The world is very good at labeling people. I’ve never found the labels particularly useful — not for understanding others, and not for understanding myself. What follows is an attempt at something better.
Matt Bramson
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The world is very good at labeling people. I’ve never found the labels particularly useful — not for understanding others, and not for understanding myself. What follows is an attempt at something better.
I grew up between two places — the school year in Tampa, summers on the North Fork of Long Island on a piece of land my family has held for six generations. I didn’t fully understand what that land meant until I was old enough to feel what it means to belong somewhere across time. I live now between two places again — Key Biscayne, Florida, where I’ve built a life with my wife and children, and East Marion, where I go to remember where I come from.
I am a father first, and everything else after. Not because I’m particularly good at it — I’m impatient, easily bored by the mundane, and better at the big conversations than the small logistics — but because nothing I’ve done or built or figured out means much without the people I’m doing it all for.
I’ve been a husband long enough to know that the person you choose to share a life with shapes you in ways you don’t always see coming. My wife is relentlessly, sometimes inconveniently, precise. She’ll stop a story cold to correct a detail that I’ve rounded for effect. It used to frustrate me. Now I understand it as a gift — a counterweight to an instinct in me that, left unchecked, lets a good story drift from the truth it’s supposed to be telling.
I am a large man, and I’ve sometimes wondered if people confuse quantity for quality — I’ve repeatedly found myself in rooms and roles that felt, at first, like someone made a mistake in the invitation. What I’ve learned is that doing the job my way, rather than the way I imagine it’s supposed to be done, tends to work out better than it has any right to.
I am most myself in conversation — real conversation, the kind that gets into something. I have very little patience for small talk — the ritualistic exchange of complaints about the commute most of all. My reliable escape is to ask a question interesting enough that whoever I’m talking to forgets the conversation we were about to have.
I have lived on or near the ocean for almost my entire life, and I hope that never changes. I sail — not as much as I should, but enough to know what it does to me. A sailboat is a puzzle with no fixed solution: the boat, the sails, the lines, the wind, the current, the depth, the other boats, all of it shifting constantly and demanding your full attention. I have never found a more reliable cure for anxiety. It is very difficult to worry about anything else when the water is eight feet deep and moving.
I am someone who believes that knowing where you come from is not the same as being stuck there. East Marion is in me — six generations of people who built something on a piece of land and chose to keep it — and Key Biscayne is where I chose to build my own version of that. The ocean connects them. So, I suppose, do I.
Tallahassee · 2023
I am someone who is genuinely excited by good ideas — mine, yours, anyone’s. The origin doesn’t matter much to me. What matters is whether the idea is real, whether it can be made to work, and whether it will matter to someone when it does.
I have spent most of my career in technology — not because I’m particularly technical, but because software is the most malleable material I’ve ever worked with. You can take an idea from concept to impact faster in software than in almost any other medium. That speed is intoxicating to me. I’ve never gotten over it.
I am a communicator — specifically, someone who can take a complex or contested idea and find the version of it that lands. I do this mostly through analogy, usually spontaneous, occasionally surprising even to me. I’ve learned not to overthink it. The right analogy tends to arrive on its own if I trust the conversation.
I am a leader who delegates freely and shares credit generously — perhaps too generously, I’ve been told. I care more about the result than about my proximity to it. I’ve noticed that this tends to produce better results, which is convenient.
I am also someone who has learned to be honest about what I don’t know. I am a confident expert in a few things and an interested novice in many others, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. The novice position is actually the more enjoyable one — there’s more to discover there.
I have built and rebuilt businesses across telecom, energy, communications technology, and AI-enabled services. I mention this not as a resume but as evidence of a pattern: I am drawn to businesses at the point where something needs to be reimagined rather than simply managed. The existing model has run its course, the obvious next move isn’t obvious yet, and someone needs to figure out what comes next. That tends to be where I do my best work.
I have a son who makes his living as a musician and a daughter who builds AI systems. I can’t decide which of them surprises me more.
I am not particularly motivated by credit or compensation — I like both, but neither is what gets me out of bed. What gets me out of bed is the possibility that something I do today will matter to someone. Not abstractly. Specifically. A business that works better, a person who gets something they needed, a conversation that changes how someone sees a problem. I have found that if you optimize for that, the other things tend to follow.
Community is a word that gets used loosely. I use it carefully.
Mine starts with my family — my wife, my children, the people I am most accountable to and most shaped by. It extends outward from there: my neighbors in Key Biscayne, my fellow sailors at the yacht club, the people of East Marion who have been part of my family’s life for longer than I have been alive.
Beyond that it gets harder to define but no less real. I take citizenship seriously — not as an identity or a bumper sticker, but as a practice. I have served on boards, run for office, sat on planning committees, and shown up for things that needed showing up for, sometimes at a personal cost. I believe that the people who complain the loudest about how things are run are usually the ones least willing to do anything about it. I try not to be one of those people.
