I've done this before.

Plenty of people build things from nothing. Fewer have had to live with what they built — the maintenance, the scale, the end-of-life nobody plans for. I have, repeatedly: the whole thing, from just me at the start to a shipped product, the system under it, and a team that can carry it. So even when I build something I won't be around to maintain, I build it like someone who's had to.

I'm hands-on for it — architecture, data engineering, the application, the AI woven through it, the hiring calls, the customer conversations.

I've done it for consumer products and enterprise software, more than once at the same company. At Aginity, twice. At Rise Gardens, the team, the infrastructure, and the application together. And I'm doing it now, standing up a regulated platform from the ground up.

You haven't really shipped until it runs without you.

Data is the throughline of my career, and I'm sharper at it now than I've ever been. I co-founded Aginity and built it into a firm delivering bespoke data and analytics systems for Fortune 1000 companies across retail, banking, and insurance — forecasting engines, customer analytics, segmentation, warehouse modernization. Out of that work came the leading SQL development tool for high-performance analytic databases like Redshift and Snowflake; it spun off and still runs today as Coginity.

At Rise Gardens, I built a data and analytics platform more mature than a company our size had any right to — fifteen-plus sources, from application and device telemetry to marketing, supply chain, and support, feeding the analytics that ran the business. Enterprise-grade data, on a startup's budget. I'm doing the same kind of work today — data-centric products in healthcare and real estate.

Data is most useful when the people who need it can just ask it questions.

I come at AI from two sides — the product, and the organization.

Treat AI as a feature and you get a chatbot nobody uses; treat it as a capability and it changes how the product and the company work.

I've built teams from five to a hundred-plus, led them onshore and off, and turned around the ones that were stuck. At Aginity, a consulting organization past a hundred people with a product team layered on top. At an established software company, leading modernization across a forty-five-person engineering org, onshore and offshore. Lean senior teams that out-deliver their headcount, and hiring across engineering, product, design, and data.

The harder version is transformation — changing how a company already works. I've driven the services-to-product shift that breaks most firms, and learned why it breaks: the culture has to change, not just the org chart. I've moved a siloed, waterfall organization toward something collaborative. Years of working with an executive coach reshaped how I lead, and I bring those tools to the leaders I work with — often as much of the value as the technical work.

Team-building is mostly a coaching problem dressed up as a hiring problem. Standards that exceed a team's capacity get ignored, and pull beats mandate every time.

I've run the company, not just its technology. I co-founded Aginity and built it into a hundred-person firm — managed the board, raised twenty million in venture capital, and drove the pivot from services to product. I sold multi-million-dollar engagements to C- and VP-level buyers at Fortune 1000 companies, and built the partnerships — IBM especially — that multiplied our reach. As chief architect at Click Commerce, I helped take a company public and ran the technical due diligence on its acquisitions.

I bring that to the technology work. When I tell you a technical decision is really a business decision, it's because I've sat on both sides of that table — including the seat you're in.

The best technical calls come from someone who's felt the business consequences of the wrong ones.

Full stack used to mean front-end, back-end, and database. It means much more now — hardware, firmware, the application, the AI, the analytics: software and intelligence reaching into the physical world. That's where products are headed, and I work across all of it.

It started at the physical end. As an aerospace engineer I co-invented a variable compressor diffuser for small turbine engines — two US patents, and engines built on that design still fly in commercial regional jets.

At Rise Gardens, I brought the whole stack together — roughly twenty thousand connected devices, from custom electronics and AWS IoT Core to over-the-air firmware, manufactured across China, Taiwan, and Mexico, feeding the app and the analytics that ran the business, with a CES Product Innovation Award along the way. I also took the agile discipline I'd honed in software over to the electrical and mechanical engineers — weekly iterations on hardware, of all things.

And I'm still working down there. Recently, an IoT environmental-control system for steam-heated commercial buildings — smart valves, microcontroller hubs, full provisioning on AWS — and the hardware-software architecture for a consumer projection product.

The interesting problems live where the layers meet, and the people who can work across all of them build things the specialists can't.