I have four versions of my bio. Fifty words, a hundred, two-fifty, and a stripped-down eighty for conference programs. They’re all true. They’re all wrong. Each one leaks something different about who I actually am, and the leaks are usually where the real story lives.
What an abstraction is supposed to do.
In software, an abstraction is a thing that hides complexity. A function call hides the underlying machine instructions. A database query hides the storage layout. A networking library hides the packet routing. The whole point is to discard information you don’t want to think about, so you can think about the thing you actually care about.
The problem is that abstractions leak. The discarded information doesn’t disappear; it sits underneath the abstraction, and the moment something goes wrong, it comes back. Every senior engineer has had the experience of writing what should be simple code that takes thirty seconds instead of thirty milliseconds, and now they have to go reason about the index structure they thought they didn’t have to think about anymore. A bio is an abstraction in exactly the same way. It’s a function call you offer the world for the underlying complexity that is your actual life, and it leaks for the same reasons.
What leaks.
Take the fifty-word version. It’s the conference-badge bio. Tim Jordan, founder of three things, former C-suite at one notable thing, host of a podcast, spoke at ninety-one conferences. That’s the function signature. What does the fifty-word version leak? Almost everything. There’s nothing about why I’m running three things at once instead of one. Nothing about what I left behind to do it. Nothing about the years where the bio was much shorter and would have looked less impressive but I was probably a better person to be around. Nothing about the version of me that built and exited DTC brands in my twenties when I knew nothing.
The hundred-word version puts back a few of the missing edges. It mentions Shanghai and Guatemala City, which carries something real about how I actually spent the years between twenty-six and thirty-two. It still hides what I learned there, but at least it admits that I was there. The two-fifty is a confession. It starts naming things in their right order. It says I built and exited brands. It uses the word “founder” several times because that’s the one that’s true. It says I’m building AI infrastructure, which is the current version of a sentence I have said in twelve different ways across fourteen years. Whatever the current version is, it’s the smallest accurate version. There’s always more underneath.
The bios don’t leak randomly.
The interesting thing about leaks is that they’re not random. Each abstraction leaks in a specific direction, and you can predict the leak if you know what the abstraction was optimized for. The fifty-word bio is optimized for “is this person worth introducing.” It leaks everything that doesn’t help answer that question. The hundred-word version is optimized for “what does this person do.” It leaks everything that isn’t a verb. The two-fifty is optimized for “should we hire this person or feature this person.” It leaks the parts of me that don’t pay for their seat in a proposal.
None of these are dishonest. They are honest about a slice of the truth that’s relevant to the asker. But if you only ever encounter someone through their own bios, you’re not encountering them. You’re encountering a series of compressions, and the person is sitting in the leaks.
What this changes about how I read people.
Once I started noticing the leak pattern in my own bios, I started seeing it in everyone else’s. When I read someone’s LinkedIn, I’m not reading them; I’m reading what they think the audience for LinkedIn wants. The leaks are predictable. No mention of the years they were figuring it out. No mention of the venture that didn’t work. No mention of the period when they took a job they didn’t want because they had to. All of that is sitting underneath the abstraction, and it’s where almost everything interesting about the person lives.
When I want to know someone, the LinkedIn is the worst possible source. It’s a function signature. What I want is the implementation, and the implementation is in the things they don’t lead with: the projects they describe casually, the years that aren’t on the resume, the answer to “what were you doing in 2014,” the long story when you ask them about the part that doesn’t fit the bio.
A small note for anyone writing about themselves.
I’m not going to argue against writing bios. We need them. They do useful work in the world. But I’ll offer one observation, which is that the bio is not the person, and the gap between bio and person is not a failure of the bio. It’s the bio doing its job.
If you find yourself uncomfortable with how reduced you sound in your fifty-word version, that discomfort is the leak telling you something. You can either learn to make peace with the abstraction, or you can write longer pieces somewhere else where the leak can come back to the surface. That’s part of what this blog is, for me. A place where the bio’s leaks can be made visible. Not the whole story. Just less of a function signature.