SEACOMP (Displaytech, HDP Power, MH MFG)

Help Innovators Deliver Awesome.

We design, engineer, and manufacture consumer, medical, and industrial electronic devices.

HQ in San Diego, CA. Manufacturing at our wholly-owned factories in Tijuana, Mexico and Dongguan, China.

Strategic Partnerships

Conduit Venture Labs

Conduit is a venture studio focused on enabling founders, inventors, and strategic innovators to focus on solving the problems that face our planet and its inhabitants working at the intersection of the physical and digital.

Fellow

The New Way Inc.

Helping families, that are experiencing homelessness, to find help, homes, & hope.

Executive Director

GTM United

Ambassador of a private community of go-to-market professionals united by a mission to put their development first. Giving feedback, asking questions, practicing self-care, and making real connections.

Content Advisor

Instawork

Our vision at Instawork is to create economic opportunity for local businesses and professionals, globally.

Instawork is the on-demand staffing app for hospitality & light industrial shifts. We quickly and reliably match businesses with nearby qualified workers. We’re excited to enable our Professionals, a new generation of the emerging, diverse workforce, to be a part of the growing gig economy.

Senior Account Executive

Gemini Legal

Gemini is a legal copy service that compels and obtains document evidence for California attorneys representing injured workers.

The will and hope of Gemini is to embrace and meet our clients’ true needs by providing a safe, stable and competitive work environment where employees, clients and vendors enrich their community and themselves personally and professionally. We meet our challenge through principled, personal leadership.

Business Development Manager

Quartzy, Inc

Laid off due to COVID-19
-------------------------
Quartzy is a free web-based platform for managing research labs. It is used worldwide by 360,000 scientists in the academic, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical labs. 

Quartzy saves labs time and money!

As a Business Development Associate at Quartzy, I am responsible for building the supplier relationships and product portfolio that enable Quartzy to be the only free online laboratory management platform offering an extensive lab supply ordering system. 
See our rapidly growing list of supplier partners HERE:
https://www.quartzy.com/suppliers

Business Development Associate

BlueGrace Logistics

Business Development Executive

Sales Director

Senior Sales Executive

Sales Executive

Account Manager

Wolf Creek Brewery

Develop and maintain strategic partnerships with key retailers and restaurants. Assume leadership role in implementing key brewery initiatives with distributors, retailers, and restaurants. Work closely with distributor on new product releases, seasonal releases and pre-orders for brewery. Drive and grow sales. Act as the face of Wolf Creek Brewery within a given territory.

Territory Manager

Wesco Aircraft

Provide pricing analysis for management. Perform margin and pricing analysis in order to support business initiatives. Validate sales quotations for accuracy and profitability; exercise and manipulate data via analysis techniques. Develop a system of communication, documentation and review of internal and external comparative pricing data. Identify opportunities to optimize sales and profitability through pricing strategies. Confer with sales and marketing teams to develop proposals. Prepare multi-year cost and pricing models. Engage suppliers and branches.

Corporate Sales Analyst

We Design & Build Your Hardware

We design & manufacture
Industrial, medical, & consumer electronics
Small enough to fit in an oven

HQ in San Diego, CA. Manufacturing at our wholly-owned factories in Tijuana, Mexico and Dongguan, China.

Connor Bush

Shoutout to industrial designers.
Y’all do cool stuff.

Industrial designers:
Making “why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?” moments happen every day.

Connor Bush 🔋🖥📟

We Manufacture Your Hardware at Scale (USA, Mexico, & China) | Ecosystem, Pipeline & Partner Strategy

Founders always ask for the same thing:
“Do you know a partner who can do everything: Engineering, prototyping, low-volume builds, and mass production?”

I get why.
On paper, it sounds perfect:

🔹 One team that knows the product from Day 0
🔹 Smooth handoff into EVT/DVT/PVT
🔹 Manufacturing input baked into early design
🔹 Less friction, fewer vendors, more trust

Totally intuitive.

But here’s the reality almost nobody says out loud:
Those are four completely different skill sets, with different cultures, tempos, tools, and incentives.

And the partner who is world-class at mass production is ALMOST never world-class at rapid iteration.
Because the traits that make you strong at one phase often make you weak at the other.

