Our Story
Kaleidoscope Axiom exists because two people who love deep conversations and living a life that matters to them decided that what they had built together was too important to keep to themselves.
This is how it happened.
Sue's Story
Sue got sober at 19 years old. For the next two decades she stayed clean, built a life, and still carried something she couldn't shake — what she used to call her jail house values. The mentality left over from her drug days. She felt shame around it. She thought it meant she hadn't fully recovered. That the person she had been during her using years had permanently marked the person she was trying to become.
When she was 40 she finally sat down and worked through that question properly. She needed to answer, once and for all: what do I actually stand for?
She developed a process to get there — working through her values, defining what they meant to her in her own words, mapping how they connected to each other. When she was done she handed Andy what she had built and asked him to look at it.
He said he could see the jail house vibe. But he also saw something else. The loyalty. The survival instinct. The fierce refusal to be naive. The values she had carried with shame were actually core to who she was. They belonged on the tree. They were part of her strength.
That moment — of seeing yourself clearly and finding that what you feared was a flaw is actually a foundation — is what Krystallos is designed to give people.
Years later Sue experienced a trauma that left her with PTSD. She lost her sense of self all over again. She went back to her Humanistic Tree. It was her roadmap — a record of who she had already proven she was. It gave her somewhere to start rebuilding from. She learned something important that second time: this process isn't just for beginnings. It's something you return to.
Andy’s Story
Andy found his passion for computers at 13. He is now 60, and in the decades between those two points he built a career in computer science that took him to some of the largest companies in North America. By any measure it was an impressive career. But what has always driven Andy isn't the technology itself — it's what technology can do for people.
Andy is the kind of person who volunteers before he's asked and gives before he's thanked. He has a deep, genuine interest in people and in what makes a life well-lived. He and Sue share a love of long conversations that go somewhere real.
When Sue showed him the process she had developed he saw immediately what it could become. Not a personal exercise. A tool. Something anyone could use. He wanted to figure out how to bring it to people from the moment he saw it.
How Kaleidoscope Axiom Was Born
In 2008 Sue and Andy began presenting the Krystallos process as workshops. They watched people go through it and saw what happened — the clarity, the recognition, the relief of finally seeing themselves honestly. The workshops worked. But workshops have limits. They reach a room. They wanted to reach the world.
In 2017 Andy made a decision that said everything about how seriously he took this. He quit his job — a successful career he had built over decades — to build a mobile app based on the process. That year they formed Kaleidoscope Axiom, named for two ideas that define how they see the world: a kaleidoscope that finds beauty and pattern in complexity, and an axiom — a self-evident truth that doesn't need to be proven to be real.
Their goal was simple and ambitious in equal measure: bridge their two worlds — Sue's deep understanding of human psychology and values, Andy's remarkable ability to see how technology can enhance the way people live — and make a difference in people's lives.
Where We Are Now
Like most things worth building, Kaleidoscope Axiom has had its seasons. There have been years of focused work, years of stepping back, and years of returning to it with fresh eyes and renewed purpose. For the past two years Sue and Andy have picked it up again with a clear intention — to really make it go.
Over 380 people have completed Krystallos to date. The work has been recognized by leaders in the field of positive psychology. The Krystallos process that started as a personal exercise in 2007 has grown into a suite of tools — Krystallos, Krystallos Pro, and Mim — all connected by the same belief that people live better when they understand what they genuinely value.
Where We Are Going
Sue and Andy are building Kaleidoscope Axiom toward a simple but meaningful goal — to put tools for self-understanding into the hands of people who need them most.
That means recovery homes and treatment facilities where people are rebuilding their sense of self. It means psychology professionals who want evidence-informed tools that meet clients where they are. But it doesn't stop there.
Sue and Andy build what grabs them — what they see a genuine need for, what speaks to someone they love, what keeps them up at night with possibility. Their compass is their passion. Where Kaleidoscope Axiom goes next will be decided by what matters most, to real people, in real moments of their lives.
One turn of the kaleidoscope can change your life. Everyone has the choice to change or stay the same. And anything is possible when you change how you see it.