Four exits — one as a founder, three as an advisor. An incubator built, a classroom since 2018, three years coaching, and a lot of scar tissue earned the ordinary way — by getting some of it wrong first. I've never really stopped teaching, whatever the job title said.
I've been building things since I was 24. Companies, products, a community, a book — the form changes, the habit doesn't.
I founded FastPencil and sold it to Courier Corp in 2011 — my one exit as an operator. After that I built a consulting practice of my own, advising startups and small businesses for years, paid in cash and often equity. Three of those clients went on to billion-dollar exits — an IPO, a merger, and a private-equity deal. I was part of the team, not the reason it happened, and the equity meant I shared in the wins. Along the way I launched a startup incubator at San José State University, and I've been a professor there since 2018 — thousands of business students so far, and I'm still in the classroom.
The coaching is the newest part — three years now, and the one that finally put a name on what I'd been doing informally for two decades. The teaching isn't a footnote on the résumé — it's the part I kept coming back to. Standing in front of a room full of people who want to make something, and finding the sentence that makes it click, is the most useful thing I know how to do. Everything on this site is a version of that: a workshop, an hour on a call, a standing session, a project we build side by side.
My work sits at the intersection of innovation, strategy, and execution. That's an easy sentence to write and a hard one to live: most people are good at one of the three and quietly hope the other two sort themselves out. They don't. The interesting work is always in the seams between them — where a good idea meets a real market and something has to give.
I still build — right now, every day. I run a venture studio, Custany, and the startup I'm building inside it is Radi8, an AI marketing platform. Before that came Foclarity, a go-to-market tool for CEOs. I build the things I recommend rather than just recommending them. And I wrote What Holds Up the Roof to put twenty-five years of that thinking into one place a builder can actually finish.
These days I spend most of my time with people who are building something — a website, an app, a business, a startup, sometimes their very first thing. In the room, at a whiteboard, working on the decisions that will still matter in two years.
The best evidence that someone can help you build something is that they're still building things themselves.
The AI marketing platform I'm building right now, and use every day — also the engine behind the execution when I build with clients.
See Radi8 →The studio the building happens inside. Radi8 is its current product — the venture-studio pattern I keep coming back to: build it, establish it, hand it off.
See Custany →A go-to-market tool for CEOs, built out of the same frustration that started most of my companies: the advice existed, the system didn't.
The free community and podcast I built for people making things — peer groups, workshops, and candid conversation. It's where I send anyone who isn't ready to pay for help yet.
Join it free →The four principles of entrepreneurship, told as a business fable — a founder learning what keeps a business standing when the plan falls apart.
Read about the book →I launched a startup incubator at San José State University, helping student founders get from idea to something real.
A professor at San José State since 2018, still teaching business students — which is where I learned to explain this stuff without hiding behind the jargon, and where the coaching really started.
And these days a visible body of work beats a resume — it's evidence, not claims. So I help people build both: the thing itself, and the reputation that makes people trust them before the first conversation.
Worth knowing before you book a call, so you can decide whether this is the kind of help you want.
I'll tell you what I actually think, early, including when the answer is "this isn't the problem you should be solving." You can do whatever you like with it — but you won't have to guess where I stand.
I've seen enough beautiful strategy die in a drawer. Everything we decide has to survive contact with a real person and a real calendar, or it isn't a plan — it's a slide.
I like the room, the whiteboard, and the argument. I'd rather be the person you call when something breaks than a consultant who shows up for the readout.
Book thirty minutes and tell me what you're building. No pitch, no BS — and you'll get a feel for whether we'd work well together.
Book 30 minutes with me