About
I've seen the surface from above — and the failure from inside.
A patrol aircraft teaches you to distrust calm water. Running a business into the ground teaches you the same thing, at much higher tuition. Everything on this site comes from holding those two educations up to the arrival of AI.
The story in six chapters
The view from above
I started in military aviation, on maritime patrol. The work, underneath the hardware, was epistemology: somewhere below an enormous and mostly featureless surface is something that matters, and it will not announce itself. You learn to fly search patterns instead of hunches, to log weak signals instead of dismissing them, and to let a crew cross-check every read — including yours.
Building something real
Then I built a business in renewable energy — from nothing, through the years when every surface signal pointed up. Revenue grew. The team grew. The story people told about the company, including the one I told myself, grew with it.
The conditions change
The business failed. Not from one dramatic blow, but the way most of them fail: conditions moved underneath a structure that had been built for the previous conditions, and the surface signals kept smiling almost to the end. I have spent years taking that failure apart honestly — not the sanitized keynote version, the real sequence — because the tuition was too expensive to waste.
How people change their minds
The wreckage pointed at people, not spreadsheets — at how decisions actually got made, what could not be said out loud, and what trust cost when it broke. So I went and studied that directly, through formal training in coaching. It turned out to be the missing instrument: business failure is usually a human system failing before it is a financial one.
The new condition
Now the biggest change in operating conditions of my lifetime is arriving, and I work with AI daily — hands on, building, failing at small scale on purpose. Not because the tools are the point, but because you cannot study a change in the water from the shore.
This practice
This site is where those lines converge into one discipline: studying how businesses succeed, how they fail, and how AI changes the conditions beneath both — in public, with the evidence labeled, and with my mistakes left in the record where they can teach.
The working position
Patrol altitude, not podium distance.
Most commentary on business and AI is written from the shore: safe, dry, and far from the conditions it describes. I try to work at patrol altitude instead — close enough to see the structure under the surface, honest enough to log what I find, including the contacts that turn out to be nothing.
That means I publish working hypotheses before they are safe, label the evidence under every claim, and keep a public record when a conclusion changes. It is slower than confidence. It holds up better.
Plain terms
What this site is, and is not.
This is
- An independent research practice, published as it develops
- First-hand study — my own operating history is part of the evidence
- A record that keeps its revisions and its wrong turns visible
- Written for people running real businesses, in plain language
This is not
- A pitch, a funnel, or a services page
- AI commentary written from the shore
- A promise that any of this is finished thinking
- Advice that knows your business better than you do
The most useful thing you can bring me is a hard question from a real operation.