I was five years old the day my grandmother told me I could pick one thing to take home. I picked an American flag. She asked me why. I told her, "Because I'm gonna be a Soldier someday." I could not have known where that sentence would take me. But the kid who said it already knew who he was.
I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, raised by my Mom, my Grandma, and my Pa. Baseball, the woods, the pool, family. My Pa used to tell me I was gifted, that I was going to do amazing things in this world. I did not understand what he saw back then. I think I am only now beginning to.
I gave the next seventeen years of my life to the United States Army. People picture the military as one long list of orders. That is not what it gave me. It gave me a doctorate in leadership, taught by some of the finest human beings this country has ever produced. I served under leaders who could walk into a room and make you feel like the only two people in the world. That kind of presence, that kind of care for another person, you never forget it. And I learned that trust is not something you teach. It is something you earn getting wet in the same rain, cold on the same freezing nights, standing next to the person on your left and the person on your right. That foundation still lives in me.
The Army taught me the thing I build everything on now. Every position I ever held, I wanted to hand off stronger than the day I walked in. That was the whole reason I joined in the first place, to be part of something bigger than myself. There is a phrase that still gets me worked up in about two seconds flat: "that is just how we have always done it." I am not wired to accept that. If something can be better, it should be, and I have never once believed the way we found it is the way it has to stay.
I learned to love failure, too. Most people run from it. I think it is one of life's unsung heroes. Without it we would all be mediocre, following the flock. But if you can endure it, truly embrace it, that is where the real growth happens. That is where comfort zones stop existing and ordinary people do extraordinary things. It is what makes success feel so damn good when it finally comes. So when I set my mind on an objective, I do not entertain the possibility of failure. Not because I believe I cannot fail, but because I have already decided what the outcome is going to be.
For a long time I measured my own success by one thing: the seeds I planted. The leaders I helped shape. The people I might have made a little better, as leaders and as human beings. That is still how I measure it. I have never really counted my life by what I accomplish. I count it by what I leave behind in other people.
And then it ended. Seventeen years, and one day the mission was over.
I will be honest about what that did to me. Simple: I lost my purpose. My drive, my ambition, the thing that got me out of bed to be the best Soldier and leader I could be, it was gone. It took me years to retool, to refocus, to find my calling on the other side.
I tried working for other people. I was disappointed almost every single time. The last job I held before ALEETH was the finest example of toxic leadership I have ever seen, and worse than that, a catastrophic failure of a man. I decided right there that the world has no place for people like that. And instead of complaining about it, I wanted to do something about it. The Soldier surfaced. The mission came into focus. That man's failures were all the motivation I needed to kick the door in and build an organization that would never stand for it, done right from the foundation up, because that is what the world deserves. We must never be defined by the weak. Those of us lucky enough to have the skill set to make a difference, we go and do it.
That is where ALEETH comes from.
I have spent my whole life thinking about what happens when power lands in the hands of people, or systems, that are not ready for it. Responsibility. Authority. Preparation. Accountability. That is the exact problem the world is walking into with artificial intelligence, machines that no longer only advise but act. Everyone is racing to make them more capable. Almost no one is building the thing that proves they were governed, that an action was authorized, and that the record cannot be quietly rewritten later. That is what we build at ALEETH. That is the next mission. And it is bigger than a company. It is the thing I intend to leave behind.
If I could stand in front of that five-year-old holding the flag, I would tell him he had it right the whole time. The uniform changes. The mission never did.
And I think that little boy would look at what I am building now, look me dead in the eye, and say, "See? I told you."