Confidential · Strategic memo
Strengths-based reads on real working relationships.
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Comm Matrix · Dossier 04
Two assessments, two people, one founding question: where does each of us most naturally fit? A read on the Jak Moroshan × Dawson Christy partnership for an at-home diagnostic testing venture — letting the findings reveal the roles, rather than assuming them.
Profile A
Founder · originator. Generates the ideas and the big questions.
Working Genius
Genius: Invention, Wonder · Comp: Discernment, Enablement · Frust: Tenacity, Galvanizing
"The Creative Dreamer"
Profile B
Co-founder · realizer. Drives momentum and execution to completion.
Working Genius
Genius: Galvanizing, Discernment · Comp: Tenacity, Enablement · Frust: Invention, Wonder
"The Intuitive Activator"
You and Dawson are a near-mirror complement. Across both frameworks, what energizes one of you is precisely what drains the other — and almost nothing is left uncovered. For a founding pair, that's a rare and strong signature. The roles don't need to be assigned; they fall out of the assessments almost on their own.
This document works in layers. First Working Genius (where each of you gives and loses energy across the stages of work). Then CliftonStrengths (how each of you is wired). Then the two together — where they corroborate, where they complicate. Only after all three layers do the roles get named, because the whole point is to let the findings lead rather than starting from an assumption about who does what.
What energizes one of you is precisely what drains the other. For a founding pair, that's a rare and strong signature.
One finding worth stating up front, because it shapes everything below: in Working Genius terms, you own the front half of how work gets done — the originating — and Dawson owns the back half — the realizing. The handoff point between you is clean and natural. That's the spine of the partnership.
The six stages of work · where each of you gives and loses energy
Working Genius maps the natural arc of any endeavor: Wonder (spot the need) → Invention (generate the idea) → Discernment (judge the idea) → Galvanizing (rally people to it) → Enablement (support the doing) → Tenacity (drive to completion). Each person has two genius stages (joy + energy), two competency stages (can do, for a while), and two frustration stages (drain + burnout).
You live at the very front of the work cycle. You derive real joy from wondering whether there's a better way (Wonder) and from generating novel solutions to problems that don't have obvious answers (Invention). You can assess ideas (Discernment) and support people (Enablement) for a while, but the back end — rallying people to act (Galvanizing) and grinding tasks to completion (Tenacity) — actively drains you. Not "you're bad at it." Drains you. Left in those stages too long, you burn out.
Dawson lives in the middle-to-back. His genius is judging which ideas are actually sound (Discernment) and rallying people into motion around them (Galvanizing) — he's an instinctive, confident decision-maker who can read a situation fast and move people to act. He can carry execution to completion (Tenacity) and support others (Enablement) as competencies. What drains him is the front end: the open-ended wondering and the from-scratch inventing. Hand him a blank page and ask him to dream, and you'll exhaust him.
Lay the two strips on top of each other and the complement is almost startling:
Five of the six stages are covered by at least one person's genius or solid competency, and the two stages that drain you most (Galvanizing, Tenacity) are exactly where Dawson is strongest or steady. The handoff lands right at Discernment — the moment an idea moves from "invented" to "judged and acted on" is the moment the work passes from your hands to his. That's the cleanest possible seam.
Each Working Genius pairing comes with a short profile of what energizes and what deflates it. Side by side, yours and Dawson's are worth keeping in view — they're the practical handling guide for working together day to day.
Consideration — wants questions genuinely heard and thought about. Freedom — to create and invent without constraints.
Being dismissed — "who cares / no time to stop and think about that." Constraint — restrictive parameters, being forced to stay inside the box.
Trust — wants his judgment, instincts, and assessments trusted. Reaction — engagement and confirmation that the thing is real and worthwhile.
"Prove it" — having to argue for what his gut is telling him. Apathy — calls to action met with silence.
Read those crush rows against each other and the pattern jumps out — it's developed in detail in §VI, and it's the single most useful thing to name between you early.
How each of you is wired · the talent DNA underneath the energy map
Working Genius tells us where you each gain and lose energy. CliftonStrengths tells us how you're built — and here it largely confirms and deepens the Working Genius read, with a few useful wrinkles.
