Technical Leader & Builder
AI-forward, hands-on technical leader with 25 years of experience building software products and engineering teams from the ground up. Currently co-founder at LEANSTACK, where we build AI-powered tools to help startup founders navigate from idea to product-market fit.
I've spent my career at the intersection of technology, product, and people — most often in the kind of resource-constrained environments where you have to build smart. I've led engineering at venture-backed fintech startups, built accessibility platforms for the deaf community, shipped security SaaS used by enterprise organizations worldwide, and been part of teams that have shipped software with users across the globe.
My Approach
I start from the customer and work backwards. Most engineering failures aren't technical — they're teams building the wrong thing with great confidence. Working alongside Ash Maurya has sharpened how I think about this: his Continuous Innovation framework, the Lean Canvas, and structured customer discovery and validation have become the lens through which I approach every new product decision. Get in front of users, sell the demo, make your customers an offer they can't refuse. Speed of learning is a competitive advantage.
When it's time to ship: small, highly functioning teams with lots of autonomy, clear lines of responsibility, and boring over clever. The most leveraged decisions I've made as a leader have been about what not to build. Creating the conditions for a team to do their best work — that's where I spend most of my energy.
But we're in a different world now, and AI has changed everything. I use AI I use AI tooling daily and have developed real intuition for where LLMs create leverage and where they create risk. Shipping AI in production requires a different discipline: you're managing probabilistic behavior, not deterministic logic. That means evaluation frameworks, observability, cost optimization, and UX designed around what the model actually does well. I've built coaching agents, RAG pipelines, and multi-step AI workflows that are in front of real users — not demos. The teams that win with AI won't be the ones who use it most. They'll be the ones who use it most deliberately.
We talk about customer discovery like it's a business development activity. In practice, the best customer discovery is engineered—built into the product, systematic, and treated with the same rigor as any other technical system.
ReadI've built engineering organizations from zero at three different companies. The circumstances were different each time. The patterns weren't.
ReadThe gap between a compelling AI demo and a system your customers trust is enormous. Here's what I've learned shipping a production AI agent at LEANSTACK.
ReadBuilding
LEANSpark — working on the feedback loops that make structured guidance feel less like a chatbot and more like a thinking partner for founders.
Reading
Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick. Thinking hard about what it means to build with AI as a genuine collaborator, not just a productivity layer.
Thinking about
Whether the next generation of great products gets built by small, AI-augmented teams — and what engineering leadership looks like in that world.
Listening to
Lenny's Podcast for product craft, and Nate Jones for excellent AI analysis and updates.