,597 and later won Kickstarter's Best Design Project of 2010; his site calls it, at the time, the third-largest crowdfunding campaign ever. A 2012 follow-up raised $268,437 against a $50,000 goal. More than a million prints were made with Inkodye at home, sold through Urban Outfitters and JoAnn Fabrics, and the company appeared on ABC's Shark Tank in February 2015 — drawing two offers, both declined.
Lumi and the packaging years
Building Inkodye's supply chain by hand taught them how hard it was for brands to find and work with factories. In 2015 the pair founded Lumi, a Y Combinator-backed software platform for packaging procurement, with Ango as cofounder and chief product officer. Lumi raised a $9 million Series A in 2018 and grew to serve more than 700 direct-to-consumer brands — Parachute, Nutrafol, Misfits Market — before Narvar announced its acquisition on December 15, 2021, on undisclosed terms.
The Lumi years doubled as a media apprenticeship. He co-created Computer Show (2015), a deadpan retro-comedy YouTube series, and hosted Well Made (2016–2021), Lumi's 152-episode podcast on changing consumption patterns. He also launched Slash Packaging, an open-source push for brands to publish their packaging commitments.
From superfan to CEO
Ango used Obsidian from its first release, during the pandemic, because its data lived in durable Markdown files he controlled. He built the Minimal theme, the Hider plugin, and contributed to Obsidian 1.0's default theme — work done for himself and released free, which is how the founders noticed him. On February 6, 2023, he announced he was joining full-time as CEO, committing the app to remain free to use, private, offline-first, endlessly customizable — and "100% user-supported," with no investors to compromise those values.
His framing for the job is missionary rather than managerial: Obsidian "fundamentally improved the way I think," he wrote in the announcement, "I want to see what happens if more people gain that superpower." On The Verge's Decoder in August 2025 he explained the resulting oddities: he does not know how many users Obsidian has or how sticky it is, and he argues productivity tools need community more than they need AI. Under his tenure the company has shipped JSON Canvas (March 2024), an open .canvas spec for infinite-canvas data, and Web Clipper (November 2024), an open-source extension that saves web pages as durable Markdown — alongside his own libraries Defuddle and the template language Knap.
File over app
His July 2023 essay "File over app" condenses the worldview: if you want digital artifacts that last, they must be files you control in formats easy to retrieve and read — apps are ephemeral, but files have a chance to last. His test is temporal symmetry: writing readable on a computer from the 2060s should be readable on one from the 1960s. He practices it literally — his site is written in Obsidian, compiled by Jekyll, hosted on Netlify, and colored by Flexoki, the "inky" MIT-licensed palette he created to bring analog ink-and-paper warmth to emissive screens.
The throughline
Read across two decades, the pattern is a toolmaker who hybridizes rather than specializes. Dye chemistry informs color science; supply-chain software informs plugin architecture; "style is consistent constraint" covers Winamp pixels and one-minute essays alike. He builds what he needs — from Inkodye's app to Web Clipper — then gives it away. And he keeps the loop unusually literal: the essays defending plain-text longevity are themselves plain-text Obsidian notes, compiled into the site you are reading them on.
What the record does not settle
The public record is thin on biography: no birth date or early life appears in the cited sources, and the CEO start date itself is recorded inconsistently (February 2023 in the announcement and on his site; February 6, 2024 in Wikidata). The "third-largest crowdfunding campaign" superlative is self-reported. And the two years between the Narvar acquisition and the Obsidian announcement — including whatever transitional role he held — are sketched rather than documented. The index preserves those seams rather than smoothing them over.
This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.