The Founder Burnout No One Talks About
Research shows nearly three-quarters of founders experience 'shadow burnout' while exceeding business targets. Structural causes and sustainable leadership from 45 years in tech....
45+ Years in Technology: A Journey
From programming at age 7, to seeing the world in the Navy, to running 3,000+ AWS instances. A journey through four decades of building systems, patents, and startups....
3,000 AWS Instances Later: The Real Cost of Cloud
Direct experience running 3,000+ AWS instances. Hidden costs (egress, support tiers), optimization strategies, and why 78% of companies waste 21-50% of their cloud spend....
What CompuServe Taught Me About Platform Death
CompuServe had first-mover advantage, loyal users, and great technology. They still lost to AOL. The lessons about platform economics, business model evolution, and corporate ownership remain relevant...
DeFi Will Never Be Finance
DeFi advocates claim they're building the future of finance while removing everything that makes finance work: recourse, recovery, accountability, and insurance. Billions lost to hacks prove the point...
When to Kill Your Company
Knowing when to shut down is harder than knowing when to start. The sunk cost fallacy kills more founders than failure....
Why I Stopped Giving Advice
Unsolicited advice fails 99% of the time. The gap between the giver's context and the receiver's reality is where well-meaning guidance goes to die. Questions over answers, options over recommendation...
Grace Hopper's Nanosecond: The Wire That Explains Everything
Grace Hopper's famous nanosecond wire demonstration—and why understanding physical constraints still matters for every system we build today....
Watching a Friend Get Hacked in 1987: The Security Lesson That Stuck
A BBS sysop friend got hacked through social engineering in 1987. Watching it happen taught me that the most dangerous vulnerabilities aren't in code - they're in assumptions about trust....
The Dot-Com Crash From Inside
First-person account of running Core Logic Software during the 2000-2002 dot-com crash. When the NASDAQ fell 78% and 4,854 internet companies died, what it looked like from inside the ecosystem....
The USS Missouri's First Drone Surrender
During the Gulf War, Iraqi troops surrendered to the USS Missouri's Pioneer UAV - the first surrender to a drone in history. Connecting military autonomous systems history to today's AI debates....
The Anatomy of a Production Outage
The pattern behind production outages: the 2am alert, the escalating panic, the decision that makes it worse. What separates teams that recover from teams that don't....
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