About Me (and this site)

Read Uncut is written by someone who has spent the better part of two decades in tech, starting with the part where you found your own companies because you were too stubborn or too stupid to work for somebody else, and ending with the part where you do work for somebody else, at the kind of company where a single product decision affects enough users that the meeting about it requires a legal review and a comms plan before you've even opened the slide deck. I've done both stretches, the scrappy founder years and the corporate years, and the thing that connects them is that I have been in enough rooms where consequential decisions get made by a surprisingly small number of people with a surprisingly high opinion of themselves to have formed some views about how those decisions actually work.

I've been in AI for over twelve years, which is long enough to remember when saying you worked in AI at a dinner party got you the same look people give someone who says they're really into sourdough, polite interest concealing the suspicion that you might be a bit much. Two companies founded, one in hardware and one in software, both in tech, both the kind of experience that teaches you more about how things break than about how things work, which turns out to be the more useful education. After that, nine-plus years in product management, the last six-plus at the director and VP level, building and scaling teams, running the operating rhythm of organizations large enough that the people making the decisions and the people affected by them have never been in the same room, and probably never will be.

The politics half of this site isn't a hobby I picked up because the news got interesting. My degree is in political science, I founded a politics society at my university back when that meant organizing panel debates in underfunded lecture halls rather than posting takes on social media, and I've stayed active ever since, not for any party, because the moment you attach yourself to a party you start defending things you know are indefensible, but through the quieter stuff that doesn't make for good content, helping people, donating to causes, and paying enough attention to how policy actually works to get annoyed when it doesn't. The tech career came after, but the political instinct came first, and most of what I write sits in the overlap between the two because that's where the overlap between power and money lives, and nobody seems to be watching it closely enough.

I don't use my full name here, and I'm not going to apologize for it. The articles on this site are frequently unkind to companies, executives, corporate strategies, and political figures, and I write about industries I have worked in, currently work in, and will probably work in again. Attaching my legal name to a piece arguing that a Fortune 500 CEO's AI strategy has the structural integrity of a sandcastle at high tide would be, at minimum, an interesting career move, and I have enough self-preservation instinct left to avoid making it. The anonymity is not about dodging accountability for what I write, everything here is sourced, argued, and open to being wrong, but about maintaining the freedom to write it in the first place without a LinkedIn mob or an HR conversation I didn't ask for.

What I write about is the gap between what companies and politicians say and what they actually do, the distance between the all-hands slide and the spreadsheet that produced it, between the press release about "investing in our people" and the quiet Thursday afternoon layoff that follows it by six weeks. Most coverage of these things happens in the first 48 hours, filed by smart people on deadline in a format that doesn't have room for the second thought, and the second thought is usually the one that matters. These pieces are an attempt to catch that thought, across AI, tech, corporate strategy, and politics, before it gets buried under the next news cycle and forgotten.

The writing is opinionated because I think the alternative is dishonest. I am not a neutral observer. I have worked in the industries I criticize, sat in the meetings I describe, used the tools I question, and I have views that come from that proximity, not from reading about it on the internet. Those views are argued rather than asserted, sourced rather than vibed, and wrong sometimes, because anyone who has never been wrong about something has never committed to a position worth holding. When I cite a number I tell you where it came from. When I'm guessing, I say so. When I have a conflict of interest, I flag it.

Subscribing

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There is no paid tier yet, and honestly the site would have to get a lot bigger before that question becomes interesting. The free newsletter is the thing this site does, and if I ever charge for something, it will be in addition to this, not instead of it.

Getting in touch

I read everything that comes in and I respond to most of it. james@readuncut.com