About

Set Earth is Braydon McCormick, the software assistants that take the work that repeats, and specialists brought in as engagements need them.

I’ve run companies across pharma, devices, and software for twenty years: built them, grew them, sold one, shut one down, reported to boards, took a company through a regulatory pathway. I’m involved in six today. The fleet that runs this practice’s own work built and deployed this site. The operating work I do now is the same job I’ve always done; the fleet is what lets me run more than one at once. When the work surfaces a real application that needs building, LightForge Works, a firm I am part of, builds it.

The companies

The six:

• Set Earth Consulting: fractional COO work on a retainer, for companies adopting AI.
• LightForge Works: the software firm I’m part of; it builds applications, and the AI Operating Sprint now runs there.
• Synthyra: a biotech AI company building protein language models. I’m its fractional CEO and head of business development.
• Navicyte: a life-sciences company working a product through the FDA pathway.
• Plum Spun: an operating company of mine, d/b/a Aclara. Aclara makes anti-microbial materials; I’m a co-inventor on its fabric patent, US 11,975,221.
• Concresca: a new company, still in stealth.

How I think

When a problem is tangled, I start by asking what decision is actually being made. Then I name what good looks like, state the constraints, and map the workflow far enough to see the handoffs and the failure modes. Then I pick the smallest validating path.

When work fails, it’s usually one of three things: the decision is vague, the owner is unclear, or the proposed system has never run real work. I ask what it costs when the thing breaks, what the return is if it works, and where a person still has to verify the result.

This is also how I build with AI. I care less about adding another tool than about what the system can see, what it’s allowed to do, where it hands work back to a person, and whether it helped.

Where the value comes from is my working theory: interactive AI, the kind you work with directly rather than systems built into a product, pays out at the intersection of three things. Operator craft: how these systems work and how to run them. Domain expertise you can say out loud: AI amplifies what you can explain, not what you know in your hands. And the accurate language of your field: precise words are what let it do expert work. Raise any one and the results get better; the ceiling is where the three meet.

Music

I trained as a composer. PhD in music theory and composition from Boston University; BA in Russian and Music from Colby College. Composition taught me to hear a system as more than a collection of parts. A piece works because the voices have roles, enter at the right time, and yield when another voice needs the space. The same is true of a well-designed operating system. Each part needs to know what it’s there to do and how it relates to the others.

The Boston University Orchestra performed my Symphony No. 1. The third movement:

More is on SoundCloud.

Coordinated agents get interesting when the roles, timing, boundaries, and handoffs make a person’s work more coherent.

Endurance

Running and triathlon raise the same questions I bring to systems. You pace the distance, and you carry the load you actually have. A system that looks impressive at the start is worth less than one that keeps working, and the people who live with it have to be able to maintain, inspect, and improve it.

Education

Elsewhere: LinkedIn · SoundCloud.