I’m Done and Why
As you may have read somewhere, I resigned as Managing Partner of Exotics at Redmond Town Center after almost eighteen years of volunteer service. Why I resigned is on my Substack. I'm not going to rehash it here. This post is about something more useful. Eighteen years of building one thing teaches you a few things worth writing down, so here are mine.
The idea was mine. Seattle didn't have a car community back then, just a lot of fighting on the brand forums, one brand against the next, and I kept thinking we're all car guys. We all loved machines of all kinds. That was the whole premise. I did the early research through 2008. Vic, my co-founder, came in late that year, felt the same pull to build something, and we launched it together. He was working full-time at Apple, so the day-to-day became my full-time job, and it stayed that way for most of the early eighteen years.
The first thing it taught me is the one I'd put on a wall. Trying to be everything to everyone fails. It fails for a car event and it fails for any product you will ever bring to market. E@RTC was never aimed at everyone, and we knew that going in. We aimed it at a few, the people who would drive a long way for it, and we trusted that others would come out behind them. They did. The temptation, every single year, is to widen the gate so more people are happy. Don't. The thing that makes a few people travel for you is the same thing that makes it not for everyone. Widen the gate and you lose both.
The second lesson cost me more, and I only see it clearly now. Put your name on what you build. I didn't. Vic and I stayed in the background on purpose, because we wanted the event to be about the community and not about us, and we wanted credit to land on the exact person who earned it. That instinct was half right. Crediting people accurately matters, and I still do it. The car criteria page was mostly Dan Putnam's work, with a few edits from me, and Dan should be named for it. Thanks, Dan. I personally wrote everything else, from end to end.
But staying invisible doesn't keep a thing pure. It just leaves a vacuum, and a vacuum gets filled. Over the years I watched people claim to be founders who weren't, and claim pivotal roles they never played, and the reason they could is that I had left the space open. Credit doesn't stay empty. If you don't claim your part of what you built, someone else will claim it for you, and they will not be careful about it. Modesty is fine. Anonymity is a gift to the wrong people.
Here is the part that isn't a lesson, just the truth. My real job for eighteen years was guarding the core of the thing, keeping it close to the roots that made people travel for it. That job runs on energy and on standing, and the day I no longer had enough of either to do it well was the day the honest move was to hand it to someone who does. So I have. The transition will run smoothly. I will see to that.
Then I'm out. It's time to go have some fun again.
I had Claude help me write this one, something I never do except to proof read. There was so much I wanted to say, but Claude said no, I shouldn’t. I then suggested that Claude rewrite what I wrote, and that’s what you see above.