The longer version.

I've spent twenty-plus years making physical things and getting people to want them — luxury door hardware, faucets, outdoor power equipment, building products, and a promotional goods company I started, ran, and sold.

Somewhere in there I stopped thinking of myself as a marketer. The job was always bigger than that: figure out what the market will ask for by name, build the thing, build the team that can ship it, then build the system so it happens again without me.

I've spent most of my career inside big companies and never quite worked like one. I'd rather ship and adjust than wait for the next review cycle. That's cost me a few meetings and won a lot of launches — a luxury collection priced to rattle the incumbents, a smart lock in nine months, a faucet that beat its number by 240%. People said they looked like a startup did them. In the ways that count, one did.

The founder part isn't a metaphor. In 2020 I started Promote Yourself Inc. from a blank page: product, manufacturing partners, operations, sales, brand. I carried the P&L and the quota at the same time. Four years later it was acquired. You don't come back from that the same — every product decision afterward gets the question would I spend my own money on this?

The AI part isn't a buzzword either. I'm Claude Code certified, Microsoft AI certified, and I run an always-on agent from a Mac Mini on a shelf. Not because it's clever — because a one-person operation can now look like a team of five, and I'd rather teach a room full of non-technical people to do that than watch them wait for IT.

Off the clock: Orange County, married, three kids. Two daughters who play competitive softball, a son who trades high-value Pokémon cards and plays baseball. Weekends are games, tournaments, and youth sports — I'm in it, not watching from a chair. Nights are whatever app I'm building at 11pm.