About The Anger App

Growing up, I watched my father struggle with anger. He would go from zero to erupting in seconds, and as a kid I didn't understand why. What I did understand was this: communication breaks down, and people get hurt. That stayed with me.

Professionally, I've spent years as an Area Vice President of Solution Consulting, a role where staying calm under pressure isn't optional. When something breaks in front of a client, you have about two seconds to decide how to respond. I've read everything I could find: Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication, Chris Voss on negotiation under pressure, the Stoics on why anger exists and how to make it work for you rather than against you. The philosophy is clear. The tools weren't.

Then I became a father. Three kids. And sometimes all three need something at exactly the same time: one needs help with homework, another is crying, a third is hungry. In those moments I'd feel the trigger rising and think: I need something that works right now. Not in three taps. Not after a loading screen. Now. Every app I tried was built for calm people. The Anger App was built for that exact moment.

Cody and I had been working together for years when the idea crystallised. We said: why doesn't something like this exist? We had the conviction, the research, and the partnership. So we built it. Anger itself is not the enemy. It's information. The question is what you do with it in that first second. The Anger App answers that question.

Johannes remembers the two of us asking why something like this did not exist. What I remember is knowing I could build it, and that being the least interesting part. I build things constantly. Almost all of it serves people having an ordinary day. This was the first time a bug meant something other than an inconvenience, and that changed what I was willing to put my name on.

My own version of the pressure is not at home. It is being the person whose thing broke in front of a room. Johannes gets two seconds to decide how to respond. I get the same two seconds knowing it is mine, with my face doing something calm and the rest of me doing something else. You do not get to leave and cool off. You keep talking.

The decision I pushed hardest for is not one anyone asks a CTO about. The part of The Anger App that asks what is underneath your anger has no AI in it. It is deterministic, it runs on your phone, and it makes no network calls. That was harder to build and easy to argue against. But a model means a request, and a request means the worst sentence you have ever typed goes somewhere.

I did not want to promise that we protect it. I wanted the honest answer to be that there is nothing to send. Someone opening this app is often ashamed of why. You cannot leak what you never collected.