I was working on a Claude project — the one I actually use to draft my newsletter — when two threads I’d been carrying around in my head separately finally connected.
The first had been with me for a while. A few clients have started asking me to build things with AI as part of our work together. And two questions keep coming up that I haven’t had clean answers to: if I build something with AI for you, can I sell it to other clients? And what’s the human element that makes it worth paying me for at all, once the tools can do more of the work?
The second thread came from Level Up, a business accelerator I’m currently participating in. They introduced me to something I hadn’t had framed for me this way before: IP isn’t just something corporations protect with lawyers. It’s something you can build, package, and sell.
Sitting there brainstorming in Claude, those two threads connected. The answer to both client questions runs through the same place — your expertise, documented in a form you own. And most of us, especially those who spent years in salaried roles, were never taught to think about it that way.
What IP actually is for knowledge workers
Not patents and trademarks. For people working in tech, policy, communications, and campaigns, intellectual property (IP) is the stuff you’ve figured out that others haven’t — documented in a form someone else could actually use.
An idea isn’t IP. The documented, teachable, transferable version of your expertise is.
Your framework for evaluating a regulatory comment. Your prompt library. The onboarding course you built for new practitioners. The workbook that walks someone through a process you’ve been running in your head for years. The AI assistant trained on your methodology and perspective.
The distinction matters because a lot of people I talk to are sitting on a decade of intellectual infrastructure — scattered across their employer’s servers, their old slide decks, their heads. None of that travels with you.
The tradeoff of who you are building for
When you’re employed, the default is to build for your employer. That’s the arrangement, and it’s a fair one. The frameworks you develop, the processes you codify, the institutional knowledge you accumulate — it belongs to them. That’s what the job is.
But nobody teaches you to think about what you’re building for yourself in parallel — through your own time, your own tools, your own independent work. And if you ever want to go independent, or if independence finds you before you’re ready for it, that parallel track is what you’ll have to stand on.
One of the things I’ve been working through in developing Panic Responsibly — a decision-making framework for navigating high-stakes ambiguity that I’m building out as the premise for my second book — is that signal without a home dies. I came up with that phrase thinking back on what happened during the Cambridge Analytica period. I had the early signal in 2015, escalated it, and then let it go because there was no organizational home for “this might become a serious problem in two years.” It died in a queue.
The same thing happens to expertise. You accumulate signal — hard-won, specific, earned in rooms most people never get into — and it dies in your head or in your employer’s systems because you never built it a home you own.
The question isn’t whether to be loyal to your employer. It’s whether you’re being intentional about what you build on your own time, in your own name.
What my library is starting to look like
In the spirit of showing not just telling, here’s what I’ve built (or am building) so far.
The AI Transparency Workbook — a documented process that runs without me in the room.
The AI skill files I use to do my job faster, built into replicable instruction sets.
The Claude 101 course I developed for trust and safety teams.
A vibe-coded dashboard of election officials and candidates in different countries.
The election calendar we built that tracks what’s coming globally.
And two I’m most excited about, both just starting to take shape: Panic Responsibly, which I’ve been testing with clients and developing into a full decision-making methodology. And what I’m calling the No Playbook Playbook — a framework for people operating in genuinely new territory where no established guide exists. Both are early. I’m still figuring out how to package and position them.
Every item on that list started as something I was already doing in my head or in scattered notes. The act of building it out created the asset.
Where to start
Five questions to find yours if you don’t know where to start:
What do people keep asking you to explain? That’s probably a course or guide.
What process do you follow that others don’t know exists? That’s probably a workbook or framework.
What would a new version of you have needed on day one? That’s probably a training resource.
What tool do you wish existed in your domain? That’s probably something you could build and there are more ways to build it now than there used to be.
What’s the thing you know that your clients or colleagues don’t and where did you figure it out? That’s the core of a briefing series, a licensed methodology, or an AI assistant trained on your actual expertise.
Pick one. Spend 90 minutes this week turning the answer into a document. That document is the beginning of your library.
Why this matters
This matters for a few reasons.
The first is scale. Documented IP lets your expertise reach people you’ll never have a direct conversation with — through a course, a licensed framework, a workbook, a tool. That’s how you extend your impact beyond your own calendar.
The second is passive income. A workbook, a course, a licensed methodology — those can earn while you’re at a conference, between client engagements, or after you’ve decided you’re done taking calls for the month. That’s not a side hustle framing. It’s what a sustainable independent practice actually looks like.
The most important is that I firmly believe AI is accelerating more people to move toward portfolio careers. Fewer people will have one job for 20 years. More people will stitch together consulting, advising, content, training, and tools. Your IP is what makes that stitching possible.
You don’t have to have it figured out. You just have to make the mind shift and start somewhere.
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