Adam Jace
Trying to figure out how to live well, shipping products that help in the meantime.
I was born in New Zealand and grew up moving — Australia, Malaysia, a handful of states across the US. I studied abroad in Italy, attended my undergraduate at the University of Dallas and a graduate degree at Vanderbilt.
Currently, I live in Austin with my dog, Caspian, and I build Virtues. Most technology takes your data somewhere you can’t follow and sells it back to you as ads, addictions, and algorithms. Virtues reclaims it from big tech, away from profit incentives and government subpoenas. In two thematic words, Virtues is digital subsidiarity Borrowed from CST: matters ought to be handled by the smallest, most local authority capable of handling them. Applied to technology — your life’s data belongs in your hands, not someone else’s..
Why I started Virtues
Early 2025. I was trying to use data & AI to learn about myself — my patterns, habits, temperaments — and I couldn’t ingest the data let alone aggregate it narratively. No personal-data ELT paradigm existed in the market, so that’s what I built first: a data lake for personal ontologies, queryable alongside AI inference. The data alone gave a map of where I was, the AI model added an intelligence layer, but there was no compass for where I should be going. The data needed an axiological layer, a “middle-out” guide for the intelligence layer to follow. Hence, the name Virtues.
Hardware as subsidiarity
Privacy isn’t a technical preference; it’s a moral precondition for self-knowledge. You stop asking the real questions when you know the apparatus is selling the answers. But the deeper problem isn’t that your data is exposed, it’s that it arrives pre-ordered as a telos meant to exploit you for that end — attention economics, your next purchase, corporate engagement, toward the vice-loop. Vice runs in predictable loops and loops are profitable.
So the first thing Virtues does is reclaim your data to a server in your home. This is what sovereignty actually means here: the removal of a foreign final cause.
This leaves you with raw data — an untenable non-abstraction. Because sovereignty, by itself, is soulless, you need to add a north star to derive insights.
Axiology as alignment
Alignment, in AI safety, means aligned with human values in aggregate. This is great for platitudes and clichés, but not for concrete discernments. A father needs different prudence than a single man in his twenties.
Prudence is what “middle-out” means, how data is indexed, and why I named the company Virtues. Not bottom-up, where the data decides who you are — that’s just determinism with better dashboards. Not top-down, where an authority hands you your ends — that’s big tech, and it’s every moralizing app. Middle-out: the self at the center, the data as map, the person has the freedom to align their telos onto the material.
- Technology that orders you toward its own ends exploits you.
- Stripping those ends gives you sovereignty, but sovereignty is empty.
- An axiological framework (middle-out) grounds your AI in who you are and are becoming.
- ∴ Virtues is both the hardware and software for digital subsidiarity.
How I use Virtues
I’ve moved enough times to know my own pattern: throw myself into work, the weeks blur, and one day I realize I haven’t talked to anyone who isn’t a coworker or Caspian. I told Virtues, and now on weekends, if it notices I’ve been working heads-down too long, it researches and texts me something happening in Austin that very moment. It holds the goals I’ve said out loud and nudges me toward the blind spots I’d otherwise work straight past.
The rest is daily texture. It showed me my chess rating climbs when I play at lunch and craters when I play before bed. It’s my Notion and Obsidian. It’s my Dropbox and Drive. It’s where my search and general questions go now — “what’s the weather today? good for outdoor pickleball? if so, message a few people and see who’s down” — one ask, and it checks, decides, and acts. It frees me from all things technical as much as possible (texting, web searching, passwords, accounts), to allow me be in the real world.
My workbench
At home, I always have a unhealthy healthy amount of projects. Right now: an ESP32 curtain rig to test out a potential virtues-home library, a chess-playing robot arm, piano and composing, pickleball, oil painting, drinking Guinness at pubs, Zometool, reading, rock climbing, running, you name it.
At work, I am surrounded by people who are far better at their craft than I am at mine. I think that makes for a good founder. My native shape is broad — software, hardware, business, finance, philosophy — and I enjoy exhausting myself vertically down rabbit holes when I have to.
Find me
- Email: adam@virtues.com
- LinkedIn: Adam Jace
- X: Adam Jaces