Everyone's Building in Public. Most of Them Are Doing It Wrong.

The 'build in public' movement has devolved into performance art.

Scroll through LinkedIn or Twitter and you'll find founders sharing revenue screenshots, celebrating milestones, and narrating their journey with the production value of a reality show. It's not transparency. It's marketing wearing transparency's clothes.

I have nothing against sharing your work publicly. I do it. This blog is, in some sense, building in public. But there's a version of it that's useful and a version that's performative, and the line between them matters.

Useful transparency

Useful transparency shares the reasoning, not just the results. It explains why a decision was made, what the alternatives were, and what tradeoffs were accepted. It acknowledges when something didn't work and explains what was learned.

When I write about the AI work I do, I share the reasoning because I think it's genuinely useful for people thinking about AI transformation. I also share what's hard about it: the knowledge audit takes longer than expected, some teams resist the process, the technology changes faster than the documentation can keep up.

Performative transparency

Performative transparency shares curated wins, sanitized failures, and engagement-optimized narratives. The revenue screenshots never include the months that were terrible. The 'lessons learned' are always conveniently repackaged as strategic pivots rather than mistakes.

The audience can tell the difference, even if they can't articulate it. Performative transparency builds an audience. Useful transparency builds trust.

What I try to do

My standard is simple: would I share this with a client or a colleague in a private conversation? If yes, it belongs on the blog. If I'm only sharing it because it makes me look good, it doesn't.

That filter eliminates about half of what I could write. What's left is smaller but more honest. I'll take the trade.