8 posts tagged with "Thoughts"

I came into the Sorensen Institute’s Emerging Leaders Program with opinions about government and relatively little experience working with it. Coming from industry, I generally favored less government involvement. I had a much clearer sense of what I wanted government to do less of than of how the people inside it approached their work.

Over three sessions in South Boston, Richmond, and Gloucester, I had the chance to learn alongside people whose experiences were very different from mine. They worked in government agencies, legislative offices, political campaigns, businesses, and nonprofits. For many of them, the institutions I usually encountered from the outside were part of their daily lives.

I still generally favor a smaller role for government. I left Sorensen with a much greater appreciation for how much I had to learn about it, and for the people willing to help me understand.

Different experiences in the same room​

One of our early lessons was about perspective itself. We all arrive at a conversation carrying our own experiences. Those experiences shape our assumptions and even the connotations we attach to individual words. Two people can hear the same sentence and understand it differently.

That idea stayed with me because I could see its relevance throughout the program. My industry experience influenced how I thought about government oversight. Someone who had spent years working inside an agency could approach that same subject with a different set of experiences and concerns. Understanding that background gave me more to work with than simply knowing whether we agreed.

The range of professional experience was striking. Our cohort included people with backgrounds at Virginia’s Department of the Treasury, Department of Labor and Industry, Department of Medical Assistance Services, and Department of Conservation and Recreation.

There was also experience in passenger rail through the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, economic development through the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, and environmental policy through the Office of the Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources. These were people I could learn from directly, with professional backgrounds that made the scope of government much more tangible to me.

Arguing about a budget with friends​

One of the clearest examples came during our Virginia budget exercise. We faced a disagreement that will sound familiar to anyone who follows politics: should we cut government spending or increase corporate taxes?

I argued for cutting spending. Then I found myself appreciating the context of that argument: I was making it to a group that included friends who worked in government.

My position made sense to me from my own experience. Their working lives gave them a different vantage point on government. That realization made the lesson about perspective feel immediate. I still had a case I wanted to make, but I also had people across the table whose experience deserved my attention.

Before the program, I couldn’t understand how government could fail to agree on a budget. It seemed like something that simply had to get done. Working through our Virginia budget exercise helped me appreciate how much sits behind an agreement: competing priorities, decisions about spending and revenue, and different ideas about what government should do.

I can now see how those disagreements can bring the process to a standstill. To me, that is a process failure. The exercise left me wondering how the process could help people work through disagreements earlier and make the tradeoffs clearer before a deadline.

Discovering the breadth of government​

I also learned just how much government there is in Virginia. Apparently, that includes 121 agencies and other public bodies, far more than I would have guessed before the program.

The people I met helped put faces to that complexity. Beyond agencies, our cohort’s experience extended to the Virginia House of Delegates, the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission, and earlier service in the Office of the Secretary of Labor. Classmates also brought experience in the Virginia Senate, Virginia’s U.S. Senate offices, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and local service on Prince William County’s Parks and Recreation Commission.

There were perspectives from outside government, too: conservation work at The Nature Conservancy, government affairs at Two Capitols Consulting and CRD Associates, and community development at the Danville Neighborhood Development Corporation. Together with campaign and industry experience, that variety made the program especially informative for someone with my background.

What I value most about that variety is that these connections became friendships. I now know people I can keep learning from long after our sessions together.

Leadership starts with communication​

Another lesson reinforced something I had been learning through Toastmasters: being a good leader often comes down to being a good communicator.

Our leadership workshop brought that connection into focus for me. Explaining an idea clearly matters, especially when you want people to work toward a shared outcome. So does understanding the people receiving it. If their experience gives a word or a proposal a different meaning, I need to account for that when I communicate.

That is a useful challenge to bring back to industry. I can be confident in an idea and still have work to do in helping someone else understand it. I can also learn something by paying closer attention to the questions they ask. Sorensen gave me more opportunities to practice that kind of attention with people whose work was unfamiliar to me.

Seeing Virginia through its places​

Traveling across Virginia gave the experience another dimension. South Boston, Richmond, and Gloucester each offered a different setting for learning about the Commonwealth and the people who help shape it.

In South Boston, we learned about the town’s economic history. Its growth around the railroad and tobacco trade helped make it an important commercial center. According to Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources, by the early 1900s it had become the country’s second-largest bright-leaf tobacco market. Learning that history gave me a fuller picture of a region I knew less about.

