Chased by Cheetahs, Why We Launched 5xFive
By Trip O’Dell
Growing up in Virginia, my first-grade teacher told my mother I would be lucky to graduate high school. Severely dyslexic, dysgraphic, with dyscalculia and undiagnosed ADHD, I couldn't read until I was 10. By eighth grade, I was on the dropout track. The system had decided I was defective.
My mother was a single mom with a high school diploma, no degrees, credentials or institutional authority. What she had was something the system couldn't account for, true grit. She fought the school district in the early 1980s when "learning disabilities" were barely recognized. She pushed back on administrators who told her I would never amount to anything. She lost more battles but won enough to help me succeed.
I learned to read, years behind my peers, using methods she found outside the system. I went on to build systems at Amazon, Microsoft and Adobe used by billions of people. I hold five U.S. patents and won a Gates Foundation Innovation Award.
My mother shouldn't have had to fight that hard. Most parents can't. Most families trust the system and believe the experts. Their children end up systemically overrepresented in incarceration and homelessness, or they disappear into lives of quiet diminishment, never knowing what they could have been.
Thirty years later, I watched the same system come for my children. All three are neurodivergent. When my son ‘K’ was eight, he told us he wanted to die. That we would be better off without him and his “problems”. I heard him introduce himself to a kid in our neighborhood, “Hi my name is ‘K’, I don’t make friends very easily”. He was already buying the lie in second grade and when he pushed back, they tried to add another label, “oppositional”. When we asked his teachers to name his strengths, they could produce exactly one, ”He tries hard.”
But lying awake in the dark, unable to sleep from the trauma he carried home every day, ‘K’ described himself as, "A graceful gazelle who leaps and bounds, but he's being chased by cheetahs with infinite energy, and I'm getting tired."That's not a child who lacks intelligence. That's exploratory cognition trying to survive in a system built for exploitation, and the system calls it disorder.
My mother fought for me in the ‘80s and I’ve fought for my children since 2011 when my now college freshman was about to enter kindergarten. The approach changed, but the battle remained the same: convincing institutions that cognitive difference isn't a defect.
When we refused the deficit framework, here's what happened: My oldest graduated with a 4.3 GPA, entered University of Pittsburgh's Franklin Honors College pre-accepted to their graduate program, made the dean's list their first semester, and founded their high school's neurodiversity club. My son ‘B’ is on the honor roll and his brother ‘K’ is thriving.
They work differently than their peers. They always will. However, they carry no shame. In our family, neurodiversity isn't an affliction, it's genetics. My children trace their cognitive quirks to their grandparents, uncles, their mother and myself. It's how we're built.
The difference between my children and the millions the system is grinding down isn't talent or grit. It's that they had parents with resources, knowledge and the will to fight.
Unfortunately, most families don't.
We pretend that cognitive difference is a childhood affliction that people outgrow. Adults who make it through are fine. They're not. They learn to mask, to hide who they are, to manage unreasonable expectations, to perform as if their brain works the way the system demands. The cost shows up as burnout, substance abuse, anxiety, depression and lives spent pretending.
Many adults, especially women, don't get diagnosed until middle age. They spend decades wondering why everything felt harder. Why they had to work twice as long for the same result.
When someone burns out, we blame the individual. When someone struggles with a new system, we call it a training issue. When communication fails, we say people aren't paying attention. We never ask whether we're demanding performance that doesn't match how people actually think.
The Understanding Problem
Every system that delivers information to humans including schools, hospitals, corporate training programs or military operations, assumes a single cognitive profile. Same textbook. Same onboarding deck. Same discharge instructions. Same briefing format. Delivered identically to billions of individual minds, each shaped by distinct genetic, developmental and experiential context.
The cost is measurable. CRICO Strategies (Harvard's medical malpractice research arm) investigated 23,000 malpractice claims and found over 7,000 were attributable to communication failures, resulting in $1.7 billion in costs and nearly 2,000 preventable deaths. Research cited by SHRM estimates that miscommunication costs large companies an average of $62.4 million per year. A Grammarly and Harris Poll study puts the total cost to U.S. businesses at $1.2 trillion annually in lost productivity, turnover and customer loss.
This isn't a communication failure. Information was transmitted, however, it wasn't understood because the delivery systems don't know or account for how each person actually processes information.
The understanding problem is a design problem. The design assumes one type of mind, the genome builds many.
Why Now
Personalization has always been possible. Wealthy families could provide private tutors for their children. The barrier was never knowledge. It was economics. You can't hire a tutor for every student, a coach for every employee, a translator for every patient, so we standardized.
Technology eliminates the economic constraints, it removes barriers, and what was a luxury for the wealthy is now open to everyone. That’s what we’ve done for understanding and learning, we built the infrastructure to enable this at scale.
Why It Matters
We founded 5xFive because:
An eight-year-old who described himself as a gazelle being chased by cheetahs with infinite energy deserved a system that could see what he actually is. Profound.
My mother shouldn't have had to fight alone in the ‘80s, and I shouldn't have had to continue the struggle in the 2010s. No parent should have to take on a system that calls the race before it's even run.
The only future where cognitive difference isn't punished is a future where technology adapts to the full range of human minds.
"Five by five" means I hear you loud and clear.
It's time to build systems that actually do.
Trip O’Dell is the founder and CEO at 5xFive. He crafts the company’s strategic vision and champions its mission to re-humanize human potential through intelligent technology. A former teacher and coach, he spent two decades in leadership roles at Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Audible and Pearson, building large-scale products across education, accessibility and personalization. Trip’s credentials include graduate training in cognitive psychology, plus five USPTO patents in accessibility and human-computer interaction
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