Mass production excellence =
🔸 Rigid systems
🔸 Heavy validation
🔸 Process obsessed
🔸 Optimized for scale, yield, and stability

Early-stage excellence =
🔸 Fast
🔸 Messy
🔸 Creative
🔸 Comfortable with ambiguity and change

Trying to get one team to do both is like expecting awesome sushi at the italian restaurant. 
(They might try… but should they? 🤢)

Can it work?
Yes, but only under very specific conditions:

✔️ Clear, locked industrial design
✔️ Serious funding
✔️ No long pauses or fundraising gaps
✔️ A straight path from prototype to EVT → DVT → PVT
✔️ A product destined for mass production from Day 1

SEACOMP has done it.
But it takes alignment, timing, and a founder who understands what they are signing up for.

For most teams, the healthier model is a relay:
Expert design ➡️  expert prototyping ➡️  expert CM for scale.

Different people, same mission.

Not shaming anyone. The instinct makes total sense.
The physics of hardware are just harder than the theory.

------
Want to chat on this some more? Come hang with us at #CES.

Link in the comments.

Collecting quotes for ID, ME, EE, FW, or product development is a wild ride.

$40k from overseas.
$200k from the Midwest.
$700k+ from Boston or San Francisco.
Sometimes even a $300k and a $900k quote from the same city for the same scope.

At a certain point… the limit does not exist.

But here’s what most founders miss: you’re not just paying for hours or skill.
Hardware development is art, judgment, taste, and manufacturing philosophy baked into one.

So the real question isn’t:
“Why is one quote 10× another?”

The real question is:
What are you actually buying?

• Alignment with the partner who will build or design your product
• DFM baked in from Day 1 (not after three redesign loops)
• Whether incentives are to finish or to bill more hours
• Experience in your specific product category
• How many mistakes you will not have to pay for later

Quotes can go to infinity.
(Or sometimes to $0, which is equally dangerous lol.)

The cost of choosing the wrong partner is very real.

** For the practitioners who live this every day: what’s the widest spread you’ve seen, and what do you think actually drives those gaps?

Building 1 of something is hard.
Building 1,000,000 of that same thing is just as hard, but in a completely different way.

One requires creativity.
The other requires discipline, systems, and control.

This is where a lot of innovators get surprised.
They lock the design and think the hard part is over.

But in hardware, the real climb begins when you go from “this works once” to “this works every time.”

A lead came in today.
Source: “LinkedIn, Connor Bush.” (blush / hair flip)

But here’s the part I keep thinking about…

This wasn’t an overnight win.
And honestly, the “LinkedIn, Connor Bush” part was probably the least influential piece of the whole chain.

This one lead took YEARS to show up.

It took:
⭐ A teammate building trust with a customer years ago
⭐ Our engineers and ops absolutely crushing that program
⭐ A happy customer willing to do a case study
⭐ Our marketing manager turning that story into something real
⭐ Me spending four years building a network and posting consistently
⭐ Someone in my network engaging with a post this week
⭐ LinkedIn surfacing it to a stranger who needed what we do
⭐ And that stranger clicking through, reading the case study, and reaching out

It only looks like “a lead from LinkedIn.”
In reality, it was a long chain of small things done well by a lot of people.

There’s that old line: “It takes 20 years to become an overnight success.”
In hardware and sales, sometimes it just takes 20 steps.

Everything you do matters.
And eventually… it all stacks and hits at once.
--------
Anyways 🤷‍♂️ , come hang with us at #CES (link in comments)

Cancelled my mini camping vacation scheduled for next week.

Not because of grind culture.
Because hardware has real deadlines.

Balance is not always a 50/50 split.

Push now.
Camping in January.
Still balanced.

Goals met <3.

If you want to ship hardware by Black Friday 2026…

Start yesterday.

Love,
Connor

Join us! 

One of many #CES events we are hosting / co hosting. 

Space is limited across the various events. We will do our very best to accommodate all of our friends! 

Check out the link in the comments for the different SEACOMP Las Vegas happenings.

Join us for an exclusive gathering for leaders shaping the future of connected hardware at CES 2026!

