Joey Smith

That belief is the through-line of everything I've ever built, and the older I get the more convinced I am that perspective isn't something you arrive at — it's something you're handed, piece by piece, by the people and places that raise you. I was lucky. Mine was handed to me from a lot of different directions at once.

I grew up in Maryland, in a middle-class family that worked for everything it had. My dad woke up at 3 a.m. to deliver newspapers, then went to janitor at the local high school, then came home for a few hours with us before heading back out at night to clean a bank. Three jobs, stacked end to end, for years. When the school system offered him a slot in an HVAC training program, he took it, and turned that opening into a thirty-year career — long enough that even now, retired, he's still the person large contractors in Montgomery County call when they're modernizing energy and HVAC systems they don't fully understand. My mom ran a daycare out of our house, and she was the creative center of everything around it. She designed and hand-made our Halloween costumes, painted and decorated our bedrooms with us, sewed custom clothing, sang, played guitar, and turned every holiday into something she'd built from scratch. She was the fountain of creativity in the house — the reason I grew up assuming that if you could imagine a thing, you could just make it. Between the two of them, before I had words for any of it, I absorbed two ideas that have never left me: craft compounds, and creativity is something you do with your hands.

The rest of my education came from the wider family, and what made it formative was that none of them were the same kind of person. My grandmother — Momo — was the warmest human I have ever known, the kind of person who stayed cheerful through hard times because what made her happy was being around family, not the circumstances of life. My grandfather on my dad's side, Pop Pop, was her opposite-of-sorts and her perfect match — a showman, a risk-taker, an actual race car driver, the kind of man who lived loud on purpose. My uncle inherited that gene and amplified it: Rolex, Corvette, forty-two-foot boat he called a yacht, the loudest and most magnetic person in any room he walked into. He'd let us drive the Corvette on our birthdays. My aunt — my dad's sister — took the inverse of that path and somehow ended up performing too, just on her own terms. Early in life she left to travel the country and visit every hot spring in America, living out of a van. Later she lived in Mexico in hammocks. Then she went to work on cruise ships as a photographer, where she met a magician, became his stage assistant, and ended up touring magic shows across the country while running the business and the bookings. Frugal, vegetarian, completely free — and a performer in a way none of the rest of the family was. She'd call us from everywhere in the world, and when she visited, she showed up with stories that quietly rearranged what I thought a life could look like.

And then there was my mom's father, who shaped me in a quieter, longer-arc way. He grew up dirt poor in upstate New York, joined the Navy in World War II, came home and went to college on the GI Bill, and was eventually recruited into the Treasury Department. He spent the next five decades in finance, living in D.C. and taking the train back and forth to New York, attending the kind of grand dinners and fundraisers that most people only read about — and going home from every one of them to a life that stayed humble, frugal, and disciplined, the way his Depression-era childhood had taught him to live. He's also the reason I got an early look at the institutional side of American life — the rooms where decisions get made — without ever absorbing the idea that the people in those rooms are different from the people who aren't.

Put all of those people together and what they gave me was a kind of omni-dimensional view of the world. Hard work and craft from one side. Hospitality and warmth from another. Showmanship and risk from a third. Frugality and freedom from a fourth. Institutional service and quiet duty from a fifth. I didn't have to pick one. I got to triangulate.

I was the middle child between a star athlete and a star ballerina, and for a long stretch of my childhood I struggled to find my own version of that. I became almost clinically curious about other people instead — what they wanted, what they were afraid of, why they made the choices they did, how they wanted to be seen. At the same time, and I think for the same reason, I became obsessive about how things worked. I took apart toys to look at the circuit boards. I'd sit there asking why — not just why does this work, but why did someone design it this way, why did they make this trade-off, why did the person who bought it pick this one over the one next to it on the shelf. I didn't know it then, but I was already doing the job I'd end up doing for a living.

When I was about five, my grandfather bought our family our first computer. I have a very clear memory of being on the landline with a friend who was trying to walk me through getting onto the internet — just click the blue e — and being completely baffled when nothing happened. We didn't have internet service yet. Nobody had thought to mention that part. But the obsession started there and never stopped. By the time AOL and AIM came around I'd found something I hadn't known I needed: a layer of abstraction between who I actually was and who I wanted people to think I was. A place to experiment with identity, with language, with how to be read. And, eventually, a place to take software apart the way I'd taken everything else apart as a kid. The first time I decompiled a Flash game and saw what was underneath it, something locked into place. By twelve or thirteen I was building Flash games and small applications of my own.

