About Jared Smith
Right now I'm the founding engineer at EnergyConnect, a marketplace for bulk liquids and chemicals that sits between carriers, brokers, suppliers, and end customers. Empty repo to production in sixty days. 4,154 commits in the first six months, most of them typed by coding agents and every one of them answered for by me. The writing on this site is what that work looks like from the inside.
What I'm doing now
EnergyConnect is a dozen user roles, multi-path onboarding flows, regulatory paperwork, and integrations with systems that predate the web — the kind of product that used to take a team of fifteen and a year. I'm building it with a small team and a working knowledge base the agents read and write: thousands of lines of markdown describing how bidding runs, how the carrier–supplier relationship works, and every correction we've had to make. That is the real experiment here — not whether agents can write code, but whether a team can compound what they learn. Most of what I publish about agent velocity, agent memory, and managing agents like reports comes straight out of that codebase.
Alongside it I take a small number of fractional CTO and vCISO engagements. Founders usually call when a first enterprise security review is blocking a six-figure deal, or when a three-person engineering team has hit the wall and they need to decide between a fourth IC, a fractional staff engineer, or both.
How I work
Most engagements start the same way: a 30-minute call where the founder describes the actual blocker, not the job description. From there I scope a fixed deliverable — SOC 2 readiness in 90 days, a four-month embedded engineering rotation, the next three engineering hires — and ship it without leaving operational debt. I bring real numbers to every decision: $25–45K is what SOC 2 actually costs; $2–4K/month is what a fractional CISO actually costs; the staff hire who's senior-leveled is the one to walk away from. Founders bring judgment to "should we do this." I bring it to "here's how it actually goes."
Background
Before EnergyConnect I was Director of Information Security and Staff Software Engineer at Lavender, where I shipped production AI features in Go for 100,000+ users, ran a multi-cloud migration that cut $350K in infrastructure spend, and built the security program through SOC 2 Type II.
Before Lavender: senior backend engineering and identity at BlockFi, analytics and messaging infrastructure at InsideTrack, telemetry ingestion at AAMP Global, and co-founder of PopSocial where I scaled engineering from a solo build to a fifteen-person organization. Thirteen-plus years of production work, distributed across pre-Series-A, growth-stage, and post-acquisition contexts.
What I believe
The interesting decisions at startup scale aren't about people — they're about commitments. What slice ships first. What hire comes second. What rituals survive the team doubling. My job is to make those commitments cleanly, not to defer them through process or hide them behind frameworks. AI changes the work — it doesn't change that.
If you're working on something ambitious, I'd like to hear about it. Grab 30 minutes on my calendar I take a small number of engagements at a time, and the intro call is the right place to figure out whether one of them is yours.