We’re bringing together executives, founders, and directors for an elevated networking experience at The Venetian Resort.

This is your opportunity to step out of the show-floor noise and into conversations that will move your business forward - exchange insights on scaling strategies, building resilient supply chains, and what's next in the world of connected hardware.

Connected Devices + Conversations: A Networking Happy Hour
Tuesday, January 6, 2026 | The Venetian Resort | CES 2026
Register here: https://lnkd.in/gEEu2a8q

A special thank you to our sponsors Acorn Product Development, Mesh Systems, and intent for supporting this executive gathering!

Space is limited and attendance is by approval - register to get on the list today!

Hardware development is a lot like oil drilling: most people quit long before they hit the reservoir.

In oil exploration, you can pick the right field, be standing in exactly the right coordinates, and still walk away empty-handed.

Not because there’s no oil.

But because you didn’t go deep enough.

Hardware works the same way.

You can be:

solving the right problem

for the right user

with the right technology

in the right market

…and still miss simply because you only drilled one or two “holes." *

One prototype, one layout, one round of testing ... and then assumed there was nothing there. 🤷‍♂️ 

But the truth?

Most successful products weren’t overnight “discoveries.”
They were the 10th iteration, the 27th tweak, the 42nd failure, the moment the team finally broke through the rock and hit something real.

People think hardware dies from “wrong ideas.”

It usually dies from not drilling deep enough into the right idea.

In both oil and hardware:

The resource is there.

The payoff is real.

But only the patient operators get to see it.

If you’ve picked the right field…
Keep drilling.

Your reservoir is further down than you think.

Our team is heading to CES in January and we want to meet with you!

Let's meet in Las Vegas to chat about your product and how we can help support your goals. We'd love to connect on:

- scaling your production in 2026
- leveraging our Mexico facility for duty-free imports into the US
- improving your speed to market with accelerated NPI

Let SEACOMP be your manufacturing partner in 2026. See all the ways we can connect at CES and request a meeting here: https://lnkd.in/gH5E-bPD

Trying to enjoy the holidays
while also
trying to ship everything before the holidays
while also
trying to prep for CES
while also
trying to plan around CNY
while also
trying to be a human with a family.

It’s a vibe.

If you’re feeling the “festive chaos” today, I see you.
Happy Friday. 🤝

Thanksgiving (yeah, I know I’m late lol) and mass production have something in common:

99% isn’t good enough.

You can have:
- Every side dish perfect
- Table set
- Guests arriving
- Desserts ready to go

But if the turkey is two hours late?
Dinner is two hours late.

Hardware works the same way.

NPI is a chain of perfectly timed steps:
tooling ➡️ components ➡️ tests ➡️ assembly ➡️ packout

You can nail almost everything...
…but if one critical item slips, the entire schedule bends around it.

Great manufacturing isn’t about heroics.
It’s about orchestration.
Dependencies.
Timing.
Flow.

Thanksgiving looks effortless when everything hits the table at once (and when someone else is doing all of the prep lol).
So does mass production.

Neither is an accident.

Happy holidays! And if you're pushing a product toward 2026, now’s the time to start timing your “turkey.” 🦃⚙️

Lost my fantasy football matchup this week by 0.84 points.

And honestly… losing by less than 1 point feels worse than getting blown out by 40.

A blowout is clean. Clear. Obvious.
You shrug, you move on, you fix your roster.

But a tiny margin loss?
That sticks with you.
You replay every lineup choice.
“Should’ve swapped that flex…”
“Why didn’t I check injuries…”
It lingers because it was just close enough.

Hardware is the same.

A catastrophic failure forces you to stop.
Rebuild.
Fix the root cause.
Come back stronger.

But a small, non-catastrophic failure in the field?
A 1% return rate.
A flaky latch.
A charging bug that “only happens sometimes.”

That is the dangerous one.

Because it’s just tolerable enough to live with.
Just cheap enough to avoid solving.
Just annoying enough to hurt reputation and growth
but not painful enough to trigger full correction.

Small problems linger.
And lingering problems compound.

In fantasy football, it costs you a matchup.
In hardware, it can quietly cost you the whole season.

