About
Alex Muresan. Creator of Anima.
When I was five, I started competing in ballroom dance in Romania. By 13, I was the junior national champion. At 15, I left for the United States, and I had to start everything from zero. New country, new language, no dance partner, no reputation. Just a kid with a title that meant nothing to anyone around him.
I gave up dance for a while. Went to college at the University of Georgia, where I fell in love with it again. I danced all over the country, got offers to perform in New York and LA, and said no to all of them. I wanted to build something. I wanted to sustain myself on my own terms.
So I built a trampoline gym. Then expanded it into a full trampoline park. Then sold it. I took the money and invested, started new companies. They were all young. They all failed. I learned more from those failures than from anything I have ever read or been told.
Then came Mondans, which became a real company. I scaled it, lived inside it, and recently exited. That chapter is closed.
Being a founder is hard on your growth as a person. You pour everything into the company and forget to pour anything into yourself.
After exiting Mondans, I made a decision: I would spend the next five years focused on my own growth. Not another startup. Not another fundraise. Just becoming a better, more complete person.
Part of that was joining Implement AI, where I could learn from experienced founders instead of always being the one figuring it out alone. Part of it was wanting to track what was actually happening in my life. Not goals. Not habits. Just a clear picture of who I was becoming, day by day.
I had never been a technical founder. Every fundraise I had ever done, I had to defend that fact. So I thought it would be fun to see if I could actually build something myself using Claude Code, having never written production software before.
Anima started as a personal tool. I would talk about my day, and the AI would classify what I did into seven stats that no machine can replicate: strength, vitality, intellect, empathy, emotional intelligence, creativity, and awareness. I could see my character evolving based on how I actually lived. No goals. No guilt. Just a mirror.
I used it for weeks before I showed it to anyone. When I did, the reaction was always the same: "Can I have this?" So I released it.
I document the journey of building Anima and working on personal growth daily.