I Didn't Mean to Start a Blog

Let me be honest about what this is, because the format oversells it. A personal blog, a domain with your name on it and your opinions underneath, carries a certain implied claim: that the world was waiting for your takes. I want to disown that claim right away. I did not set out to write a blog. If anything, I’m mildly embarrassed to have one.

I’ve spent a lot of years around technology, in agencies and now on my own, and if that time taught me anything it’s a healthy suspicion of people who are very sure they’re right in public. The internet does not have a shortage of confident opinions. It is not exactly starved for men of a certain age explaining how things really work. I did not want to add to that pile, and I still don’t think my opinions are better than anyone else’s. Held strongly, sure. Superior, no. I’ve been wrong too many times to believe my own press.

“Held strongly, sure. Superior, no.”

So why is this here.

The thoughts were evaporating

The honest reason is a little selfish. Over the years I noticed I kept having the same thoughts and then losing them. A conversation would sharpen some idea, about how AI actually lands in a business, or why a certain kind of project always fails, or something I’d learned the hard way about money or positioning or people, and it would feel clear and true for an afternoon. Then it would dissolve back into the general noise. Six months later I’d re-derive the same thing from scratch, usually a little worse than before, having forgotten I ever worked it out once already.

That started to bother me. Not because the thoughts were precious, but because I was so obviously wasting them. I had a couple of decades of pattern-matching rattling around with nowhere to land and no structure to it. Ideas I never quite finished. Opinions I’d never actually tested by trying to say them plainly.

Writing is how I find out what I think

Here’s the thing I keep relearning: I don’t really know what I think about something until I try to write it down. In my head, every idea feels coherent. On the page, half of them fall apart the moment I try to turn them into real sentences, and that turns out to be the most useful thing writing does. It isn’t a broadcast. It’s a test. The clumsy first draft is where you discover that the opinion you were so sure of has a hole in the middle of it.

So that’s what this is, mostly. A place to force the vague stuff into actual sentences and find out which parts survive. To catch the thoughts before they evaporate and, more importantly, to structure them: to line them up next to each other over time and see what I actually believe, where I’ve quietly contradicted myself, where I’ve changed my mind without noticing.

If that sounds more like a filing cabinet than a publication, good. That’s closer to the truth. It’s a filing cabinet for my own head that happens to have the door left open.

If you’re reading this

You may have arrived here by accident, and if so, no hard feelings, you can leave whenever you like. I’m not going to chase you with a popup or funnel you toward anything. There’s nothing to buy here. None of this is a lead magnet.

What you’ll find is notes on the things I spend my days thinking about: AI and how it actually behaves inside real businesses, as opposed to how it’s sold; the craft of building things; the unglamorous realities of running a company; and a fair amount of everything else, because a life isn’t neatly sorted by category and I’d rather this not be either.

The opinions will sometimes sound confident. That’s just how prose works, since hedged writing is unreadable. But please read all of it with the quiet asterisk I’m attaching right now: these are one person’s provisional conclusions, held firmly and offered loosely, by someone who fully expects to be wrong in public and has decided that’s a fair price for the chance to think a little more clearly.

If a piece happens to be useful to you, that’s a nice bonus. But I should be straight that it was never really for you. It was for me, a way to capture and structure what I’ve picked up before it slips away again. You’re just welcome to read over my shoulder.

Welcome, I suppose, to the filing cabinet. Mind the mess.