At Holly Knoll in Gloucester, we encountered a different part of Virginia’s history. The home of educator and civil rights leader Robert Russa Moton became a gathering place for discussion and ideas. We also heard the local story connecting the site to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Gloucester’s Civil Rights Trail describes the speech-writing association as a rumor; it remains a local tradition rather than an established account of where the speech was written. The visit was an opportunity to learn about the site’s place in the history of civic leadership.

Making friends along the way​

Some of what I will remember most is simply spending time with the people in the program. There was room for friendship alongside the workshops and policy discussions, including a little fishing.

I am grateful for the people I met, the insights they shared, and the perspectives they brought. Those relationships are a big part of what I hope to carry forward. I look forward to getting to know more people throughout the Sorensen network and helping strengthen the relationship between industry and local government.

If you are considering the program, especially if most of your experience has been outside government, I encourage you to learn more about Sorensen’s Emerging Leaders Program. I arrived with opinions and a limited view of the work behind them. I left with more context, more questions, and friends whose experience will keep expanding my understanding.

In July 2024, I walked into Richmond Toastmasters with a practical goal: I wanted to be able to pitch investors. I believed in the ideas I was building, but I knew I needed to communicate them clearly if I wanted other people to believe in them, too.

I was also an introvert. For my first few meetings, I said almost nothing.

At my third meeting, I found the courage to take a Table Topic: a short speech with no advance preparation. My two minutes quickly revealed that I was a cryptocurrency enthusiast. It may not have been the subject that most interested the room. Still, the members listened closely and gave me encouraging, specific feedback on how I spoke.

That response mattered. I had found a place where I could test an idea, stumble through part of it, and leave knowing how to make the next attempt clearer. I was hooked.

At my fourth meeting, I took on my Ice Breaker speech. I talked about my vision of becoming an exceptional entrepreneur and leader. At the time, standing up to share that vision was a challenge in itself.

Learning to speak for the room​

I kept speaking about subjects I cared about, especially blockchain and AI. With each speech, I became more comfortable putting my thoughts into words. Then I began to notice a difference between speaking about an interest and giving the audience something useful.

I started asking myself what the people in the room might want to hear. Sometimes the answer was something from my everyday life: why I start early, how I protect my sleep, or how I think about eating well. The subject could be ordinary. The work was to find the part of my experience that might help someone else.

That shift made me a better speaker. I still cared about clarity and accuracy, but I also cared about the people receiving the message. Toastmasters gave me regular chances to practice all three.

Learning to lead with other people​

About a year after I joined, Richmond Toastmasters held its executive board elections. I decided to run for president. I had no detailed playbook for the job. In my election speech, I spoke about the members who had welcomed me, supported me, and helped me find my voice. I wanted other people to have that experience, too.

Officer training helped me understand the responsibilities. Serving in the role taught me something deeper: a club president needs to communicate with peers toward shared goals. The job is to understand what matters to the members and help them move it forward.

Some of my fellow officers had clear plans and the energy to pursue them. I tried to encourage their work and ask where I could make it easier. Others had goals but were unsure of the next step. They usually knew more about the problem they were trying to solve than I did. I listened, helped them find confidence in their judgment, opened doors where I could, and brought other members together behind their ideas.

I had joined to learn how to stand in front of a room. Now I was learning when to step back and help someone else take the lead.

That lesson reached beyond our club. When an opportunity came to help form new Toastmasters clubs, I volunteered as the East Coast Extension Chair. I had little business development experience, which made the work appealing: outreach was a skill I knew I would need as an entrepreneur.

I asked district leadership whether it would help if I emailed prospective organizations. With their approval, I reached out to 50. Those emails became calls about how Toastmasters could help people in those organizations grow as speakers and leaders. Working with district leaders and the people who answered those calls, I helped establish clubs at Liberty University, McKesson, and Reynolds Community College.

I did not expect a few emails, a few calls, and a genuine offer to help to travel that far. They did because other people were willing to build on the opportunity.

Making room for the next leader​

Toward the end of my presidential term, I began thinking about who would lead Richmond Toastmasters next. I started conversations with members who might serve on the next executive board. Some were unsure they were ready. I understood that feeling because, only a year earlier, I had been in their shoes.

When I encouraged someone to step forward, I remembered the members who had encouraged me. They did not wait for me to become a confident speaker before giving me a chance to speak. They made it possible for me to become one.

