Most of this
didn't work.

My parents are still in love.

Weird way to open a website. Also the load-bearing fact of my entire life, so it goes first.

They came to everything. Every game. Every dream I announced at dinner. Every idea that, in hindsight, was NOT an idea. And somehow they got me believing I could be any of it — a thing I have never recovered from and don't intend to.

I was a chunky kid who wanted abs. Mom said do a hundred crunches a night. I did. Two months. Nothing. She looked right at me and said, "You've got abs, honey. You just can't see them yet."

It's already possible. You're just early.

And that house was never only us. Cousins, aunts, uncles — everybody took their turn living with us. Kat's best friend spent more time at our place than her own. There are people who came through that door I call my brother, my sister. Not as a figure of speech.

Nobody sat us down and announced this as a Family Value. Door was open. Mom or Dad saw a kid who needed parenting, they parented them. That's the whole policy.

Then my mom got so good at being a mom she went and built a children's museum. More kids than just us.

Number 12. Five foot seven, a hundred and forty-seven pounds, and I can jump maybe seven inches off the ground.

Mississippi College, then Belhaven. Then Brazil, which is the part people should actually be asking about.

One of my teachers had been a soccer agent in a previous life, and he was going to Brazil for the summer, and that was the whole plan. Six months of bussing tables at night, class in the morning, training every afternoon, plus every graduation-gift check anybody handed me. I landed in Rio on May 14th, 2014, chasing a contract.

I had paid a man to sort out my visa and he took the money and vanished. So I lived with a teammate, shared a bed, bounced club to club, and learned Portuguese one inappropriate phrase at a time. For a stretch I stayed in a friend's house at the end of an unpaved road, with trees dragged across the street by drug lords to keep the police out and newspaper stuffed into the holes in the tin roof to keep the bugs out. Three months, no hot shower. Duque de Caxias is where the local press wrote about the small American considerably more than the small American deserved.

And then there was the beach. Brazil–Chile went to penalties and I watched forty thousand people on Copacabana go completely silent at the same instant — no samba, no songs, nobody breathing — and Brazil missed the first one. Grown men sobbed. The last kick got saved, the whole beach detonated, and five minutes later I was shirtless, had lost every object I was carrying, and had never been happier in my life.

The final was the other side of the same coin. A hundred thousand Argentinians, twenty thousand Germans, a handful of Americans, one me. Germany scored in extra time and the sand turned into a brawl — chairs going past my head, beer cans as ammunition — and there I was yelling "¡Tranquilo, tranquilo!" in an American accent, to no success whatsoever. Greatest game on earth. Also a mirror, and the world it reflects is flawed.

Philadelphia came after, on the way down — lower-level American teams, one contract at a time, the stretch where you can still call it a career if you say it fast.

Here's what being small does to you. You can't win anything in the air and you can't out-muscle a single person on the field, so you have to know where the ball is going before it goes there. That isn't a talent. It's the only strategy available to you, and you get very good at it because the alternative is not playing.

Then it ends, and nobody tells you which day it is. The body stops recovering the way it used to, the money was never there to begin with, and the doors above you quietly stop opening.

Then, one day, out of nowhere really, you realize it's time for something new. I realized it when I burst into a monumental amount of tears watching Monsters University. Mike wasn't meant to be a Scarer. He was a better coach. Maybe I wasn't meant to be a player, but something else too?

And so a new exploration began. A new language, a newish love, and a very VERY loose life plan: learn ideas and see what happens. First I needed some money, because adventures require capital and my bank account was running on fumes from the previous dream.

That's what people said to me, laughing, every single time I told them where I was going to study. They don't even speak Castilian down there. They live in the orchard. They sunbathe, they eat oranges, there's nothing.

I was going for a master's in innovation and tourism marketing, which I want on the record as the least likely credential in this entire story.

They had painted Murcia for me as a calabaza — a pumpkin — and honestly I was scared to arrive. The train did not help. October, window seat, and outside the glass was sand and mountains and desert, a world that looked more like Star Wars than Earth. I got there under a cloud of dust, into a heat that could kill you, and said out loud: what have I done.

Then I walked into the most creative room I have ever stood in. A studio called Rapsodia, where innovation wasn't a quarterly initiative, it was a Tuesday — Greeks, Filipinos, Canadians, Belgians, one American, and a guy from Cehegín, all around a table buried in Playmobil, lateral thinking as the house language. I came to Murcia to learn Spanish. I stayed because I had never been anywhere more inventive. The region that supposedly has nothing gave the world the submarine and the man who figured out the helicopter.

So I stopped defending the place and joined it. I wrote a column in murciano under the byline Juanico Saye, Americanico. I went looking for the orchard everybody warned me about and never found it — oranges everywhere, sure, that part is true, but what I actually found was a culture of making things.

I came to Murcia to learn Spanish. I stayed because I had never stood anywhere more inventive. And I decided that if I do like the murcianos do, I'll keep finding innovation. Acho.

