I build companies in the AI era — and the tool that makes them possible.
Aqen.ai is the AI cofounder system: you bring the idea, Aqen brings everything else. Grazier Ventures is the holding company for what I build with it.
Currently building Aqen.aiAdvising at TideHelmWriting weekly at /blogSouthern California
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Aqen.ai
The AI cofounder system. You bring the idea; Aqen brings everything else — legal, finance, marketing, ops, product, brand — coordinated across every business function. Like having a cofounder who’s built it all before.
The holding company for the portfolio of companies I’ll build using Aqen. Aqen is the first. The thesis: AI has collapsed what it costs — in time, capital, and headcount — to take an idea to a real business.
Every Tuesday: AI implementation, engineering leadership, and what it actually takes to build at scale. A public notebook on the operator-to-founder transition, in real time.
I’ve spent 15+ years building inside other people’s companies. I scaled Weedmaps from 30 to 300+ engineers through IPO, led ShopKeep through a $550M acquisition by Lightspeed, and most recently served as Chief AI Officer at BuildOps as it crossed unicorn status.
Across all of it I kept learning the same lesson: the hardest problems in technology aren’t technical — they’re human. And now, increasingly, they’re about what gets coordinated, not what gets coded. I’m building Aqen.ai — and Grazier Ventures around it — to put that observation to work.
Every few months someone posts a screenshot of a one-person company doing a million dollars a year. The replies split clean in half. One side calls it the…
The notebook, in your inbox. Every Tuesday, one essay on AI implementation, engineering leadership, or the operator-to-founder transition. No digests, no roundups, no AI-generated news — just the ideas I'm actually working through.
