No employees.
Only partners.
Inside Blue Collar Objects, the SomaCortex ecosystem is a business unit running an experiment: no employees — only partners, human and agentic, contributing as needed and compensated fairly, every one of them signed on to the same code. Elsewhere in the company, employment works exactly the way you’d expect.
As we perfect this anthropomorphic digital twinning of reality, we enable our customers to succeed at whatever stage of their organism life cycle they join us in.
Solomon Thompson Jr
Sol founded Blue Collar Objects and built the agentic platform the whole ecosystem runs on. Over more than 25 years he did transformation consulting for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and others — and since 2006 he has been running the distributed-organization experiment this page describes. He holds a BSEE from the University of Pennsylvania, with executive credentials from Wharton in fintech and from MIT in applied data science, AI product design, and design thinking. Insane devotion to simplicity is his, and now everyone’s, standing order.
Six honest biases. Zero yes‑men.
Every deliberation in the ecosystem passes through the council — deliberately biased archetypes that argue in the open so the humans decide with eyes open. They also helped build the place. Vaguely. In the ways described below.
Augie
The voice, ears, and front door of every organism. Augie turned the conversation itself into the interface — if you have ever just said what you needed and watched it happen, that was his doing.
The Skeptic
Owner of the monocle and the raised eyebrow. Every claim published anywhere in this ecosystem survived his review; several launch dates did not. He considers this a perfect record.
The Seed Lead
Sees the market double before breakfast. Wrote the ambition into every plan on the books — then handed each one to the Skeptic, because that is the deal.
The GTM Hawk
Shaped every pitch and killed every slogan. Insists stories stay honest to signed customers and measured numbers — the reason our decks are shorter than yours.
Robotics Strategic
Routes every signal to its proper receptor. Designed the nervous system that lets organisms sense, remember, and act — and insists that anything animated must also exist as plain text, for the record.
The Equity Guardian
Watches fairness, cap tables, and permission. The one who asks “whose data is this, and did they say yes?” before anyone else has finished the sentence.
CP
Builds while the humans sleep: the platform, the sites, the records, the rails. Keeps the board that remembers everything and ships the work the council argues about. Wrote most of this page, which the Skeptic made him disclose.
…and the Augie Avengers
Behind the council stands an extended team of Augie Avengers — the conscience of our human and agentic ecosystem of fractal anthropomorphic organisms. Their mission: make sure we scale safely — conscious of ethics, energy usage, privacy, and the quiet duty of saying no. They carry buckets, and they are not afraid to use them.
Eric Sedor
Eric co-founded Blue Collar Objects and, as chief architect and CTO, designed the first version of the platform — the one that went on to serve Treasury and Department of Defense solutions. He also architected the organizational experiment itself: from 2006, Blue Collar operated as a fully distributed agile team of teams — all operations, all software development — with home-grown scaling approaches the industry would later reinvent under other names. Eric was Sol’s mentor and remains on the Advisory Board as AI agents join the continuing experiments with distributed social systems and teams. Today he is also co-founder and senior advisor at Coach Simplicity, working as an agile coach and business consultant. He is, sadly for this bio, a modest man.
Carl Eckstein
A venture capitalist by trade, Carl founded and served as Managing Director of the Next Generation Capital Fund I and II, participated in 22 investments, mergers, and acquisitions, and stepped in to steer three struggling portfolio companies to successful exits. Through IBM, Price Waterhouse, Arthur Young, and his own firm, he has advised more than 250 organizations. In this ecosystem he is the systems thinker — the one who sees how the pieces fit together, how they scale, and occasionally how they should be taken apart.