Advisory & Ventures

‍Alongside my institutional work, I build software of my own and take on a small number of independent engagements. Both extend the conviction that runs through my governance work: clarity is something you design in advance, not something you summon in the moment.

Presence

Presence is a privacy-minded preparation platform for job seekers heading into high-stakes interviews, from early-career candidates to senior leaders. It guides you through organizing your experience into a structure you can retrieve under pressure: anchor stories, leadership themes, and a briefing packet you can carry into the room.

Presence Story, the flagship tool in the Presence portfolio, adapts to where you are in your career: a STAR structure for early-career roles, STAR+ for managers, and a four-beat Frame, Risks, Approach, Story structure for senior leaders. An AI coach helps you get your first draft on the page, so you are never staring at a blank field. Credits are purchased as you need them: no subscriptions, no expiring lifetime pass.

The idea came directly from my governance work. Institutions perform better when decision authority and structure are defined before the difficult moment arrives. The same is true for people. An interview compresses years of judgment into minutes, and the difference between a strong answer and a lost one is rarely knowledge. It is retrieval. Presence applies the discipline of governance at a personal scale: do the structural work early, so the thinking does not have to be improvised when the room goes quiet.

Presence is also a working demonstration of the architecture I advocate. It runs on Cloudflare's edge stack (Workers and D1), with Zero Trust access, WAF, and bot management, and authentication handled through WorkOS rather than a homegrown login system. Privacy is built into the data model and access controls from the start, not bolted on after the fact.

Visit Presence → · Read the philosophy →

Candidate Research Survey

Presence started with a question I could not answer from experience alone: how do senior people actually prepare for high-stakes interviews, once the process has changed around them? So in July 2026 I ran a short, informal survey of fifteen senior professionals. It is not a large sample, and I have tried to say so throughout, but the answers were specific enough to be worth publishing: a gap between how candidates prepare and what interviewers are actually assessing, and AI arriving on both sides of the table in the same search cycle. The findings inform how I think about Presence, and about a larger round of this research I am planning. The full write-up is published openly under CC BY 4.0. Read the findings →

‍Independent advisory

‍In 2024 and 2025 I served as IT strategy and investment advisor to an early-stage advanced-materials manufacturer planning multi-region global operations. The engagement produced a first-year technology strategy and investment proposal: phased, scenario-based spending tiers aligned to projected revenue, an AI strategy spanning internal efficiency and new revenue streams, a security and IP-protection architecture, and platform selection across ERP, CRM, and collaboration.

In 2026 I advised a Connecticut law practice on AI adoption: a getting-started brief covering tool selection and data boundaries, confidentiality guardrails, and a phased 90-day plan built around group learning and a shared prompt library. The engagement was deliberately scoped to technology adoption and governance, with professional-responsibility questions routed to the sources qualified to answer them.

Working together

I take on a limited number of advisory engagements in IT strategy, governance, and digital workplace transformation. If that intersects with a problem you are working on, reach out through the contact page.