Coty Beasley

Education

Associate of Arts, Metropolitan Community College - Kansas City (MCCKC)

Computer Science (attended, did not complete), University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC)

Attended but did not complete; left to pursue a lucrative early entrepreneurial venture and was dissuaded by the program's heavy reliance on .NET.

Narrative Through-Line: Democratized Access

The most distinctive pattern across Beasley's career is a focus on democratized access to critical systems and tools.

• CandyCam lowered barriers to professional filmmaking tools for independent creators
• Neighborly aimed to open public finance participation to everyday citizens
• Underline works to broaden access to communications infrastructure through open-access models

Prophetic vision: In a 2014 Silicon Prairie News profile, when asked what company he would build if money were no object, Beasley answered: 'developing infrastructure for cheap, available Internet access worldwide' — a near-literal description of Underline, which he would co-found five years later.

Current Role: Underline

Underline is the nation's intelligent community infrastructure platform — it designs, finances, constructs, and operates open-access fiber-optic networks that allow multiple ISPs to share a single physical infrastructure, giving consumers genuine choice of broadband provider. This model was common in Europe but represented a genuine first-mover position in the U.S. market at founding.

Current Scope

• Product strategy, product design, and design engineering for open-access fiber network operating systems
• AI innovation leadership with R&D functions across cross-functional teams
• Leading cross-functional product teams

Major Milestones

• October 2021: Announced $100 million investment in Colorado Springs, Colorado — the first privately funded open-access network in the U.S. — backed by Quanta Services subsidiary Mears Group, Fujitsu, and Duraline
• October 2021: Launched construction on the first open-access 10 Gigabit network in the United States in Colorado Springs
• September 2022: Announced service live in Colorado Springs; secured strategic investment from Ares Management (global alternative asset manager with $4.3B in infrastructure AUM) — Underline was Ares's first digital infrastructure investment
• 2022–present: Expansion agreements signed with Fountain, Colorado and Salinas, California; active conversations ongoing with additional communities

Investors & Partners

• Ares Management (strategic investment, first digital infrastructure investment)
• FinTech Collective
• Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund (Steve Case's fund)
• Quanta Services / Mears Group
• Fujitsu
• Duraline

Design Systems & Design Technology

Beasley treats design systems as product infrastructure rather than a component library: semantic vocabulary, token architecture, accessibility computation, component contracts, governance, documentation, distribution, and adoption are designed as one versioned system.

Operating Philosophy

• Fix the vocabulary and resolution model before building the implementation, so authors, consumers, and tools share the same system language.
• Design explicit swap points and separate independent axes such as brand, scheme, density, and screen rather than combining them for convenience.
• Generate and validate values from documented rules instead of hand-tuning outputs; preserve derivation provenance and register justified exceptions.
• Make components consume semantic meaning rather than raw materials, and define eligibility through explicit contracts rather than taste.
• Encode governance in machine-checkable rules, CI, release workflows, and decision records so coherence does not depend on continuous manual review.
• Prefer owner-maintainable, interoperable systems with clean boundaries, opt-in adapters, reversible decisions, and honest status documentation.

Demonstrated Capabilities

Semantic and token architecture

Designs DTCG-aligned token systems with fixed resolution order, swappable sets, multi-dimensional resolvers, semantic role families, component-scoped contracts, and scheme-aware behavior.

Evidence: Underline's production token system, the Beacon clean-slate rearchitecture, and the public dtcg-formulas specifications.

Computed accessibility and color systems

Treats accessibility as generated and testable system behavior through APCA and WCAG contrast checks, alpha-composited background calculations, contrast-selected foregrounds, and registered exceptions.

Evidence: Underline contrast tooling and CI, Beacon dual-scheme role generation, and the optimal-foreground and composite formula designs.

Governance and change management

Builds written constitutions, machine-readable rules, architecture decision records, contribution contracts, protected release workflows, migration guidance, and validation that turns undocumented drift into a build failure.

Evidence: Four years of Underline design-system governance, more than 30 decision records, 20 tagged releases, and breaking-change-managed migrations.

