The path
The order matters more than the dates, because every step handed something to the next one.
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Hands-on from the start
He was selling on eBay at fifteen. Then came a paintball technician's bench, where the job was making other people's equipment work again, on a deadline, with the customer watching.
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Technician to general manager
He rose to general manager at the largest paintball company in Minnesota, running the retail store, the park, and a 40-actor seasonal event. He served as the Midwest technical support lead for the major marker brands and directed product development, from bolt designs and a titanium barrel set to an apparel line, with overseas manufacturing to oversee. That job taught the first lesson in shipping: a product is only done when a stranger can use it.
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Operations, and the systems that outlasted the job
As warehouse coordinator at the Valley Outreach food shelf, he ran shipping and receiving, box truck logistics, volunteer drivers, and contractors. Then he built the part nobody asked for: a visual task-slider board that replaced the volunteer schedule, standardized intake and output tracking, an efficiency study that found $6,240 a year of wasted walk time, and safety training scripts written for broadcast. The second lesson was that the fix that sticks is a system, not a reminder.
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Fabrication for paying customers
He took commissions for signage, sculpture, and functional parts, built from laser-cut layers, resin, LED neon, 3D printing, and hand finishing. One commission stacked five different processes on a single piece.
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Founding Pathfinder Prototyping
He wrote the business plan, the brand identity, the website, the financial models, and the equipment strategy himself, then ran the company he had planned. That is the third lesson: if you can write the whole plan, you can build the whole thing.
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Crossing into AI
He earned 37 certificates in eleven months, then went after the part the certificates do not teach: a knowledge base he can search by meaning, seven MCP servers written from scratch, AI agents running across three machines, and a production line that turned one plugin into 35.
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Now
Today he runs an independent practice that builds custom AI tools for businesses, and it hands over everything it builds.
Principles, as shipped
Values are easy to write on a website. These are the ones that survived contact with a product, each backed by the listing that ships it.
A key that quietly does nothing is worse than one that tells you.
Plasticity Hotkeys. Plasticity ships 61 of its commands with no keyboard shortcut. Until the bindings are installed, those keys show the deck's alert instead of pretending to work.
Never a stale number.
Krita Complete. When Krita is not running, the dial strip shows a dash and never the last value it saw, so a number on the strip is always current.
Destructive commands ship un-placed.
Phone Link Hotkeys. The command that clears every notification is reachable only through the plugin's settings panel, so a stray press can never wipe the list.
Ask the app, not the guess.
SOLIDWORKS Hotkeys. Commands that can fail silently go through the native API, so a refused command never looks like a finished one.
Say what it does not do.
Two listings. The SOLIDWORKS listing names the one Stream Deck model it does not cover. The OneNote listing names the three OneNote versions it does not work with. The buyer finds out before paying.
No lock-in, no rent.
The whole line. Every paid plugin is a one-time purchase, never a subscription. Excalidraw's listing says it plainly: no account, no cloud services, no telemetry. Custom work is handed over with the source.