Pre-Series-A AI founders call me when their first enterprise security review is blocking a six-figure deal — or when their three-person engineering team has hit the wall and they need to decide between hiring 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
Most recently 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: 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.