Bloom

Two years ago I asked the CEO of the company I co-founded if we should publish our cap table to 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 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.

When something lacks coherence, we hide it. A company that won’t show its ownership is hiding because the ownership wouldn’t read as beautiful if it were unveiled. The founders would look over-compensated. Venture capital would look like they got a huge slice for writing a check with other people’s money. Early employees would be pissed. Nothing about the math would sing.

Whenever you feel you must hide one thing to make the whole look beautiful, it never was.

I didn’t know how to say any of this two years ago. A teaching two weeks ago in a Hatha class at HAUM gave me the words.

The teacher, Juan, opened with a passage from the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna and Krishna are on a battlefield. Arjuna doesn’t want to kill, but it’s his dharma—his intrinsic nature and duty thereto—to fight when fighting is 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 work.

Following one’s dharma isn’t about doing anything, but rather dropping the resistance to your own nature—to what feels good to you.

What feels good to me is to make things coherent. To make beauty.

And I can name it now.

How do you know beauty when you encounter it?

You just do. It renders your soul speechless, speaks to your heart, and pulls you into the present before your reasoning mind catches up.

As I build my life anew, I try to ask myself, “Does this make my heart sing?”

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

Most of us don’t choose our moral framework. It gets handed to us. We obey like automatons and call the doctrines “values.” But we rarely ask whether the framework itself is beautiful, much less whether what flows from it is.

The book The Ethics of Beauty argues this is upside down. Beauty must come first, and ethics and morality will flow down from it. Most Western traditions start from logic and reason their way down to what feels right. The reverse is to start from what’s beautiful and let the rest sort itself out.

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 this is what I’m trying.

Charge a dollar per member per month and nothing else. That’s the whole pricing page. No credit card processing markup hidden behind a line item, no per-seat tier dressed up as a feature, no AI add-on upcharge. The studio grows, the bill grows. The studio shrinks, so does the bill. We’re aligned by definition.

The legal agreement is written so a human can read it. No vendor lock-in. If a studio wants to leave, they take everything with them—their data, their teachers’ profiles, their members’ history. The relationship has to earn its right to continue every day.

I wrote down what I believe before I had any customers. Anyone can point at it and hold me to it.

And today, the books go public. Sihaya LLC’s balance. Tala’s MRR (zero, as of this morning, with the first customer going live in three days). What I’m paying myself (nothing). What I own (all of it). Every dollar that moves through the company, visible.

Of course, I might be wrong about this approach. The market doesn’t always reward beauty. Often it rewards extraction, and the extracted feel grateful for the deal. The standard playbook has a lot of quarterly evidence behind it. I’m betting the playbook is wrong. The bet might miss.

I’m placing it anyway.

The venture-backed machine runs 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 is true of a person. Carl Jung called the work of becoming whole individuation and 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 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.

The move is to approach the fear. Look at it in the eye. Ask it questions. See what it is 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 us all 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 and coherence.

Yours is yours to name.

Watch what opens.