Richard Henry

Recent Work

• v3o 2025

  I created an experimental AI video editing app. In early versions, the model was quickly overwhelmed by the video context and number of tools. Eventually I got this working by narrowing the context to a transcript, frame samples, and shot boundary info. Instead of giving the model a hundred tools, I took advantage of its coding abilities and it would manipulate the video timeline as a JSON document.

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  Video demo of the v3o AI video editor

• Stealth Data Product 2025

  I designed and built a React web UI for a startup working on an AI data analyst, including a drag-and-drop editor and custom charts in D3. I also built a workflow editing 2D canvas UI.

  Drag-and-drop report editor Drag-and-drop workflow editing canvas

• Lumo 2025

  A crypto knowledge sharing app that I launched in beta. To create a seamless signup, I built a web-based Ethereum wallet secured with a passkey. I did the design and engineering while a friend managed the community. Users were rewarded with a token called Lumex that was distributed through an Elo-like rating system.

  Desktop site Mobile site

Wavelength 2022–2024

Wavelength was a threaded group chat product—and for a while, a top 10 app on the App Store—that I co-founded with Marc Bodnick and Riley Patterson. We raised a seed round from First Round Capital and other investors and built a team of 5 people.

“It looks a lot like what I’d imagine a new ‘Messages for Groups’ app from Apple itself would look like.” John Gruber, Daring Fireball

“One of my favorite apps.” Rebekah Cox, Head of Design (2009–2013), Quora; Product Design Lead, Facebook (2007–2009)

Press

My Role

In addition to my role as CEO, I was the only designer and lead engineer on our native iOS, Mac, and iPad apps. I mostly designed the product on the whiteboard and in code, but mocked up key screens in Figma. I also designed our branding and promotional materials.

Product

Wavelength was a new groups app with intuitive chat threading. Instead of a single noisy channel for a group, you could chat about multiple things asynchronously in threads. If you weren’t interested in a particular conversation, you could ignore or hide it. Users could also add AI bots to groups, including custom characters with configurable personalities. Wavelength was available on iOS, iPad, Mac, and Android.

Wavelength on Mac and iPhone

Features

Conversation Threading

Building a chat app with an intuitive conversation threading model was challenging, and no other consumer chat apps had a threading feature at the time. After many iterations, I landed on something that felt so simple that the design disappeared—a three-level design: Groups → Threads → Messages.

Level 1: Groups Level 2: Threads Level 3: Messages

Below is an earlier version of the Threads screen that we shipped in the beta app. Although the screen below looks more ‘designed’ and shows more of the conversation, functionally it was worse and our users preferred the density.

Earlier iteration

End-to-End Encryption

We implemented the Signal protocol for end-to-end encryption. One consequence of this was that when new users joined a group, they couldn’t see earlier messages and would experience broken threads as new replies came in. So Riley and I designed a peer-to-peer history sync feature, and Wavelength was the first messaging app to have any kind of encrypted history sync feature.

AI Bot Designer

I designed and built an AI bot designer that allowed users to customize an AI character. The LLM would struggle to stay in character over long conversations, so I devised a solution where the user message would be injected between reinforcing system instructions about how to reply. There were other important UI design considerations here too, like an affordance for telling the user that messages that mention a bot will be shared with the LLM provider.

AI Web Search & Citations

In 2023, no LLM providers offered web search as a tool available through the API. To help ground the AI bots in reality and minimize hallucinations, we built a custom web search tool and I designed and built a citations UI for it. The only other product that had something like this at the time was Perplexity.

Internationalization

For a while, Wavelength was growing quickly outside the US so I worked on internationalizing the app into 10 languages. We eventually achieved the important milestone for any social product of being blocked by the CCP in China.

Turkish Spanish Chinese

Telepath 2017–2022

A new social network that I co-founded with Marc Bodnick. Marc played a pivotal role in building the early Quora community (while running the business and community teams), and we decided to collaborate on something new. We raised a seed round from First Round Capital, Slow Ventures, and other investors and built a team of 12 people.

“One of the best new consumer social apps for smart people of 2020.” Garry Tan, President and CEO, Y Combinator

“It’s beautifully built.” Charlie Cheever, Co-founder, Expo; Co-founder and CTO, Quora (2009–2012)

Press

My Role

In addition to my role as CEO, I was the only designer. Early on I wrote a lot of code, but eventually I transitioned into a role where I ran the company during the day and then churned out mockups and UI at night to keep up with the engineering team. Mackey Saturday designed the logo.

One of the Sketch files I found in my archives

Product

A “Twitter meets Reddit” social network. Good conversation organized into user-created networks with excellent and proactive moderation.

Features

Infinite Threading

We built an infinite threading UI for conversation, where replies would nest up to a certain limit and then you could expand into the next leaf by tapping through to another screen. When navigating to a notification target (which may be a deeply nested leaf) you could also move up in the other direction to the parent. In feed contexts, we would truncate the conversation to just the most relevant replies. What could be an overwhelming UI felt pretty clean and simple.

Mockup of truncated chat in feed

Networks

Every post on Telepath was organized into user-created networks, which meant that in addition to exploring the user graph, you could explore the network graph to find topics and communities that you were interested in. Users created networks for all sorts of things: #HotSauce, #DankMemes, #PrivateEquity, #NFL, and so on. You could personalize your feed experience by following users and joining networks. Network hosts had controls over who could post and where, the theming of the network, the rules, and so on.

Mockup of network screen