Architects know that a structure can't rest on a single load-bearing column — and, according to SYNTHETIVITY Founder and CEO Lori Mazor, neither can companies. Here, the longtime Chief Member reveals how this foundational structural engineering principle has shaped her approach to business-building. Hint: Being a solo founder doesn’t mean going it alone.

I was trained as an architect. Most people hear that and picture a profession: drawings, buildings, hard hats. For me it became something closer to a grammar: a way of seeing how things hold together, and what happens when they don't.

There's a first law you learn early. Load can't rest on a single point. It has to distribute or the structure fails. You can design the most beautiful building in the world, but if every force runs down to one column, you don't have a building. You have a countdown.

I've thought about that law a lot over the last 25 years, because I've rebuilt my own structure five times. I've changed careers more often than a New Yorker changes apartments. Sometimes the shift was leaving someone else's payroll for my own. These days it's subtler: learning to tell my "self" apart from my "business." As the CEO of a single-member LLC, I am the founder and the employee, the thought leader and the workhorse, and some days just plain confused.

I started at Ennead, one of the big New York architecture firms. When friends would visit from out of town, I’d take them on a tour of all the bathrooms I had designed. My biggest client was NYU, and eventually NYU hired me away. I earned my Executive MBA there and decided to build something of my own: SYNTHETIVITY. I did a little of everything, from helping startups to orchestrating an $8 billion capital plan for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was writing algorithms to predict staffing from projected work volume.

In the fall of 2019, CUNY Hunter College recruited me in-house as Vice President for Administration. I had no idea the job would have me writing a university's COVID plan, running a 500-person on-site operations team, keeping a public K–12 school open, and moving 3,000 classes online. We even rebuilt the bell schedule so that when everyone returned to campus, room scheduling conflicts would stop blocking students from graduating on time. I hired a machine learning software engineer to automate what was being done on index cards.

And then I was done. Exhausted in a way I'd never been, mentally and physically. I knew I couldn't stay in the same job. What I needed wasn't another title. I needed a social safety net, something that would hold me long enough to design the next thing I'd build.

That's when I found Chief.

I didn't join to network. I joined because I needed a floor under me. But a strange thing happens when you stand in a room full of women operating at your level: You stop bracing, and you start building again.

At Chief, I wrote a book, Temperature: Creativity in the Age of AI. A month after ChatGPT arrived in 2023, I pointed SYNTHETIVITY at it with a single goal: teaching people to embrace the technology not for its own sake but so they could return to doing human things at work. I invited my fellow members to learn with me. Three hundred of them signed up for free classes in the winter of 2023. That became 18 months of executive AI bootcamps, half of them filled by Chief Members. The other half came through LinkedIn, championed by Chief Members who shared my work without being asked.

Then the structure did something I couldn't have engineered. Those same members started landing C-Suite roles, and they invited me in to train their teams. My business moved from B-to-C to B-to-B almost on its own, carried by relationships I'd built years before I needed them.

Then I got a contract with NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority to build a full training program and agentic platform, the kind of project that asks you to scale 10x overnight whether or not you're sure you want to. I wasn't sure. My Core Group held me through it. Fellow founders walked the same road and compared notes. When I needed a bookkeeper, a resource, or a sane second opinion, I put out a call and members answered. I've become a better boss, a better communicator, a better Chief, because my peers showed me how.

If you take one thing from this, take the law: Don't float your business on a single column. Whether or not you ever set foot in a Chief room, the principle holds:

  • Build the foundation before you need it. I didn't go hunting for clients in those free classes. I led with generosity, and the relationships became load-bearing later, on their own time.
  • Be someone worth inviting in, not just someone who shows up to take.
  • Treat your community as infrastructure, not a rolodex: something you design with intention, reinforce, and return to, especially on the days you have nothing left to give it.

Because here's the truth nobody tells you about going solo: solo doesn't mean alone. I'm the only name in the company. I am also one node in a structure I could never hold up by myself and wouldn't want to.

It's damn hard, I'm not gonna lie. But it's a lot easier when you're not trying to float your whole building on a single column. I've got a strong, distributed foundation now. And whether my next move is to grow the company or go backpacking in a jungle to write songs (yes, that's also a thing I do), I'm not going anywhere without my people.