About

For my entire career, building an ambitious technical product required a company, a payroll, and k employees with capabilities I did not personally possess. An idea could be mine, but bringing it to life necessarily required a technical organization - and (venture) capital raised.

But in November 2025 we crossed the rubicon. Claude Code was suddenly capable enough that I (as a non-developer) could begin building the systems I had already spent years thinking and coordinating and writing about. The "minimum viable institution" collapsed effectively overnight. Companies remain useful for capital, distribution, durability, and scale, of course. But they no longer have to be the first (or only) vehicle through which someone builds something ambitious.

So here I am: a forty-something independent researcher, building and exploring with a nominally infinite, increasingly capable band of AI comrades.

In my previous life, I helped startups grow. Not “growth hacking” or anything comparably dogmatic and cringey. I generally did whatever the company needed in order to move forward: new market development, analytics, data, product, strategy, organizational structure, and the seemingly endless array of insidiously thorny problems that did not belong cleanly to anyone else. I was, for better or worse, Winston Wolf with less blood and more spreadsheets.

Most recently I spent four years at Omaze in executive roles spanning growth and new business, plus a brief turn as interim head of product. We raised ~$80M, expanded from US to UK, and grew quickly in a highly regulated environment. I jumpstarted the house-prize business from scratch into a roughly $10–20 million annual operation in the United States and helped lay the groundwork for the UK business, now profitably operating above $200 million in revenues and still growing (albeit sadly no longer in the US).

I was employee thirty at adtech startup AdColony, helped it exit for $350M to Opera Software, and left as VP of Growth. In between I helped seed markets across North America, Europe, APAC, and Latin America; built and managed multidisciplinary growth and analytics functions; and handled projects like tackling ad fraud when such issues arose. AdColony peaked somewhere around $600M ARR during the mobile boom of the 2010s and is now a shell of itself after countless acquisitions.

Between the two, I founded and eventually shut down Mitos, a bootstrapped cloud-gaming startup that had the misfortune of building in the frothy wake cast by Google Stadia, Apple Arcade, and other behemoth play toys that were never actually going to work.

In another life I was attempting to live the life of Clarice Starling, and have a master’s in Psychology and Social Behavior from UC Irvine to show for it. I published it in case anyone is interested in such work.