Planting Roots

This blog has a new home, and a new address: brandonrlipman.com. Old lipmanb.com links still work. They just forward here now.

It is a small thing. It also feels bigger to me than a website should.

Why now

I have been in tech for over ten years. I have worked with top Y Combinator startups and with public companies. I lived in San Francisco, then New York, and now I am home in Cincinnati. I have sat with founders on their best days and on the days when an engine fails mid-flight.

And some days I still feel like an imposter. I think most people do, even the ones who look like they have it all figured out. Especially them, maybe.

What has changed is that I am getting more confident in who I am and what matters to me. For a long time I was the youngest guy in the room, and I carried that with me. I worked harder to prove I belonged there. I don't feel like the youngest guy in the room anymore. I am proud of the leader and the person I have become, and I am okay saying that out loud.

The other reason is OffDeck. We rebranded from Redwhale and launched, and for the first time in a long time I feel ready to step out in public. For years I kept my head down and did the work. The work is still the point. But it feels okay now to be online, as myself, with my name on it.

The old blog didn't do that. I put it on Posthaven in March on purpose: simple, almost retro. I still love that. But it said almost nothing about who was writing it.

Feel the ground

Right now, it feels like we are all looking for ground to stand on. Everything is moving ungodly fast. One moment AI is coming for our jobs. The next, it is coming for all of us. An hour later, it can't do anything useful without us. It is hard to know which way is up.

I see it every week with the founders I work with. The ground under their plans shifts every few months. Last quarter's strategy looks quaint. Everyone has an opinion and nobody has a map.

What I keep coming back to is fundamentals. Companies that last are built on things that don't change much: knowing your customer, telling the truth about your numbers, building systems you can trust, and people who show up for each other. That is the idea underneath OffDeck. It is why we are not VC-backed, and why I am fine with that. Being grounded doesn't mean standing still. It means knowing what you stand on.

This site is a nod to that. Same typefaces and deep teal as OffDeck. One steady grid, with every section lined up on the same edge. A lot of room. A single green dot at the top that says "from the front lines." Nothing moves. Nothing shouts. I wanted it to feel like a place you could put your feet down for a minute.

I am not trying to sell you anything here. Will I post on a schedule? No. Some months will be quiet. But whatever I post will be me.

The root mark

My favorite detail is the small mark in the corner, and it started at our wedding.

I recently married Maria. Her wedding gift to me was a piece from Rookwood Pottery. If you are not from here: Rookwood has been making pottery in Cincinnati since 1880, and it is about as Cincinnati as it gets. (It was founded by a woman named Maria, too. I like that.)

The piece is a hand-painted tree, and it shows the whole thing, roots and all. Most art shows you the branches. This one shows you what holds it up. Most of a tree's strength is in the part you never see, and I keep coming back to that. It is true of trees. It is true of companies. It is true of marriages, I am learning.

So when it was time to replace the old "BL" square on this site, I wanted a root. We drew four directions: a calm taproot, a root with a green signal at its tip, a root system that looked like a network diagram, and a single wandering root.

I liked the green highlight on B and the feeling of D, so we tried putting them together: D, with B's green dot at the tip, four different ways.

None of them beat the first D. Adding the dot made it busier, not better. The plain one, a single root wandering down and splitting into a couple of rootlets, felt the most like the tree Maria gave me. Imperfect, a little asymmetric, real. So that is the one.

Every time I see it now, it reminds me of Maria, and of a simple idea: planting roots, and being real, is beautiful.

The same person everywhere

One part of this you will never see. More and more, people meet you through Google or an AI assistant before they meet you in person. Those systems assemble you from scraps: your site, LinkedIn, Wikidata, your company's page. When the scraps disagree, the machines guess.

So now they don't have to. This site carries everything on my LinkedIn, links every profile I have, and describes me exactly the way offdeck.com does. Wikidata points back here. It is the rest of this post, written for machines: be the same person everywhere.

Every page also has its own share card, so a post looks like itself on LinkedIn or X. And the blog has its own page now, at /blog. I called it Dispatches.

One thing to take with you

This isn't just for founders. It is for anyone who has ever felt like they had to perform to belong.

Be who you are. You don't need to show off. You don't need the perfect title, the perfect launch or the perfect post. The people worth having in your life, and in your company, will find you when you show up as yourself, and the rest will sort itself out.

Have faith in yourself. Believe in yourself. Plant your roots somewhere, and let them grow.

Well, this is it for this post.