I never really wanted to be a technology guy. I'm a 90s kid and a writer, and growing up you were going to have to rip the pen and paper out of my cold dead hands. The only piece of tech I adopted as a kid was the word processor. So I fell into tech completely by accident, by way of writing, and then I caught the bug. Honestly I didn't fall in love with software so much as I fell in love with software engineers. I love how salt-of-the-earth developers are, and once you work in startups you're not just in your own startup, you know everybody, you're in all of them, and all of it was fascinating to me.

I cut my teeth working with founders to start, build and grow their products, then parlayed that into roles with Fortune 500 companies. Now I'm building for myself, in product, web and SEO, brand and content. I've experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows, professionally, personally and emotionally, and I found a solution to life and life's problems on both sides. My work today is grounded in a bedrock of principles that hold up regardless of the platform or the model. The tools change, the principles don't.

When I first got into tech I told my uncle this stuff was going to change everything, and he'd spent his career as a sales executive at a cable company. He asked me, do you know what the hardest thing about selling software is, and I said no. He told me: you don't need it. I couldn't even fathom what he meant. Of course you need email, you need word processors. And he said no, think about it objectively. If you don't have a word processor you have pen and paper, if you don't have email you have snail mail. Everything we build in software, we already have a solution for in the real world. What you're actually selling is a time savings, a better life, an outcome. That blew my absolute mind, and years later I finally understood it.

It's never been more true than today, because now we have Claude Code. If you have a need, you can just build it. Who needs Salesforce when you can have Claude Code build you a CRM that actually works, and who needs to pay for all the little add-on apps when you can build those too. So AI isn't the root cause, AI is the lever. The root is that we didn't really need this stuff in the first place. And it isn't only coming for the blue chips, it's coming for all the marketplaces and add-ons those SaaS companies thought were their moat. The moat now is some combination of data, brand, attention and product. Time to market was never a moat, and with AI everybody can come to market fast.

The mind is a muscle. If you offload your thinking, you stop exercising it, and my real concern is that more usage isn't going to bring the bottom up, it might just hollow out the great thinkers we could have had. People say you can have AI question you and challenge you, and you can, I actually do that. I'm a writer, and I've had this writer's block ever since I got into tech. Recently I opened up Claude and said, have a conversation with me, challenge everything I say, but I don't want you writing anything, your job is just to document what I write and give it back. But how many people are telling it don't do any work, only challenge me? Nobody is doing that.

For anything else, I check it, because Claude cannot replicate my brain. What makes me good at what I do is me, my soul, my intention to serve, my morals and values and principles, my mission and my drive. There's no AI that replicates that, so if I offload all my thinking to it, I can't deliver maximum value to the people I serve, and I want to deliver maximum value.

Show me the receipts where you actually did the thing. There's so much of this online, people with a course or a framework who aren't applying any of it themselves, and the tell is always the same: they can't point to where they did it. So that's what I ask for, the receipts.

You see people selling seventy-page decks, and I won't even write a seventy-page deck because I won't read my own seventy-page deck. You want me to believe you personally sat down and wrote all seventy pages, or that you edited all seventy pages the AI spit out? Come on. In marketing especially, people can feel when something isn't authentic. Even people who don't know how these tools sound definitely know when something doesn't feel real. They're not really pushing against AI, they're pushing against the lack of authenticity, and I think that's deeply human.