I care particularly about young men. Not because I think they have it harder than anyone else, but because I think we’ve stopped paying attention to them in ways that are starting to show. The young men I worry about are not lost causes — they are often simply without adequate examples, expectations, or anyone willing to take them seriously enough to tell them the truth. I try to be that where I can.
Music has always mattered to me — and young musicians in particular occupy a place in my thinking that I can’t entirely explain. There is something about the combination of discipline, vulnerability, and the willingness to be heard that I find quietly heroic. I root for them.
I believe in justice, fairness, and freedom — not as abstractions but as things worth defending at some personal cost. I have more respect for the person who takes an unpopular position because they believe it than for the person who takes the popular one because it’s safe. I try to be the former. I don’t always succeed.
I am still figuring out the full shape of what I owe and to whom. But I think showing up is most of it.
Islander News · August 2024
When I was six years old I first started thinking quite a bit about death — what it meant to no longer be conscious and to have that last forever.
The person I wanted to share those thoughts with and seek comfort from was my mother. As I write this I am sitting in a chair a few feet from her and she has just died.
I remember our conversation that day nearly fifty years ago when I went to her with my concerns about death. She was sitting on the couch and I sat down close to her. She could tell, like only a mother can, that something was bothering me and she asked me if I wanted to talk. I told her I did but that what I wanted to talk about was scary and made me uncomfortable.
As I started to share my understanding of death and my fears about it, she pulled me close and watched me closely as I spoke. When I was done I simply asked, “What do I do about this [death]? How do I not be afraid?”
What she said I have reflected on many times. It wasn’t profound — that wasn’t her style. It wasn’t spiritual either. What it was was practical. She said, “There’s nothing you can do. It is scary to think about. It scares me too. I try not to think about it and enjoy the time I have.”
It was a mature answer for a six-year-old to absorb. But it was honest, real, and loving. She was sharing with me the same advice she was giving herself. That’s what she always did: reply to my concerns, doubts, and fears with her own best advice. Sometimes that was frustrating. Sometimes I didn’t want advice. Sometimes I wanted to be comforted more. Maybe even lied to a little (“everything’s going to be okay”). But, like all great mothers, she gave me what I needed and could use rather than what I wanted.
It’s hard to believe she’s gone — although the last few weeks watching her deteriorate have been very hard. The house already feels emptier — although she’s still here and I can see her lying in the bed we setup downstairs. I’ve lost something irreplaceable. A great mother. There are conversations I can have with no one else. Answers to questions I won’t get from anyone else.
But I also know that she’s still here. Inside me. I hear her voice when I talk to my kids. I know what she would say to most questions I might need to ask. She’s such a big part of me and that’s something I can never lose.
The hospice nurse just came and declared her dead. She gave us a piece of paper and we called the funeral home. They are coming in a few minutes to pick her up. Part of me wants these minutes to last for as long as possible. I don’t want her to leave this house in someone’s truck. The empty feeling in the house is bound to get emptier. Moving the couch we put in the garage to accommodate the hospital bed back into the house when the bed gets removed will be sad. It will be erasing her a bit more — putting things back the way they were.
It’s her in me that’s writing right now. Before she got too sick and weak to continue she was furiously working to finish her third book — or maybe it’s her fourth or fifth if we count some of the works she published on professional topics. She believed in writing things down. In sharing thoughts and experiences across generations as a way to remember and honor people. I think she wanted her latest book to be more than she was able to make it but it’s good. She should be proud of it. And it helped bring us together this year as we all knew her time left with us was limited.
The men from the funeral home just arrived. They’ve recommended we leave this part of the house so they can remove her. I think that’s a good idea. Goodbye mom.
Ruth Ann Mosback Bramson · 1942 – 2022
“It is good people who make good places.”
Anna Sewell
Dam Pond Nature Preserve · East Marion, New York · April 2022
Which is a long time. These are some pieces I’m glad I wrote.
“Wherever the ball goes, is exactly where you shot it.” A story about accountability, told by the best teacher I almost didn’t recognize.
Leadership · PreparationWhat I learned working directly with a billionaire. Shorter than you’d expect. More useful than you’d think.
Strategy · ExecutionFind your Power I Right, Overstack, 44 Dive and run it every single day. On keeping it simple when the obvious play isn’t working.
Citizenship · TechnologyOn social media, manufactured urgency, and the cynical business model of keeping us frightened and divided.
Creativity · FamilyMy son explained sales to me on the way home from jazz camp. He was right. I’ve never thought about it the same way since.
If something here resonated, or you just have something worth saying — I’d like to hear it.
matt@mattbramson.com