Your top 10 leads with Belief #1, then a dense Strategic Thinking core — Strategic #2, Ideation #3, Futuristic #4 — softened by relational range (Adaptability, Woo, Individualization, Positivity, Connectedness). This is the profile of someone who generates ideas and futures, anchored by a strong sense of why the work matters. Critically: Achiever #19, Focus #16, and Discipline #31 sit low — the execution-grind themes are not where you live. This is the CliftonStrengths echo of your Tenacity frustration.
Dawson's top 10 is Executing-heavy and unmistakably operational: Achiever #1, Arranger #4, Focus #6, Deliberative #10 — the stamina, the coordination of moving parts, the goal-protection, the careful risk-weighing. Wrapped around that: Relator #2 (deep loyalty to a close circle), Competition #5 (driven to win), Significance #7 (wants the work to matter visibly). Just enough strategic overlap with you — Futuristic #3, Strategic #8, Belief #9 — to share your wavelength without duplicating your function.
You both carry Futuristic, Strategic, and Belief in your top 10s. That matters: it means you'll see the long game similarly, reason about strategy on compatible terms, and both need the work to mean something. The shared Belief is especially important — unlike the Jak/Jake pairing where Belief diverged sharply, here you and Dawson both have values in your top 10. You're less likely to hit the silent values fault line. You'll disagree about execution and pace, not about why you're doing this.
Where the lenses corroborate, and where they add nuance
They corroborate the core split cleanly. Working Genius says you originate and Dawson realizes. CliftonStrengths says the same thing in different words: your Strategic-Thinking-plus-Ideation top end is an idea engine; his Achiever-Arranger-Focus core is an execution engine. Two independent instruments pointing at the same structural truth is about as much confidence as this kind of analysis can give you.
Where CliftonStrengths adds nuance Working Genius misses:
The one place both frameworks agree you're both thin: broad, public-facing influence. Your Woo #6 is real but it's relational-warm, not sales-machine; Dawson's influence is Relator-deep, not broad. Neither of you is the person who naturally works a room of strangers into customers. Both frameworks flag it. (More in §VI.)
You asked not to start from assumed roles, but to let the assessments reveal them. Here's what they actually point to — earned from the two layers above, not assumed at the outset.
Jak — the natural fit
Everything upstream of "is this the right thing to build, and is it sound?" The product itself — what the at-home testing experience feels like, how the app makes biomarker data personal and intuitive in a way Function Health doesn't. The brand and the why. The next-horizon thinking about where the company expands after testing. Your Wonder + Invention genius and your Ideation/Futuristic/Belief CliftonStrengths core all converge here.
What to protect you from: being the one responsible for grinding operational execution or rallying-and-chasing people to hit deadlines. Both frameworks say that work will burn you out. It's not a discipline problem; it's a wiring problem. Design the partnership so you're not stuck there.
Dawson — the natural fit
Everything from "this idea is sound, let's go" forward. Standing up the actual testing operation — sample logistics, lab relationships, fulfillment, the operational machine a diagnostics business lives or dies on. His Achiever + Arranger + Focus + Deliberative CliftonStrengths core and his Discernment + Galvanizing genius all point here. His Deliberative + Discernment is especially well-matched to the judgment calls a health-data business has to get right.
What to lean on him for that's easy to miss: the discernment gate. He's wired to judge which of your many ideas are actually worth pursuing. That's not a threat to your Invention — it's the complement to it. Your job is to generate options; his genius is selecting the sound ones. Use that explicitly.
Shared — held jointly
You both have Futuristic + Strategic + Belief in your top 10s. The big directional calls — where the company goes after testing, what it stands for, which expansion to pursue — are genuine shared ground. Don't divide these; talk them through. This is where two strategic minds with aligned values produce better answers together than either alone.
Your Adaptability #5 + Wonder genius vs. his Deliberative #10 + Focus #6 + Achiever #1. You'll want to keep wondering, keep adjusting, keep the future open. He'll want to lock the decision, weigh the risk carefully, and drive it to done. When you re-open a question he considered settled, his Deliberative reads it as risk and his Focus reads it as drift. When he wants to commit before you've finished exploring, your Wonder feels cut off.
One specific watch-out from his pairing profile: people with his Galvanizing + Discernment combination "can sometimes be cavalier in their declarations and may appear impatient or dismissive when made to consider critical details required for implementation." Combined with the fact that Tenacity is only a competency for him — not a genius — this means the fine-grained implementation detail is a real gap to mind. He'll make a fast confident call and want to move; the unglamorous follow-through on details is where neither of you naturally lives.
