Bloom

Two years ago I asked the CEO of the company I co-founded if we should publish our cap table. Show who owned what percentage. What did we have to hide?

He balked.

I didn't push. But I knew the thing I was suggesting was beautiful, and his resistance was exactly the shape of what wasn't beautiful about us.

Something is beautiful when what it says it is and what it is are the same thing. Beauty is coherence. Your soul recognizes it even when your mind can't put words to it.

Hiding is where the gap lives. A company that won't show its ownership is hiding because the ownership wouldn't read as beautiful if it were shown. The founders would look over-compensated. The VC would look like they got a huge slice for writing a check with other people's money. Nothing about the math would sing. It would just show.

That's the test. What would this look like shown? If the answer is ugly, the thing is ugly. The hiding is the evidence.

I didn't have language for any of this two years ago. A teaching gave me the words a week and a half ago, in a Hatha class at HAUM, a yoga studio in the Mission in San Francisco.

The teacher, Juan, opened with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna and Krishna on the battlefield at Kurukshetra. Arjuna didn't want to kill, but it was his dharma to fight when fighting was righteous.

Each thing has a nature. It is the tree's dharma to bear fruit. It is the flower's dharma to bloom. Becoming coherent with your own dharma is the whole of the work.

I was lying on a mat sweating when Juan said this. The sentence that landed: it is my dharma to make beauty.

I couldn't have named that in the conversation two years ago. I can name it now.

How do you know beauty when you encounter it?

You just do. It renders your soul speechless. It speaks to your heart. It pulls you forward before your reasoning mind catches up.

That's the test I run at Tala. Does it render my soul speechless?

If the answer is no, the thing isn't right yet, however clever or strategic it looks on paper.

Most of us don't choose our moral framework. It gets handed to us. We follow it like automatons and call the following “values.” We rarely ask whether the framework itself is beautiful, or whether what flows from it is.

Timothy Patitsas wrote a book called The Ethics of Beauty arguing this is upside down. Beauty comes first. Ethics flows from beauty. Morality flows from ethics. Most Western traditions start from rules and reason their way down to what feels right. Patitsas says start from what's beautiful and the rest sorts itself.

The things I've done because they felt beautiful to do have turned out to be the most ethical things. The things I did because the rules permitted them have often turned out to be ugly.

Start with beauty. The rest flows.

At Tala the work looks like this.

Pricing aligned with customers, not extracting them. One dollar per member per month. No processing-fee markup. No per-seat tier. No AI add-on upcharge. If a studio grows, they pay more because they have more members, which means we're worth more to them.

An agreement fun to read. Written like a human talking to a human. No vendor lock-in. If a studio wants to leave, their data is theirs. Their teachers' profiles are theirs. Their members' history is theirs. Easy to come. Easy to go. The relationship has to earn its continuation.

An ethos published before we had customers. The things we actually believe, written down where anyone can point to them and hold us to them.

Books public as of today. Sihaya LLC balance, Tala MRR, monthly burn, runway, cap table. I own one hundred percent. I pay myself nothing right now. Tala MRR is $0 today. The first customer goes live in three days. Every dollar that moves through the company is visible.

None of these are smart by conventional SaaS logic. Each is exactly right.

Venture capitalists make a lot of their money on information asymmetry. The gap between what a company knows about itself and what its investors or customers know is the whole business model. That's not an attack on them. It's just how the machine works.

I'm not building that kind of machine. I'm building one that works because the gaps are closed.

The same logic applies to a person.

Carl Jung called the work of becoming whole individuation. He saw it as the central project of a human life. Integrating every part of yourself, including the parts you've been taught to hide, until there's one continuous person instead of a public self and a private self held apart by effort.

When you're whole, transparency is effortless. Nothing to hide because nothing is in shadow. The flower can show every part of itself.

Only parasites, pathogens, and impurities die under the sun. The rest of it thrives.

We get afraid. Afraid that if people saw the whole thing, they'd leave. Afraid that the interest we've built is a function of image management. Afraid that the version of us getting loved isn't the version underneath.

Approach the fear. Look at it. Ask it questions. See what it's actually made of.

That's where it loses its power. Most of what we've been hiding turns out to be more lovable than the curated version we replaced it with.

Today the Flower Moon is full. It invites all of us to bloom.

We don't manage the light. We let it shine across us. We show the beauty we have.

It is the tree's dharma to bear fruit. It is the flower's dharma to bloom. It is mine to make beauty.

Yours is yours to name.

Watch what opens.