GPS Self-Narrative — Working Draft (May 20)
Status: Reuben’s existing prose (lightly corrected) + new paragraphs added to flesh out the R/R/R arc, the honest gaps, and the closing. About 1,100 words; trim or expand from here.
Run /stop-slop before submitting.
GPS Self-Narrative 2026
My third year at the Accelerator has been another year of serious professional growth as I’ve grown from “capacity builder” to system designer and strategist. The time our team spent last summer writing our Team Handbook has laid the foundation for the cohesion we felt as a team this year. I feel we have really started to hit our stride as a team, working through the definitions and rituals that we established in the Handbook throughout the year. In a series of 1:1s with Josh this spring, we started talking about my work in terms of Reach, Robustness, and Resonance: the audiences a piece of work finds, the structures that let it survive without me in the room, and the shifts in how the people around it see themselves and what they can do. That framework is now the grammar I’ll use for the rest of this narrative, and for the year ahead.
The year started off with an intense four week stretch where I had a workshop every week in October. Conducting workshops is one of the parts of the job I enjoy the most. After that, I collaborated with Josh to create what is now the AI Flash Lab, which he presented at the UNESCO Learning Week in France. That workshop, and its international debut, has been a catalyst for our expanding reach. We’ve held that workshop both here at Stanford and overseas; one of the highlights of my career here at Stanford (so far!) was traveling to Oman in February to deliver the workshop with our partners at the Ministry of Education.
Speaking of workshops, Build-a-Bot continues to be a sought after workshop, validating our approach of creating things that are focused on real staying power and enduring skills, not just ideas that are temporarily popular at the moment. There have been incremental updates to the platform throughout the year, including the addition of multi-lingual capabilities — the site is now available in English, French, Spanish, and German — and we are currently exploring a collaboration with a researcher from Stanford medical school. Even two-and-a-half years after creating it, the workshop’s reach continues to grow, Courtney Garza (who participated at the AI Show one year) took it to TCEA in Texas in February and delivered her own session. Andy Hock adapted the deck for a CTE conference in Eugene. That shift, from “workshop I run” to “program others run,” was the reach I was hoping for when we started the train-the-trainer thread last year, and it’s beginning to materialize.
A new dimension of reach is emerging: the ISTE partnership conversation pivoted from a single workshop booking into something structurally different: with OTL’s involvement we arrived at a two-tier IP model that keeps the open Flash Lab curriculum open while building a proprietary train-the-trainer layer that we can license. That structural decision could determine whether the program runs for a decade or for a season.
Internally, we also made the team’s scaffolding more durable. Josh and I co-developed a seed-grant lifecycle framework — SPARK, BUILD, SHARPEN, SCALE — that gives us shared language for where a project sits and how much contact it warrants right now. It lets the whole portfolio be held without every project demanding the same level of touch.
This year I also feel I have grown in the role of becoming a trusted partner with researchers within the GSE, prototyping several Virtual Field Trip tools for Rachel Wolf and the broader VFT team, including launching the web-based Photosphere viewer, so that anyone, anywhere can create their own photosphere without needing to have a special camera. I’ve also contributed to Cathy Chase’s work on the AI Comic Studio, which had stalled before I built a prototype that Cathy could test with students. She told me the project had been re-invigorated as a result. And I helped Ana Saavedra’s team in Colombia build a chatbot platform that supported their research and produced exportable conversation data and images.
Working with the range of projects across the seed grantees has really expanded the breadth of projects I’m a part of, both providing a growth opportunity and demonstrating the versatility of my skill set: from building a 3D-printable “cat” for the HarmonAI project, to providing technical guidance for the MyBook project with Wen Ma, to running a cross-cohort Legal 101 workshop in February that pulled seed grantees, tEquity, and Create+AI participants into the same room for the first time. The cross-cohort moment was a different kind of reach than the workshop count. Fewer people, but people from previously-siloed groups in the same conversation, which is a harder distance to close.
One of the more meaningful moments of the year for me came in an April 1:1 with Josh, when he told me, unprompted, that “when Reuben steps into the room, you get unsucked,” and that I am “not just an IT guy — I’m a relationship writer.” Last year’s GPS narrative had named that “IT guy” perception as a gap I wanted to work on, so hearing him close that loop in a moment I wasn’t fishing for meant a lot. The same series of conversations is also where the R/R/R framework took shape, which makes the work feel shared in a way it didn’t quite before.
A few threads didn’t carry the way I wanted them to. My re-engagement with Cyan DeVeaux in late April was the right move (her project went from stalled to active in a single conversation), but the five-plus intros I committed to making haven’t all gone out, and the thread has cooled because I didn’t keep pulling on it. I named that at our May Strategic Huddle. Airtable hygiene is still inconsistent despite Airtable being the measurement instrument for our team’s Goal 1 — I capture things in markdown and Fizzy, and I under-update the shared system. And while more than ten strategic consultations happened this year, none of them turned into publishable artifacts. The writing habit itself is what I’m short on, more than the deliverables.
My personal wellness goals took a real step forward this year. The weekly review block on Friday afternoons has held since January, and the capacity analyses I ran in January and March gave me a clearer read on where I was drifting than I would have had otherwise. And the physical routine I named as a gap in last year’s narrative finally has something behind it: I just finished a twelve-week diet change following Joel Fuhrman’s Eat to Live, and I’ve been walking at least two miles a day or visiting the gym.
Looking ahead, there are three growth areas I’m focused on. The first is documenting the strategic influence I’ve been having so the work lives somewhere other than in conversation — case studies, written reflections, things I can point to. The second is pushing the train-the-trainer thread from “we’ve trained facilitators” toward “the licensing economics are proven,” building on the structure we landed with OTL this spring. And the third is continuing to lean into the strategic-connector identity in a way that shows up in what gets built when I’m not in the room. My role continues to evolve. By this time next year, I want to be able to point to specific case studies, licensing milestones, and workshops running in rooms I’m not in. That’s the kind of staying power I’ve been working toward.
Word count: ~1,100. Drafted: 2026-05-20. Voice anchor: 2024-25 narrative.
prep/2026-05-20-gps-narrative-draft.md