I came to Toastmasters because I wanted to pitch investors. I found a supportive place to practice speaking clearly, learn what an audience needs, and take responsibility alongside people who wanted to grow. Those experiences are still shaping the speaker and leader I hope to become.

Toastmasters has about 13,000 clubs worldwide. If you are curious, find one near you or online and attend a meeting. You can begin by listening. That is where I began.

Tomorrow will be a completely new day. You may wake up with different goals, new motivation, new people to see, and demands you cannot predict tonight. But the condition in which you meet that day is not decided when your alarm goes off. It begins a few hours earlier.

Every night, you can be kind to the person you will be tomorrow, or you can become tomorrow's first inconvenience.

That sounds more dramatic than it usually feels. Most of the time, the consequence is not a ruined day. It is a day that is a little slower, a little less focused, and less than it could have been. That is what makes the choice so easy to ignore.

Tomorrow is won tonight.

Scenario 1: You become tomorrow's first inconvenience​

It is 7 p.m. Your workday is over. You know that if you want eight hours of sleep, you need to be in bed by 10.

Then a few good friends from college invite you to dinner and drinks. You have not seen them in a while. These are people you care about, and the friendship is worth maintaining. It is a good invitation.

You accept because you assume you will be home in time. Three hours seems like plenty. You can have dinner, catch up, maybe have a drink, and still get to bed when you planned.

Dinner is a good time. In fact, it is a better time than you expected. You are glad you came. Then ten o'clock starts getting close, and the evening still feels unfinished.

You already know what staying means. You will not get the sleep you planned for, but leaving now feels like cutting off a night you are enjoying with people you rarely see. So you stay a little longer.

By the time you get home, the sleep window is gone. You go to bed late, but the next morning's obligations have not moved to accommodate you.

The alarm goes off. You are groggy. The morning takes longer than it should, and you arrive a little late to your first meeting. Nothing terrible happens, but you feel off.

The feeling follows you through the day. The workout does not happen. You finish the work that has to get done, but not much more. You make it through the day without doing your best work or feeling like your best self.

Nothing is ruined. You saw your friends. You attended the meeting. You completed some work. Life continues.

The day is simply less than it could have been.

The version of you who stayed out made the decision. The version of you who woke up paid most of the cost.

Scenario 2: You are kind to tomorrow's self​

Rewind the tape.

It is 7 p.m. Your workday is over. You know that if you want eight hours of sleep, you need to be in bed by 10.

The same friends send the same invitation. You still care about them. You still want to go. The value of the friendship has not changed, and neither has the fact that you have not seen them in a while.

This time, you consider tomorrow before answering.

That does not leave you with one rigid answer. You have options. You can reschedule dinner for a night when you have more room. You can go with a firm departure time. You can join for dinner and skip the drinks. If tomorrow's demands make the cost too high, you can decline this time without treating the friendship as unimportant.

The important part is that you see the tradeoff before making it. You do not pretend that tonight and tomorrow are unrelated.

Whatever option you choose, you protect enough time to wind down and be in bed by 10. Once the social decision is made, the rest of the evening has a job. It needs to help your mind and body move toward sleep.

You avoid starting anything likely to follow you into bed. This is not the time to begin the day's hardest intellectual work, search for the root cause of a production failure, or start an argument with your significant other. You also skip the heavy late workout and anything else that is likely to wake you back up.

Instead, you use the time for things that still need to happen but do not require your best cognitive hours. You might fold clothes, prepare food for another day, read, or draw casually. The work is useful without asking too much from a mind that should be slowing down.

You take a warm shower. You continue winding down. At 10, you go to bed.

Sleep does not decide everything that tomorrow will bring. But you have not made the day harder before it begins.

You have given yourself a better chance to wake up rested, arrive on time, get the workout in, and bring some creativity and enthusiasm to the work in front of you.

That is what being kind to tomorrow's self looks like. It is not a single routine. It is seeing the cost clearly and choosing with both tonight and tomorrow in mind.

How I use the final two hours​

My schedule starts early. I go to bed at 8 p.m. because I need to wake up at 3:30 a.m. That means my final two-hour window begins around 6 p.m.

I organize the end of my day around sleep because I cannot expect my most creative and enthusiastic self to appear when I am not well rested. The cost reaches beyond one groggy morning when I repeatedly cut sleep short across the week. It changes how I think, work, and show up for everything else.