Figma-to-code coherence

Separates design-tool authorship from repository authority, validates synchronization, preserves variable identity through renames, and builds targeted tooling when vendor behavior blocks a reliable workflow.

Evidence: Figma and Supernova authoring pipelines, repository-side DTCG resolvers, sync checks, Code Connect, and a purpose-built Figma utility.

Distribution and release engineering

Transforms one canonical resolved token source into consumer formats with independent versioning, selective imports, runtime scheme selection, generated changelogs, and automated validation and releases.

Evidence: Underline packages for DTCG, CSS, JavaScript, Tailwind, and a shadcn/ui adapter, supported by six CI and release workflows.

Specification and open-source engineering

Authors narrow, compatibility-first specifications and TypeScript tooling with explicit non-goals, stable diagnostics, typed contracts, test suites, release automation, and education-first documentation.

Evidence: The public dtcg-formulas specification, parser, and registry packages.

Agent-readable systems

Makes rules, schemas, manifests, documentation, and contribution constraints legible to both human and AI collaborators, with agent-authored work held to the same validation and review model.

Evidence: Machine-readable governance and agent workflows in Underline, Beacon's agent consumption manifest, and typed dtcg-formulas definitions.

Evidence and systems research

Models capabilities through explicit prerequisites, keeps distinct measurements separate, publishes methodological limitations, and removes findings that do not survive self-audit.

Evidence: The Design System Capability Map covering 44 capabilities, a 147-respondent field survey, and an evidence review of 22 publicly documented systems.

Production Ownership: Underline Design System

Role: Primary architect and maintainer across the system's production history while serving in product-design and innovation leadership at Underline.

Period: November 14, 2022 through July 23, 2026

Evidence status: Evidence summarized from a private repository-history snapshot prepared in September 2026; repository internals are not presented as independently public evidence.

Current status: The repository is unmaintained after Beasley's transition into an innovation role and a subsequent change in design-system leadership. Its final architecture emphasized external authorship, contract enforcement, generated distribution, and reduced dependence on a single steward.

Scale

• 1,412 commits in the repository-history snapshot, with approximately 92% of human commits attributed to Beasley's author identities.
• 20 tagged releases from v0.5.0 through v8.0.0.
• More than 30 architecture decision records.
• An eight-article governance constitution with machine-checked anti-drift rules.
• A production semantic model of nine roles with 18 intents per role.
• Five independently versioned distribution packages generated from a canonical DTCG source.

Architecture and Migration

• Modelled tokens as a fixed resolution chain across core, brand, sub-brand, scheme, and density, with resolvers generated from declarative intent rather than hand-written file paths.
• Kept resolved DTCG output canonical while preserving derivation provenance and platform transformations as separate concerns.
• Defined component specifications as framework-independent behavioral contracts whose styling and platform mappings remain optional adapters.
• Managed deliberate clean breaks, including expansion from four to eight semantic intensity levels, removal of an inverse role, consolidation of 30 text tokens into five, and a large dark-theme palette migration.

Accessibility

• Computed contrast for semantic backgrounds and foregrounds across schemes instead of relying only on visual review.
• Migrated the default contrast model to APCA, changing 21 foreground selections and adding formula provenance to 99 foreground palette tokens.
• Corrected contrast calculations for alpha-composited backgrounds so checks evaluate the color users actually see.
• Maintained a bidirectionally validated exception register: every hand-tuned override required a matching record, and every record had to match a real override.

Governance and Release Engineering

• Authored governance rules once and projected them into human and machine guidance, with drift treated as a CI failure.
• Separated repository governance from design-system governance using a documented boundary test.
• Enforced conventional commits, contribution metadata, review criteria, protected-branch controls, generated changelogs, and explicit breaking-change documentation.
• Automated validation, distribution ownership, releases, back-merges, and post-merge operations through six CI workflows.

