30 Years in Tech.
4,000 Hours of AI.
One Dog Named Larry.

I graduated summer school in 1992 1/2. No college degree. No connections. Just a high school diploma and the ability to read people and fix machines.

My first real job was at a 5-person company near Livermore, California, assembling keyboard drawers. That's it - the entire job was snapping together keyboard trays. But they gave me a shot when they didn't have to. I never forgot that.

Within a year I was doing systems integration. Then building and selling NT servers with SCSI drives in RAID arrays. Then flying to New Jersey to install systems at the PATH transit authority. I remember when the release of the Pentium DX2-66 chip release - 66 MHz felt like pure science fiction. I stayed at that company for seven years.

In 1998 I chased the dot-com dream like everyone else who had been around computers long enough to know something was changing. I ended up at a startup incubator, running help desks for partner companies, doing a bit of everything. I loved it. That energy - people building real things, fast - it was electric.

I also briefly tried carpentry. About six months. Came back to tech. I wasn't wired for it.

Then came the IBM Whistlejet network appliance - QA testing, networking, VPN administration, email systems. I was learning what made infrastructure actually work, not just the theory of it.

2001 arrived and the dot-com world collapsed. The incubator folded. Jobs evaporated. I ended up in LA, broke and between things.

I spent about a year living in Venice Beach with my 1-year-old son. Tourists. Street performers. Homeless folks with more dignity than half the executives I'd met. No hustle. No laptop. Just one-on-one with my kid every single day.

That chapter ended. Divorce. Merchandising jobs. The kind of work that pays the bills and slowly makes you forget what you're actually capable of.

I got rehired at a software testing company that had now been acquired by a multi-billion dollar corporation based in London. You probably have their mark on the bottom of your toaster. Became a FIT engineer: LTE field testing, logging with QXDM, watching 3G become LTE in real time.

After that: I was given the chance to do something different. Covering a territory of accounts in CA, OR and WA. I learned exactly what Main Street businesses need to survive - and exactly what they don't get from the vendors selling to them. Discovered the Google Maps algorithm tricks. And I more than doubled sales in my territory over the course of two years in an industry that was slowing down.

I spent over 4,000 hourslearning AI systems. Building, breaking, throwing away, starting over. I wasn't following YouTube tutorials. I was trying to understand the structure - how these tools actually reason, where they fail, what they need to produce something useful versus something that sounds useful.

The wave of AI hit local businesses the same way the internet did in 1998: a massive shift nobody asked for, that rewards the prepared and punishes the invisible. Big companies moved fast. Small businesses got left behind again - same story, different decade.

I'd spent years watching local businesses struggle with the same invisible problems: wrong phone number on one directory, no recent posts, no schema markup, no llms.txt. Things that take 15 minutes to fix if you know what they are - and cost you real customers every week if you don't.

My first computer business started with flyers. I printed them, tri-folded them, punched a hole through each one, threaded a rubber band through it, and hung them on doorknobs in the neighborhood. Got two customers before life intervened. That's still how I think about this: show up where people are, say something real, make it easy to call.

My son is a firefighter now. He runs toward things most people run from. I like to think we both chose lives with purpose over paychecks.