I've run more than six hundred workshops on four continents — for IBM in Madrid, for chemical plants in Baton Rouge, for the Navy, the Air Force, the Army, and the NYPD. The job is almost always the same underneath: the problem is fuzzy, everyone has been building beautifully against their own assumptions for two years, and my work is to sharpen it until the right decision is obvious to the people who have to live with it.

I got here the long way. Professional soccer at a hundred and forty-seven pounds. Door-to-door vodka sales. A master's in Spain that ended with a hundred and five résumés, two callbacks and twenty-seven days left on a visa. A drawer of inventions, most of which failed, including a biodegradable plastic made out of crawfish shells that worked chemically and never worked commercially. I co-founded Stale Chips in 2021 with John Hawley, and we've spent five years building AI and process work for people whose networks go down and whose decisions are permanent.

Now I live in St. Petersburg, and I've started pointing the same method at the city I can walk across — storm communications that survive the towers going out, a checker for our own land development regulations, and a teardown of the permitting process that I earned by filing through it myself.