Design-to-Code and Distribution

• Used Figma and Supernova as authoring surfaces while retaining repository-side resolvers as structural authority where the vendor model could not express all system dimensions.
• Added synchronization checks, Code Connect, CSS token injection, UUID-preserving renames, and a custom Figma utility to work around an upstream alias-editing limitation.
• Distributed DTCG, CSS, JavaScript, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui packages with independent semantic versioning and documented build-time and runtime selection.

Agent Collaboration

• Made navigability for humans and agents an explicit governance objective.
• Represented rules, filing maps, manifests, schemas, workstream history, and documentation indexes in machine-readable forms.
• Applied the same branch, review, validation, and contribution requirements to agent-assisted changes as to human-authored changes.

Evidence Artifacts

Underline Design System

Kind: Private production system
Status: Unmaintained; repository-history snapshot through July 23, 2026
Evidence visibility: Private or archived evidence summarized in this dossier

The production-history layer: four years of end-to-end ownership spanning semantic architecture, governance, accessibility, releases, migrations, distribution, Figma integration, and agent-readable operations.

Beacon Design System

Kind: Archived clean-slate design-system rearchitecture
Status: Beacon resolver v1.0.0, archived September 1, 2026
Evidence visibility: Private or archived evidence summarized in this dossier

A self-contained system archive with 46 source files, 31 rendered specimen cards, independently resolved light and dark schemes, a 201-token role vocabulary, governance documentation, a complete token reference, and an agent consumption manifest.

dtcg-formulas

Kind: Public open-source specification and TypeScript tooling
Status: Specification, parser, and registry packages shipped at 0.1.0 in the supplied September 2026 snapshot; resolver, built-ins, CLI, adapters, and ecosystem integrations remained roadmap work.
Evidence visibility: Publicly inspectable

A documentation-first, pluggable formula-provenance layer for DTCG design tokens that keeps resolved values portable while preserving how values were derived.

• Project documentation
• GitHub repository

Design System Capability Map

Kind: Evidence-based field analysis
Status: Research snapshot prepared in 2026
Evidence visibility: Private or archived evidence summarized in this dossier

A 44-capability prerequisite graph comparing a 147-respondent practitioner survey with an evidence review of 22 public design systems. The analysis keeps field and frontier adoption separate and documents sampling, estimation, and evidence limitations.

Scope Boundaries

• The strongest shipped evidence is web-oriented token, specification, governance, accessibility, and distribution infrastructure; it is not presented as ownership of production native iOS or Android token pipelines.
• The governance architecture was designed for multi-team contribution, but the core systems were operated substantially by Beasley; architecture and contribution throughput are not treated as the same claim.
• Documentation and specimen tooling used Supernova, custom self-contained archives, and VitePress rather than production Storybook.
• The record demonstrates framework-independent component contracts and token adapters, not a broad publicly shipped React component library.
• Private production metrics are date-qualified summaries from repository history; public artifacts are linked separately where they can be inspected.
• Roadmap items, open proposals, and field hypotheses are identified as such rather than described as shipped capabilities.

Expertise Domains

Product Design & UX Strategy

Two decades of product and design leadership across fintech, civic tech, enterprise, and infrastructure (Evidence: Neighborly, Underline, NAIC, Epiq Systems)

AI / Cognitive Computing Product Work

Building AI-powered products since 2015 with IBM Watson partnership; now leads AI innovation and R&D at Underline (Evidence: Edge Up Sports × IBM Watson (2015), current Underline R&D role)

Open-Access Network Product Systems

Designed and leads product for the first privately funded open-access fiber network in the U.S. (Evidence: Underline co-founder, $100M Colorado Springs deployment)

GIS & Spatial Data

Early career in digital cartography with continued spatial data platform expertise (Evidence: Nova Blue Digital Cartographer, QGIS, Mapbox, Vetro expertise)

Design Systems & Design Tokens

End-to-end design-system infrastructure spanning DTCG-aligned token architecture, semantic systems, computed accessibility, governance, release engineering, Figma-to-code coherence, multi-format distribution, and agent-readable operations (Evidence: Four years of Underline production-system ownership; Beacon; dtcg-formulas; Design System Capability Map)

