Calmly navigating complex challenges.

Partnering with companies and founders across hard tech, energy, and aerospace to reach the next critical milestone with ease.

Your company is somewhere between having a brilliant idea and landing on the moon.

The journey from idea to execution is a long one.

For hard tech companies, it’s even more challenging.

Not confined just to the world of bits, we must also arrange atoms and parade electrons in just the right way to make the vision come to life.

As a hard tech engineer and entrepreneur, I understand where you are.

I specialize in helping companies quickly move toward critical milestones through engineering design support, establishing market fit, and executing turnarounds.

In short, no matter what stage you’re in right now, I’ll help you navigate to the next one.

UNTANGLING THE PLACES WHERE ENGINEERING, MISSION, AND MARKET MEET

Fractional CTO

The all-in-one answer for early-stage companies, or teams with a handful of concurrent challenges. Quarterly fractional CTO services allow you to make progress fast.
Limited to one client per quarter.

Technical Advising

I can make valuable connections to industry, evaluate product strategy, perform early design sizing, find product-market fit, or help the team build paths to market.
Limited to two clients per quarter.

Mission & Strategy

A step deeper than advising, I will work with you to evaluate your technical and business strategy to set you up for mission success using my Mission Design Review process.
Limited to two clients per quarter.

System Design

When there are technical challenges, my custom three-phased design process moves your hardware system design from concept to reality faster & cheaper.

Field General

Sometimes you need boots on the ground to help execute a complex test, or give a lagging project a strong push in the right direction. I can help develop processes & procedures, as well as lead

Turnarounds

Precision results for later stage companies working to turnaround underperforming assets, from products, to departments, to entire hard tech companies.
Limited to two per year.

What you can expect working together

The 🥜 & 🔩 of how we get things done.

  • I am a grounded, approachable, and humble person who likes working with cool people on interesting problems!

    That's it. I don't do hype, I don't do sales tricks, I don't try to make the solutions seem hard so you'll need to keep me around. I solve challenges, leave a team better than I found them, shake hands and move on.

    When working together, I ask only that we be tough on the problem, and easy on one another. As I used to always say: There's no point in going to space if we're all miserable when we get there.

  • I use modern tools to help us stay focused on the work, and not locked into endless calls or forever circling back to email threads.

    I use Loom to present findings so you can digest them, and then decide if you want to meet. I also use Asana to ensure that any time you're curious about progress you are only one click away.

    Of course, when you want to meet I am happy to do so! But I also like to focus on delivering results instead of convincing everyone I'm really busy by filling up all our calendars :-).

  • I believe that billing for time spent is often the worst way to go about it. In fact, some of the most important projects I have worked on have required completion in the shortest amount of time. Clients don't like time either, because they always wonder what a phone call or another meeting is going to cost them.

    I prefer to understand your available budget and then tailor my offerings to what's reasonable for you. Because I am always oriented towards the best possible outcome, I tie my efforts to the value created for your company: the milestone achieved that lets you raise the next round, the time saved by delivering a system before a technical team is onboarded, or the revenue gained by turning around an underperforming sector.

    I am also able to explore adaptable payment terms, especially for historically underrepresented founders and teams.

Launching rockets.
Landing them at sea.
Bootstrapping a startup to orbit.

In both engineering and entrepreneurship, solving hard problems has been at the center of my career.

I have spent over a decade honing proven, hands-on, industry-leading expertise. My first engineering jobs were at SpaceX where I rose to be the Lead Engineer of the new west coast launch site at Vandenburg for its maiden launch, before helping lead the development of the sea-based landing barges through the first missions.

I then founded and led a company that bootstrapped hardware to outer space purely on customer revenue and trust.

We grew to millions in revenue while working with every major launch company in the U.S. because we were capable, adaptable, and — most important of all — a joy to work with.

Engineering at the edge of what’s possible and bootstrapping a hardware business that delights some of the world’s toughest customers are not easy things to do.

Those experiences now infuse everything I do. I am on a mission to re-invent the way hard tech companies are built and run, because the why of our work is often more important than the how or the what we are building.

Check out some of my previous work below to learn more

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Check out some of my previous work below to learn more 👇

Opinions of People Smarter Than Me

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Ready to escape the hardware valley of death?