A few months ago, I did something I never expected to do.

I ran for local office.

Specifically, I ran for Westport, Connecticut’s Representative Town Meeting, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds. There were no attack ads. No lawn signs stolen in the night. No shadowy super PACs. Mostly it was neighbors, conversations on sidewalks, and me explaining to my kids why Dad was suddenly talking to strangers at the grocery store.

And I ran on one simple idea.

Radical empathy.

Not as a slogan. Not as a buzzword. But as a practice. Listening first. Assuming good intent. Being genuinely curious about why someone feels the way they do, especially when you disagree. Trying, imperfectly, to see the world through someone else’s eyes before insisting they see it through yours.

And somehow, incredibly, I won.

That experience didn’t just reaffirm something I believe about civic life. It reinforced something that sits at the very heart of Reflekta.

Radical empathy is not a feature.
It is not a marketing message.
It is the foundation.

Reflekta Was Never About Technology First

People sometimes assume Reflekta started with a clever piece of tech.

It didn’t.

It started with a very human question.

What do we owe each other, across time?

What do we lose when stories disappear, when voices fade, when memories become fragmented footnotes instead of living connections? And how do we use technology not to replace humanity, but to protect it?

Those questions don’t come from venture capital decks or growth hacks. They come from sitting with families. From listening to people talk about parents, partners, grandparents, children. From hearing the joy, the regret, the humor, and the unfinished sentences that make up a real life.

Radical empathy means building from that place.

It means designing slowly when the stakes are emotional.
It means prioritizing consent when speed would be easier.
It means choosing warmth over efficiency, even when efficiency would scale faster.

And yes, it means sometimes building things the hard way.

We Are Not a Giant Corporation

This part matters to me.

Reflekta is not some massive, faceless tech company with a hundred layers of approval and a legal department that never sleeps.

We are a small team.

A deeply human team.

Developers who argue passionately about user experience because they care about the person on the other side of the screen. Creatives who obsess over language because words matter when memories are involved. Builders who could be working on a dozen flashier projects, but choose this one because it feels meaningful.

We talk about our families.
We talk about our histories.
We talk about why this work matters to us personally.

And when we debate decisions, we don’t ask, “What’s the fastest path to growth?”

We ask, “How would this feel if it were my family?”

That question slows you down. It also keeps you honest.

Radical Empathy Is Not Passive

One thing I learned on the campaign trail is that empathy is often misunderstood.

It is not being agreeable.
It is not avoiding hard conversations.
It is not saying yes to everything.

Radical empathy is active. It takes effort. It requires holding complexity instead of flattening it. It asks you to listen longer than is comfortable and to design systems that respect nuance instead of erasing it.

At Reflekta, that shows up everywhere.

In how we think about privacy.
In how we approach memory ownership.
In how we frame storytelling as an invitation, not an extraction.

We are building something that deals with the most intimate parts of people’s lives. If we get that wrong, no amount of clever engineering will save us.

So we choose empathy, even when it complicates things.

Especially then.

Why This Matters Right Now

We are living in a moment where technology often feels like it is accelerating past our ability to feel connected. Faster feeds. Shorter attention spans. More noise. Less listening.

Reflekta is our small but stubborn act of resistance to that trend.

It is a belief that technology can be slower. Kinder. More human. That it can help us understand one another across generations instead of flattening us into data points.

Winning a local election didn’t make me a politician. But it did remind me of something essential.

People want to be heard.
People want to be understood.
People respond to sincerity far more than spectacle.

That truth applies to communities. It applies to families. And it applies to the things we build.

Radical empathy isn’t just how I ran a campaign.
It is how we show up at Reflekta every day.