CES is around the corner, which means every hardware team on the planet is about to be in the same place for a week.

If you know a founder, engineer, or product leader who is working through any of this right now:

 ☑️ nearshoring / tariffs
 ☑️ scaling electronics manufacturing
 ☑️ choosing China vs Mexico for EMS/ CM
 ☑️ launching hardware in 2026

I’ll be in Vegas all week with our engineering and executive team.

If someone in your network would benefit from a short manufacturing conversation, I’m happy to make time. No pitch. Just clarity and guidance on what actually works heading into 2026.

If anyone comes to mind, feel free to tag or DM me.
And if you’re at CES, would love to say hi.

Connor 'Hardware Ecosystem All Around Awesome Guy' Bush 🫡 🖖 

* link in comments to sign up for cool events and such

If you're leading teams building connected devices, this is the room you’ll want to be in at CES! 

Meet other CEOs, founders, VPs, and product executives for a thoughtful break from the show. This networking event is designed for high-level discussion, insight sharing, and strategic relationship building. 

Connected Devices + Conversations: A Networking Happy Hour
Tuesday, January 6 @ The Venetian Resort during CES 2026
Please Register Here: https://lnkd.in/g2tjuMsd

Expect meaningful conversations on achieving operational excellence, accelerating speed-to-market, and the evolving landscape of connected devices. Space is limited and attendance is by approval - register now!

Thank you to Mesh Systems, intent, and Acorn Product Development for helping champion this executive community gathering during CES!

Evan Patterson 💅🏻

GTMadness

Co Host

Evan Patterson Consulting

Providing go-to-market marketing consulting, influencer marketing management and services, affiliate marketing management and services, product advising, social media marketing and management services and training, community marketing and management services and training, social selling and personal branding coaching, ghostwriting, copywriting, and public speaking services for B2B SaaS startups and adjacent businesses.

Freelance Digital Marketer

The Slaybook 😻

The Slaybook is a sassy, fun, educational podcast filled to the martini glass brim of high-energy conversations with natural innovators and friendly industry disruptors who bring both expertise and charisma to every episode.

Season 1 premiers Summer 2025!

Host

TerraRossa Impact Advisors

Executive Branding Consultant

SDR Leaders of USA

Partnerships Manager

SDR Leaders of EMEA

Fractional Head of Marketing

Rocket Science Branding

Fractional VP of Sales & Marketing

Inclusive Agile

Marketing Consultant

Worklyfe

Fractional Content & Community Marketing Leader

Across the Pond & Over the Rainbow

Co-Founder & Co-Host

Hire Me & Win In The Attention Economy💥 I Help Founders & Startups Grow Audiences 🔥 Ghostwriting • Personal Branding • Social Selling • Community Marketing • Content Strategy • B2B Influencers • Affiliate Programs

CURRENTLY BOOKING NEW FRACTIONAL MARKETING CLIENTS 👋🏻 You should really click the "...see more" button over there. 👉🏻

😉

👉 If you’re a B2B SaaS founder, CMO, or GTM lead looking to grow brand and pipeline without hiring a bloated marketing team—I’m your person.

🧠 I build and run lean, high-impact marketing machines for startups that want to punch above their weight.

Whether you need:

- A ghostwriter who can make your LinkedIn presence explode 💥
- A social-led content engine that actually drives pipeline
- A partner to launch influencer, affiliate, or co-marketing campaigns
- Or someone to figure out why your content flops harder than a 2008 Vine star…

🎯 I’ve got receipts and repeatable playbooks.

💡 Specialties (aka how I turn chaos into conversions):

- Fractional CMO / Head of Content & Community
- Founder/ELT Ghostwriting & Personal Brand Strategy
- B2B Social Media + Community Management (LinkedIn, Bluesky, Reddit, YouTube & more)
- Influencer & Affiliate Marketing for B2B
- Co-Marketing, Channel, & Strategic Partnerships
- Social Selling Enablement for Sales Teams
- Podcasts, Carousels, Shorts, Oh My 🎙️
- Making B2B Actually Fun (not a felony)

👥 Who I work with:

- B2B SaaS startups (Pre-Seed to Series B)
- GTM leaders ready to invest in visibility + growth
- Founders who know they need a marketing expert yesterday
- Impact-driven businesses
- Professional services and communities

📊 Why me? Glad you asked.

