# Photographing Kings, Coordinating Chaos, Extracting Patterns In the Bittensor ecosystem, the technical analysis and the tokenomics get covered ad infinitum. The human layer - what actually drives the people building this, the patterns that show up across them, the psychology behind the builds - barely gets touched. That's my focus. The why behind the work, not just the what. It's the same thing I've been doing my whole working life, in wildly different clothes. ## Where one mistake meant millions For fifteen years I worked offshore. Most of that time I coordinated logistics on subsea construction - saturation diving ships and ROV vessels across the UK, Norwegian, Dutch and Danish sectors, the Gulf of Mexico, the Black Sea. Ships that cost clients £250-350k a day. Equipment movements worth £50 million in subsea tooling. One miscalculation in a demob and the delay cascaded through the whole project. That work taught me to hold the big picture and the granular detail at the same time, to read what wasn't being said on a coordination call, to spot the pattern that decided whether a complex operation held together or came apart. Creative thinking and logical execution weren't opposites out there. They were how anything got done when the stakes were that high. There's an etymology I like: forge comes from the Latin *faber*, a worker. That's exactly what I was, all those years offshore. ## From photographing royalty to human interest After offshore, I built a photography business that opened doors I hadn't expected. The Prince's Regeneration Trust commissioned me to photograph the then Prince Charles, now King Charles III, on a project visit. The work brought recognition I hadn't gone looking for - a Women Ahead Rising Star award, speaking at the SWPP Convention in London, features in Scotland on Sunday, HuffPost, Woman's Weekly and more. What stuck with people, though, wasn't the high-profile commissions. It was the written interviews I did with women in business - the human blended with the work, who they were underneath the public profile. One woman stopped me two years after I'd stopped doing them, to tell me a specific interview had stayed with her. That taught me something I've never let go of: when you show the human side of what someone is building, it lands deeper than any amount of promotion. ## The same skill, different stakes In 2013 I started coaching. More than 3,200 people came through my courses and membership over the years, but the one-to-one coaching I kept deliberately small - a handful of people at a time, worked with properly. That evolved to Forge & Flourish in 2023, when I trained as a Heroic Coach and added mental fitness to the mix. The average coaching relationship in this industry lasts about three months. Mine average three years. I had two clients for nine years. One is still with me now, even though I've closed the practice. Coaching sharpened one specific thing: hearing what someone is really saying underneath what they're telling you, and reading how people make decisions under pressure. Offshore, photography, coaching. Different industries, different stakes, different people. **The same skill underneath: seeing what's actually happening, and helping people act on it.** ## Finding Bittensor I found Bittensor at the end of February 2024, and the same lens showed me the gap straight away. Everyone was covering the technicals and the tokenomics. The human patterns that actually decide whether a project makes it? Barely touched. Bittensor distributes the creation of intelligence across thousands of independent people, where what you contribute determines what you earn, not how much capital you arrived with. At the exact moment centralised AI is showing its fragility - the energy, the concentration, the cost - here was something built on a different foundation entirely. That's what drew me in. Not just the thesis, but the recognition that this is a genuinely different way to build. ## Why this work matters When I lost my pension savings to a scam in TAO, the community supported me without being asked. Not just the kind words, though those mattered, but in ways that showed me something rare about this ecosystem. People showing up for each other, not because there was anything to gain, but because that's what this community does. If you've been through something like that, or you carry the quiet fear that it could happen to you, I understand the weight of it. It shapes how I do this work - not from having it all figured out, but from knowing what it costs to stay when everything is telling you to leave. If that's you, you're in the right place.