At 6 p.m., I stop eating. I do not have another meal or snack, especially anything that is going to move my blood sugar right before I sleep. I have found that I sleep better when I leave that window alone.

I also stop asking my brain to do its hardest work. Late in the evening is not when I want to start a deep root-cause investigation into why production is broken. It is not when I want to begin a difficult argument with my significant other. Those problems do not disappear when I get into bed. They come with me, and then my brain gets to replay them while I am trying to sleep.

That experience is not unique to me. Most people know what it feels like to lie in bed while the mind reviews every decision made since the third grade.

I avoid heavy workouts right before bed for the same reason. I am trying to reduce stimulation, not create more of it. A warm shower works much better for me during that window. It helps me make the transition from the activity of the day into sleep.

My hot take is melatonin. I am not a doctor, and I am not prescribing it to anyone. It is simply something that works consistently for me. It gives the end of the day a clear signal and helps stop the overthinking before it starts.

Video games, however, are a hard no. I think video games are some of the most interesting things on the planet. That is exactly why I cannot play them before bed. They pull me back into active problem solving at the moment I am trying to get my brain to calm down.

That still leaves me with two hours that are probably not my most productive hours of the day. I do not think that makes them useless. I use them for the maintenance of my life.

I can fold clothes, prepare food for another day, read, or draw. Drawing is relaxing for me because I am not a professional artist. For someone whose work depends on drawing well, it may demand far more concentration. The activity itself matters less than the cognitive demand it places on the person doing it.

This routine is mine. Other people can build a different one. I am not arguing that friendship, spontaneity, or a good night out are enemies of ambition.

I want to make my evening choices honestly. Good choices still have tradeoffs. Intentionality means seeing the cost and deciding when it is worth paying, rather than handing the bill to my morning self without thinking about it.

Tomorrow will still be a new day. It will bring new goals, different motivation, new people, and problems I cannot anticipate. I cannot control all of that tonight.

I can control the condition in which I meet it.

When I structure the end of my day well, I give myself a better chance to be rested, creative, and enthusiastic in the morning. I give tomorrow a better chance to become the new best day of my life.

Tomorrow is won tonight.

There are two ways you can arrive at the same 9:00 a.m. standup.

Morning one: the day starts without you​

8:50 a.m. The alarm goes off. You snooze it.

8:59 a.m. The alarm goes off again. You admit defeat, get out of bed, and hop directly into your 9:00 standup.

9:00 a.m. You are technically awake, but you are groggy and less present for your team. Other people are talking through what they are doing, what they need, and what changed. The information may be useful. You are just receiving it before you have had a chance to think about your own day.

After standup. You make coffee and start working through emails, messages, requests, and whatever feels urgent. These are legitimate priorities, but they have reached you first. The day is already being organized by the people and systems around you.

The rest of the day. Meetings, messages, and work carried by other people's priorities fill the available time. The creative project you wanted to move forward remains a backlog item. The workout you meant to do becomes something you will try to fit in later.

Late that night. You either push the work into hours when you are less conscious and less deliberate, or you defer it again.

Nobody tried to block you. The outside world simply advocated for its priorities, and you never created the space to advocate for yours.

Morning two: You Seize The day​

3:30 a.m. Your alarm goes off. You get out of bed.

3:35 a.m. You are still waking up, but exercise comes first. You work out for about 30 minutes, then spend another 15 minutes stretching and doing core work, sometimes with push-ups. The whole block takes about 45 to 60 minutes.

Around 4:30 a.m. You shower, make coffee, and transition into work.

Once you are reset. You write down the four or five outcomes that matter most that day. They might include a call, a social post, opening an account, or taking one concrete business action. Putting them on paper makes your priorities visible before the day starts revising them.

The next block. You define and launch work across several active projects. Right now, that might mean setting up AI agents with clear tasks. The setup requires focused thought. Once an agent is working, you can move to the next priority while the project keeps moving too.

Later that morning. You work through emails, messages, and texts until you have a clean slate. Inbox zero can be motivating, even though it is not the point of the routine.

Before standup. If time allows, you take a walk so you can arrive at standup with a clear head.

9:00 a.m. You join the same standup. This time you are awake, prepared, and ready to understand what everyone is doing. You can look for ways to work together and absorb information that may legitimately change your plan.

Sometimes it should change. Collaboration matters, and other people can see opportunities and problems you cannot see on your own.

The difference is that you have already exercised, put independent work in motion, cleared your communications, and decided what you want the day to accomplish. A change now feels like an informed pivot instead of the day simply happening to you.