✅ Booked 70+ meetings/month via social selling as a BDR
✅ Ghostwritten for 100+ execs (without sounding like ChatGPT)
✅ Coached 500+ reps to increase booked meetings by 20%+
✅ Built a 26K+ audience from scratch—no bots, no BS
✅ Led 300+ influencer campaigns that generated millions of views and real pipeline
✅ Have a waiting list for my personal branding coaching (yes, it’s that good)

If we work together, we’re gonna laugh, grow fast, and make some damn good content while we’re at it.

DM me or comment on one of my posts—let’s chat. Worst case? You leave with 3 new ideas for free.

Ditch the gift cards, scrap the underutilized benefits package, and focus on the individuals in your organization instead.

Companies looking to improve performance and retention should care about helping people get further faster towards what matters most in their life. We make this easy with tools to create personalized incentives, meaningful recognition & self-defined benefits that help their people unlock "sacred funds" towards their personal life goals.

Employee Motivation Simplified.

Evan Patterson

Last week I saw a job posting for "Chief Vibes Officer." I laughed. Then I saw the salary: $275,000 plus equity.

I stopped laughing and started updating my LinkedIn.

Remember when "Social Media Manager" wasn't a real job? Those people who laughed are poor now.

The same thing's happening with these roles:

Emotional Intelligence Architect 
- Maps emotional journeys, not customer journeys. Figures out your checkout triggers abandonment anxiety at step 3. ($250-400K)

AI Whisperer 
- Makes AI sound like your smartest friend, not Wikipedia having a stroke. Anthropic's paying $335K for this.

Visibility Alchemist 
- SEO for AI. Makes ChatGPT cite you instead of your competitor. ($175-300K because 90% of AI citations come from search positions 21+, not top 5)

GTM Engineer 
- Treats customer acquisition like distributed systems. Clay's 6x growth last year? These people. ($200-325K)

Emotional Data Scientist 
- Turns feelings into SQL queries. Figured out Tuesday sadness predicts Thursday purchases. ($175-325K)

Your English degree? Suddenly worth $200K. 

Your philosophy minor? That's your secret weapon. 

Time "wasted" on Reddit learning how people think? Congrats, you're qualified.

How to get these jobs before they exist:

Pick one role
Start doing it for free
Measure impact in dollars
Post the case study
Turn down first 3 offers (lowball)
Take the 4th (2x current salary)

McKinsey says demand for emotional skills will grow 26% by 2030. But these jobs are hiring NOW. They just don't know what to call them yet.
Be the person who tells them.

When they ask, "Is this even a real job?" smile and say, "It is now."

Then send them an invoice.

The gold rush started. Most people don't know yet.

[See all 8 roles and exact scripts to pitch them →]

#FutureOfWork #EmergingCareers #AIJobs #CareerAdvice #JobTrends

“He’s the Joan Rivers of Marketing” 😎 Ghostwriter for Executives ✨ Freelance Marketer 🤖 Fractional CMO 😍 Personal Branding Services 👻 Growing B2B Brands 📈 AuDHD 🧠 LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍🌈 Cat Dad 🐈

A field guide to the professional titles that will make your parents ask, "That's a real job?" while you're buying your second Tesla Last week, I saw 

Open article: The Jobs That Don't Exist Yet (But Will Pay $300K Next Year) by Evan Patterson • 12 min read

The Jobs That Don't Exist Yet (But Will Pay $300K Next Year)

HELP ME?! I’m trying to hire a type of person I’ve never hired before. And I’m not totally sure I’m even writing the JD correctly. This is me building my leadership skills in public.

I create a lot of content and I have plans to produce even more.

Daily LinkedIn posts. Articles. A weekly-ish newsletter via an agency. Instagram carousels. Posts for X and Bluesky. Substack. Sometimes YouTube. I write everything myself and my designers handle visuals.

What I need now is someone who can take the finished content and publish it across every platform. On time. Correctly. Consistently. I need effectively need what I believe to be called marketing ops.