What helps: use his Discernment genius as the bridge. When you've generated options, hand them to him to judge — that's the natural handoff both frameworks describe. Agree that you own the divergent phase (generating possibilities) and he owns the convergent phase (selecting and driving). Name when you're in which. The friction comes from doing them at the same time; the harmony comes from sequencing them.
Both of your assessments name what each of you craves and what deflates you. Laid side by side, they reveal something neither of you should miss: the thing each of you does most naturally is the exact thing that crushes the other.
What helps: name this out loud with each other early. It's completely avoidable once you both see it. When Dawson brings a gut call, lead by trusting his read before you interrogate it ("I trust your instinct here — help me understand it" rather than "prove it to me"). When you bring a piece of wondering, he should resist the urge to dismiss it as lost time and instead give it genuine consideration before moving. Two small habits that defuse the single most predictable source of friction between you.
The single stage neither of you holds as genius — it's a competency for both. In a testing/diagnostics business, Enablement is the support-and-assist work: customer care, the human glue, walking anxious people through health data and results. Given your stated ambition to be more personal and in-tune than Function Health, this is precisely the muscle the product promise depends on — and it's the one neither founder is naturally driven by. Build it deliberately: hire for it early, or design the support experience as a first-class product concern rather than an afterthought. Don't assume it'll emerge on its own; both of you will drift away from it toward your geniuses.
Both frameworks flag it. Your influence is relational-warm (Woo), his is relational-deep (Relator) — neither is broad-market, work-the-room, convert-strangers energy. For a consumer health product that needs to acquire customers at scale, someone eventually has to own growth marketing and broad-audience persuasion. Dawson's Galvanizing + Competition can stretch toward it for a while, but it's not the center of either of your wiring. Plan for a growth/marketing hire as an early gap-fill, not a someday.
Worth checking. Your Empathy sits low (#30 in your CliftonStrengths). Dawson leads with Relator (deep loyalty) but his profile is driven and Executing-heavy. In a health business where customers are sometimes receiving frightening information, someone needs to genuinely feel the user's emotional state. Dawson's Relator and your Individualization + Connectedness partially cover it, but it's worth being honest that emotional attunement to customers is not the trio's deepest strength — another reason the Enablement hire matters.
Share this dossier with Dawson and talk through whether the energy map matches lived experience. Working Genius is most useful when both people confirm "yes, that's where I gain and lose energy." If he reads his own Galvanizing/Discernment genius and Invention/Wonder frustration and says "that's exactly right," you've got real signal. If something feels off, that's worth knowing too.
The single most useful operating agreement for this pair: you own generating possibilities, Dawson owns judging and driving them. Name when you're in "still wondering" mode vs. "decide and go" mode. The Discernment handoff is your friction-prevention tool — use it deliberately rather than discovering it the hard way.
Decide now how the support-and-care layer gets owned, given that neither of you is wired for it and your whole product promise is "more personal than Function Health." Early hire? Designed-in product feature? Either is fine — drifting past it is not.
Equal co-founders, 1-year cliff, 4-year vesting regardless. Write down the role split the findings point to — you on product/vision/origination, Dawson on operations/execution/realization, strategy held jointly — and what happens at impasse. The assessments give you a strong starting structure; the paperwork makes it real.
This is one of the cleaner founding-pair complements two assessments can show. You originate; Dawson realizes. What drains you energizes him, and the reverse. You share just enough strategic wiring and values to understand each other, and differ enough in execution energy to not compete for the same work. Both frameworks, read independently, tell the same story — which is the strongest form of confidence this kind of analysis offers.
The roles weren't assigned here; they emerged. You toward product, vision, and the originating front-half of the work. Dawson toward operations, execution, and the realizing back-half. Strategy and the company's larger direction held jointly, where your shared Futuristic-Strategic-Belief produces better thinking together than apart.
The watch items are honest and manageable: the pace-and-commitment friction between your Wonder and his Focus (solved by sequencing divergent and convergent work); the Enablement gap that your own product promise makes critical; and the broad-influence gap that a growth hire eventually fills. None of these is a reason not to proceed. All of them are easier to handle named than discovered.
If the conversation confirms what the assessments show, you have a genuinely strong foundation to build the testing business — and the company that grows from it.