You Scanned the Tag.
Congratulations. You are now a data point in a 12-year-old’s vendor scorecard.
You scanned a piece of plastic hanging off a stranger’s backpack in the middle of a tech conference.
Bold move. I respect it. Here’s everything you were hoping this would be.
First, the important part
This tag was designed, printed, and invoiced by Justin. He’s twelve. He runs a fabrication operation out of our basement called Justin's 3D Lab, and when I commissioned this tag he charged me a 40% markup under a line item labeled “brand premium.” When I questioned it, he said: “You wrote a whole newsletter about vendors. I read it.”
Your scan just landed on his scoreboard. Every visit to this page is counted, because he is in an active competition with my best LinkedIn post ever, which reached 71,600 people and converted six newsletter subscribers. That story, and what it says about how our entire industry confuses reach with trust, is basically the thesis of everything I write.
So…Want to help a kid beat an algorithm?
What you actually get
The Department of First Things First is a weekly newsletter for the people who run HR systems, not the people who buy them. Workday architecture, AI governance that survives contact with a real tenant, and the occasional enterprise software lesson delivered by the aforementioned twelve-year-old. Clean your data before you buy the robot. That’s the whole religion.
Start here: The Bus Factor Self-Audit — a one-page audit that tells you how much of your tenant’s “why” lives exclusively in one person’s head, and what breaks when that person takes a vacation. It’s free, it takes ten minutes, and half the people who run it get quietly horrified.
If we just met at Rising
If you were at the Shareathon AI roundtable on Sunday: the anonymized writeup of what that table said is going out to subscribers this week. Subscribing is how you get it. That was the deal.
If you’re a RUG leader holding one of these tags in your hand right now: flip it over. That title on the back is real, he earned it, and everything I said in the ten-minute talk about capture is demonstrated by the fact that you’re reading this sentence.
If you just scanned a backpack in a hallway: you’re my favorite kind of person. Come say hi.
I’m the one with the tag.
—Mike.
P.S. — Justin asked if this page has analytics. I said yes. He said, “good, because I want it on record when I win.” It is now on record.
The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.