Showing Your Cards

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5:14

19 May 2026

A few days ago I was on investor call, and we did not talk about the company. We talked about our families, our journeys, our reasons. We had given each other things most friends do not have.

I am turning that hour over, trying to understand why I keep choosing this. Why I was in a fundraising call and bypassed the fundraise. Why I felt reserved for the rest of the day.

I trained for twenty years in a profession built to remove uncertainty from the body. Diagnose, research, decide. Now I am introducing a technology by making uncertainty on purpose, every day, by choice, and the part that keeps surprising me is that I am better at it than I was at the other thing. I have learned that some risks are regrettable if not taken.

The risk I am writing about is the smallest one and the hardest. The risk of being seen.

Everyone I know is carrying a version of themselves into rooms. So am I. The version has my credentials, my achievements, my title, and now a new technology. It walks into a room and tells someone how to treat me. The version is useful. It is how I got taken seriously fast enough to do the work I was actually meant to do.

The version is not the same as the person, and after almost twenty years of running it I notice this version gets nodded at. The person gets lonely.

Here is what I mean by lonely. You are in meetings. People want your time and your read on their pitch. You are useful. Almost none of them know you.

That is the cost of the version. It is also the version’s whole purpose. The version exists to be useful at scale. It exists so that I do not have to be re-known by every new room I enter. It is efficient. And it is hollow in exactly the way efficiency tends to be.

So sometimes, in some rooms, with some people, I put it down. I just stop performing. I say the thing I would say if there were no record. I admit the doubt I would normally route around. I tell the story I would normally edit. I let the other person watch me think about something I have not finished thinking about.

And almost always (this is the part I am still working out) the other person does the same. I have not figured out why. Maybe going first gives the other person permission. Maybe they were waiting for an opening. Two people who walked into a room as their versions and somewhere in the middle agreed, without saying it, to set the versions down on the table between us and talk to each other instead. That is the practice. That is what I mean by showing cards.

It does come at a cost. I found people who write about vulnerability tend to make it sound free, and it is not free. When I put my version down I have given someone material. They could use it. They could see it as weakness. They could repeat what I said in rooms I am not in. The reservation moment afterward is my nervous system telling me I have just done a thing my training optimized me to avoid.

I spend time with people in their last moments. The dignity is already gone. They tell me about the version they lived and the version they wish they had. They were valued and not known, and they can feel the difference at the end. For a long time that was something I observed in other people, patients on the ward at night, and then, on New Year's Eve of 2024, my own mother in a hospital room, certain she would not survive the surgery ahead of her. She did survive it. But that night I understood that even I knew a version of her, not the person underneath. You can be valued your whole life and not known. I do not want to reach the end and find that is what happened to me.

I am still trying to learn how to read the room before I commit. It seems there are two ways the practice fails. One is that the other person never puts their version down, and I find myself stranded, exposed alone, while they observe me through the slats of their own composure. The other is more dangerous. The other person performs putting their version down. They say the right kind of vulnerable thing, in the right register, with the right pause before the word that is supposed to land. And nothing about them is at risk.

The first failure is easy to spot. The second I have learned the hard way. The tell, when I have it right, is cost. The person who is actually setting their version down looks different. Quieter, more alert. Something about them is slower afterward. The person who is performing it leaves the room exactly as they entered. Whatever they confessed cost them nothing because it was already part of the act.

Specificity is the other tell. Real disclosures are specific. They have a date, a name, a smell. Performed disclosures are categories. *Imposter syndrome. Burnout. The pressure of leadership.* Words that sound like the shape of a confession without containing one.

I have been wrong about this. I have trusted people who turned out to be skilled performers of the thing I was trying to do honestly. The alternative is to never try.

I cannot do this work alone. The work is harder than I expected. The people who have stayed with me are the ones who have been willing to put their versions down too. I have co-founders and advisors I trust. I have a partner, friends, and family who know me underneath the version. None of those people are with me because they were impressed by my version. They are with me because at some point, in some room, I put it down, and they did the same, and we discovered that the people underneath could work together. Doing it this way makes life colorful and alive. The people who could meet me there kept choosing me back.

The people who could not meet me there fell away on their own. It is hard to pin what made the difference. Some saw vulnerability as weakness. Some were distracted by materialistic noise. Some were still searching for an opportunity that was already in front of them. I began to see them as people on a different track.

I am putting this out publicly because writing it and then leaving it in my journal would be a smaller version of the same problem I am writing about.

.........

Me at seven. Before any of this.