I’m JC. James Coleman on paper, but JC to everyone who knows me.
I help leaders and families develop the one thing AI can’t generate for them: their own point of view.
For twenty years I built service-based technology businesses — most recently a referral-driven practice that quietly served Fortune 50 board members, Apple veterans, and families navigating the strangeness of being early to something. In 2017 I relocated to Kobe, Japan. In 2024 I began the work that became GENRIKEN (原理導研究所) — a practice for organizations and individuals who suspect that AI is not new software, but new physics.
The clients I work with are people who recognize the shift in their bones before they can name it. CEOs facing operational dysfunction they can no longer outsource their way through. Boards quietly worried that their relevance is expiring. Parents watching their neurodivergent children get crushed by systems built for someone else’s brain. These are not technology problems. They are problems of judgment, of cadence, of point of view — and AI is the lever that makes them solvable for the first time.
First Principles is where I think out loud about that work. About what AI changes and, more importantly, what it doesn’t. About the difference between the people who will use this moment to amplify their humanity and the ones who will use it to abdicate.
If you’ve been reading the AI coverage and feeling like everyone is talking past the actual thing — welcome. You’re in the right room.
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— JC
Kobe, Japan
