Happy 1st Birthday to us!
One year ago today, I made it real. Not finished. Not funded. Not built. But nevertheless real.
For a long time before Longleaf Global existed as a business entity, there were notebooks, questions, research, spreadsheets, sketches. There was an idea for a racetrack that gradually became an idea for a destination. Then a town. Then infrastructure, safety, education, hospitality, economic development, and eventually there were enough pieces on the table that thinking about it wasn’t enough anymore.
So, on September 18, 2025, Longleaf Global became a company. I had absolutely no idea how much I didn’t know. That may be my favorite thing about the first year.
Change it While You Can
One of the cheapest things you can do on a multibillion-dollar development is change your mind - provided you do it early enough.
Early-stage development involves an enormous amount of work that will never appear in a rendering - studies, research, models, financial analysis, regulatory conversations, operational planning, environmental work, design iterations, endless meetings, and questions.
So many questions.
Miles and miles of questions.
Sometimes questions confirm the original idea, sometimes they improve it, and occasionally they tell you to throw part of it away and start again.
Cross-Agency Coordination
Emergencies don’t respect organizational charts. When something goes wrong, the response rarely belongs to one team. Every group from race control to onsite emergency responders to the receiving hospital has a different part of the same job - creating the best possible outcome for the patient. Unfortunately, they all may also be working from a slightly different perspective of the same incident.
Which creates one of the questions at the heart of SERAPH: How do we help the right information move as quickly as the responders do?
Excellent emergency response isn’t simply about individual capability - it’s also about coordination. Who knows what happened? Who has been dispatched and who is already there? What resources are moving and where do they need to go? Has the situation changed? What does the next team need to know before the handoff reaches them?
Seeing is Attending
At a racetrack, the race shouldn't disappear just because you left your seat. That sounds obvious, but it isn't always how venues work.
At a major sporting event, there are dozens of perfectly ordinary reasons someone leaves their seat: lunch, merchandise, the restroom, meeting friends, taking a restless child for a walk, visiting an exhibit, finding some shade, or simply exploring.
Too often, that means leaving the experience behind as well. You descend into a concourse, the track disappears behind concrete, and suddenly the event you traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to attend is happening somewhere else.
Pedestrians Come First
“Pedestrian-first” means more than adding sidewalks. It means deciding, from the beginning, who the best parts of a place are actually for.
In much of American real estate development, we design the movement of cars first: Roads determine the blocks, parking determines the buildings where storefronts face the road, and then pedestrians get whatever space remains between the curb and the front door.
At Monteverde, however, we’re approaching that hierarchy differently so the pedestrian realm comes first.
Piazzas, promenades, courtyards, and pedestrian streets aren’t leftover spaces between buildings - they’re some of the most important spaces we’re designing. Wherever possible, storefronts will face into those places rather than turning their front doors toward traffic, which changes what happens outside them.
9/11 25 Years On
25 years ago, at this exact moment, I was horror-struck watching The Today Show. I had just seen hundreds of people perish on live TV, something I couldn’t quite comprehend the enormity of at only 19.
I knew my day wasn’t going to go according to plan no matter what unfolded from here. The biggest worry was “how many more of them are there?”, because once is an accident and twice is planned.
I had no idea how busy my day was about to get as an EMT and firefighter just a stone’s throw from Shanksville. I also didn’t know that this dispatch record would be something I would listen to annually for many years to come. You can even hear my dad on it at one point.
In the intervening years, many people have forgotten about this day. Young people have no comprehension of just what we lost then or how different life was before it. Those of you who haven’t done a good job of explaining it to them should be ashamed of themselves, as should anyone who learned nothing from this.
Never forget 9/11/2001.
God bless the survivors, the families, the first responders, and especially those who lost their lives these last 25 years who did rush to help.
Parts of the Whole
“Why are you doing all of these different things?”
It’s a fair question, considering Longleaf Global is developing a world-class motorsports destination, a mixed-use community, and safety technology. We’re thinking about education, workforce development, research, and other capabilities that may eventually extend well beyond the boundaries of our first project.
