A little about me

Building inside a large company and on my own

At Thomson Reuters, much of my work focuses on the systems customers depend on but rarely think about: account management, billing, payments, support, and self-service.

I’ve spent years working through the challenges of modernizing existing platforms, navigating competing priorities, and making changes to systems that can’t simply be switched off while you rebuild them. It’s taught me to appreciate the details, especially the ones that aren’t obvious until something goes wrong.

Running Kindred Tales has been a very different experience.

I started Kindred Tales because I wanted to make it easier for families to capture the stories of their parents and grandparents. What began as an idea has become a real business with paying customers, AI-assisted interviews, speech-to-text, and a publishing system that turns those stories into hardcover books.

Building the product has been one thing. Running the business has been another education entirely. I’ve had to figure out everything from product design and engineering to marketing, customer support, printing, and fulfillment.

It’s also where I’ve done much of my hands-on work with AI. I’ve built systems for interviewing storytellers, turning conversations into written chapters, and helping automate parts of the business through AI agents.

When you’re responsible for both building the product and keeping the business running, you find out pretty quickly which ideas actually work.

Why Be Unorthodox?

Over the last few years, AI has changed what I can build and how quickly I can go from an idea to something that actually works.

Some of that work has been for Kindred Tales. Other projects have started because I was curious, wanted to solve a problem, or simply thought something would be fun to make.

I’ve experimented with combining computer vision and voice AI into a personal tour guide, built a mobile point-of-sale app for selling Kindred Tales gift cards, and made a personalized word-search game for my kids.

Not everything needs to become a business or even a finished product to be worth exploring.

I also don’t think you need to be a developer to find practical uses for AI. There’s a lot of potential in everyday problems, whether that’s figuring something out around the house, making something for your family, or finding a better way to get through work.

That’s the idea behind Be Unorthodox. I want to share both the business side of building with AI and the smaller experiments that anyone can try.

I’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d approach differently. And I’ll be clear about the difference between something running in production and something I put together to see if an idea would work.

What I think about

• How product work actually changes when AI agents are in the loop, not just chatbots.
• Bootstrapping with a day job. What’s possible, what’s not, what nobody talks about.
• Modernizing legacy systems without burning the place down.
• The lawyer-brain bits: ambiguity, evidence, decisions under uncertainty.

What I’m strong at

• Founder, operator, and builder. Working across product strategy, technology, and business operations, often at the same time.
• Customer-facing platforms. Billing, payments, support, self-service, entitlements, and the systems connecting them.
• Practical AI applications. Building workflows that go beyond a demo, including the data, guardrails, and human oversight that make them useful.
• Building from scratch and improving what’s already there. Taking ideas from concept to working product, while also navigating the realities of large, established systems.