What changed between the two mornings​

Both mornings can belong to the same person. I have lived both. The difference is the order in which priorities get a claim on my attention.

I think about priorities in two categories. The first contains the things I know matter to me: my health, long-term learning, creative and entrepreneurial work, and the ideas I want to build. The second contains the priorities carried by the people and systems around me. They arrive through meetings, messages, requests, and urgent work.

Both categories matter. The outside world will naturally advocate for its own priorities because a teammate knows what they need from me, a meeting has an agenda, and a message announces itself. None of those people know or own all of my private priorities.

That is why the morning matters to me. Once I am fully awake, it is often my clearest working time. I am rested and have not yet absorbed the day's noise. It is the most reliable chance I have found to take care of my health, think creatively, and move personally meaningful work forward.

Exercise belongs in that time because my health, energy, longevity, and mental health matter enough to deserve regular protection.

That early block is where I get to cook on my own life.

This is my routine, not a universal prescription. Nobody needs my exact wake time, workout, or sequence. Parents, shift workers, late risers, and people with less control over their schedules will need a different version. The transferable principle is to protect enough intentional time to move your own priorities forward before outside demands take over.

I do not want to protect the morning so rigidly that I ignore the world. I want to win the morning first, then let collaboration and the outside world inform the rest of the day.

Here's the truth: we need to be more specific when we talk about what is true.

There are many types of truths, and not all of them deserve the same level of confidence.

If we want to move truth closer to objective, we need to separate the levels:

• Perceived truth: what feels true.
• Statistical truth: what the numbers suggest.
• Logical truth: what must be true.

Level 1: Perceived Truth​

Definition: A perceived truth is something a person believes to be true because of what they have seen, lived, felt, or absorbed from the world around them.

It may come from direct experience. It may come from culture. It may come from a group of people repeating the same belief until it feels obvious.

My story: When I first started building my company, I believed blockchain gaming was one of the right places to build.

That belief did not come from nowhere.

Capital was moving into the space. Smart people were talking about it. Founders were building. Investors were making the category feel inevitable.

At the time, "blockchain gaming is the future" was not just my perceived truth. It was a social truth held by a significant number of people around me.

But consensus isn't always correct.

Level 2: Statistical Truth​

Definition: A statistical truth is what happens when we move beyond what feels true and ask what the numbers say.

Only about 0.07% of startups reach an IPO or significant acquisition within six years. Among startups that reach venture backing, that jumps to about 25%.

Use: Statistical truth is useful for navigating uncertainty.

It does not make the future certain. It does not prove that one path causes the outcome. It shows the shape of reality across a population.

The same ambition can look impossible in the set of all startups and much more possible in the set of venture-backed startups. That does not mean the ambition changed. It means the set changed.

That is why statistical truth is stronger than perceived truth.

Perceived truth says, "This feels like the future."

Statistical truth asks, "How often does that kind of future actually arrive?"

Level 3: Logical Truth​

Definition: A logical truth is different.

It is not based on what I experienced, or what usually happens. It is based on what must be true once the assumptions are accepted.

Set theory: Take the set of 27,976,477 startups.

Then take the much smaller set of 13,406 startups that reached an IPO or meaningful acquisition within six years.

For each startup, consider the set of decisions made throughout its journey: what to build, who to hire, when to raise, when to pivot, when to keep going, and when to stop.

Question: What can we know with 100% certainty about the set of decisions made by the startups that reached a meaningful outcome?

Answer: The set does not contain the terminal decision to quit before reaching it.

That is the only logical difference between the startup that wins and the startup that loses.

Every other truth is secondary.

Inspired by Robert Browning and Robert Frost.

I have cleared the thorns.
I have crossed the snowy mountains,
burned through forests,
fought off looters in the dark.

My grasp has always exceeded my reach.

It has served me well.
It has carried me far.

Now two paths wait.

One is cut from stone,
with rails for tired hands,
and beyond it, a castle:
friends, exquisite parties,
rooms warm with easy light.

The other breaks open
over lava and demons,
over heat that names my fear.

But beyond it
there is a shimmer
I have never seen before.

And if I choose the safer road,
I know the question will follow:

Did my grasp exceed my nerve?

So I go on,
toward the edge,
toward the unknown measure,

to learn, at last,
what it means
for my reach
to exceed my grasp.