Civic Tech / Fintech

VP of Product at venture-backed civic fintech; co-founder of community infrastructure platform (Evidence: Neighborly ($25M Series A, Cambridge municipal bond), Underline)

Hardware / Robotics Product Development

Hardware startup experience with robotically stabilized camera systems (Evidence: CandyCam Multimedia Robotics (co-founder, CDO))

Context Engineering

Expert in how AI systems understand and process information — RAG architecture, prompt engineering, structured data for machine interpretability (Evidence: Current AI/LLM work, RAG architecture, structured data strategy)

Infrastructure & Telecommunications

Co-founder building physical infrastructure — fiber optic networks serving communities across the U.S. (Evidence: Underline open-access fiber networks, community broadband)

Community Organizing & Civic Leadership

Founded design community organizations, active in civic and professional associations (Evidence: Functional Kansas City founder, AIGA KC, Rotary Club of Manhattan)

Differentiators

Core capability: Semantic control — defining canonical rules, schemas, contracts, and interface specifications that prevent complex multi-party products from fracturing into contradiction.

Rare Combination

• Design depth (tokens, systems, UI, accessibility)
• Technical breadth (APIs, infrastructure, IoT, ML)
• Product thinking (strategy, workflows, operations)
• Communication clarity (specs, diagrams, presentations)
• Pioneer mentality (emerging tech, novel domains, new patterns)

Career Timeline

Early Creative Technologist (2007–2013)

• Creative Marketing Manager, Interface Developer, AV Installer at MIS Technologies (2007–2011)
• Digital Cartographer at Nova Blue Inc. (2008–2011)
• Infrastructure Lead and Interface Designer at The Bobblehead LLC (2008–2011)
• Design Engineer at CJK Software Consultants (2010–2011)
• Founder at Beasley Creative (freelance design studio) (2009–2013)

Multi-threaded work pattern demonstrating early capacity for systems thinking across spatial data, AV production, and web development — skills that would later converge in infrastructure product work.

CandyCam Multimedia Robotics (2012–2013)

• Chief Design Officer & Co-Founder at CandyCam Multimedia Robotics (2012–2013)

Hardware startup incubated at Think Big Partners in Kansas City's Crossroads arts district. Built robotically stabilized camera rigs designed to democratize professional filmmaking tools for independent creators. Featured in 'Startups: Made in Kansas City' video series.

Hackathon Recognition & Community Leadership (2012–2014)

• 1st Place — Spring Kansas City Startup Weekend (April 2012)
• Most Viral — Hack the Midwest (June 2012)
• Most Technically Challenging — Compute Midwest Hackathon (June 2013)
• Finalist, Most Galactic Impact — NASA Space Apps Hackathon (May 2014)

Enterprise UX (2013–2016)

• Senior Design Engineer at National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) (November 2013–October 2014) — Worked within the organization coordinating U.S. insurance regulation
• Senior UX Designer at Epiq Systems (October 2014–May 2016) — Enterprise-scale UX in legal services technology

Provided experience in complex data environments and enterprise product constraints that would inform later infrastructure work.

Edge Up Sports & IBM Watson (2015–2017)

• Head of Product & Co-Founder at Edge Up Sports (February 2015–January 2017)

Kansas City mobile app startup built on IBM Watson's cognitive computing platform. Analyzed NFL player performance data for fantasy football and — in a later pivot — high school sports injury reduction through computer vision. Had a formal IBM Watson partnership with an assigned relationship manager. Ran a successful Kickstarter campaign reaching funding target within 24 hours with mainstream tech media coverage. Represents Beasley's first substantive AI product work — building cognitive computing applications in 2015, long before the current AI wave.

