Year End/Year Beginning Report
2025/6, from New Orleans
I’ve always liked the end of the year.
Not because it’s sentimental, and not because it promises anything clean or new, but because it forces a pause. A moment to actually look at what you did, what worked, what didn’t, and what you’re carrying forward whether you like it or not.
ACORN used to enforce that pause. Every year there were year-end, year-beginning meetings. People came in from all over the country. We argued, evaluated, owned mistakes, took responsibility, and reset priorities. It wasn’t soft. It was practical. If you didn’t do that kind of accounting, the work suffered.
Judaism has a version of this too. The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about reckoning—looking clearly at yourself, your choices, the harm you caused, the good you did, and what repair actually requires. Not theatrics. Not performance. Just honesty.
I find myself in that same posture now.
Because if I’m honest, we’re in quite a moment.
Not in a dramatic way. In a structural way.
A long time ago—in 2009—my friend James Griffith sat me down, along with my partners, in the data center at Maxwell Worthington LLC. He said something that stuck with me:
Everything built in the last decade is going to break in the next decade. And it’s only going to speed up.
Tomorrow took longer than he thought. Longer than I thought. But tomorrow is here now.
You can feel it. Institutions straining. Systems cracking in places people didn’t expect. Costs going up while trust goes down. Technology accelerating faster than social norms can adapt. People sensing that something fundamental is shifting, even if they can’t yet name what it is.
When things break at this scale, they don’t break evenly. They break sideways. They break people you didn’t expect to break. They break assumptions that felt permanent. And they often break quietly at first.
That’s the context I’m entering this year with.
For me, clarity means a few simple things.
First: I’m focused on building.
That’s always been true of me. Organizing. Businesses. Technology. Art. I don’t sit still well. Right now, that means building technology that I believe—deeply—can be useful, smaller, more accurate, more efficient, and more humane than the brute-force excesses that defined the early AI race. I’m proud of the people I’m building with, especially my friend and co-founder Correy Kowall, whose way of thinking has been anticipating this inflection point for a long time.
Second: I’m paying attention to where I live.
New Orleans is in a hard moment. I’ve been coming here for decades, long before I moved here eighteen years ago. I fell in love with the music, the art, the way people show up for each other when things get strange or heavy. Right now, due to a federal immigration crack down people are helping neighbors eat and stay safe. People are protecting each other where they can. There’s tension in the air. There’s fear in places it doesn’t belong. And there’s also decency and love that washes across the entire area.
That contrast matters to me.
Third: I’m clear that speaking up still matters.
Doing the right thing still matters. Not loudly. Not performatively. But steadily. This country was built on the idea that every person counts, that no one needs permission to belong, that power doesn’t get to decide who is fully human. We’ve fought wars over that. We don’t need to relearn the lesson the hard way.
I’m not naïve about how difficult the year ahead may be. I’m also not interested in despair. If democracy actually means something than it has to be something that most people see as fair, transparent, and effective. It is clear that for the average American things are not getting better.
Thank you for reading my stories.
If you stay with me this year, that’s what you’ll get. No hype. No pretending things are simpler than they are. Just a clear-eyed account of building, breaking, rebuilding, and trying to do the right thing in the middle of a complicated moment.
That’s how I’m entering the year.
Grateful.