Builder-Leader The AI Exoskeleton That Crosses the Gap. The book is outBuy on Amazon

Twenty-five years and half a mile.

The morning before my first day I went for a run through Chicago. A couple of miles in, I recognised the route. Scroll to run it.

The start · 2001

I was working at a web company as a biology major, which takes some explaining. I had been building websites since junior high. Nobody taught me any of it, because there was nobody to do the teaching. I was not precocious. I was early.

2002 to 2010 · Genomics

In 2002 the human genome had a draft and no finish. The software to assemble one did not exist as a thing you could buy, so you wrote it. Nobody at TIGR ever asked what my degree was in. They asked whether the pipeline ran.

2010 to 2013 · Clinical sequencing

I left for EdgeBio in 2010 to build the sequencing platform for a clinical lab. There was no reference architecture, so we built one, and found out where it was wrong by running real samples. GeneDx acquired the services business in 2013.

2013 · Thirteen years

Thirteen years at AstraZeneca. I joined to work on genomics infrastructure and left running the AI Centre of Excellence for R&D. None of those four platforms was assigned to me. I wrote the first version, proved it worked, recruited people better than me, and handed it over. Safe is the fast way.

2023 on · Agentic AI

The fourth window. Everything on this site was built inside it: 48 projects started, 291 posts published, as of 2026-10-08.

2,640 ft · 2026-08-03

It came out at twenty-five years and half a mile. That is the distance from the web applications company where I interned in college to the building I walked into a few hours later as a VP. I got the goosebumps. Then I finished the run.

The address changed. And that's about it.

Read the postWhat I buildLinkedIn

Windows and stations from my post; the record from the projects and posts exports, as of 2026-10-08. Feet are half a mile divided by twenty-five years, nothing more.

Justin H. JohnsonBuilder
Leader
The AI Exoskeleton That Crosses the Gap

The book, paperback 2026-07-01

The builder and the leader stopped being two different people.

The skills you build collaborating with AI at night, intent, orchestration, judgment, knowing when to step in and when to stay out, are the same skills that make you better at leading people during the day. So I wrote it down.

Buy on Amazonbuilder-leader.com

Domino Data Science Leaders, episode 100, 30:04

Becoming the builder-conductor

  1. I called myself the second mover in my own project.
  2. I came to coding sideways through biology. Science was kind of that passion. Code was kind of how I got there.
  3. You can't read your way across this. The crossing is personal.
  4. Get uncomfortable, build, get out of the way of AI.

Quotes from the episode's auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned. Each stamp starts the episode at that second.

One job for twenty-five years: turn up where the rules are not written yet, and build.

VP, Head of Data and Applied AI, R&D at Tempus. Read the post

About meLinkedIn

Justin Johnson