Festina lente
Prologue
I build things — products, companies, and hopefully someday, institutions. I live in Seattle, and I read a lot of history to learn what lasts.
I.Career
I grow things.
By trade I'm a product marketer — lifecycle, data and performance — across AI infrastructure, media, venture and crypto. I like building systems that keep compounding after I've set them up.
RunPodLifecycle Marketing Manager · 2025
Built the lifecycle journeys that lifted usage and conversion across an AI cloud — worth more than a million dollars a year.
Savage Ventures · VICEEmail Marketing Manager · 2023 – 24
Ran email for Savage Ventures and its brands — VICE, Munchies and Motherboard among them: 1M+ active subscribers, 5M+ site visits a month, and operating costs cut by 75%.
Kosei AdvisorsAssociate · 2022 – 23
Managed a $40M+ digital-asset portfolio through a bear market — launched its staking program and grew its value.
Med IDCo-founder · 2020
Co-founded a privacy-first COVID-19 contact-tracing nonprofit, and won the University of Washington's Buerk Center startup competition.
The record
II.Building with AI
I build with AI — and I started small.
My first project, in March 2025, was a copy of Chrome's dinosaur game. Going by the commits it took about eleven minutes, and you can play it right here. Each thing I've built since has been a little more ambitious than the last. The latest is a company.
Since then
The showcase
I. Founder · 2026 —
The inbox that talks back.
A modern inbox with a native chat layer and agents built in. Claim an address, bring your Gmail if you want it, sort mail into channels, and let agents draft, triage and reply with your approval.
WebMaciPhoneMCP
II. Founder · 2026
Ad blocker for your email.
Blocks spam, sales and marketing email in Gmail. It came first — and Soda Road was built on its plumbing.
GmailAI triage
III.Travels
To know a place, go and stand in it.
Every arc on the globe leaves from Seattle, and every one of them comes home.
North America
Vancouver·Portland·San Francisco·Los Angeles·Austin·Nashville·New York
Europe
Reykjavík·London·Cardiff·Edinburgh·Paris·Brussels·Amsterdam·Berlin·Munich·Copenhagen·Oslo·Stockholm·Riga·Vilnius·Warsaw·Kraków·Kyiv·Bucharest·Budapest·Prague·Vienna
Asia
Singapore·Hong Kong·Beijing·Tokyo
Drag to turn · arcs from Seattle
IV.History
History is the only laboratory we have.
I minored in Classics at UW, and I still read history for structure: how civilizations are founded, how they peak, and how they fall. In the 1830s Thomas Cole painted that whole cycle as five canvases, The Course of Empire.
I think every organization runs the same cycle — companies, institutions, movements. They start on passion, peak when passion and logic are in balance, and slide when comfort and process take over.
“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.”
Influences
c. 428 – 348 BC
Traced how each form of government decays into the next — the oldest version of the idea that regimes run in cycles.
“The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.”
384 – 322 BC
Named the three modes of persuasion — ethos, pathos and logos — and argued that every virtue sits between two vices: too little and too much.
“It is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.”
63 BC – AD 14
Ended a century of civil war and built the Roman peace. The greatest statesman who ever lived.
“Festina lente — make haste slowly.”
AD 121 – 180
The last of Rome's “five good emperors”: a Stoic who held absolute power and tried to use it for the people under it.
“Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen.”
1332 – 1406
Worked out why dynasties rise and fall, generation by generation.
“The past resembles the future more than one drop of water another.”
1732 – 1799
The American Cincinnatus. He won the war, handed his command back to Congress and went home to his farm — then stepped down again after two terms as president.
“Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action.”
1743 – 1826
A Renaissance man: he wrote the Declaration of Independence, designed Monticello and founded a university. He also wrote against slavery while enslaving more than six hundred people — and he knew it.
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
c. 1755 – 1804
Built the working American government: wrote most of The Federalist, then created its Treasury, its credit and its first national bank.
“…whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
1769 – 1821
Won forty battles, and was proudest of a legal code.
“What nothing will destroy, what will live forever, is my Civil Code.”
1809 – 1865
A self-taught lawyer from the frontier who held the country together through its worst war and ended slavery.
“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves.”
1858 – 1919
Trust-buster, conservationist, rancher, soldier and explorer. He broke up monopolies, gave workers and consumers a Square Deal, protected some 230 million acres of public land and started the Panama Canal — then, after the White House, went down an uncharted river in the Amazon.
“The nation behaves well if it treats its natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value.”
1880 – 1936
Argued that civilizations are born, grow old and die like living things.
“The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture.”
V.Home
Between the volcanoes and the sea.
Cascadia is the Pacific Northwest seen as one place: the rainy strip of coast west of the mountains, from Northern California up to Southeast Alaska. It's home. On a clear day it looks like a Song dynasty scroll — tiny people, enormous mountains, water everywhere.
Mount Tacoma is an old name for Mount Rainier.
Interlude
I like things that get better with age — buildings, companies, institutions. The Northwest happens to be full of materials that do.
Labradorite. A feldspar that looks like dark rock until the light catches it. Tilt it and it flashes blue, green and gold.
Studies
Models and renders of the places I want to build one day.
An architectural study
Blue domes above cream stone and charcoal marble. Curved stairs, bronze figures and flowing rainwater, shaped by the Pacific Northwest.
The original architectural render.
Model credits
An architectural study
Cedar above dark masonry, planted terraces and a glass conservatory. A place to live among trees, with a twelve-pointed bronze star above the entrance.
The original architectural render.
Model credits
An architectural study
An open stone sanctuary in the cedar forest. Carved columns, moss-covered steps and a spring flowing into a green bathing pool.
The original architectural render.
Model credits
An architectural study
A terraced stronghold of basalt, sandstone, cedar and bronze. Forest courts and rainwater channels follow the ridge beneath broad green roofs.
The original architectural render.
Model credits
VI.What I believe
Three ideas I keep coming back to.
I · Cycles
Civilizations, companies and movements all go through the same stages — passion, balance, comfort, decline — and then start over. The goal isn't to escape the cycle. It's to make each one end a little higher than the last.
II · Arcadia
Where people live shapes who they become. The land sets the limits and hands out the resources — what grows, what you build with, what you have to defend — and over time it shapes how a place looks, too. On this coast, rain and giant cedars gave the first peoples their plank houses and canoes. I think Cascadia has the best geography anywhere: volcanoes, rain forest, rivers and sea, and the timber, stone and water to build things that last.
III · The Builder's Republic
I believe in the America of Hamilton, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt: a government that builds big things, and leaders who serve and then go home. Cincinnatus was a Roman farmer handed total power to save the city. He saved it, gave the power back after sixteen days, and went back to his plough. Washington did the same.
VII.A few ways to know me
I’ve always liked
personality quizzes.
Some are thoughtful. Some are just fun. I like seeing which parts fit, and which don’t. Here are a few of mine.
Scores from my personality assessments.
Twelve archetypes · One reflection
You want to understand. You look beneath the obvious explanation and test what you think you know.
Aquarius · Amethyst
Your turn
Understanding things. Making things. Looking after people. We all have a little of each.
I put together a quiz around twelve archetypes and the values behind them. See which ones feel most like you.
24 questions · About 3 minutes
Free, with results here. No signup.
The archetypes and symbolic pairings reflect my own framework. Your quiz result comes from your answers, not your birth date.
VIII.Goals
Build Soda Road.
The foundation. Everything else on this list is built on it.
Visit every country in Europe.
17 of 44 down so far. The UK counts as one.
Clone my dog, Barnabus.
One of him isn't enough.
Pl. V — Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842 · National Gallery of Art, Washington
