A tattoo, a talk I almost skipped, and the slide that connected everything

Last week I was in a startup incubator in downtown Austin for an AI event. Three speakers. I came for the first two.

Two talks on AI agents — digital workers, persistent automation. Both interesting. Both enough for one night.

By the break I was full. Information overload. Ready to head home for the bedtime routine.

Then someone noticed my tattoo. It says "do good." He asked about it.

He was a veteran. Worked with dogs in rehab and training. Not a tech person. He'd been driving for one of the presenters, who convinced him to stay for the event.

I started telling him about the company. About Foster Greatness. And as I talked, I heard myself connecting what I'd just heard to foster care. How these tools could find resources, keep information current, handle administrative work that consumes small teams in crisis.

He got it immediately. Not because he understood the technology. Because he'd done the same work with veterans and recognized the problem. Two different populations. Same gap. The people who need the most help are served by the smallest teams with the least infrastructure.

By the time we finished talking, the third session had started. I took a seat.

The presenter was Travis Oliphant, the creator of NumPy — one of the foundational tools behind almost every AI system being built today. He talked about open-source infrastructure and his work at his company Open Teams.

I'd always thought of open source as a developer thing. People collaborating on shared tools. Shared code. Shared value.

He reframed it. Open-source infrastructure means you own your data. You own your systems. You're not locked into a vendor whose business model depends on keeping you dependent.

That hit me twice.

Once for the business. Small companies don't have data privacy attorneys or enterprise compliance teams. Owning your infrastructure isn't a philosophy. It's protection.

And once for the mission.

Right now, if you're a former foster youth trying to find support, you're navigating two realities. Either the information is scattered across dozens of websites, outdated PDFs, and social media posts that may or may not still be accurate. Or it's locked inside a system you aged out of or don’t know about. You know help exists. You just can't find it at 11pm when you actually need it.

He put up a slide showing three layers. A company builds its own intelligence hub. That hub connects outward to partners and the outside world. Then multiple hubs interoperate — a distributed economy where no single entity controls the network.

I sat there mapping every layer onto a different world.

Standardize the data on open formats. Connect the advocates who are building in isolation — thirty or forty people in our community alone launching training programs and websites, each one reinventing the wheel. Then the system at large. An advocate in rural Texas gets access to the same training, the same resources, as someone in Los Angeles. Geography stops being a barrier because the infrastructure doesn't care about zip codes.

A slide about business architecture. And all I could see was foster care.

That's what I walked out with. Not a new strategy. A frame. The tools that abstract complexity are useful. The tools that distribute ownership are transformative. And the architecture that makes one small company sovereign is the same architecture that connects thirty advocates who've never met.

Coordination, not consolidation. Every node that joins makes every other node smarter.

The standardization is the democratization.