I'm Lance Hydrick. I was a first-generation college student, raised by a single mother in a household that did not have money. My father was incarcerated. There was no child support, no safety net, and no plan B. The math of survival was the math I learned first.
That kind of childhood does two things to you. It teaches you to read situations the way most people read books — closely, repeatedly, looking for what isn't being said. And it makes you allergic to theater, because theater is what people perform when they have the resources to perform it. Neither of those instincts went away when my circumstances changed. They became how I build companies.
Where I am now
I'm the founder and CEO of Halda, an AI-native engagement platform serving educational institutions. We work with universities, colleges, and the leaders trying to drag legacy institutions into a world none of their training prepared them for. Our customers are Provosts, Presidents, VPs of Enrollment, CIOs — people making consequential decisions in rooms that move on geological time.
I am writing weekly because I have spent the last several years operating in two worlds at once: the founder's world of fast iteration and existential risk, and the higher-ed world of careful stewardship and 200-year time horizons. The translation problem between those two worlds is one of the most interesting things I have ever lived inside. Most of what I write here is field notes from that translation.
What this site is for
It is a publication of earned lessons — meaning lessons that cost something to acquire. I am not interested in restating frameworks I've read. I am interested in writing down the things I've learned that I have never read anywhere, because they came from the floor and most operating wisdom is written by people who were never on it.
The audience is two groups, and I write for both: senior leaders in higher education trying to understand the technical wave heading at them, and founders / operators / builders trying to sell to, work with, or replace those institutions. The overlap is where most of the interesting decisions of the next decade will be made.