Letter · From the Founder · March 2026

How we got here.

A letter from the founder on leaving finance, traveling the world, and building the memory standard nobody asked for.

Adrian Ritchie · Founder & CEO

I started Somewhere Media LLC in 2022 after leaving a wealth management job. Finance had been my entire world: JP Morgan trading floors, economics degrees, hyper-quantitative environments. But something was off. I was watching advisors celebrate numbers that didn't reflect any real integrity. So I left.

And I went backpacking. Six months. Portugal first, then wherever felt right. While researching the trip, I noticed something: everyone documenting travel was a content creator who happened to backpack, not a backpacker who happened to create content.

“I'll see you sometime, somewhere.”

That's what you'd say. And then you'd see them again on a street in Venice.

somewhere media was born as a travel magazine, inspired by the likes of Time Out and Wired, interviewing real people while traveling. The stories were everywhere. Everyone deserved to be heard.

Eventually, the money ran out. I came back to Philadelphia and picked up a waitressing job next to a jazz bar. The local musicians became close friends. And then I realized some of them were Grammy Award-winning artists playing this tiny bar.

Then I joined a large media company. I ran into the same battle: my own IP rights. I had ideas they recognized were valuable, but the foundation couldn't see the solution. It was too big for the system.

I knew if I waited any longer, I'd look back and say: I should have jumped.

“When you talk to an artist, a content creator, someone protecting their own IP — their concerns are real, and they're being ignored.”

So I jumped. MemoryIntelligence™ exists because I don't believe in the marketing-level conversation the industry is having about AI.

I looked at every tool in the market. Pinecone owned Retrieval. Obsidian owned Storage. dbt owned a narrow slice of Provenance. Each legitimate. Each incomplete.

  • 2022Left wealth management. Started backpacking. somewhere media born as a travel magazine.
  • 2023Returned to Philadelphia. Joined a media company. Hit the IP wall firsthand.
  • 2024Jumped. Started mapping the memory landscape. Found the gap: nobody owned all five dimensions.
  • 2025Filed the patent. Built the algorithm. Defined the standard.
  • 2026MemoryIntelligence™ is live. The memory standard exists.
Timeline — From finance to founder. The path to the memory standard.

Nobody was asking whether all five could exist simultaneously. I realized I wasn't building a better tool. I was defining a new category.

Human experiences deserve to become digital assets — verifiable, traceable, and owned by the people who created them. That's what we built.

“Memory has no standard, so we built one.”

Adrian Ritchie · Founder & CEO, Somewhere Inc.

SEE THE STANDARD → SEE HOW IT COMPARES →