One job, in many costumes.
Every job I've ever had has been the same job in a different costume: take something messy in the real world and turn it into something useful for the people stuck inside it. Maps for the National Park Service. Mortgage emails for actual homeowners. Mountain-bike riders learning to send drops without sending themselves to the ER. Three costumes, one job. Geography was where I started — a discipline that lets you ask "what's happening" and "why is it happening here" in the same breath. Out of college I went into nonprofits using software for good, until I noticed "humanitarian help" sometimes meant exporting American capitalism in a development-aid trench coat. So I left.
That kicked off a decade of chasing product-market fit at startups. Homebot — where I figured out how to make millions of homeowners actually open a mortgage email. Teren — where I built marketing for a drone-imagery company and got to keep my geospatial brain alive. One success, one failure, and a permanent conviction that PMF is mostly stubbornness with a measurement plan. After that I bet on customer data platforms — the third-party cookie was dying, the post-cookie internet needed plumbing. Turned out it was a race to the bottom against a hundred competitors. Then Google didn't even kill the cookie. Weh weh.
I needed to recalibrate, so I got PMBIA-certified to coach mountain biking. Spent a couple seasons teaching women and youth how to get shreddy — and how to take care of their bikes, because MTB is fundamentally an equipment sport. Helped a beloved local ski + bike shop trade retail margin for service and community. Then I got stung by a bee in Fernie, BC, went into full anaphylaxis on a trail, and didn't die. Shortly after, I had a kid. Both reset the "what matters" axis in a hurry.
Now I'm raising a small human who'll grow up dating robots, and in the cracks I've gone all-in on AI for the unsexiest, most consequential vertical I can find: small drinking-water and wastewater utilities. They run on spreadsheets and tribal knowledge from the 1970s, and the climate is no longer being patient. So I co-founded getupstream.ai as a side project — building the software these operators need for a more volatile century.
