I spent 16 years in the Army — including a year as an Observer/Controller/Trainer at a Combat Training Center, where the Army developed the After Action Review, and six years in a drill sergeant unit. I trained units in running AARs and watched the process surface truths that rank alone never could. I learned how organizations actually get better: examine what happened with brutal honesty, then change what you do next.
I left to examine banks for the FDIC as a Financial Institution Specialist. I ran risk and compliance reviews — which means I spent years learning to see any system through a regulator's lens: what could go wrong, who could get hurt, where policy meets reality. That's the rarest skill in AI right now, because almost nobody building AI products has ever sat on the regulator's side of the table.
Then I became a Senior AI Product Manager at Dell Technologies. I wasn't doing some lightweight pilot — I was shipping agentic AI systems, MCP server implementations, GenAI tooling, and an account intelligence platform inside one of the world's largest tech companies. A workforce reduction ended my time there.
I have four sons, an MBA from Texas A&M, and the AIGP certification in flight. I've been a hobbyist coder for years; AI tools finally let me ship.
Builder's Path is what I wish I'd had when I started. The gap between "it works on my laptop" and "people are paying me" isn't engineering. It's the stuff I learned in three careers nobody usually connects.