Verizon Owns My Digital Ghost

Verizon owns my digital ghost, and I support that.

I recently left Verizon, amicably. So I'm now outside the firewall, and my former team is steering their own ship.

For seven years I served that team by running what a customer sees before they buy - the homepage, the landing pages, the full outbound portfolio. We moved real numbers, and we rebuilt how the work got made while we were doing it.

Before I turned in my keys, I built them a parting vain gift.

I gathered the record of me. Everything I had done and said there that got written down - the decisions, the feedback, the arguments, the answers. Not all of it. But a ton of it. Everything on the record.

Email, Slack, Drive. Seven years across two very different chapters of scope, all of it already sitting on Verizon systems where it belonged. I didn't move any of it anywhere. I built on top of it, inside the firewall, and I left it there.

I called it WWWD. What Would Wes Do. I'm not the Beatles claiming to be bigger than Jesus, but I've got a wealth of experience and I represent.

It's a browsable site. People: nearly 600 profiled, with career arcs, working styles, relationship maps and notes on how to work with each person. Projects: the programs I ran, reconstructed from the strategy decks, roadmaps, analyses and proposals behind them. Corpus: more than 180,000 emails, 34,000 Slack messages and 700 documents. A section for the 21 AI-assisted projects I built, with their architecture decisions and session logs. A folder of 78 memes, used with care, at the moments when a picture landed better than words.

And a search box. Behind it is a chatbot wired to a frontier model with that corpus underneath. You can use it like a very good search - what did we do, what did we decide, where's the old deliverable. Or you can ask it the other kind of question. How would Wes handle this. It answers from seven years of how I handled things like it before.

As far as I know, it's still live inside. Eventually a lot of it will age out, and the API key under the hood might die. But much of what I gave Verizon, including the parts with evergreen value, will stay there and stay usable indefinitely.

That content is lost to me forever

I would love to have that content. There's an enormous amount of me in there. I have none of it, and I don't think I have any right to it. When a person leaves a company, the digital footprint they leave behind belongs to that company.

Why don't I think I have a right to any of my own history? The biggest reason is respect for proprietary information.

Personal communications at a company - email, chat, documents - carry a tremendous amount of what the company owns and keeps inside. How things work. Who the people are. Where the risk sits and how it gets mitigated. Future plans. Resources. Information about competitors, partners and employees. There are legal concerns threaded through it. There are private human stories in it.

The day I walked out, I became an outside party. A wise person would never kiss and tell. But my good behavior isn't what protects any of it. The incentives and the controls that keep company content from being used badly get much weaker the moment someone is no longer there. No amount of trust or goodwill makes up for that. So when you're out, you're out, and you export nothing that is even remotely business related.

Internal content = knowledge equity

Everything in WWWD - the profiles, the projects, the decisions, the feedback - is one person's slice of something bigger.

When people work together as a large matrixed team, the sum is greater than the individuals. What you get is a living organism that can meet different needs in flexible, efficient ways.

People find ways of doing things, and they learn what works in which situations. Knowledge equity gets created, grown, spread, magnified, codified and built on. It runs into culture and human relationships. It's the blood that flows through an organization.

It's fed every time someone sends an email, a chat or a meme, or speaks in a meeting or on a stage. It's strengthened every time someone gives kudos, or gets grace to go deal with a sick kid, or spills something on their shirt at the potluck lunch.

That's the stuff that makes an organization survive and thrive. And a lot of it ends up embodied and fossilized inside the company's digital corpus - and inside each person's slice of it.

We put ourselves into that pool. Leaders especially. We make the decisions, we give the feedback, we negotiate between groups with competing truths, we build and foster the relationships.

All of that runs through our own lens of personal experience and expertise. That lens is what lets a person add to what's in front of them in ways that are worth something. That's an individual's contribution to the knowledge equity pool: the whole of their experience and skill, combined with everything happening in the commons.

Those contributions used to be low fidelity. They lived in people, and in the moment. They had to be constantly remanufactured - people bringing what they bring every day to keep the reserves of knowledge equity high.

Modern tools keep that material and make it usable later. Take a meeting. In previous times, people met, maybe someone took notes, maybe those notes went around afterward, and maybe a few people read them. Probably not. Whatever survived did so in the emails, the chats, the conversations and the memories of the people who were there.

Now, used properly, that same transcript produces the status report, the next steps, the accountability tie-back, and gets each person the information in the shape they need it, when they need it. The value of one hour in a room, both in the moment and later, is exponentially greater - and what we put into those rooms can be used far longer than it ever could before.

The old contract

The arrangement used to be simple. I show up. I make my contributions. The company gets the value from them in that moment. I get paid. That's it.

There's a spectrum of use here, and I think it shifts. A company can now get enhanced value from a person's contributions while they're there, by using these tools to full effect, and then keep getting significant residual value from that person after they're gone. Until it ages out, which I think it does. The material degrades.

You can't take your slice with you when you go, either. On top of every reason above, there's a practical one: there's no way to separate one person's contributions back out of the company's knowledge equity commons. It was never filed that way. So even if you wanted an export, and even if there were no reasons against giving you one, there isn't a clean version of it to hand over.

Whether a company can keep using what you left behind is not really debatable. They can. With a few exceptions - likeness, maybe - they will. The open questions are whether they bother, how far they take it, and whether any of that changes how people get paid.

I acknowledge you're going to hold on to those things. I acknowledge you're going to continue to get value from them. Therefore I'd expect my compensation to be proportionate to that value exchange, in a form and a format that's fair to both parties, at a rate the market determines.

I don't have that expectation today. And I don't know how much it gets factored in down the road. That depends on how much people come to see themselves adding value in explicit ways, long after they've stopped being paid for it. But I think this is going to come up and need to be worked through - the way musicians and actors and other professions in Hollywood have already watched their compensation agreements get rewritten under them.

Not soon. Any company could be there next month if it had the technology, the know-how and the desire at the same time, and getting all three at once is the slow part. So I don't actually expect anyone to use the digital ghost I built for them. Five years from now, I absolutely think they would.

It's holding seven years of what was really our shared work. So I left it for my team, to keep getting as much value out of it as they can, for as long as it stays relevant.

Google is bidding for Spirit Airlines' corpus

Somebody has already put a price on a company's corpus.

In August, Google bid ten million dollars for Spirit Airlines' internal business data in a bankruptcy auction, outbidding an AI startup at seven and a half. Emails, Teams messages, OneDrive files, spreadsheets, calendars, HR records. Passenger information was carved out and a court-appointed privacy ombudsman would oversee de-identification. Google's entire public comment was that the data "can be helpful in improving our products and AI models." The sale still hasn't gone through. Google is trying to buy the corpus. It doesn't have it yet.

The reporting since has been clearer about the appeal than Google was. The value isn't aviation expertise. It's that a corporate corpus encodes how people do their jobs - how they collaborate toward a shared goal, what the unwritten norms are - which is the material you want if you're training agents to do white-collar work generally.

So this isn't something that might one day happen to the work people leave behind. It's on the market now, and privately - we know the price and almost nothing else. Whoever wins reads an entire company at scale: an unprecedented view into how people actually work and interact, and the collective wisdom of thousands of people over many years. I would argue it's one of the most valuable and insightful datasets that's ever existed. I would have paid $100 million for it.

I'm excited and nervous to see what comes from it.