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.
For most of my career I believed I was building products but looking back, I was mostly building org charts. Every real scaling problem I hit — Weedmaps…
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.
