My dad worked for Hewlett-Packard, so I grew up around computers in the '80s and early '90s. Big floppy disks. Ours was the only family I knew with a second phone line just for dial-up. He got me hooked early, built machines with me, taught me to tinker. He was also 10 for 10 on advice. Anytime I got stuck, one phone call and I knew what to do. A lot of people don't have that growing up. I always wanted to be that for someone else.
I started building things young. Magic shows in the backyard. Mowing lawns and hiring neighbor kids to help. By 12, I was deep in Photoshop and early Flash, making animations. I sold one to my dad's company for an ad. At 16, terrified, I knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar electric company and walked out of a boardroom with a signed deal to build their website. By 17, I was running an e-commerce shoe store I'd built and managed end to end, drop-shipped, SEO, paid clicks, models for product photos, the whole thing. It printed money. Then Zappos showed up, flooded Google with affiliate sites, and the small-business affiliate game got eaten alive. First real lesson in defensibility.
I went looking for cash flow and landed at Verizon. That turned into 20 years, 12 jobs, 9 relocations, and a career I never planned. I started in a mall kiosk in Spokane and ended as an Associate Vice President reporting to the CRO of Verizon Business. Four President's Cabinet wins. Four major market turnarounds. Selected as the only field leader for Verizon's Master Red Team Program, pressure-testing CEO-level strategy with eleven other operators trained by Bryce Hoffman.
The pattern in every role was the same. Find the broken system everyone had stopped questioning. Redesign it. Get it through finance, HR, operations, and the executives. Ship it. The quota model nobody trusted, eventually adopted nationally. The customer success function that didn't exist, that cut new-account churn in half. The $220M sales initiative. The Playing to Win strategy framework I rolled out twelve times across different teams.
All twelve worked.
The thing I miss most about that career isn't the title or the size of the org. It's the mentoring. I had open one-on-ones three levels down. Anyone who asked for time got it. I watched people unlock things in themselves they didn't know were there, and grow into careers that genuinely surprised them. That's the part of the work that felt like cheating, in the best way.
I left in 2024 through Verizon's Voluntary Separation Program. Not because I was burned out. Because I could see what AI was about to do to every operating system inside every institution, and I wanted to be hands-on with the tools while the rules were still being written.
AI does not fix broken organizations. It exposes them faster.
Twenty months later: five live AI products, 30,000 monthly users, close to 10,000 hands-on hours in the tools. I'm not a software engineer and don't want to be. What I am is an operator who turns business friction into working systems, fast enough to skip half the meetings.
If you want the unvarnished version — month by month, what worked and what face-planted — the build journey is logged here.