That's the work I love most: the ambitious, nebulous beginning, where the culture hasn't been cast yet and every early decision compounds. I set the team up to be fast, happy, and AI-native from the first commit, then hand you a self-running machine and step out.
Who you bring in first is the highest-leverage decision you'll make. I was part of Google's interviewing and hiring machine. The move that matters most: find the ambitious engineers who are stuck, bored and under-leveled somewhere else, and offer them a role a level up with real ownership. The great ones jump.
Build or buy, how much architecture before you ship, what debt is acceptable at the start. A team built today can be AI-native from the first commit: behavior defined in specs and tests that live outside the code, and a build that goes from checkout to passing tests in minutes.
FAANG teams don't run heavy Scrum. They run empowered individuals who ship often and get real customer feedback. Set up that way from the start, a small team ships 2–5× faster and never has to unlearn slow habits.
Real ownership with the authority to match, a path to grow, and the high-five-at-every-bug-fix camaraderie that makes hard work feel good. Cast it right at the start and you never have to repair it later.
Building is constant small corrections.
None of this is set-and-forget. I see the problem while it's still small, make the change, and watch for the next one: the hiring mismatch, the process that's starting to drag, the architecture decision that's about to calcify, before any of them becomes the mess that needs rescuing.
Build or buy, the architecture, the security plan, and a development environment where a new engineer can check out, build and test in minutes.
A hiring loop calibrated the way Google calibrates, and the first engineers chosen for ambition and ownership.
Ship early with real customers. The scorecard starts in month one: feedback-to-ship time, delivery, quality, cost, and how the people are doing.
I help you hire the person who runs it for the long term. They walk into a system that already works.
I like the building more than the running. When the product is stable and the team is confident, they take over the process I built, and I fade out to find my next beginning.
A software-defined radio startup with no radio engineers. I was hired as a field engineer and ended up inventing the department.
A vision for a data platform and no team. I shaped the strategy with the CEO, shipped the platform, then hired and mentored the permanent team that runs it today.
The internal software project I started and ran for two years is still in use more than a decade later.
Machines build. People direct. Customers decide.
Happy team, happy customers. Let's have some fun and make some money.
If you are growing a team, changing how engineering works with AI, or navigating a difficult technical transition, I would love to hear what you are building. Based in Denver; working with teams across the U.S.