Here We Go
Notes on building companies, making films, planting forests, and the future in the age of AI
I’m launching this at the start of a new chapter — for myself, and maybe for the world around us.
We are living through one of those rare moments when the tools change, the language changes, the economics change, and the possibilities change all at once. AI is part of that story, obviously. But I’m less interested in AI as a novelty or productivity hack, and more interested in what it asks of us:
Can we think differently?
Can we build differently?
Can we listen better?
Can we create more intelligently, more humanely, and more courageously?
Can we connect ideas, people, places, and stories that used to sit in separate rooms?
That is the territory I want to explore here.
This Substack is a place for me to think out loud, share what I’m learning, and invite others into the conversation. It will live at the intersection of entrepreneurship, filmmaking, music, AI, environmental stewardship, travel, food, friendship, building, and the messy creative work of making things that matter.
That may sound broad. To me, it feels connected.
At their best, all of these worlds are about creating spaces where people can imagine what is possible.
A company can be a space.
A film can be a space.
A song can be a space.
A home in the woods can be a space.
A meal around a table can be a space.
A team, when it is working well, can be one of the most powerful spaces of all.
The work is not just to make something. The work is to make something that invites people in, helps them see differently, and gives them enough structure, confidence, and energy to move forward together.
That is what I care about.
Why I’m here
I’m here because I want a place to document what I’m learning in real time.
I’m currently building a new AI-native software company, Radicl Work. We are focused on helping people, teams, and organizations unlock more of their capability around the plans and projects that matter most.
That means I’m spending a lot of time inside the practical realities of building software in the age of AI.
How do you design for it?
How do you make it valuable instead of performative?
How do you keep the human in the loop in a way that is meaningful, not cosmetic?
How do you use AI to bring out the best in people instead of flattening, distracting, or replacing what makes them valuable?
How do you build tools that help teams get clearer, move faster, trust each other more, and make better decisions?
And just as importantly: how do we use AI inside our own company to become better builders ourselves?
At Radicl Work, we’re not only building an AI product. We are learning how to build an AI-enabled company.
That means using AI to help us operationalize the business, experiment quickly, respond to market signals, learn from customers, test assumptions, sharpen strategy, improve product decisions, and make the founding team more effective.
Some of that will work.
Some of it won’t.
We will fall down. We will get back up. We will find new opportunities, new pivots, new language, and new spaces to move into.
I want to share that process honestly.
Not as theory. Not as polished hindsight. But as a working journal from inside the build.
AI as opportunity, not retreat
I’ve been around technology long enough to know that breakthrough moments are never clean.
They come with excitement, fear, hype, misuse, misunderstanding, and genuine possibility — all at the same time.
My own relationship with technology goes back to the Apple II. Across roughly fifty years of watching, using, coding, designing, and adapting to new technologies, I’ve seen this pattern repeat: something new arrives, people overstate it, people underestimate it, people fear it, people exploit it, and eventually the deeper opportunity becomes clearer.
I believe AI is one of those moments.
But the opportunity is not simply to automate more tasks.
The opportunity is to think differently.
To build differently.
To organize differently.
To create differently.
To learn from systems that already know how to coordinate complexity — forests, ecosystems, artistic communities, scientific communities, great teams, great bands, great kitchens, great film crews.
There is inspiration everywhere if we are willing to look.
The natural world has been solving problems of adaptation, resilience, interdependence, regeneration, and balance for longer than any company, product team, or technology platform ever will.
So one of the questions I’ll keep returning to here is:
What can we learn from living systems about how to build better human systems?
Communities. Organizations. Teams. Creative collaborations. Software companies. Homes. Forests. Cities. Families.
AI should not make us less human. Used well, it should help us become more intentional about the human work only we can do.
Making things that connect
Filmmaking teaches you that meaning is assembled.
A shot by itself is just a shot. A line of dialogue is just a line. A piece of music is just a piece of music. But when you put them together with care, timing, tension, silence, and trust, something larger appears.
Entrepreneurship is not that different.
You start with fragments: a problem, a belief, a market, a prototype, a customer conversation, a team member, a hard lesson, a small signal that maybe the thing is real. Most of the time, it does not look like much at first. It is messy. It is unfinished. It is easy to doubt.
Then, if you stay with it, a narrative begins to form.
Not a fake narrative. Not the kind you paste on afterward for marketing. A real narrative — the deeper pattern that explains why this thing matters, why now, why this team, why this way.
That is where I find the energy.
I’m interested in the moment when scattered inputs become a story people can act on.
That applies to a film. It applies to a startup. It applies to a family. It applies to a forest. It applies to the way we think about land, work, technology, culture, and responsibility.
The artist and the entrepreneur
I’ve been fortunate to have two parallel careers since my early twenties.
One as an entrepreneur. One as a filmmaker and musician.
For a long time, those may have looked like separate lives. To me, they have always informed each other.
The artistic work made me a better entrepreneur. It taught me to listen for voice, tone, rhythm, emotional truth, and the thing beneath the thing.
The entrepreneurial work made me a better producer and collaborator. It taught me how to organize people around possibility, move through ambiguity, find resources, make decisions with incomplete information, and keep going when the path is unclear.