And when I finally reach that shimmer,
and see the jewels
which reflected impossible light,

having widened my grasp
around what once exceeded it,

I will build the road.

Not to prove I crossed.
Not to make the chasm tame.

But so others may see
the jewels as well.

Still, there is one road
whose build eludes me.

Not the road across the chasm,
not the road through fire,
not the road up the mountain.

But the road
to chase the shimmer.

Life and business are non-zero-sum, repeated, incomplete-information, asymmetric, multiplayer games.

That is the board.

Most people play as if the game is smaller than it is. They optimize for the visible round, the immediate transaction, the next meeting, the next raise, the next sale, the next status move. They mistake local advantage for strategy.

But local advantage is not enough in a repeated game. The move that wins today can make tomorrow harder. The signal that gets attention can make trust more expensive. The clever angle can close the door that would have become the better game.

TAP is the strategy for winning repeated games.

Transparency makes you legible. Authenticity makes you credible. Perspicacity makes you useful.

Together, they make you partnerable.

This is the same TAP framework I use to describe CipherPlay's operating values, but the principle is larger than one company. It is a strategy for life and business wherever repeated partnership matters.

Name the Game​

A non-zero-sum game is not a contest where one player's gain must equal another player's loss. The best games create mutual upside. In life and business, the strongest outcomes usually come from coordination: customers getting real value, companies creating profit, investors backing durable growth, communities becoming stronger, and collaborators building things they could not build alone.

A repeated game means the current move changes future rounds. Reputation compounds. Trust compounds. Distrust compounds too. Every promise, delivery, introduction, explanation, and silence becomes part of the next player's decision about whether to keep playing with you.

An incomplete-information game means nobody has the whole board. Every actor is making decisions with partial knowledge. You do not know every constraint, every incentive, every risk, every internal conversation, or every future opportunity. This is not a flaw in the game. This is the game.

An asymmetric game means different players have different resources, constraints, timing, networks, strengths, and vantage points. A startup, an investor, a nonprofit, a government agency, a researcher, and a customer are not playing from the same position. Their power, information, speed, and objectives are different.

A multiplayer game means outcomes emerge through relationships. It is not enough to be smart in isolation. Coalitions matter. Referrals matter. Distribution matters. Reputation matters. Who trusts you enough to share information, take a risk, make an introduction, or build alongside you matters.

If that is the game, then the winning strategy is not short-term gamesmanship. It is becoming the kind of player the right people choose again.

Winning Depends on the Objective Function​

Winning is objective-function-relative.

A for-profit company may optimize for making money. A nonprofit may optimize for helping a community. A government may optimize for staying in office. An individual may optimize for freedom, wealth, impact, reputation, meaning, or some private combination of all of them.

Different actors have different objective functions. That does not make the game incoherent. It makes partnership necessary.

Because the game is non-zero-sum, there are arrangements where different objective functions can advance together. Because the game is repeated, the quality of the relationship affects the cost of future coordination. Because the game is incomplete-information, information flow matters. Because the game is asymmetric, one player's weakness may be another player's strength. Because the game is multiplayer, no serious objective stays isolated for long.

The more ambitious the objective, the more partnership matters.

If you want to build something meaningful, you need people who will keep taking the next round with you. Investors need enough trust to allocate capital. Customers need enough trust to adopt. Collaborators need enough trust to build. Communities need enough trust to engage. Potential partners need enough trust to share what they know.

This is why being partnerable matters.

To be partnerable is to be legible, credible, and useful across repeated games. It means potential partners can understand what you are doing, believe that your signals match your actions, and see that your judgment helps them navigate the board.

TAP is how you become partnerable.

The False Strategy​

The false strategy is short-term gamesmanship.

Short-term gamesmanship optimizes for isolated wins. It hides information when clarity would build trust. It performs a persona instead of revealing a position. It uses selective truth to create temporary leverage. It treats opacity as sophistication and cleverness as strength.

This can work for a round.

It can win attention. It can win a meeting. It can win a negotiation. It can even win a deal.

But repeated games punish strategies that make future coordination harder.

If people cannot understand what you are doing, they hesitate. If your words do not match your actions, they discount your signals. If you cannot turn information into judgment, they stop looking to you for insight. Each failure increases friction in the next round.

Short-term gamesmanship misunderstands the time horizon. It tries to win the move while losing the game.

TAP plays the actual game.

Transparency Makes You Legible​

Transparency is not radical exposure. It is strategic legibility.

