This big idea, the one so big he sofa surfed for 12 months, was to use the data mined by various companies from people’s internet use to make money. His utter faith in it saw him give up his apartment and job, effectively making himself homeless for a year to spend the money he would have spent on rent funding his idea. But then Adam had an idea for a project that seemed too good to ignore. “All my stuff wound up being digital, so I built a bunch of games, I won a bunch of awards,” he says. His background is in advertising, having worked at agencies including Anomaly in New York. While the origins of the platform are fascinating enough, those of Adam himself are just as surreal. ‘Love’ can be sarcastic or false or passionate, so that’s where the beginning came from…” You get out of using a single word or image: you have a huge sphere of ways to decide what you want to say, and those things can borrow any moment from culture. Everyone has an understanding of culture, and you can use gifs as a way to express yourself. Gifs come from content, and content is global. The lightbulbs all went off when we realised we didn’t have to use language. “We were seeing gifs in emails and text messages and knew there was a visual thing happening. We had an aha moment where we thought we don’t have to invent a new language, what if we just get out of using words?

Wittgenstein proposed a problem without a solution.

You end up trapping yourself, but at the same time you can’t invent a new language. “It’s so hard to describe love with the word ‘love’. “Language can be really clumsy and tricky if you’re going to talk about big ideas ,” says Adam. But after a chat with the effervescent chief operating officer of Giphy, Adam Leibsohm, you can see where this lofty association comes from. At first, it all seems a far cry from congratulating your colleagues in the form of a never-ending image of a man being applauded as he spins about on the spot. Specifically, from the ideas of Wittgenstein, the early 20th Century philosopher who investigated the possibilities and concepts of language. Scrolling through constantly moving images of Austin Powers’ Dr Evil snippets of Adventure Time people falling over and cats, so many cats, it’s hard to imagine that the idea for gif-sharing behemoth Giphy came from rather high-brow philosophical origins.

Spong bob moving images jiifs