what i actually want

the version of the answer that doesn’t fit on a linkedin profile

01-Apr-26

You spend over a decade doing things that don’t look connected. Petroleum engineering. Equity research. Renewable energy in emerging markets. Policy. Now AI tools for small businesses. People keep asking what the plan is. For a long time I didn’t have a good answer.

Now I do.

I want to help people save money, solve problems, and stop doing work that a machine should be doing for them. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

the pattern

It took me a while to see it because it never looked the same twice. In oil and gas it looked like figuring out new recovery techniques. In finance it looked like publishing research that executives acted on by morning. In policy it looked like building a data function from scratch with Python and a small team. Now it looks like deploying AI systems for businesses that can’t afford a tech department.

Different jobs. Same instinct: find the problem nobody wants to touch, build something that fixes it, hand it to the person who needs it most.

I used to think the goal was to be in important rooms. Big decisions, big stakes, the kind of work that looks good on a resume. And I do come alive in those rooms. Sitting with a COO, mapping out what needs to change, designing the solution live.

But the moment I keep coming back to is smaller than that.

The work that sticks with me is never the executive presentation or the signed contract. It’s the person three levels down, buried in manual entry, doing work nobody noticed and everybody depended on, who suddenly isn’t anymore. Three hours back in their day, and nobody made a speech about it.

Impact as an abstraction does nothing for me. I want to build things that free real people from work they thought was permanent. The person who benefits most is never the person who signs the check.

what i’m optimizing for

It comes down to five things.

  1. Financial freedom without selling my soul for it. Finance taught me how money moves. Policy taught me how decisions get made. Entrepreneurship taught me what freedom actually costs. Now I’m trying to make the passion and the money work at the same time.

  2. Work that compounds. Something where every system I design, every model I deploy, every process I automate feeds the next one. The alternative is running hard and staying in place.

  3. Being in the room where it matters. Solving the problem live, with the person who owns it.

  4. Building for people the system forgot. As a conviction. The people doing the hardest work with the fewest resources deserve better tools than what they’re getting.

  5. Autonomy without isolation. I’m rooted in Calgary. The next version of this looks like a small, focused team. Two or three people working on things that matter, with enough traction to stay focused on the work.

the hard part

The hard part is focus. When you can see multiple paths forward and any of them could work, the discipline is picking one and letting it compound. Breadth got me here. Depth is what comes next.

I’ve noticed something about the work I’m most proud of. None of it happened alone. The best results always came from two people in a room, one bringing what the other doesn’t. That pattern keeps showing up.

the shape

I keep thinking about what the right structure actually looks like. It sits between a traditional firm and going solo.

Three to five partners who all face clients. Nobody is purely management. A handful of specialists on retainer, pulled in for specific engagements, contracted rather than managed. And underneath all of it, an AI layer handling the work that used to require another ten people: drafting, research, modeling, formatting, basic analysis.

Six to ten humans total. Output capacity of twenty-five or thirty. The math works because the AI layer replaces the admin staff, junior analysts, and project coordinators that used to fill out a mid-sized firm. The partners coordinate the work rather than supervise it. That’s what keeps overhead near zero.

It may still change. But it’s the clearest picture I have of a structure that matches everything above.

the through-line

I build tools instead of slide decks. I reach for the people doing the hardest work with the least help. I keep choosing problems where the biggest payoff goes to someone who never expected it.

A decade of left turns, one straight line.

If any of this resonates, I’d welcome the conversation: [email protected].