In an incomplete-information game, useful information lowers coordination costs. Potential partners need to know what you are building, what you believe, what you see, what you need, what you can offer, and where the uncertainty is.

Transparency helps people locate you on the board.

It does not mean sharing everything with everyone. It means refusing to make confusion part of the strategy. It means explaining the market you are studying, the problem you are solving, the trade-offs you are making, and the reasons behind your moves.

This is why I value transparency in public research, product decisions, and partner conversations. It moves the relationship closer to a better information environment. It gives serious people enough signal to decide whether we should play a bigger game together.

In repeated games, legibility compounds.

Authenticity Makes You Credible​

Authenticity is not self-expression for its own sake. It is signal integrity.

In a repeated game, your words become predictions about your future behavior. If your stated values, public claims, private conversations, and shipped work diverge, your signals get discounted. People may still listen, but they will price in the gap.

Authenticity closes that gap.

It means the move matches the message. It means the public thesis is connected to the private operating system. It means you do not need a different version of the story for every room.

That does not make you universally agreeable. It makes you easier to evaluate. Potential partners can tell what game you are playing, what you are optimizing for, and whether your commitments are likely to survive pressure.

In repeated games, credibility compounds.

Perspicacity Makes You Useful​

Perspicacity is clear judgment in noisy environments.

The game is incomplete-information, but it is not information-scarce. Most markets have more data, commentary, tools, signals, dashboards, opinions, and narratives than any actor can fully process. The scarce resource is not information. The scarce resource is useful interpretation.

Perspicacity is the ability to see through noise, synthesize what matters, and identify strong next moves.

This is where strategy becomes more than posture. Transparency and authenticity make you easier to trust. Perspicacity makes that trust valuable.

Potential partners do not only need someone honest. They need someone who can help them understand the board. They need judgment about markets, technology, incentives, timing, and risk. They need someone who can turn abundant information into actionable insight.

In repeated games, usefulness compounds.

TAP Is Values as Strategy​

TAP is not naive niceness.

It is not a request for the game to be fair. It is not a refusal to compete. It is not an aesthetic preference for moral language.

TAP is values as strategy.

The ethical move and the optimal move often converge in repeated games because trust changes the payoff structure. A transparent move can make future coordination cheaper. An authentic move can make future signals stronger. A perspicacious move can make future partnerships more productive.

This does not guarantee that every round rewards you. Some people will exploit openness. Some rooms will reward performance over substance. Some players will optimize for extraction and call it strategy.

But the goal is not to be chosen by every player.

The goal is to become partnerable to the right players.

Winning the long game means building the trust, judgment, access, and optionality needed to accomplish your objective function with better partners over more rounds.

Life and business are non-zero-sum, repeated, incomplete-information, asymmetric, multiplayer games.

TAP is the strategy for winning them.

TL;DR: ICAP VA is where scientists learn how to become entrepreneurs—and where I learned that tech, no matter how exciting on its own, only matters when it solves real problems for real people.

The Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP) is one of the most valuable programs I've been part of.

It's built for entrepreneurial scientists and technologists. ICAP brings together founders working in everything from sensor tech to blockchain to biotech. You're surrounded by people who deeply understand their field but are learning how to turn that knowledge into something a customer will actually pay for.

More than anything, ICAP makes you face the big question:

Who is your customer?

And from that question, everything changes.

The Biggest Shift​

The tech industry doesn't exist to serve itself. It exists to serve everyone else.

Tech helps healthcare become more efficient and accessible. Tech helps retail thrive online. Tech powers the games we play and the tools we use. But there's no real "tech consumer" for the sake of tech alone.

That hit me hard, because I've always been most excited about the tech itself. But ICAP made it clear: if you're building something just because it's cool, that's a hobby. If you want to be an entrepreneur, your work has to matter to someone else.

The opportunity here is actually massive. Tech is cross-industry by nature. It improves everything it touches—reach, security, accessibility, performance. If you're building something in Web3, for example, your customers might be businesses still relying on legacy cloud platforms. The tech may be new, but the customer problem often isn't.

Final Takeaway​

ICAP forced me to stop thinking like a builder and start thinking like a founder. It pushed me to identify who I'm serving and how to make something that truly solves a problem for them.

If you're in Virginia and working on an early-stage tech idea, this program is worth your time. It gave me the clarity I needed to start building something real—and I think it could do the same for a lot of people.

Happy to chat more about what it was like or help connect you if you're curious.