Not a writer.
Not a strategist.
Not a designer.
A pure operator.

I'm making the content and making sure all of the ingredients are there. I just need someone to ensure all the pieces of the puzzles (which I'm making) get put together and shipped.

Someone who manages posting, scheduling, formatting, asset integration, and quality control across all platforms. Someone who keeps the publishing engine running.

Here’s where I need feedback from people who have done this before:

• Does this scope make sense for a distribution-only role?
• Is 10 to 15 hours per week reasonable for this volume? or should I expect more?
• Is the compensation range realistic for US or Canada freelancers? What does this kind of service or person cost?
• Should I hire an individual or is this better for a small agency?
• If you have hired for this role before, what should I know?
• If this is your field, does this sound like work you take on?

There may also be future work with my clients. So the role could expand.

I put together a work-in-progress JD and I’d love your thoughts on it. If you want to rip it apart and give me feedback on it, or maybe you or your agency wants to pitch yourself, can you DM me or comment below? 

I'm looking for feedback from marketing leaders, too, who aren't the ones who want to hire, but are just the kinds of leaders who are open to helping out a entrepreneur  like me trying to figure out how to solve for this gap in my business (and potentially for my clients).

If you have advice, warnings, corrections, or recommendations, I’m all ears.

And if you do this kind of work, my DMs are open as well as the comments section.

Your outreach should be as interesting, fun, and insightful as my content, by the way. 

Stale, boring, canned, unoriginal, conservative is a quick way to lose my interest before you even get it.

“He’s the Joan Rivers of Marketing” ✨ Fractional CMO for Companies 😎 Personal CMO for the Ambitious🏆 Egregiously Unique, Audaciously Effective, Feral Specificity

Me at a gay bar last night… my friend: “Trump being our first out(ed) LGBTQ+ President was not on my BINGO Card.”

Me, a fellow Gay™️: “Really? With that much gender affirming care? Between the Jersey Shore look, the cheap wig, an Vance’s eyeliner, we all know who’s having the ice salad and who’s ordering the steak, if you know you know, wink wink nudge nudge.”

A gay guy showing his straight girl friend around the bar: *spits drink out laughing onto girl by accident*

Me: “See? Even we spit. Donnie Josephine Trump sure as h*ll doesn’t.”

Ready isn't a feeling, it's a choice.

Do your due diligence, sure, but you do not have to have it all figured it out. 

Launch that business, get it wrong, reiterate, get the feedback, churn that customer, drop that ball, live and learn.

Being ready doesn't mean you won't make mistakes.

Being ready means you're deciding that you need to allow yourself to do your best, which means you will make mistakes, and you will learn from those mistakes, and you will keep doing this til the day you die.

You got this, boo.

Fractional CMO for Companies ✨😎 Personal CMO for the Audacious 🏆 Egregiously Unique, Audaciously Effective, Feral Specificity 🌈 LGBTQ+ & AuDHD 🧠 2x Cat Dad 🐈 🐈‍⬛

A lot of founder-led companies stall out for one simple reason: They hire Business Development before they build Marketing. BD is not a band-aid for founder burnout, folks... it is a scaling function. Marketing is the prerequisite.

If you don’t have:
• positioning
• ICP
• a narrative
• content
• demand-gen
• enablement
• a POV

…BD will fail.

I have zero success stories of the “BD first, marketing later” model working. Not one.

It’s a sequencing issue.

Your decisions determine whether you grow — or stall.

Every founder thinks they’re the exception. And every time, I watch the exact same story play out: A founder-led company hits that weird middle stage 

Open article: Why Founder-Led Companies Stall Out: The Fatal Mistake of Hiring BD Before Building Marketing by Evan Patterson • 4 min read

Why Founder-Led Companies Stall Out: The Fatal Mistake of Hiring BD Before Building Marketing

I don’t talk about doing marketing in my content because I do marketing as my content. 

Which marketer do you want to hire?

Someone who tells you how or someone or does it?

I don’t ask how you found me when you book a meeting with me because I don’t know how. 

I ask how you found me when you booked a meeting with me because I was already pretty sure I knew how, I was making sure my marketing was working as expected. 

That’s the difference. 