Mode3 / Damascus Edge (2016–2017)

• Principal Designer at Mode3 (formerly Damascus Edge) (August 2016–January 2017)

Neighborly: Civic Fintech at Venture Scale (2017–2019)

• Principal Product Designer → Director of Product Design → VP of Product at Neighborly (March 2017–October 2019)
  • Principal Product Designer (March 2017)
  • Director of Product Design (June 2018)
  • VP of Product (September 2019)

San Francisco/Kansas City fintech startup founded in 2012 with the mission of democratizing municipal bond investing — building a retail marketplace for the $400 billion/year municipal bond market.

Investors: Formation 8 (seed investor), Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher's fund), Organizations connected to Laurene Powell Jobs, Bee Partners (led $25 million Series A)

Key milestone: In February 2017, Neighborly underwrote a $2 million municipal bond for Cambridge, Massachusetts (home of Harvard and MIT), selling it in $1,000 lots directly to residents — the first transaction of its kind.

Underline: Co-Founder & Infrastructure Innovator (2019–present)

• Head of Product / Co-Founder → Head of Product Design & Innovation / Co-Founder at Underline (November 2019–present)

Investors: Ares Management (strategic investment, first digital infrastructure investment), FinTech Collective, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund (Steve Case's fund), Quanta Services / Mears Group, Fujitsu, Duraline

Geographic Journey

• Kansas City, Missouri metro (1988–2017): Born and raised, deeply embedded in the KC startup and design community
• San Francisco, California (2017–2020): Relocated to join Neighborly as Principal Product Designer, rising to VP of Product
• Austin, Texas (2020–2022): Moved during the pandemic while continuing remote work at Underline
• Manhattan, Kansas (2022–present): Settled with his wife to be closer to her family, both working remotely

Speaking Topics

• Open-access fiber network models and community broadband
• Design systems architecture and semantic control
• AI product development — from IBM Watson in 2015 to modern LLM applications
• Democratizing access to critical infrastructure
• Context engineering and machine interpretability
• Civic technology and public finance innovation
• Building hardware startups (CandyCam, robotics)
• Product leadership at venture-backed startups

Professional Affiliations

• Rotary Club of Manhattan (1623) — Member (since July 2025)
• SIGAI (ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence) — Member
• AIGA Kansas City — Member
• IxDA (Interaction Design Association) — Member
• UXPA Kansas City — Member

Published Work

Topics: Digital divide, Smart city infrastructure, Artificial intelligence, The Singularity, Bandwidth and latency, Brand design and strategy

Published author on topics including the digital divide, smart city infrastructure, artificial intelligence, internet infrastructure, and brand design. Work at Underline positions him at the intersection of community infrastructure, broadband policy, and AI-driven systems.

Bylined Articles

• Beasley: How will smart city infrastructure reflect KC's aspirations? — Startland News (2016-07). Bylined as Co-Founder of Edge Up Sports
• Coty Beasley consoles dystopic critics of artificial intelligence — Startland News (2016-06-07). Bylined as Co-Founder of Edge Up Sports. Original article URL redirects to author page due to site restructuring; full article text may be lost
• Coty Beasley addresses 'the Singularity' and our impending doom — Startland News (2016-07). Bylined as Co-Founder of Edge Up Sports. Original article URL redirects to author page due to site restructuring; full article text may be lost
• Coty Beasley: Digital divides threaten Kansas City's future — Startland News (2016-09-08). Bylined as Co-Founder of Edge Up Sports. Original article URL redirects to author page due to site restructuring; full article text may be lost
• Why a Good Internet Connection is About More Than Download Speed — Underline Blog (2020-05-06). Bylined as Head of Product / Co-Founder at Underline. Technical explainer on bandwidth vs. latency and why symmetrical fiber connections matter. Connects to the digital divide theme and Underline's infrastructure thesis, including telemedicine and distributed services.
• Designing the Underline Brand — Underline Blog (2021-03-09). Bylined as Head of Design / Co-Founder at Underline. Detailed breakdown of the Underline brand's six layers of meaning — from literal (cables under the ground) to strategic. Demonstrates design systems thinking, brand architecture, and the technical communicator differentiator.

