Fifteen years at the helm of other people's hardest technical decisions. Now I take on a few of yours.
Through TideHelm I advise founders, CTOs, and investors at the inflection points — scaling, succession, technical diligence, and what AI actually changes about the org. I write about the work here every Tuesday. And I build Aqen.ai, a lean AI-native product, on the side.
The advisory practice. I work with founders, CTOs, and investors at the calls that shape the next two to three years — the first VP of Engineering hire, post-Series B scaling, a platform rewrite, technical diligence on a portfolio company, a CTO succession, or what AI actually changes for the org. Fifteen years of building through a NASDAQ IPO, a $550M exit, and unicorn status, pointed at your hardest decision.
An AI-native product I build lean and independent — an AI cofounder that coordinates the non-product work of starting a company: legal, finance, marketing, ops. Built to be useful and sustainable, not to raise a round.
Grazier Ventures — the holding company for what I build, starting with Aqen. One roof over the products, built lean rather than chasing one big swing. Grazier Ventures →
I’ve spent 15+ years building inside other people’s companies. I scaled Weedmaps from 30 to 300+ engineers through a NASDAQ IPO, led ShopKeep through a $550M acquisition by Lightspeed, and 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 increasingly they’re about what gets coordinated, not what gets coded. These days I put that to work three ways: advising founders and CTOs through TideHelm, writing about the craft every week, and building Aqen.ai.
I run Claude Code and Pi across everything I build. They’re good, but they also forget everything the moment a session ends. Every project decision, every dead end…
The notebook, in your inbox. Every Tuesday, one essay on AI implementation, engineering leadership, or what it actually takes to build at scale. No digests, no roundups, no AI-generated news — just the ideas I'm actually working through.