High school was where the two halves of me — the one obsessed with people and the one obsessed with systems — first really collided, and I'll be honest about how. When I was fifteen, I social-engineered the school's media director into installing a VNC server on her machine without realizing what she was doing. She had admin privileges across the network. From there I could remote into her computer from anywhere on the school network — and through it, into administrative files, into other teachers' machines, into the grade system. I installed games on the lab computers for other kids to play. For a while nobody knew who was behind it, until pride got the best of me and I wanted credit for the thing everyone in the school was talking about. I lost my computer privileges in the public school system for the next two years and managed to talk my way out of anything worse. I still had my computer at home. The same instinct kept getting me into trouble in other corners of the early internet — I got banned from a number of e-gaming sites for finding and publishing exploits — but the lesson underneath all of it wasn't really about computers. It was the discovery that the leverage point was never the system alone or the people alone. It was the seam between them. Understanding the system without understanding the people was just engineering. Understanding the people without understanding the system was just intuition. The combination was something else entirely. That's the lesson I've been quietly building on, more responsibly, ever since.

After high school I didn't go to a four-year college. I took some art and music classes at a community college and bummed around long enough to fall in with a circle of friends in bands, designing flyers and posters and shooting their photos and building their first websites. MySpace was taking off. Facebook was right behind it. My first real job was building websites for a local video production agency, and not long after I landed an internship at a regional fishing and boating magazine doing print layout, local advertising, and web work — the kind of small-shop role where you end up doing every job in the building because there isn't anyone else to do it.

That internship led to the job that, looking back, is where I really learned what I was capable of. The editor of the magazine called and asked if I'd come work for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources fisheries department. The title was webmaster. The actual job, by my third month, was anything they needed. I took over their graphic design and print operation alongside the web. I turned their fishing regulations — historically a printed booklet — into a navigable web database and then a mobile app. I designed their annual fishing magazine, hundreds of pages, large-format. They bought me a five-foot printer and rolls of canvas and turned me loose on banners and signage for the state. And I built a social platform called Anglers Log, where Maryland fishermen could share their catches and stories and photos, which doubled as a clean data pipeline for the state's biologists. The piece I'm still proudest of, though, was modernizing the state's annual fishing tournament. The original system was carbon-copy paper forms collected at bait shops, driven around the state once a month by a woman from the office, hand-typed into a computer, and then mailed back out as printed certificates. I rebuilt the whole thing — design, software, ticketing, submission, authentication, certificate generation, promotion — into one digital workflow. The thread connecting all of it was the same thread from when I was a kid taking toys apart: pay attention to what people actually do, then build the thing that fits the shape of their lives instead of the shape of an org chart.

From there I went to Ocean City, Maryland, where I designed and built ads, newsletters, websites, and event platforms for hundreds of local restaurants, hotels, condos, and attractions, all of it rolled into a single platform that could promote those businesses, sell hotel and condo blocks, push coupons, and surface specials and events up and down the coast for visitors. Then I came back to D.C. to work at a UX startup that used biometric hardware — physiological signals — to measure how people actually responded to ads, websites, and video. We were building algorithms on top of attention and emotion, which is a strange thing to do for a living and an unbelievable education in how far the gap between what people say they think and what they actually feel can stretch.

For the last decade I've been doing public affairs work inside an agency of the world's largest advertising holding company. The clients are some of the largest organizations in the world. The work is helping them communicate on issues that matter to them, find the people who care, and move policy through a combination of digital and field tactics. The craft underneath it — the part that's actually mine — is using data to understand individuals deeply enough that we can synthesize real audiences out of the noise, reach them where they actually are, and communicate in the ways that genuinely move them to act. It's the same job I was doing in middle school, taking things apart to see why they worked. Just at a much larger scale, with much higher stakes.

Today, as SVP of Product at that public affairs agency, I lead the vision and strategy of our product ecosystem. A growing piece of that work is figuring out what AI changes about this craft, and what it doesn't. My answer, more and more, is that AI raises the floor — it makes capability cheap. The ceiling is still set by perspective. By who you've listened to, what you've taken apart, what you've watched succeed and fail, and what you've decided actually matters when no one's watching.

Mine was set by a dad who worked three jobs, a mom who ran a daycare, a grandmother who could light a room, a grandfather who lived loud, a grandfather who served quietly, an uncle with a Corvette, an aunt who lived in a van and ended up running a magic show, two siblings who outshone me into curiosity, and a kid's obsession with finding out why things — and people — work the way they do. The view I ended up with isn't from any single one of those places. It's from all of them at once.

That's the perspective I bring to the work. It's the part AI can't level.