From the outside, those can look like very different businesses, but from where I’m sitting, they’re all parts of the same system:
Seconds Matter
In an emergency, a few seconds matter and a few minutes can be an eternity.
Last week, we talked about shared situational awareness: making sure the people responsible for an emergency aren’t spending its first critical moments trying to assemble the same picture. What we didn’t touch on is that the information only matters if it helps someone act.
That’s the next question behind SERAPH: How much time can we give back to the people responding?
At a motorsports facility, an incident can trigger an extraordinary chain of human decisions. Race control recognizes what’s happening, marshals and emergency equipment respond, medical teams deploy, and even outside emergency services may need to be involved.
Each step takes time and, traditionally, some of that time is spent waiting for information to travel from one person or system to another. Our goal isn’t to automate judgment out of that process; SERAPH is being designed to help put better information into the hands of race control, marshals, firefighters, paramedics, and physicians sooner, so they can make the next good decision faster.
The objective isn’t technology for technology’s sake - it’s reducing the distance between “something happened” and “help is on the way”.
Friday Night Lights
Then there are the things that might become traditions of their own.
I've long loved the idea of Friday Night Lights during the summer - evening track activity after the worst of the Carolina heat has passed, the circuit fully illuminated, dinner available, families and friends coming out to watch, and Monteverde still humming next door. Because not every memorable night at a racetrack needs a world championship attached to it.
Some may use the entire circuit, while others may need one section of the campus, a handful of garages, a meeting space or technical facilities while something completely different happens elsewhere. That understanding helps to inform the design conversation.
Happy Labor Day
We talk a lot about creating places where people want to live. For Labor Day, it seems appropriate to talk about creating places where people might actually enjoy going to work.
Somewhere along the way, I think we broke the office. Millions of people now battle their way through a commute, find a desk, open a laptop, put on a headset, and spend much of the day on video calls with people sitting somewhere else - or worse, a few aisles over. Then they get back in the car and battle their way back home.
It’s unsurprising people aren’t particularly enthusiastic about this arrangement.
Competing Priorities
Founder Fridays occasionally involve lessons learned in boardrooms. This week’s involved a rake, a headlamp, and the temporary loss of my dignity. The frog pictured here was not involved IN the incident - he is merely a witness TO the incident - and has retained counsel.
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At approximately 5:30 one morning this week, whilst wearing a headlamp and carrying my favorite four-tined cultivator, I accidentally inserted myself into an in-progress ant evacuation.
You read that right - ants.
This went about as well as you might imagine.
Playing Jenga Blindfolded
One of the easiest ways to make a bad decision on a complicated project is to solve the right problem in isolation. Across our inaugural project, we have racetrack designers, neighborhood and hotel designers, transportation and utility engineers solving for capacity, and many more incredible professionals applying their skills and experience to bring Charlotte International Circuit and Monteverde to life.
Every one of those solutions can be perfectly reasonable on its own; the problem is that none of them actually exists on its own, which is something I’ve become increasingly conscious of while developing Longleaf - move one piece and something else moves with it.
Right Info, Time, & People
The first few minutes of an emergency shouldn’t begin with figuring out what’s happening.
At a motorsports facility, responding to a serious incident can involve far more people than the crew arriving at the scene - everything from race control and marshals to potentially outside fire, EMS, or medevac resources.
Although each one has a different responsibility, an effective response depends on all of them understanding the same problem and coordinating seamlessly.
That’s harder than it sounds when information arrives from different places, at different times, to different people. Conditions can change rapidly and what one team knows may not yet have reached another, and while everyone works to assemble the picture, the clock keeps ticking.
A Destination for Dwelling
The race may be the main event, but it doesn’t have to be the only event - what does a great race weekend look like for the whole family?
Realistically speaking, not everyone who travels together loves motorsports in quite the same way.
