Seven Thousand Strong: Notes on Stepping Into the Frame

The number turned over sometime this week. Seven thousand people on LinkedIn. I noticed it the way you notice a birthday you’d half forgotten was coming, a little late, a little surprised. And then I sat with it for much longer than I expected.

I want to write this one differently. No framework, no case study holding it up. Just some notes in the order they come to me, because what I’m thinking about is my own relationship with being seen, and I’m not sure I have it worked out yet.

I was always the one behind the board

For most of my career, I thought of myself as a strategist in the most literal sense of the word. I moved the pieces. Someone else stood at the podium, gave the keynote, became the face of the launch. I was more than fine with that arrangement, because I liked it. I think best when nobody is watching me think.

There was a practical reason too, and it had a lot to do with where I chose to work. I spent years in crypto and the wider frontier of technology, an industry that moves faster than its own reputation. One quarter the whole sector is celebrated; the next it’s dismissed, for reasons that have nothing to do with the team or the quality of what they’re building. I chose teams I believed in, and I still stand behind that work. But I understood early that in a young and volatile industry, the headlines about the category can overwhelm the story of any single company. And whoever stands at the front absorbs that weather personally.

Staying in the background gave me room to commit fully to early teams without tying my name to every swing of the market around them. I could bring my network into the room quietly, make the right introduction, call in a favour when a founder needed a door opened. The company carried the public story while I focused on the strategy underneath it. For a nascent startup, that discretion was often more useful than another loud voice. What they needed most was someone who could open doors without making a scene of walking through them.

Google was a different kind of quiet

The one exception, or perhaps the one variation, was Google. I stayed behind the scenes there too, but for completely different reasons. At a company of that size, every public word carries a weight you can’t fully see from the inside. There are comms reviews, safety reviews, legal reviews. And behind all of them sits the knowledge that a careless sentence from the wrong person can become a compliance problem, or a line in an analyst note about the stock. Silence stops being a personal style. It becomes part of the job itself.

I respected that then, and I still respect it now. It taught me that visibility always has a cost, and that somebody pays it, even when the person speaking isn’t the one who ends up paying.

I’ll also say plainly: there were bumps along the way, at other companies, in the moments when I did step forward as part of the public face of the work. They’re nothing I want to relive in an essay. But they shaped me, and they’re part of why I kept choosing the back of the room for as long as I did.

Now the audience is part of the hire

Here’s what I keep noticing, especially in AI companies, especially in marketing roles. The job description asks for strategy, execution, team leadership: all the familiar things. And then, somewhere in the conversation, it becomes clear that the company is also hiring your audience.

They want someone who already has a voice, with enough authority that they can put that person on a stage next month, send them to the community call, let them post about the product knowing it will land, because people already listen. The followers become part of the offer. Sometimes explicitly. More often in the way an interviewer’s eyes light up when they realise how many people read what you write.

I understand why this is happening. A young AI company has no history and very little trust to borrow from. A person with an established voice lends them some of both from day one. It makes sense as a strategy. I’d probably recommend it to a founder myself.

But it changes what it means to be a professional in this field. The personal brand used to be a pleasant extra, something you built on the side if you enjoyed it. Now it sits much closer to a mandate. Anyone who wants the interesting roles at the companies building what comes next is expected to cultivate a public self: actively, consistently, and far more deliberately than any of us had to before. For someone who built a career on being the chess player rather than the piece everyone watches, that’s a strange thing to absorb.

Are we all starting to sound the same?

The other thread I can’t let go of is what this public self is supposed to look like. Because the expectations are there, and anyone who’s spent time on LinkedIn can feel them pressing in.

There’s a way you’re supposed to write: short lines, a confident hook, a lesson at the end. A way you’re supposed to look: the right headshot, the right conference lanyard, the right lighting in the video. A way you’re supposed to behave: generous but never too soft, opinionated but never risky, visible in all the right comment threads. And more quietly, there’s even a sense of what your background should be. Which schools. Which companies. Which kind of story about where you came from.

I find myself wondering whether all this visibility is producing a plurality of voices or a very narrow one. When everybody is required to have a personal brand, and everybody studies the same handful of accounts to learn how to build it, it seems quite possible we end up with thousands of versions of the same character, each wearing a slightly different job title.

I don’t have the answer. I suspect it depends on how many people are willing to sound a little unlike the template while knowing it may cost them some reach. And I suspect the people least able to take that risk are the ones whose backgrounds already don’t match the picture. That bothers me far more than any question about my own comfort in front of a camera.

So here I am, in the frame

Here’s the funny thing. While I was telling myself I preferred the back of the room, I was quietly building something that faces forward. Moon Foundry is an editorial brand with my name all over it. I published a book, and there are more projects on the way that will put me in front of people in ways I would have avoided a few years ago. Somewhere along the way, the strategist started stepping into the frame. I’m only now admitting it in writing.

Maybe the truest version of this is that I didn’t choose visibility because the market demanded it. I found I had things I wanted to say, and saying them meant being seen. The market simply happened to arrive at the same place at the same time.

What I want to do with it is be one more distinct voice, not a better copy of the template. Write the way I think. Say the things that don’t fit neatly into a post format. Keep some of the strategist’s instinct for what belongs behind the curtain, because not everything needs to become content.

And I want to say thank you properly. To the seven thousand, and especially to the people who write to me directly, who leave a kind comment, or who push back on something I wrote and make it better in the process. I read all of it. It’s a large part of why stepping forward has felt far less frightening than I expected.

I don’t know yet exactly what comes next. More writing, certainly. Probably video. Hopefully live events, where I can meet some of you in a room instead of a feed. I’d like to work it out together with you rather than on your behalf.

Which leaves me with the question I started with, only slightly rearranged: if being seen is now part of the work, what kind of person do I want to be seen as, and how much of the chess player do I get to keep?