Hi, I'm RJ.
I've never punched a clock. Almost thirty years on straight commission — and that's a different kind of life. You don't get the opportunity to be complacent. My desk was wherever the decision was being made: a family's kitchen table, an owner's boardroom, an engineering office at JPL. Personal budgets, government budgets, interstate acquisition contracts, financing structures from utility programs to bank lending. Different rooms, same work — you come alongside a person's vision. You learn, you love, you engage. And you live in the space of rejection, constantly, which is exactly where owners and operators live — the people I've spent my life helping build.
I've been a builder even longer. At fourteen I was pulling plumbing in my family's manufacturing shop — water systems for commercial aquariums running on Omron programmable controllers, two thousand gallons an hour through stainless steel frames, pumps, carbon filters, thermoplastic welds I laid myself. Ever since, whenever the work turned repetitive, I built a tool — some way to multiply my time and my energy. In 2024 the technology finally caught up with the habit, and I went down the road. I learn, I build, I break, I ask, I test, I engage.
So at fifty I'm in a strange place: a lifelong closer doing systems architecture, audits, energy, and papers — because now I can. The people business turned out to be the information business. The information business turned out to be the energy business. Nothing new under the sun.
So I started measuring the sun. What does it cost, in sunlight, when a machine thinks? I wrote down what I found. It's called Sun-to-Token:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22083896
Life is my canvas. And the goal underneath all of it is simple to say and long to build: to be a bridge between carbon-based creativity and silicon-based intelligence.
I'll write here when I have something worth saying. If this letter found you, write back: rj@ryansheridanjohnson.com
In success,
RJ
