Former students.
Reconnect, talk through a decision, show me what you are building, or come ready to debate a strategy, a technology, or the question that has been sitting in the back of your head.
Students / conversation / work
The Study of Business.
Business is not a separate subject from making. It is the study of how ideas become products, companies, markets, decisions, and useful work in the world.
What lives here.
This page is for former students, conversations about business, notes about programming with AI, and the professional background someone needs if they are thinking about working with me. The essays, book, and deeper archive now live under Writing. I love working with aspiring, energetic entrepreneurs, especially when the conversation gets into the rough edges of strategy, technology, timing, and what to do next.
Essays on business.
Entrepreneurship, marketing, innovation, categories, venture capital, and the strange ways markets decide what matters.
Programming with AI.
Notes from current software projects, including the Codex work for our tennis club, and what I am learning about what AI is and what it is not.
Experience.
CDA, Leaf Systems, Sound Vision, Babson, teaching, mentoring, consulting, and the long thread from engineering to entrepreneurship.
For former students.
If you were one of my students and want to reconnect, I would rather this site make that easy than make you hunt through old addresses and half-remembered introductions.
The best conversations usually start with something real: a company you are starting, a job decision, a product that is stuck, a technology question, or a business model that does not quite work yet. I like the energy of people who are still in motion.
Essays and working notes.
The archive is not here as a publishing business. It lives under Writing because some of these ideas may still be useful. I want former students and curious builders to be able to browse the essays freely, pull out what helps, and ignore the rest.
Business models
Innovation
AI and software
American Idol is like Shark Tank.
Media reach, contract leverage, and the way attention can create business value before anyone admits that attention is the product.
Darwin and business.
How selection, variation, extinction, randomness, and survival show up in markets, inventions, and entrepreneurial decisions.
From SaaS to OaaS.
Ice, Kodak, Sea Oaks, AI-assisted development, open source, and the question of whether customers buy software or outcomes.
AI, Codex, and software now.
This is where I am collecting observations about AI and the use of Codex, OpenAI's programming tool, in 2026. The point is not abstract futurism. It is what happens when AI becomes part of the actual daily work of writing, testing, revising, and shipping software.
Right now I am using Codex to write code for our tennis club, and the project is becoming a practical education in what AI is and what it is not. For software, it feels like a combination of a super programmer and a puppy dog with a new toy: endless energy, enthusiasm, and raw talent.
That may be why I like it so much. It keeps coming back with another idea, another version, another way to test the thing. It is literate, fast, occasionally too eager, and has even developed the snarky attitude it has learned I enjoy.
Read the Codex field notesEntrepreneurial Action.
A free downloadable copy of my book now lives in the Writing archive because it is part of the larger pile: teaching people how ideas become companies through action, testing, markets, randomness, and iteration.
Free PDF downloadBusiness experience.
This is the human version of a CV: enough structure to understand the work. The fuller professional record now lives on the CV page.
Companies and products.
- CDA, Leaf Systems, and Sound Vision: companies built around technology, products, customers, and the practical work of making a market.
- Hardware and software for sophisticated math engines used in sonar, radar, CT scanners, MRI scanners, audio, and video systems.
- Entrepreneurial work that connects engineering judgment with product strategy, sales, and market timing.
Teaching and mentoring.
- Teaching entrepreneurship at Babson and mentoring students, entrepreneurs, and builders over many years.
- Work with students and entrepreneurs at MIT, Babson, and international entrepreneurship programs.
- A bias toward action: business as something you test, build, sell, revise, and learn from.
Business, at its best, is another way of making something real.