Hello, hello -

If you're receiving this, I hope you're doing well! Consider this a broad catch-up or an invitation for one in the near future.

First, big personal news

We welcomed a baby boy - Caspian Clark Shaffer - into our family on April 26, 2026. He's settling into a routine already, and his big sis, Camina (just turned 3), has taken to calling him "the burrito", in reference to his swaddle.

Professional Update

  • I'm with ActionTank [https://www.actiontank.io/], and we've partnered with Activate America [https://www.activateamerica.vote/] for a project focused on the 2026 midterm elections. We're currently targeting swing House districts, but may add in Senate and local races, depending on how fundraising goes. The basic gist is to use commercially available data, AI, and data science to individually target and then message eligible voters.

  • ActionTank also has a core service for non-profits and universities. The tagline is "activate your supporters to do ... anything ... except ask them for money". For a simple example, picture an environmental group that organizes park cleanups across a metro area.

    • What they do now: bury a schedule in a newsletter, send it to everyone in their CRM

    • What ActionTank would do: figure out who in the CRM lives or works near each park, and just invite people to the one or two that might be relevant, increasing participation

  • Over at Outpace Bio, [https://www.outpacebio.com/] I've been helping design and roll out a data layer for drug candidates and the various assays performed. It provides a governance and permissioning layer and a "record and label your results by default" operating framework, which smoothes lab operations and makes it possible to pull up information required for FDA review on demand. We're currently building AI features for discovery and analysis on top of it.

  • I did a stint over at Ascertain [https://www.ascertain.com/], building integrations to submit prior authorization paperwork to various insurer portals with janky API-less interfaces. This helps doctors get paid more quickly and with less hassle.

  • I became an LP in Adaptation Ventures [https://adaptation.vc/]

Tech Industry and Trends Thoughts

I finally got around to putting together a few blog posts.

Here's a somewhat technical post with some techniques that help "tune" token usage in AI workflows embedded into deployed software.

https://www.scoutcorpsllc.com/blog/2026/5/18/one-weird-trick-to-drastically-reduce-your-token-usage

Here's another one about the economics of inference and how I think it'll effect the industry going forward.

https://www.scoutcorpsllc.com/blog/2026/6/2/predictions-for-the-future-of-ai

Appendix: More on ActionTank x Activate America

Why? Political campaigns currently focus on three avenues for targeting:

  • Registered voter files. Weakness: they don't include eligible but unregistered voters - one-quarter of all eligible voters, over 40% of young ones. They're also frequently out of date; the number of students in colleges in swing districts who are registered at their parents' houses is high enough to move the needle in competitive races.

  • Social media & ad networks. Weakness: low hit rates and opaque accounting (you might only reach 15% of your target audience on YouTube, and 20% on Meta, and you have no idea how small or large the Venn diagram overlap of those two is). More long-term, you're increasingly relying on a small set of gatekeepers with a record of putting their thumbs on the political scale in order to reach your audience at all.

  • Door-to-door. Weakness: manual, slow, expensive, and works best in dense urban districts that don't have competitive general elections.

I'm intentionally leaving out untargeted messaging (TV, billboards, etc.) because that's a different game.

The upshot of this is that campaigns fail to reach the entirety of their voter base, even spending millions of dollars. When they do, they fail to get the one simple message across: your vote counts. Even the most highly politically engaged young people think things like "I live in [New Jersey / Texas / etc], my vote doesn't count". Valid complaints about the Electoral College aside, you hear this even from those in House districts decided by a single percentage point, or have a local sheriff elected by a few hundred votes.

Our model is to target people directly and remind them that they're in one of the precious few parts of the country where their vote does, in fact, count.

--

- Chris

I might turn this into a recurring exercise. Let me know if you want in ... or out.

(I don't have an up-to-date email, so assuming that's a better way to connect, I'm chris@scoutcorpsllc.com)