One person might happily watch every practice session, qualifying lap, and support race on the schedule. Someone else may love the atmosphere and the main event, but doesn’t necessarily want to spend three consecutive days sitting trackside. One child may already know every driver on the grid, while their sibling may be considerably more interested in what the WiFi quality is like and what’s for lunch.
All of them should be able to have a fantastic weekend.
Reclaiming Our Time
What if one of the greatest luxuries we could build was simply not having to make everything a big production?
Need coffee? Walk downstairs. Dinner? Around the corner. Groceries? A few minutes away. School drop-off? No need at all to join an interminable line of cars.
Meeting a friend for lunch, picking up a prescription, getting your hair cut, grabbing something you forgot for dinner…ordinary life contains an astonishing number of these - sometimes incredibly inconvenient - little journeys. Somewhere along the way, particularly in much of the United States, we designed the places in which we live so that nearly every one of them requires getting into the car.
Monteverde is being designed around a different proposition: What if you could drive because you WANT to, rather than because you HAVE to?
I Don’t Know…Yet
One of the most useful sentences I've learned to say as a founder is: “I don't know yet”.
A long time ago, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, I was trained never to say "I don't know" and instead to assemble some educated-sounding collection of words arranged strategically to tap dance around the fact that I don't know, but will figure it out. Saying that you didn't know something was seen as some kind of confidence-destroyer...almost a sign of weakness and incompetence.
So we "circle back" or "take it offline" or "follow up later" as code for "you asked me something I don't know; give me time to put together a response".
How much time would we all save and genuine trust would we cultivate if we were straightforward with one another?
The Center of Excellence
When people think about a major motorsports facility, they naturally think about race weekends: cars, motorcycles, crowds, race teams, and the spectacle and pageantry.
One of the things I care most about building will matter just as much on an ordinary Tuesday morning - The Center of Excellence at Charlotte International Circuit.
The idea begins with a simple belief: A world-class motorsports destination shouldn’t only host races, it should help cultivate the sport and the industry. Motorsports is an extraordinary concentration of talent, but the pathways into it aren’t always obvious. A young driver may have talent that needs cultivated through instruction and seat time. A student may love racing without realizing that their aptitude for engineering, data, fabrication, logistics, communications, hospitality, or dozens of other disciplines could become a career within the sport. A working professional may have decades of knowledge that shouldn’t disappear when they retire.
Those aren’t separate opportunities - they’re parts of the same ecosystem.
Scaling SERAPH
Safety technology shouldn’t only work for the facilities that can afford everything. That has been on my mind quite a bit as we begin thinking through what the first SERAPH prototype needs to prove.
Motorsports facilities exist on an enormous spectrum. At one end are smaller local circuits operating with comparatively simple infrastructure and limited technology. At the other are world-class venues capable of supporting extraordinarily sophisticated timing, communications, vehicle data, race control, and safety systems.
I don’t believe we should design only for the latter.
From Corner to Legend
What makes a corner unforgettable?
Some corners in motorsports have become almost as famous as the circuits themselves:
Eau Rouge and Raidillon at Spa. The Corkscrew at Laguna Seca. Parabolica at Monza.
Mention one to a racing fan and chances are they don’t simply picture a bend in a piece of asphalt. They picture a car or motorcycle moving through it. They remember a pass, a mistake, a qualifying lap, a photograph, or perhaps the first time they experienced it themselves. That’s an extraordinary amount of identity for a piece of pavement to acquire.
It raises a question I think about constantly as we work through the vision for Charlotte International Circuit: What makes a corner memorable?
Oktoberfest, 2030-something
Picture this: Monteverde, 2030-something.
Motorcycles are on track.
Oktoberfest is in full swing in the village.
You can hear the bikes in the distance as you walk through a piazza filled with long communal tables, live music, flowers spilling from balconies, and the smell of something considerably better than standard event concessions. Some people are wearing team colors. An oompah band in lederhosen adds to the soundtrack. Some have absolutely no idea who qualified on pole and are happily going about their Sunday anyway.