Blog: Why I show up to Roomns That Have Nothing To DO WIth Racing

July 31, 2026

Last night I was in a room in Toronto full of founders, AI builders, and investors at a Claude Community event — Claude for Founders & Entrepreneurs. No one else there raced cars for a living. There were no other drivers, no other mechanics, no one talking race strategy or recent wins. Just people building companies on AI, swapping demos, and trading notes on what's actually working.

I loved every minute of it.

I get asked sometimes why I bother showing up to things like this. My world is racing — split-second decisions, data acquisition, sponsorships, physical training, a calendar built entirely around race weekends. An AI founders' meetup in Toronto isn't exactly adjacent territory. But that's precisely the point. If I only ever showed up to rooms full of racers, I'd only ever hear what racers already know.

Every industry solves the same problems differently.

Founders in that room were talking about iteration speed — how fast they could test an idea, throw it away if it didn't work, and try the next one. That's not a startup concept. That's a race weekend. You run a setup, the data comes back, you adjust, you go again. Hearing someone from a completely different field describe the exact same discipline, just with different vocabulary, is clarifying. It reminds you the principle is bigger than your industry — which means you can steal ideas for applying it better.

Rooms like this show you tools before your industry catches up.

Motorsport is data-obsessed, but it's not always fast-moving when it comes to adopting new software or workflows — a lot of teams are still running processes built years ago. Sitting in a room watching people build real, working AI tools live, and hearing how they use them to run sales, ops, and accounting for entire companies, gave me a preview of what's about to become normal everywhere, racing included. I'd rather be early to that than find out about it two years from now because someone finally wrote the trade press article.

You meet people you'd never otherwise meet.

Sponsorship, partnerships, and opportunity rarely come from inside your own bubble. They come from the person next to you at an event who has zero connection to your industry but turns out to be building something you can genuinely help with, or vice versa. I didn't go into last night looking for a deal. I went in curious. That's usually when the interesting conversations happen anyway.

It keeps you sharp in a way your own industry can't.

Racing rewards obsession with your craft, but obsession can also narrow you. Spend enough time only around other drivers and engineers, and you start solving problems with the same six tools everyone else in the paddock uses. Put yourself in a room where nobody knows what a splitter does, and you're forced to explain your world in plain language — which, honestly, makes you understand it better yourself. And you walk out with new tools borrowed from a field that had no reason to think about racing at all.

I'm not an AI founder. I'm not building a startup. But I'll keep showing up to rooms like that one, because the best ideas I've brought back to racing rarely came from inside racing. They came from somewhere completely unrelated, from someone who had no idea I even existed until we started talking.

If you're in any high-performance field — sport, business, whatever — go to the event that has nothing to do with your industry. Especially that one.

P.S. Thanks to my partner ReInvestWealth for inviting me to the event!