THIS IS ME.

Me and my brother the morning of my first wedding, getting ready for the day at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in downtown Baltimore. If only marriage were as easy as the wedding day. I helped start building BuyNothing with $30,000 in personal savings and a $40,000 initial investment from my friend and former co-founder. Before that, I started my first company, dealWIP, with a $10,000 initial investment from my younger brother (which I used to build our first functional prototype

This is a picture I took earlier today in one of the bathrooms at Dooby's (a neighborhood coffee shop in Mt. Vernon in Baltimore). I'll debate the point with anyone, but I think the bathroom at Dooby's has some of the most irreverent and hilarious bathroom art anywhere in America. Never a dull trip. This particular bathroom message felt like this piece encapsulated. Yesterday, I happened upon a brilliant Uber ad while binge watching Married at First Sight on Netflix. It a

Presence Definition Meaning Art Print by Kaigozen – Fy! The Internet was built to connect computers. Then documents. Eventually, people. AI is changing what that connection means. We are entering a world in which digital identity, content and communication can be generated infinitely and almost perfectly. The scarce signal is increasingly not what someone posts online. It’s where they actually are, what they are doing, who else chose to be there and what might become possi

This is my Grandfather in London on January 9th, 1950. He was 37-years-old then, just as I am today. I’ve spent most of my life carrying my Grandfather’s name without really knowing his story. Olatunji Adisa-Williams. It’s my name, too. There’s something strange about that. A name can be one of the most intimate things we possess while belonging, in some sense, to people who came long before us. We introduce ourselves with it and sign things with it. Other people inevita

I've been sitting with the idea of what it actually means to read the room. It's one of those phrases we use without thinking much about it. But, for anyone who organizes events or operates a venue, it's basically the whole job. Is everyone having a good time? Is the music too loud? Too quiet? Are people actually meeting one another? Is there some small thing going wrong that everyone notices, but nobody feels strongly enough about to find the organizer and complain? There's

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what exactly an event organizer creates when they organize an event. The obvious answer is the event. But, I think there’s another answer hiding in plain sight. They create media. Think about it with me for a moment. If I organize a birthday party and convince 75 people to spend their Saturday night with me, I’ve done something increasingly difficult in today's fragmented social world: I’ve captured the attention of 75 people and conv

That's me making a short video for Buy Nothing Project Admin Group members explaining our early process for synthesizing and incorporating community feedback and product guidance. The Admin Group did not play, and I learned an incredible amount from them by shutting up and really listening. Cant' wait to see so many more of their product inventions come to life through BuyNothing over the next decade. I had never spent more than a moment thinking about augmented reality bef

I consider myself a 9th Amendment originalist. Meaning, I see personal privacy as a fundamental and core right, even if it's not explicitly enumerated as such in the U.S. Constitution. Just practically speaking, a society without it strips its citizenry of so much of what makes the human pursuit joyful and interesting. The right to decide what about ourselves we allow to be known, to whom, and when, is one of the finest fruits in this life. It makes everyday interesting, and

Working on the BuyNothing app introduced me to the world of designing consumer social software experiences. Before that, I was enmeshed in the world of legal enterprise software, and quite happy with it. What I discovered pretty early in the transition process is that the two worlds aren't too far apart. At the heart of my design process, is the idea of the hero's journey. In designing our enterprise legal collaboration software product, I was the hero. The overwhelmed ju

I remember Professor Julia Mahoney's Property class during my first year of law school, like it was yesterday. It was early enough that I was still locked in, like my enthusiasm was going to somehow help me unearth some novel insight from the centuries-old case law. I've never been short on earnest enthusiasm. A bit cringe in hindsight. A particular idea that's managed to cling to my consciousness all these years, is the notion of property rights as a bundle of sticks, with e

Me on graduation day from law school in 2014, with shades on to hide the evidence of late-night celebrating. When I was graduating from law school over a decade ago, I don't think I ever imagined myself going through nearly ten jobs in as many years. There's something about ingesting the entrepreneurial bug that seems to make one fundamentally unemployable. I haven't managed to escape that pesky symptom along my journey. It's been an odyssey packed with learnings, each one no

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot while building HadtobeHere is that technology rarely creates community from nothing. At its best, technology strengthens the relationships, rituals, institutions, and gathering places that already give a city its social life. That is especially true in a city like Baltimore. Baltimore’s strongest civic and business coalitions have always understood something important: cities are not just collections of buildings, businesses, r

The iconic Lake Kittamaqundi in Columbia, MD - the fertile ground from which so much of my personal writing has sprung. I've been reading my old journal entries from 2023. I laughed years ago when Lil Wayne explained that he exclusively listens to his own music. It sounded heretical to my untrained ear. The subtle wisdom in his words rings through more clearly for me today. It's not arrogance, as much as it's a reflective search for genuine self-understanding, from which

For much of the last decade, the technology industry has celebrated the idea of IRL—in real life. The phrase emerged as a welcome corrective to an increasingly digital existence, reminding us that some of life's most meaningful experiences still happen face-to-face rather than through a screen. It became shorthand for putting our phones down, spending more time with one another, and recognizing that physical presence still matters in a world increasingly mediated by technolog

This month, two seemingly unrelated stories appeared in the news. The first was that lawmakers are proposing new federal investments to combat America's growing loneliness crisis. The second was that AI companionship has quietly become mainstream. Recent research found that 72% of American teenagers have already used AI companions, while more than half report using them regularly. I think they're the same story. The rise of AI companions may be the clearest signal yet that so

For years, social products have relied on who you know. Friends. Followers. Contacts. But, some of the most meaningful human connections begin with what you love. Music is one of the strongest affinity signals we have. It reflects identity, culture, emotion, memory, and community. Yet most social platforms treat it as a profile decoration rather than a mechanism for connection. What's up with that? At HadtobeHere, we're experimenting with a different approach. Our new

the collection of cigarette butts that have begun to accumulate outside of my apartment, as i've regrettably taken to smoking over the past several months building my new company Is this thing on? It's been a while. Matthew 18:20 says, "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." I've been wondering as of late, which one is it? Two or three? Similarly, I've been wondering, at which cigarette does one become a "chain smoker?" Is it the 2nd in the sequ

i learn by observing behavior, synthesizing lessons, and then applying those lessons in low-stakes, real-world contexts. it's a tried...

know the power of LOVE. i'm filled with overflowing, uncontainable love every time I think about each of the people who have offered me...

i sometimes wonder about what keeps it all together. i'm curious about the invisible hand threading the needle that binds the fibers of...