Our Story

While working as a software engineer in Seattle, I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment with a stacked washer and dryer. About once a week, after a long day of work, I'd come home, change into workout clothes, hit the gym up the road, and return by 7 or 8 p.m. to start a load of laundry. While it ran, I'd do some combination of showering, making dinner, watching tennis highlights, and FaceTiming friends.

Too subsumed by a conversation, too cozy after a shower, or too full after a third helping of spaghetti and meatballs, nearly half the time I'd forget the load entirely. (It didn't help that the machines lived in a soundproof closet, down a long corridor from the carpeted bedroom.) I'd wake the next morning vexed, my clothes now wet, mildewy, and in need of a second wash — a realization that always arrived right before work, when I didn't have an hour to stick around and rerun them. So I'd acquiesce to the compounding mildew and wait until that night to try again.

One twice-forgotten load, on a rainy Thursday in April 2025, broke me. I needed a few important sets of clothes for a weekend trip to Lopez Island, where a friend of a friend worked as a cartographer. The night before, I'd started the load after getting home past 11 p.m. — a rarity, but not a novelty — and, true to form, forgot it, waking to the smell of damp cotton in the corridor. The next night I got home even later, having spent an exhausting day trying to ship a project we'd been finalizing for weeks. I reran the wash, warmed up a Trader Joe's frozen dinner, and helplessly dozed on the couch while babysitting the deployment.

When I woke at 1 a.m. with a start, I shout-grunted into my empty apartment and transferred the clothes, accepting the low-level mildew at this point. I stood in front of the machines, livid, reckoning with a task that required so much of me yet so little at the same time. I enumerated the steps on my fingers: (1) open the washer and dryer doors, (2) gather three to five wet armfuls of clothes and hoist them to the dryer three feet away, (3) pick up and brush off the loose socks that inevitably fall in transit, (4) close the doors, (5) toss in a dryer sheet, (6) select the settings, and (7) press Start.

I had already spent a comical amount of my life thinking about the sock problem. Every time a sock hits the floor, it bonds to dust and dirt at the worst possible juncture: when it is both cleanest and wettest. As the dryer spun before me that late April night, my eyes drifted to the corners of the machines. Perhaps a result of my sleep-deprived stupor, the borders between the machines faded and my imagination took over.

What if it were one tall enclosure, so the clothes never had to exit and re-enter between wash and dry? That alone would fix the sock problem. Then: What if the washer sat above the dryer, so gravity could do the transfer? Then: What if the drums were built from couplable semi-cylinders, allowing both a closed high-velocity spin and a full-diameter opening? What if a clever plastic guard could peel stuck clothes off the drum wall? What if a mesh net separated the clothes you wanted machine-dried from the ones you didn't? What if compartments above and below let you queue a second autonomous load?

Standing before the machine with a black Pilot G2 and a Rollbahn notebook, I started drawing. By 3 a.m., I had filled seven or eight pages of sketches and musings under a scribbled header: “LinkLoad.”

When I got back from Lopez Island, I missed two consecutive days of work to produce a manifesto perforated with colorful Figma diagrams — thirty-some-odd hours of uninterrupted me-at-my-desk time. What emerged was a hardware system with a software ethos: everything that was formerly assigned to the user, methodically abstracted away.

The substrate under every design and product decision could be summed up in one word, a word I must have written north of twenty times in that initial design document: unburden. Driving the design was this one singular goal, which served many flavors of laundry-user: liberate multi-child households from full days of trivial labor; reduce friction between roommates; let the exhausted workhorses sleep after a long day.

That 1 a.m. frustration is where LinkLoad traces its origins. But my story isn't unusual; it's ubiquitous, and that's the founding principle. Every laundry user lives some version of it every time they do laundry.

People misconceive that the problem with laundry is the two minutes it takes to move the clothes and start the dryer. The real problem is the time around it, the forsaken bookends. This two-minute activity is not a two-minute activity; it's multiple hours of overhead and overhang. Sometimes it even feels like, or proves to be, a multi-day battle, getting a load or two fully cleaned and back in the drawers (or maybe that's just me).

But while the industry incrementally improves the tech year after year, it becomes clear that nobody is making it their mission to optimize the workflow. Which is why a company built for exactly this problem, small and obsessed by design, untethered to established paradigms, is the natural author of its solution.