The People Who Get It Don't Guard the Idea

Don't Guard the Idea

4:31

Joe Sestito just wrote an article in which he called me his mentor and an AI genius.

Obviously, I'll be printing that section, framing it and introducing it into evidence every time anyone questions my judgment for the rest of my natural life.

But the compliment isn't really why his article caught my attention.

It caught my attention because Joe gets it.

In "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal," Joe explains how HyppoAI grew out of his experience running a company on an absolutely hideous collection of more than 30 different tools.

He didn't study their feature lists. He lived inside the products. He learned what each one did well, where each one broke and which problems none of them had bothered to solve.

Then he built something better.

That isn't copying. It's synthesis.

Copying reproduces the thing. Synthesis understands the thing, pulls it apart, keeps what works, throws away what doesn't and reconnects the pieces according to a better architectural idea.

That's where the actual creativity lives.

Joe used me as a small example. I'd told him that adding audio to a blog post could significantly increase its reach, and that adding related articles at the bottom could keep readers moving through the site. He took the ideas and implemented them.

He called that stealing from me.

Good.

That's exactly what he was supposed to do.

If I give someone an idea and it just sits in their notes, nothing happened. If they take it, deploy it, improve it and make it part of something larger, the idea worked.

I don't feel robbed. I feel useful.

The only part I'd push back on slightly is the mentor label. Not because I don't appreciate it. I absolutely do. But "mentor" can make the relationship sound more one-directional than it actually is.

I recognize Joe as a peer.

I learn from him too. I may not always announce it as loudly as he just did, but every time we talk, I come away with something. He's operating a real company, solving real problems and discovering things you can't learn by sitting around discussing AI on the internet.

That kind of knowledge has weight.

This is what I keep trying to explain to people: the best relationships in this space aren't built around one person possessing the answers and distributing them to everyone else.

They're reciprocal.

I see something Joe hasn't seen yet. He sees something I haven't seen yet. One of us throws an idea across the table. The other one catches it, changes it and throws it back.

After a few rounds, neither of us could honestly tell you who owns the final idea.

And neither of us particularly cares.

That's the point.

A lot of people still treat ideas like physical property. If I give you mine, I somehow have less of it. If you build on it, you've taken something from me.

But ideas don't work that way. The useful ones become more valuable as they move through capable minds.

AI accelerates this dramatically.

It lets us take more things apart, compare more approaches, test more combinations and move from observation to implementation faster than we ever could before. But it doesn't eliminate the need for judgment. In fact, judgment becomes the scarce thing.

Everyone can access the tools.

Not everyone can recognize what's worth keeping, what belongs in the trash and what's still missing.

That's what Joe understands.

He didn't build HyppoAI by pretending the rest of the industry didn't exist. He studied it, used it, broke it, paid for it and learned from it. Then he added his own architectural judgment and built the thing he believed should exist.

That's not a lack of originality.

That's what originality actually looks like in the real world.

Nobody creates from a vacuum. We inherit tools, patterns, language, code, failures and ideas from everyone who came before us. The contribution isn't pretending none of those influences exist.

The contribution is what you do with them.

Joe gets that ideas are supposed to travel. He gets that learning isn't a hierarchy. He gets that using someone else's insight isn't intellectual weakness. And he gets that the highest compliment you can pay a useful idea is to put it to work.

So, yes, I'll happily accept the "AI genius" thing.

But peer is the word I'd use for Joe.

And every time we walk away from a conversation having stolen something useful from each other, the system is working exactly as intended.

---

Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.