More recently, I’ve had the opportunity to produce several feature films, both narrative and documentary. I’ve also had the opportunity to be immersed in environments like the Sundance Filmmaker Labs and technology incubators.
Those experiences have stayed with me.
Because whether you are working with artists or entrepreneurs, one of the central questions is the same:
How do you create a place where people can take real risks, find their voice, receive enough support to keep going, and be challenged enough to grow?
That is a profound design problem.
It matters in culture.
It matters in business.
It matters in education.
It matters in community.
It matters in any place where people are trying to make something that does not exist yet.
I want to explore that here.
Music as a place for rapid experimentation
Music has always been a place for experimentation and meditation for me. When I’m playing guitar or the piano, I’m in a singular zone. No distractions.
Writing or playing a song can do what a strategy document rarely can: collapse complexity into feeling. It can carry memory, place, resistance, humor, grief, joy, and identity in three minutes. It can tell the truth before we have language for it.
The best music does not just entertain. It gathers people. It gives them a way to recognize themselves and each other.
That’s also why I keep producing historical narrative features films (TUSCALOOSA) and documentaries about bands & wrestling (LOW, THE CLAW). They are not only about the band or a scene or the archive. They are about the emotional architecture around a moment in time. Who was there. What was changing in culture. What people needed to hear. What they still need to hear.
There is something powerful about preserving that — not as nostalgia, but as fuel.
The past can become a creative material for the future.
Building with nature, not over it
Another part of this Substack will follow a more literal building project.
My wife, Jennifer, and I are building a home in the Northwoods of Minnesota. That experience has become another kind of classroom.
We are learning what it means to build a home that is resilient and in balance with nature. A home that gives energy rather than only consumes it. A place that brings joy, restoration, creativity, and connection.
We are also learning how to think about the surrounding forest not as scenery, but as a living system we are responsible to.
What does it mean to support a forest for the next hundred years?
How do we think about climate change not in the abstract, but through the trees, soil, water, weather, materials, and choices directly in front of us?
How do we convene with nature instead of simply using it?
I expect to write about that journey too — forestry, resilience, design, stewardship, materials, mistakes, tradeoffs, and the attempt to create a place where others can come to build, create, learn, rest, and participate in entrepreneurial and creative pursuits.
The environment is not a backdrop.
It is one of our most important teachers.
The rest of life belongs here too
I’ll also write about the experiences that continue to shape how I think: friends, travel, cooking, adventures, conversations, places, meals, failures, surprises, and the small moments that open up larger ideas.
These experiences are not separate from the work.
They are often where the work gets clarified.
A breakthrough idea does not always arrive in a conference room. Sometimes it shows up on a walk, in a kitchen, at a show, on a road trip, in the woods, in a conversation with a friend, or while watching people from another culture solve a problem differently than you would.
The world is full of intelligence.
Part of the work is staying available to it.
What I’m committed to sharing
Here is what I can promise.
I will share what I’m learning as I build an AI-native company.
I will share what I’m learning as we use AI inside that company to operate, experiment, and adapt.
I will share what I’m learning as a film producer, musician, and creative collaborator.
I will share what I’m learning from building a home and supporting a forest in Northern Minnesota.
I will share what I’m learning from travel, food, friendship, and the lived experiences that keep changing how I see the world.
I will share successes, but also failures.
I will share the moments when something works, and the moments when it does not.
I will share questions before they become conclusions.
I will share patterns I’m noticing across business, art, technology, nature, and culture.
Most of all, I will try to stay useful and honest.
What I hope to learn with others
I’m not starting this because I have everything figured out.
I’m starting it because I don’t.
I want to learn with people who are also trying to make sense of this moment.
Founders. Artists. Builders. Environmentalists. Technologists. Producers. Musicians. Designers. Leaders. Friends. People who care about the future but do not want to surrender their humanity to it.
How do we put AI to work for us in communities, organizations, science, the arts, and other places where human imagination matters?
How do we build tools that deepen capability instead of dependency?
How do we create companies that are fast and humane?
How do we design teams that are resilient, adaptive, and connected?
How do we build homes, products, forests, films, and communities that can hold more possibility?
How do we move through a time of extraordinary technological change without giving in to fear, retreat, cynicism, or shallow hype?
Those are the questions I want to follow.
Here we go
This space will be part field note, part founder journal, part producer notebook, part environmental learning log, part creative practice.
Some entries may be practical. Some may be personal. Some may be about a product idea, a scene from a film, a piece of land, a song, a team, a pitch, a building, a meal, a place, or a moment when something suddenly makes sense.
The connective tissue will be creation.
How do we create better companies?
Better films?
Better spaces?
Better teams?
Better questions?
Better ways of living with the tools and responsibilities now in front of us?
I don’t want this to be a space built only around answers. I’m more interested in the search — the disciplined, creative, sometimes uncomfortable process of noticing what is changing and choosing how to respond.
So, here we go.
A new chapter.
A place to think out loud.
A place to connect dots.
A place to explore how we build spaces, teams, ideas, tools, stories, and communities that help people feel more alive to possibility.
That feels like work worth doing.