I’ve spent my entire life in and around family businesses. In our family, dinner had a suspicious habit of turning into a board meeting. The minutes were terrible, but the pie was usually better.

My dad was always coming up with ideas and plans. New businesses. Better ways to run old ones. Fixes for problems nobody else had noticed yet. He could take a half-formed thought, turn it over a few times, and hand it back with three practical improvements and one entirely new problem.

He was the person I talked to when an idea started following me around.

I could bring him the version that made no sense yet. He would poke at it, improve it, ask the annoying useful question, or turn it into something completely different before the coffee got cold.

Now he’s gone.

The ideas, inconsiderately, kept showing up.

For a while I kept them to myself. This turns out to be poor inventory management. So Teddy is the new arrangement: I put the ideas out into the ether and see what happens.

Teddy turns the crank on a homemade machine that launches light bulbs, charts, gears, and paper airplanes into the night sky.
Current distribution strategy: put ideas into the ether and see who catches one.

Some are about business. Some are about technology. Some are about old things that work better than the new thing meant to replace them. Some may be elaborate excuses to draw a bear near a machine with too many buttons.

What this is not

This is not thought leadership. I have thoughts, and occasionally they escape. It is closer to a public workbench: unfinished plans, useful mistakes, tools I like, things I cannot stop thinking about, and the occasional screw left over after assembly.

What family business does to a person

It teaches you some odd habits. Every complaint is customer research. Every empty building is a possible location. Every long drive can become a strategy session without warning. There is no clean line between work and life; there is only someone saying, “While I’ve got you…”

I loved that. I still do.

Maybe an idea here finds somebody who wants to argue with it. Maybe somebody builds a better version. Maybe it just rattles around the internet attic until the right person opens the right box.

All of those count.

Dad would probably have notes.