The Long Way Around
Twenty years, one line, and a detour through a forest fire.
Story and words by Tom Lucido
New York · 2007–2017
Reading the crowd.
I started in New York, selling and planning digital media for people who made things: a theatre company, a hockey arena, a Spider-Man musical that kept injuring its cast.
Building media plans made me good at Excel. Excel made me good at data. Data, a decade later, made me good at building systems. Nobody plans it that way.
(Yes, there was a trophy. Yes, it was for Spider-Man.)
Then five years in analytics, which is a generous word for what it was: reading what enormous groups of people did, and trying to catch the thing they were about to do before anyone said it out loud.
That turned out to be the whole job. I just didn’t know it yet.
InVision · 2018–2020
The expert reader.
At InVision I wrote for designers and engineers, on a blog with 4,000,000 subscribers. It was the first time I was writing for people who knew more than I did about the thing I was writing about.
It’s a very specific kind of terror, and I recommend it.
You learn fast that the best line in the piece usually belongs to somebody else. The job is to find it and not ruin it.
Work & Co · 2020–2022
The story inside the build.
At Work & Co I ran editorial for an agency that built things for IKEA, the Met Opera and Givenchy. Site copy, award entries, press pitches: whatever got the work seen. The company roughly doubled while I was there. (I’m not taking credit for that. I’m just noting I was in the room.)
The job was to sit with the engineers who built the thing and work out which part of it was the story. It was almost never the part anyone expected.
The Turn · late 2022
And then I’d been looking at a screen for fifteen years, two of them pandemic years, which count double.
I was thirty-seven, running a lot, and I wanted a job outside that would use it.
I got the idea, and I want to be honest about this, from a smokejumper movie that only exists inside Entourage. I looked up whether the job was real. It was, and they needed people.
So I quit, went to fire camp in Colorado, and joined the Forest Service.
Oregon · 2023–2024
Watch the ridgeline.
Willamette National Forest, on the McKenzie River. Six dollars a night for a bunk, two bathrooms between six of us, a ballfield, a gym, two bars and one gas station.
On days with no active fire but high risk, we drove to high points and sat there. That was the assignment. Watch the ridgeline. Wait for something that doesn’t look like anything yet.
On the way up, my squad would stop and swim in the Blue River. Five minutes, fifteen at most. It’s still one of my favorite memories of anything.
The rest of the time I was a swamper on a saw team. The sawyer cuts, and the swamper hauls off what falls. It’s heavy, repetitive, close work beside a running saw, and all of it runs on signals.
On my first real fire, the smoke didn’t look like anything.
It started as a prescribed burn on a steep hill, on a day that came in hotter, drier and windier than expected. Small hotspots kept jumping the line. Some hoses burned over and we lost water.
I spent the hardest physical day of my life crawling up a trail on my hands and knees with a fuel can, keeping one saw running while my sawyer cut alone in the smoke.
By evening our escape route was gone. We sat in the black, the ground that had already burned and had nothing left to give, eating MREs and waiting for the fire to pass us. Then we hiked out in the dark.
Everyone could see the smoke. The signal was there in the morning and the decision came in the afternoon, and the gap between those two things is the entire story.
A few months later, a fire started on the other side of the same mountain, and we ended up right back on that spot. A guy from the next district over looked around, laughed, and said it for all of us:
“Isn’t this the same fucking hill?”
It was. This time we held it, and the town below came through, along with our station across the street.
(The most fun I ever had out there was in Colorado, behind two sawyers, the three of us catching a whole flank of a fire in front of a forty-foot wall of flame. That’s a different story.)
The Return · 2024
What I came back with.
I came back to marketing. Not because I missed screens.
I came back because I’d worked out what I’m good at: noticing the thing early, and then getting someone to care about it.
And because there were people in Michigan I wanted to be around more than I wanted to be on a mountain.
CloudFactory · 2024–2026
The boring, expensive problem.
At CloudFactory I wrote about production AI for the people who build it. Four white papers, each built from interviews with engineers who knew the subject far better than I did, each written to survive their review. 44 posts in nine months, on a calendar that didn’t slip.
The one I’d show you first: an hour with the CIO of a $1.3 billion transit operator, asking him why his drivers kept quitting. Nobody writes about driver retention, because driver retention is boring. It was also the most expensive problem he had, and the answer was sitting in operational data nobody was reading.
the driver turnover, a year laterDriver turnover fell by about half, year over year.
That’s the job when it works. Find the boring problem, ask the person who owns it a better question than they expected, and write it down so the people who can fix it actually read it.
After that I started building the thing I’d wanted at every job: a set of AI agents that did the watching. The data, the signals, the first read on what changed overnight, all of it waiting for a person in the morning.
Capture was automatic. Decisions were exclusively human.
LUCID · now
Building the lookout.
It’s the high-point job again: watch everything, wait for the thing that doesn’t look like anything yet. Except this time I built the lookout, and I built it for my own life.
It’s called LUCID. Overnight it reads the calendar, the inbox and the pile of half-finished ideas, and at seven every morning it hands me a brief: what changed, what’s due, what I said I’d think about. I built it in about a month, after carrying the blueprints around in my head for years.
It notices. I decide. There’s more about it in Projects.
The pattern · year twenty
Same job, different weather.
Lay the line out flat and every stretch of it looks the same up close.
In New York it was a crowd about to do something. At InVision and Work & Co it was the part of the build nobody thought was the story. On the ridgeline it was smoke in the morning and a decision in the afternoon. At CloudFactory it was the boring problem that turned out to be the expensive one.
Each time, the work came down to the same three things.
One
Notice the signal before it looks like anything.
A number drifting. A question nobody has asked on the record. A thin grey line over a ridge.
Two
Get people to care about it.
That’s the writing part. Usually it starts with the person who knows more than I do, and a better question than they expected.
Three
Do it before it gets expensive.
Every problem on this page was small once. The drivers. The same hill, twice.