I build things. I've been doing it long enough to know what actually works.
By day I lead security at Chime, one of the largest fintechs in the US. Six years there across security engineering, GRC, and now running security at the senior director level. Before that: consulting at Crowe, Sutter Health, Credit Karma. I started as a software engineer and eventually ended up in the boardroom.
I also start companies. I'm building HARDMODE, a fitness platform for trainers and clients. meetbell is a paid iOS app for emotional honesty on the App Store. I built rifts.to as a free live polling alternative to Mentimeter. I serve on the board of the Financial Services AI Council.
This is where I write about what I'm doing and thinking. Business, technology, AI, marketing, leadership. Nothing theoretical.
I built rifts.to, flipped one Cloudflare setting, and ChatGPT started sending me users - one of whom reached thousands of people in Latin America. Here's what happened and why most builders are invisible to AI by default.
Twelve hours in I'd burned $12. Four days later, $60. Here's how I got that under control — and what I learned running a local 7B model as a fallback.