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.
Rookie Season, 25 Years on
Other than being roughly the same age and looking fabulous in green, what do Fernando Alonso and I have in common?
We both had rookie seasons around the turn of the millennium.
Now of course mine wasn't on the Formula 1 grid, but it was somewhere else where high pressure situations and split second decisions make or break you - emergency services.
Inspiration for Centuries
It’s easy to say you’re building for the long term. The harder question is: what does that actually change?
If you’re designing something to last for generations rather than simply survive until the next transaction, you start asking very different questions. Not just: What will this cost to build? But: What will it cost to own? How will it be maintained? Can it be repaired? Can it adapt as technology and the needs of its users change?
And one of my favorites: What is this going to look like in 50 years? 100 years?
Archangel: Predictive Intelligence
The best kind of emergency is the one you see coming.
Of course, that isn’t always possible: accidents happen, equipment fails, conditions change, people make mistakes…
No technology can completely eliminate risk, and any safety system claiming otherwise probably deserves a healthy dose of skepticism. But what if we could recognize more of the warning signs sooner?
That question became the foundation for Archangel, the predictive intelligence component of SERAPH.
Most emergency systems are necessarily reactive - something happens, someone recognizes it, information begins moving through the appropriate channels, a decision is made, and resources respond.
Every one of those steps takes time.
Archangel is being designed to shrink that initial timeline.
Busy, Useful, Relevant
A racetrack shouldn’t sit around waiting for race day.
When most people picture a racetrack, they likely picture the big weekends: grandstands full of tens of thousands of people arriving from around the world, garages busy, cars on track, hospitality packed.
Those weekends matter enormously, but in the 2020s and beyond? They aren’t enough.
One of the principles behind CIC from the very beginning has been that a world-class motorsports destination should be useful far beyond its marquee events. That means designing for what happens on an ordinary Tuesday in February just as deliberately as for what happens on Race Day.
Year-Round Beauty
This is not a subdivision. And it isn’t a resort.
It’s also not a site plan, as site selection for Monteverde is still underway. While we don’t yet know the exact topography, waterways, road connections, views, environmental constraints, or other characteristics of the land that will ultimately shape the community, we do know what it should feel like.
And that matters.
I don’t want to design a town on paper and then force it onto whatever property we acquire. The land should have a voice in what gets built there.
So this image is something different: a conceptual vision of what Monteverde is intended to feel like at full scale.
There is no Case Study
One of the strangest things I’ve noticed about building my company from scratch is how much business advice is written backwards.
We hear the story after the company succeeded, so in hindsight everything acquires this tidy little narrative arc in which the pivotal meeting becomes obvious or rejection becomes this great moment of character development for the hero of the story. A change in direction becomes a strategic realignment. The person who answered the email or picked up the phone becomes “the one who changed everything”.
From Problem to Purpose
Start with the problem, and build with purpose.
Yesterday, Longleaf Global publicly introduced SERAPH, our patent-pending integrated emergency-response platform.
But SERAPH didn’t begin because I decided Longleaf needed a technology company. It definitely didn’t begin because I, as a solo entrepreneur with a foot in the corporate world, a gym habit, two teenagers, and a micro farm, decided I was bored and in need of something else to do.
It began with a problem.
Intro to SERAPH
In an emergency, minutes matter and seconds can make the difference between success and disaster.
Yet in complex, high-risk environments, emergency response can still depend on a sequence of events:
- An incident occurs
- Someone recognizes it
- Details are communicated
- The situation is assessed
- Resources are identified and dispatched
- Multiple people, systems, and agencies begin coordinating a response
And so on, in order, more or less. With time gaps in between.
Every single one of those steps is necessary, but...
What if some of them didn't have to happen sequentially?
Track Design Decisions
From the very beginning, Charlotte International Circuit has been envisioned as more than a racing facility. It has been designed to be a destination. One that you look forward to returning to again and again. One that generations celebrate and enjoy.
Longleaf Global
So what are we really building?
When people ask about Longleaf Global, they usually ask about the projects: the racetrack, the village, and/or the technology.
But those are only part of the story.
The name of the company comes from the longleaf pine, a tree that once soared over millions of acres across the American South. Longleaf forests are remarkable ecosystems, but what has always resonated with me is the tree itself.