About
The full arc
Most careers deepen one capability. Mine ran three chapters, each deepening a different one. The combination is the product.
Microsoft: twenty-six years (1994–2020)
Xbox. HoloLens. Windows Hello. Twenty-six years building and shipping at enterprise scale taught me real technical depth and the delivery leadership to move complex work across many teams, and the two never came apart. When a flagship biometric feature reported 99% success while customers were visibly unhappy, I was the one who decided the metric was lying, and built the pipeline that proved it.
Ownership: the crucible (2021–2026)
I bought a service business, built it past $1M ARR, and ran it alone: P&L, strategy, hiring, payroll, every call mine. Ownership did what two decades of shipping never quite managed, moving me from "we delivered the product" to "what are the outcomes?" And when the business had to be wound down, I learned what leadership looks like under contraction. It means protecting employees, customers, and obligations with no one else to hand the hard parts to.
AI: the way back in (2025–present)
Running that business meant drifting from hands-on technology, so the return was deliberate. I built with it daily until it became how I operate. The systems in Selected Work are deployed and running: voice pipelines, MCP servers, eval harnesses, built and maintained past the demo stage. That's what lets me wire AI into how an organization actually operates day to day.
The search itself
It started while I was still winding the business down. A soft, half-committed look, at first for roles that mirrored what I'd done last and leaning toward individual-contributor product work, an easier bar than the two decades before it. Looking back, it was closer to shopping for a layup than running a real search.
It got serious in November. I got specific about what I actually wanted, specific enough to see the real problem underneath it. My approach was dated, and so were my skills, after five years away from the industry running someone else's daily operations instead of shipping technology.
Closing that gap by studying for the sake of studying would have missed the point, so I built. I expanded the same systems already running my own life into working software, the operating system in How I Work and the pipeline in Sourcing to Submission. I still run my search through both of them today.
The search is still open. If the fit is real, I want the conversation.
What that adds up to
I caught a dashboard lying to leadership at Microsoft's scale, then carried the P&L and payroll alone when the business was mine to run. Building AI systems that actually work inside a company takes both kinds of experience, deep technical grounding and full ownership of outcomes. One operating system runs through all of it:
Align to the mission, define the plan, break it down, prioritize, execute, inspect, adapt, communicate.