Nathan Hall

My story does not start with a business plan. It starts in a whole lot of hospital rooms.

I have a rare artery disease, a couple of chronic illnesses, and more surgeries than I can count. Then we had Zoie. My daughter was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, first open-heart surgery at 31 days old, three more before most kids lose a tooth. Somewhere in all that waiting room time I quit being scared of hard things and started walking toward the scared people instead. I have never once been able to walk past somebody having their worst day.

I have always been fascinated by how things work, the why behind them, and the patterns that connect them. I was in school when websites were first coming out, studying computer science, network administration, and security, and I earned a CCNA and CCNA Security. Back then the work meant figuring binary by hand. IP addresses. How data got broken into packets, sent the fastest path through the servers, and put back together at the other end, and if one packet got lost, you got an error page. That is the foundation the whole internet still stands on, and learning it from the ground up was a blessing. Then I hesitated. I got caught up in the money in the nightlife and service industry, spent years as a general manager in high-pressure restaurants, and watched the .com wave go by without me. The thirst for why never went away. It just got suffocated by the boxes I was in.

Every regular job I ever had, this brain of mine, the one that cannot stop asking why, kept getting me treated like I was difficult. I was not difficult. I was just never going to fit the box. And our family cannot live by business before family. When your kid has a heart that needs surgeons, family is the whole center of gravity. So I stopped bending our life to fit a job and built a job that fits our life.

That is why Lefty Media Co exists. I built websites for years, and I never thought I would see an opportunity like the .com come around again. Then AI showed up. People stopped Googling and started asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity who to hire, and I watched good businesses disappear from those answers with no idea it was happening. Nobody was measuring it, so nobody could fix it. So we started measuring it. We coined Pick Rate, whether AI picks you when somebody asks who is best, and we test it on our own websites first, with the predictions written down before the data comes in and the misses published next to the wins. I get to ask why all day, every day. I would have done it for free.

I write those results up. Two papers so far, both on Zenodo under my ORCID, and a Tuesday newsletter called Lefty Notes about what AI says about your business when you are not in the room. I have talked about it on Rounding the Bases with Joel Goldberg, Beyond the Build with Kevin Stucker, at Cup of Joe and 1 Million Cups, and VoyageKC has written me up twice.

What I will not do is promise you a number. This corner of the internet is barely two years old and nobody has AI figured out, us included. What I can promise is the work, and the truth about what it turns up, whatever that truth turns out to be.

Mostly I just want to be the calm, honest one in a scary new corner of the world. That has been the assignment since the very first waiting room, and it still is.