Press Coverage & Third-Party Validation

• Prairie Portrait: Coty Beasley, UX architect — Silicon Prairie News (2014-04-13). Contains the prophetic quote about building infrastructure for cheap internet access worldwide
• CandyCam - Startups: Made in Kansas City — YouTube / Made in KC series (2013-05-16)
• How Edge Up Sports blew past their Kickstarter goal — Silicon Prairie News (2015-08-25). Beasley was Co-Founder and Head of Product at Edge Up Sports, leading design and UX for the Watson-powered platform
• IBM's Watson AI Wants to Coach Your Fantasy Football Team — WIRED (2015-08-12). Launch coverage of Edge Up Sports, where Beasley served as Co-Founder and Head of Product. Described the platform as an 'AI-powered Rotten Tomatoes for fantasy football' using Watson's cognitive computing APIs.
• All the Apps You Should Be Using to Rule Fantasy Football — WIRED (2015-09-12). Follow-up WIRED roundup featuring Edge Up Sports, where Beasley served as Co-Founder and Head of Product, leading design and UX
• There's finally a great use for IBM's Watson: making fantasy football picks — Quartz (2015-08-12). Detailed breakdown of Edge Up Sports' Watson integration. Beasley served as Co-Founder and Head of Product, leading the design of the cognitive news radar and sentiment analysis interface.
• IBM's Watson Could Help You Win at Fantasy Football — NBC News (2015-08-12). Coverage of Edge Up Sports, where Beasley served as Co-Founder and Head of Product, leading design and UX
• IBM's Watson Can Now Help You Kick Ass In Fantasy Football — Fast Company (2015-08-12). Coverage of Edge Up Sports, where Beasley served as Co-Founder and Head of Product, leading design and UX. Featured as an example of Watson's consumer and entertainment applications.
• IBM Watson brings cognitive computing to fantasy football — CIO Magazine (2015-08-13). Enterprise IT coverage of Edge Up Sports, where Beasley served as Co-Founder and Head of Product, leading design and UX
• Kansas City startup aims to give fantasy football fans an edge — Kansas City Star (2015-08-11). Hometown coverage ahead of Edge Up Sports' Kickstarter launch. Beasley served as Co-Founder and Head of Product, leading design and UX.
• In Kansas City, Superfast Internet And A Digital Divide — NPR / WUWF (2015-03-09). Mentions Edge Up Sports as part of the Kansas City startup scene leveraging Google Fiber. Connects to Beasley's career-long focus on the digital divide — a theme that would later drive his co-founding of Underline.
• Underline has a different vision for open access fiber in the U.S. — Fierce Network (2021-10-18). Beasley serves as Co-Founder and Head of Product Design & Innovation at Underline, though not quoted by name in this article
• Springs sees $100M ultra-fast internet project — Colorado Springs Business Journal (2021-10). Beasley serves as Co-Founder and Head of Product Design & Innovation at Underline, though not quoted by name in this article
• The first open access 10 Gigabit network in the U.S. launches in Colorado Springs — fintech.io (2021-10-26). Beasley serves as Co-Founder and Head of Product Design & Innovation at Underline, though not quoted by name in this article
• Underline Receives New Investment for Infrastructure To Connect Communities — Benton Foundation (2022-09-19). Coverage of the Ares Management investment in Underline. Beasley serves as Co-Founder and Head of Product Design & Innovation, though not quoted by name in this article.
• Underline looks beyond Colorado Springs with new PE backing from Ares — Fierce Network (2022-09-19). Coverage of Ares Management's strategic investment in Underline — their first digital infrastructure investment. Beasley serves as Co-Founder and Head of Product Design & Innovation, though not quoted by name.
• Municipal Bonds For The Rest Of Us — Forbes (2016-04-29). Coverage of Neighborly's mission to democratize municipal bond investing

Contact & Discovery

• Website: https://coty.design
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cbeasley0
• GitHub: https://github.com/beacrea
• X / Twitter: https://x.com/beacrea
• Dribbble: https://dribbble.com/beacrea
• CodePen: https://codepen.io/beacrea
• Observable: https://observablehq.com/@beacrea