Baton Rouge. GateCheck — a virtual ID and training app for the people who badge into chemical plants. Shell, Chevron, a hundred-plus workshops with the workers themselves.

What I actually did there was notice things and try to build. Workshops with every employee. Workshops with linemen. Safety protocol, gate access, the quality of the courses, printing ID badges, apps, a long list of other things. I even taught a class once, for some reason.

Version one of GateCheck was excellent, in a conference room. Out at a plant gate at five in the morning it was useless. Cold hands. Work gloves that don't register on a screen. One bar of signal. A line of trucks behind you and a guy who has been awake since four and is not interested in your onboarding flow. Every assumption we'd made was made indoors, by people who were warm. So we went and stood out there and rebuilt it for gloves and bad signal. Security-check failures dropped twenty percent, course completion went up ten. None of that came out of the conference room. It came out of the parking lot.

But that's not what those two years were actually about.

I came in wanting to make huge changes to the world, and to show my worth through the things I produced. I knew products. What I did not understand is that people inside an organization have a culture — and a product does not change a culture. A person rarely changes one on their own either.

Boats make a wake. Be aware of how your decisions move the water around the people next to you. And separately, though it turns out not to be that separate: trust is a terrible thing to lose.

By the time I could see my own wake — could see that my discoveries were landing on the people around me as something other than good news — it was hard to turn back. What I had wanted was to build products that helped save lives. What I actually learned is that change takes time, and that patience was a fundamental requirement for me being any good at this.

So I quit and started my own company. Not always great at taking my own medicine, I guess.

There's a drawer. In it: a biodegradable plastic made out of crawfish shells, a koozie, juice packaging, beauty products, a security-services platform. Years of nights and weekends.

Most of them failed. That's the honest number and I'd rather print it than round it.

The crawfish plastic is the one that still gets me. It was real chemistry, it genuinely worked, and it was still not a business — because nobody was standing around waiting for it. I had fallen in love with how clever it was, which is a different thing entirely from somebody needing it.

An invention and a business are different animals, and I paid full retail to learn the difference. What survived all of it isn't a product. It's the habit of asking who is already unhappy about this, before I ask what I could build.

John Hawley and I started Stale Chips in 2021. Five years since, across the Navy, the Air Force, the Army and the NYPD.

Resource prioritization for NAVFAC. A long-range plan an Army installation is still running on through 2030. Offline, local AI for the places where the network is not coming, ever, no matter how many slides say otherwise.

The thing everybody says about government is that it's slow. That is not what I've found. The people in the room are sharp and they want to move. What they've been handed is a fuzzy problem.

Fuzzy meaning: nobody can see it clearly. The problem gets declared at the top, built out of assumptions. Then the people who have to build the solution build it out of their assumptions about which assumptions the top assumed. A lovely spiral of guess and check. A more inefficient process has yet to be uncovered. A thousand monkeys typing Shakespeare comes to mind.

My favorite example, and I promise this one is real. A guy needs a computer for himself and his colleague, so he requests two. His boss says: too small, not worth my time. He requests five. Too small, not worth my time. He requests eighty-five. Instantly approved.

So a team of two now has eighty-three backup computers sitting on hand. Nobody in that chain did anything wrong. Every incentive worked exactly the way it was designed to. The problem was just never sharp enough for anybody to see what it was doing.

The best proof I have of the other direction came out of a corporate room rather than a government one: roughly three hundred candidate initiatives down to three, in two days. We didn't do the cutting. We put the criteria in front of the people who'd have to live with the answer and they cut it themselves, fast, because for the first time the question was answerable.

December 2023, St. Pete Pitch Night. I got up there with Fedscribe, an AI proposal writer I had built mostly so I would stop hating my own Tuesdays. It won five thousand dollars.

And then, standing there holding a novelty check that is genuinely too large to fit in a car, I realized I had pitched the wrong thing. The tool wasn't the prize. The prize was noticing that the AI work now paying real bills had been sitting inside a side project the entire time, and I had very nearly filed it under "cute."

Nothing about that tool was visionary. It fixed one bad afternoon that I personally had, every week, on schedule. That turns out to be the most reliable market signal I know of.

I don't know if my life reads as one full of direction, as a spinning top, or pure chaos.

I've been beyond fortunate that despite my incessant need for dreams, adventures, and learning, I've managed to carve out a little life for myself.

But at some point you have to be honest with yourself. My parents are better than me. They make a bigger impact on the world — wildly positive — than I currently do. I help big companies and big government. Twelve years of making other people's problems my love and my focus. Twelve years of making an impact somewhere far from my front door.

So, the intent and the ambition: apply my odd ability to uncover, improve, throw out, research, and experiment with any problem, on any topic, with any group of humans — to the world's greatest city. St. Petersburg.

Make civic St. Pete my driving northern star and see how, when, or where the journey takes me. Mayor of St. Pete? A nice title. Learning from my parents: be the change and the role will find you.

Of course, since we're dreaming — a fall home in Llanes, Spain for hurricane season would be a lovely addition. Go check out Llanes. Actually — don't. It's mine and I called dibs.