Don’t forget that this difference the next time you go looking for the cheapest marketer over the right marketer. 😉 

(Hi, I ghostwrite and manage the social media strategies of personal brands, not just companies. My ideal client is some who is as audacious as this post; if not more, or even laughs at the idea at calling this post audacious…

Or knew all of that before even reading that 

Or didn’t know any of that but knew that they needed to hire someone who did

And then realized I just made they realize I know they know that by making this weird meta style post?

And you’re probably hearing a voice in your head while reading this?

…

Or you think this post is an acid trip. 

Either way. I got your attention, held it, and got a response out of you. 

Isn’t that just what a good marketer does?

(No, they also get money out of you, but I just won’t do it for you for free…


…I’m too busy doing it for myself with this post.

…and every other post, too?)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how people treat AI like a magic wand for their content. They drop a half-formed idea into a prompt and hope it comes out Pulitzer-ready on the other side. It’s funny in a way, because the tool isn’t the issue. The thinking is.

AI doesn’t replace your taste. It magnifies it. If the idea is fuzzy, the output is fuzzy. If the voice is vague, the draft is vague. If the strategy is confused, the content shows every inch of that confusion. Nothing gets hidden. Everything gets louder.

This is why people work with me. It’s not because I “use AI.” It’s because I know how to shape ideas into something people want to read. I know how to take a rambling voice note and carve out a sharp point. I know how to turn someone’s personality into something that feels alive on the page. The tools speed up the work, but the judgment decides the outcome.

A lot of leaders are about to learn that the gap isn’t between humans and AI. The real gap is between people who know how to think through their ideas and people who hope the model will do that part for them.

Strong ideas still win. Strong voices still win. Strong editing still wins.

The volume is going up everywhere. Clarity is the only thing that still cuts.

Philip Lakin had the audacity to send me into an emotional cartwheel of existential thinking with this post.

I ask myself constantly if I’m actually good at what I do or if I’m just a persistent raccoon with WiFi. Years of working with founders taught me the truth. Nobody knows what they’re doing. Not the executives. Not the investors. Not the people whose lives look perfectly color-coded. Everyone is building as they go. Everyone is guessing with conviction.

There’s something freeing about that.

My job lets me see people in their real form. Brilliant, kind, chaotic humans doing their best with instinct, caffeine, and whatever emotional glue keeps the wheels on. Somehow it works. Watching people care that much makes the whole world feel softer.

I’m working with someone now who has fifteen more years of experience than I do. A man who has managed multi-hundred-billion-dollar portfolios. He speaks fluent acronym and strategy. He trusts my work anyway. He hands me decisions that feel enormous, and I keep up.

My growth came from saying what adults avoid.

 “I don’t know what that means.”
 “Explain it again.”
 “I need time to learn this.”
 “Translate that acronym for me.”

Learning starts the moment pretending ends. Every skill I have was built on top of something I did awkwardly or incorrectly. Curiosity gave me a career. Honesty gave me momentum.

There’s another part I never gloss over. I’ve hurt feelings. I’ve offended people. I’ve lost trust I valued. I’ve made choices that haunt me at random hours. I wish some things hadn’t happened. I don’t wish away what they taught me. Those moments forced me to grow both a spine and a heart. They pushed me toward the person I’m becoming.

Life finally feels wide again. My friendships feel like home. Comedy is back. Poetry is back. I’m looking for dance classes. I want to try spoken word. I’m researching dual citizenship like someone who finally believes they get to imagine a future instead of surviving a week. Hope feels solid for the first time in years.

Imposter syndrome gets loud when your life expands. Mine still shows up. The difference now is the voice I choose to listen to.

You’re allowed to grow past your past.
You’re allowed to learn in full view of the world.
You’re allowed to build the next version of yourself without apologizing for the old one.
You’re allowed to be proud of who you’re becoming.

Even if the journey here was messy or unflattering.

The mess is what makes it real.

taplio

The Battle

Connor Bush

Evan Patterson

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Performance ScoreConnor Bush's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreEvan Patterson's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Connor Bush

Evan Patterson

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Connor Bush's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreEvan Patterson's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreConnor Bush's LinkedIn Performance