Honest operator notes on building, leading & life. 36 and counting.
I write these with AI — a neurological condition took my typing, and AI gave my output back. The cost of sounding competent has collapsed, even at the top of the ladder. When everyone can produce a sharp answer, the answer stops being the differentiator. What's left is older and simpler: trust, presence, judgment — the one layer no model can reproduce.
A fault line has no god. A wildfire has no flag. Nature erases us without malice — Pompeii, Tanis, the next asteroid. Then I read the rest of the news: wars that won't stop, borders drawn in someone else's blood. That part we choose. Perspective isn't detachment — it's caring about the right things, harder, while we still can.
A UN headline put a number on the other side of the birth lottery: roughly a quarter of a billion people need urgent humanitarian help right now. Same kind of parent, same hopes for their kids — just a different line on a map. Most of my comfort is luck. The least I can do is not waste it being ungrateful.
Watching Jared Isaacman on Face the Nation brought it rushing back — the ISS, the most complicated machine humans have ever built. It didn't have to be international. In 1993, Dan Goldin invited a forty-year rival in, and that choice saved it. If we could do that up there, don't let anyone tell you what we can't do down here.
Twelve months at the table, down to minor redlines — and then it was over. For a while it felt wasted. But that collapse is the only reason we pivoted, and the pivot became a three-way international merger: the proudest deal of my career. The failure didn't cost me the win. It was the door to it.
A documentary on the birth of America, watched from Boston. The founding wasn't clean — the best of us and the worst of us have always lived in the same body. I'm not celebrating a finished country this Fourth. I'm celebrating an unfinished one, and the people on the road who are the whole point.
A photo in my friends' Boston office. Eighteen years ago Seth Burr and Darrin Lang bet on each other and started LABUR — their two last names stitched together, no daylight between them. I've watched founders chase the exit. These two chased the work. Different game.
One of twelve questions in Rabbi Steve Leder's For You When I Am Gone. Your regrets aren't a confession of failure — they're a roadmap of what you learned. Don't wait for a deathbed to answer the hard questions.
Combined enterprise value north of $100 million. I could stop there and let it sound clean. It was not clean. Across all of it, the throughline was never the outcome. It was the people.
What do a Tuscan vintner, the crew of Artemis II, and Marcus Aurelius have in common? They tell the same story. From that far out, you cannot see a single border — just one blue thing holding everyone.
Blame law school. Two cases from first-year Torts never left me. One taught me to price the downside. The other, that I only own the risks I can foresee. Different leaders, different chapters — every one of them taught me the same throughline.
A space stat and a 2002 movie. Both dragged me back to something I wrote last year. There are eight billion of us on one planet. The only things that have ever felt big up close are the people and the moments.
Within the last few days, I've said "Happy Memorial Day" and "enjoy the long weekend." The day very obviously isn't about a three-day weekend. It's about people who didn't come home, and families who've carried that weight ever since.
We sold our company eighteen months ago — after twelve years of building it from nothing. I waited for the moment that was supposed to come after. It didn't. Marcus Aurelius. Brunelleschi. Michelangelo. Every one of them is dead.
Stood in front of him today. The most powerful man in the known world. What survived him is a journal he never meant anyone to read. Performed strength ages badly. Honest reflection compounds.
Kay Cameron was the third person in the office at ATIS. David Estes helped us scale ATIS too. You don't build multiple businesses with the same people unless those people are the reason it worked the first time.
Vertical transportation is one of those quiet industries where safety, compliance, and service legacy compound over decades. What drew me in: the commitment to broad-based equity for the Team.
When Dustin Hejna and I started talking about Friendever, the thing that kept pulling us in wasn't the product roadmap. Turns out the version of "brave" we picked up as kids isn't bravery. It's armor. And armor gets heavy.
Not bad actors. Not lazy ones. People who genuinely meant well and told themselves the right story. A culture of accountability isn't harsh — it's clarifying. We talk about what happened, not what we meant to happen.
One of the most revealing moments in any room is the moment someone leaves it. What gets said in the next sixty seconds tells you everything — not about the person who walked out, but about the people still sitting there.
The private credit conversation has split into two camps and middle-market operators should ignore both of them. Neither framing helps the operators weighing whether to sell, recapitalize, or refinance into the next cycle.
She wasn't falling apart. She was feeling the weight of what she was doing — standing between vulnerable people and the thing that hurt them — and her humanity showed through. Guilty on 17 counts. Proud husband.
A man I know just ended his life. We weren't close. Never met in person. But we wrote chapters in the same book. His was called "Strength Through Surrender." I can't stop thinking about that title. We cannot keep losing people to silence.
This is my NASA badge from the Dan Goldin era. I was 22 years old and had absolutely no business being in that building. Yesterday, four astronauts flew farther from Earth than any human in history. Victor Glover said it simply: seeing Earth from that distance is a reminder of humanity's shared identity.
Make of that what you will. The crucifix belonged to a great friend who gave it to me because he thought I needed to find Jesus. Neither makes me Christian — they make me someone who understands that symbols mean what we need them to mean.
I think about it often. It started in eighth grade when I lost my first grandparent. Bad memory in general — but I can vividly recall the circumstances around that evening and every single loss since.
For decades, professional services solved complexity through specialization. AI is changing that equation — and we built Centered Partners around what comes next.
The real problem in professional services was never a shortage of expertise. It was a shortage of connection between it. Here's what AI actually does — and what it doesn't.
I'm writing a book. My Skeletons Are Better Than Yours. The real point isn't competition — it's that we're all dragging something around and burning enormous energy keeping the closet door shut.
Wars. Elections. AI. Emotional entropy. And yet — my calendar remains full. I am personally struggling with the scale of what's happening out there and the smallness of what we're asked to care about in here.
Writing was once one of my greatest strengths. AI cleared away the friction between having an idea and executing it — and gave me back the most valuable thing any of us have: time.
My wife has been an assistant prosecuting attorney for 18+ years. She handles the cases most attorneys wouldn't want to touch. She carries weight that doesn't clock out.
My dad, brother, and I started ATIS from scratch in late 2012. I will never forget sitting in my basement and filing the articles of organization. A vision. Weekly Sunday morning visits on my parents' porch.
Smart people. Real businesses. Real risk. Being served by advisors too narrow, too transactional, too focused on their own product shelf. That's the gap Centered Partners was built to fill.
Someone in the comments said it perfectly. "That's what Nero said." The answer to the noise isn't paralysis. It's building things worth building — and making sure the people around you are better off for having worked with you.
Austin Grimm is a St. Louis-based musician — former frontman of Roots of a Rebellion. He's also my brother. And somewhere in his journey he wrote a song that stopped me cold.