Meet Kieran O’Leary

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kieran O’Leary a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kieran, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

How did I find my purpose? Through trial, error, and relentless self-inquiry.

When I was younger, my path seemed clear. I loved taking things apart and solving puzzles, and I did well in math Olympiads and similar competitions. A career as a physicist or an engineer felt inevitable. But then music came into my life and completely shifted my direction. I started a band called The Post Nobles, where we wrote and recorded our own songs. For a while, that felt like everything.

I went to Penn State to study electrical engineering, but I couldn’t find meaning in the coursework or the culture. So I left. I joined a startup in its first year instead and watched it bloom into a billion dollar unicorn company. That experience taught me about growth, execution, and what it feels like to build something real. But it still didn’t feel like my path.

Next, I opened a recording studio, trying to turn my passion for music into a business. But I quickly learned that working directly in something I loved drained the joy out of it. I wasn’t fulfilled. I felt stuck between what I was good at and what I cared about.

While figuring out my next step, I took on a brief stint as a model. It helped pay the bills while I was learning to code, and it gave me an entirely new perspective. But that world felt dark and destructive to me. The values and energy didn’t align with who I was or who I wanted to become. I knew I needed to get out.

At the same time, I had always been computer savvy and a lifelong gamer, obsessed with deeply immersive worlds like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. That curiosity led me to programming. I enrolled in a Harvard bootcamp, and everything clicked. I started building my own tools, apps, and web scrapers, eventually founding my own development agency: Holy Grail Studio.

But while all this was happening, I was also wrestling with myself. In my early twenties, I partied too hard trying to escape the pressure. It wasn’t until I embraced sobriety that I finally found clarity through breathwork, meditation, sauna, and cold plunge. Those practices became my lifeline. I even became a sauna master and breathwork coach at Bathhouse in NYC. That eventually led me to help design and build bathhouse experiences across the city for different companies and communities.

Today I am at a crossroads of tech and wellness. From my apps VibeBreath.com and RubyPDFs.com to businesses like EmpoweredAE.com, WorkshopGR.com, BanyaChinatown.com, and RWProjectsInc.com, I create with the purpose of helping others. I still make music, now purely for joy, and continue to serve through breath, code, and community.

My purpose wasn’t something I discovered all at once. I uncovered it slowly, by following curiosity, recovering from mistakes, and combining everything I love into something only I could do.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m the creator of VibeBreath, a free, browser-based guided breathing app designed to help people slow down, self-regulate, and reconnect, even in the middle of a busy or chaotic day.

The idea started during a moment of creative momentum. I had been experimenting with AI-assisted development early on, long before most tools were polished. I was copy pasting code into ChatGPT, exploring the edges of what was possible. As soon as tools like Cursor and Windsurf came out, where you could build directly with AI inside your codebase, I knew this was the future. Around that time, Levelsio hosted a challenge called VibeJam, where participants had one week to build a game using AI. I built a little online Souls-like called souls-online.com and had a blast doing it.

That experience sparked a new vision. I thought, why not use the same stack to build something deeply useful? I had been doing breathwork and cold plunges for years as part of my personal journey into wellness and sobriety. But the existing apps didn’t resonate with me. They felt sterile. I wanted something that looked and felt cool, like a game. Something immersive, calming, and visual. That’s how VibeBreath was born.

Built using Three.js and WebGL, the app guides you through breathing sessions with a living, animated mesh that moves in sync with your breath. It is completely free to use, and I’m currently finalizing the mobile app so people can take it anywhere. My goal is to make this the easiest wellness tool on the market. No signups, no tracking, just real support for people who need to come back to their breath.

Beyond the app, I want to build a community at the intersection of tech and wellness. I think there is something powerful about using cutting edge tools to bring people back to something ancient and human, the breath. I am still figuring out the best ways to grow that movement, but I believe in what I am building, and I believe in the people it is for.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Looking back, I would say the three most impactful forces in my journey have been experimentation, AI fluency, and mindfulness.

1. Experimentation
For me, the most fulfilling part of life is discovering new things that light me up. I would not have found half of my passions if I had not stayed open minded and curious. Experimenting has been my superpower. Trying something new every day, listening to feedback, stepping into unfamiliar or even intimidating territory, that is where I have found my greatest treasures. Whether it was switching majors, building a game in a week, or starting breathwork coaching out of nowhere, I was willing to try. My advice to anyone early on is simple. Say yes more often. Explore. Break the pattern. And follow the sparks.

2. AI and creative tech fluency
Learning how to use AI tools and build things from scratch has completely changed my life. It is going to be one of the most valuable skills over the next ten years. The world is shifting fast, and the speed of AI advancement is only accelerating. The people who know how to use it creatively are going to have serious leverage. If you are a builder, artist, entrepreneur, or dreamer, now is the time to experiment with these tools. They can multiply your impact and help you bring your ideas to life faster and more powerfully than ever before.

3. Mindfulness and presence
As someone who builds alone a lot, it is easy to get lost in the grind. I actually enjoy being in flow, losing track of time and coding for hours. But if I am not careful, I burn out. I have learned to carve out time every day to pause, breathe, and get quiet. That reset is essential for my clarity and creativity.

Spending time with my family, with my girlfriend, and out in nature helps bring me back to myself. Those moments remind me that life is not just about output. It is about connection. It is about presence. Teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, Alan Watts, and Lao Tzu remind me to return to the present moment, especially when things feel chaotic or overwhelming. You do not need to have it all figured out. You just need to return to your breath and take the next honest step.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

Yes, I am always open to collaborating with people who are aligned with building things that actually help others, especially at the intersection of tech, wellness, and creativity.

Right now, I am especially excited about growing VibeBreath, a free guided breathing app I built using Three.js and WebGL. The mobile version is launching soon, and I would love to connect with anyone who believes in the power of mindfulness and wants to help expand access to it. This could mean helping build out new features, contributing content, supporting marketing, or just sharing ideas.

More broadly, I am also looking to collaborate with:
• Designers or creative technologists who care about the feeling and energy behind the tools we use
• Developers and indie hackers who are experimenting with AI and want to build meaningfully, not just fast
• Wellness practitioners who want to bring breath, stillness, or somatic awareness into more people’s lives using tech
• Founders or creatives who resonate with the idea of building from purpose rather than just profit

If you are reading this and any part of it speaks to you, feel free to reach out. My work can be found at theholygrailstudio.com and vibebreath.com, or you can connect with me directly on X @olearyio or GitHub @olearykieran. Always happy to jam, build, or just exchange ideas.

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