companies as self expression

The Cliffs at Etretat by Claude Monet

I have always been the sort of person who needs to know. The kind of child who peeled apart flower petals to see the bruised flesh beneath, who cracked open seashells and watched the soft thing inside recoil. I wanted to understand—why this shape, why this color, why this insistence on being alive.

When I was younger, my family would take summer trips to the Croatian coast. The rocks there weren’t soft and smooth like American beaches. They were sharp, bone-colored, unapologetic. The cherries in the ice cream tasted like cherries, not like sugar pretending to be fruit. Time stretched differently. There was room for boredom.

I spent hours wading in the sea, poking at strange creatures—sea cucumbers, anemones, urchins. The cucumbers unsettled me most. Ugly things, formless and limp, yet alive. How? I prodded them, pulled them apart, put them back together. Trying to understand.

I have spent much of my life like this—believing the answers were always somewhere else, in something I had yet to touch.

Last week, I was in Berlin (part of the Brightdale Fellowship), moving between offices and cafes and conversations, meeting people who had built things from nothing. Founders who hadn’t waited for permission, hadn’t even waited to feel qualified. They just did it.

How do you stand at the edge of the unknown and step forward?

They only smiled.

Because they had to. Because the thing inside them wanted out. Because the world, as it was, did not fit quite right, and they had no choice but to reach forward and reshape it with their own two hands.

To build is to reveal yourself, to carve yourself into existence. A kind of self-expression. A kind of ritual.

Every company had its own shape. Its own rhythm. Its own way of being. Some are built on boldness, on sharp teeth and momentum. Others on precision, on a quiet kind of mastery. Neither is right or wrong, only true or untrue to the ones who build them.

The companies that fail are the ones that bend too much to outside forces, flattening themselves to the market as they optimize for averages. Others cling so fiercely to their vision that they refuse to adapt at all—until, eventually, the world leaves them behind.

The hardest and rarest thing? To do both. To remain unmistakably yourself while still learning, growing, evolving. That’s the tightrope. And walking it takes more than intelligence. It takes intention. The best way to remember intention, is through rituals. In the liminality, in the shifting, we have to decide what remains. Ritual is a way of holding on, of pressing oneself into the world, and saying “this is what matters, this is worth preserving.”

Without rituals, a company no longer knows what it believes in. It becomes a creature of the current, shifting with every tide, bending under every wind. It optimizes for what is immediate, never pausing to ask what is enduring. And so it becomes a contradiction: successful by metrics, but hollow in meaning. Respected, but unrecognizable to itself. It wins, but the victory tastes of ash. Like a life that is ruthlessly productive but unbearably empty, where each moment is accounted for, yet none truly lived. Because a company, like a person, is not just what it does. It is what it insists on remembering.

The challenge, then, is choosing what to keep. What has been amazing, was seeing all the different aspects companies chose. Aware had soft lavender walls, meditation cushions, a space designed for reflection and deep thinking. Their rituals were ones of presence—slow, intentional, structured around care. Enpal was pure momentum—live leaderboards flashing, sales calls overlapping, fist bumps, energy, movement. Their rituals were ones of action—urgency, performance, getting things done. Langdock was quiet, white, minimalist, a company that spoke in even tones and careful precision. Their rituals were ones of mastery—perfection, refinement, stillness. Antler felt raw and electric, bold ideas thrown into the air like sparks. Their rituals were ones of creation—boldness, disruption, the thrill of the unfinished.

Towards the end of the week, we sat in workshops designed to slow us down, to turn us inward, to make us listen to ourselves, to each other. One exercise: face the person beside you and ask—what do you truly want? Again. Again. Again. At first, I was reciting answers that sounded good, but somewhere in the middle, I got stuck. Because the truth—the real, stripped-down truth—was something so simple that it startled me.

I just want to be myself.

Not a more optimized version. Not someone sleeker, sharper, more palatable.Not someone else’s definition of success. Just… me.

And it scared me how radical that felt. Because when had it become so hard to want something so natural? When had I learned to believe that me—as I am—wasn't enough?

And I realized, sitting there, that this is what makes a company great too. It’s about being so unmistakably yourself that nothing else could ever replace you. And that doesn’t come from a secret formula or an expensive playbook. Greatness is not a matter of dominance, but of distinction. A company does not succeed by outpacing others, but by inhabiting a space no other could fill. It is not a matter of height, but of depth—of roots curling so stubbornly into the earth that nothing else could grow in its place.

At the heart of every company, I think, is this longing: to be fully seen, to exist in a way that feels true. To choose problems that mean something. To build alongside people who feel like home. To take an idea and shape it into something real, to make something of yourself and offer it to the world, not as a calculation, but as a declaration:

This is me. Do you see me?