How I got here
I'm not an engineer. I'm an operator. Most of my career has been on the operations side of growing businesses — evaluating tools, rebuilding processes, and standing up the unglamorous backbone (ERPs, e-commerce platforms, reporting systems) that lets a company grow without falling over.
At one point I owned the P&L for an apparel brand and grew its direct-to-consumer sales elevenfold with distribution in 25 countries. I've done this for startups and Fortune 500s, on four continents.
"I'm not an engineer. I'm an operator."
The last stop was Gap Inc., in the office of the CTO, where I helped stand up an internal AI function. I had a front-row seat to enterprise AI — the enormous budgets, and the equally enormous struggle to turn them into results. The problem was rarely the technology. It was legacy systems that wouldn't talk to each other, layers of process between an idea and its execution, and a shortage of clear, valuable use cases.
Seeing how AI was opening doors that were previously closed, I left Gap Inc. to explore its potential in earnest—partly out of curiosity. The deeper I went, the more something surprised me: almost everything that made AI hard at enterprise scale simply doesn't exist at a small business. No tangled legacy architecture. No bureaucracy between deciding and doing. Just a business that needs to work better, and a set of tools that can finally make that happen fast.
The catch is that the businesses best positioned to benefit are the ones least equipped to chase it. No CTO. No time to cut through the noise. They're busy running an HVAC company, a farm, an insurance office. So they wait — figuring that if the giants with their deep pockets can't make AI pay off, they've got no shot.
"I think that's exactly backwards."
Why small businesses
I've always rooted for the underdog, and small businesses have been the underdog for decades — out-resourced and out-spent by enterprises at every turn. For the first time, that gap is closable. Helping a small business get systems that used to be reserved for companies a hundred times its size is the most satisfying work I've done. It helps that I run one too: a lot of what I build for myself ends up helping clients, and what I build for clients ends up helping me.
Why this is possible now
For most of my career, there was a wall between the people who could see what a business needed and the people who could build it — strategy on one side, engineering on the other, and a lot of expensive translation in between. That wall is coming down. The tools have matured to the point where one experienced operator can do what used to take a strategy firm, a developer, and a project manager.
"I couldn't have started this business at any other moment. The timing is the whole point."
Now I do that same kind of work for small businesses — who I think are better positioned to benefit from AI than the giants ever were.