When four of his favorite people married without inviting him to their weddings, Faust Whale reckoned with how much he valued those relationships and how little he acted on that care. As a neurodivergent, multidisciplinary creative who often felt like an outsider, Faust began studying social dynamics as a teenager; in college, he began developing question sets for deeper dialogues, and as an adult he's been experimenting with an outreach system for distributing attention across a broader relationship network. Friendshift turns years of iterations on a private social prosthetic into a scalable consumer product.

Faust’s nonlinear path makes him unusually well suited to build it. He studied Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford and later worked as an intrapreneur on the Rapid Evaluation research and development team at X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google [x]). His earlier work spans assistive technology and consumer products: at eight, he invented PaceMate to make remote pacemaker and defibrillator battery checks easier; at fifteen, he licensed his second invention, Needle Beetle, through By Kids for Kids to Mattel, which sold it nationwide. Needle Beetle and Friendshift pair physical devices with behavioral rituals to make difficult things easier: venipunctures in one case, staying in touch beyond what memory and willpower can support in the other.

Faust has never been more motivated by a mission than Friendshift's. Faust is all in on building it into a venture-scale company where social impact and commercial success reinforce each other. Friendshift brings together the work he is best at with a widespread problem he has spent years trying to solve in his own life: helping you close the intention-action gap and be the friend you want to be to more of the people you care about.