Who I am
I studied physics and astronomy, then spent the next five years as an engineer building things other people relied on: an identity platform that unified more than ten million accounts at McGraw-Hill Education, a conferencing service that held twenty thousand calls at once, a call-tracking platform pushing a quarter-million minutes a month.
That last one showed me a gap between phones and CRMs that nobody was closing. In 2018 I started Aloware to close it.
Aloware is a cloud contact center for SMB and mid-market revenue teams: voice, texting and automation that live inside the CRM instead of next to it. We bootstrapped it, with no outside capital. Eight years later it’s at low eight figures in ARR, serves 1,200+ customers, and has carried more than a billion calls and texts. About sixty-five people build and run it.
I still run it. I own the P&L and the architecture conversation in the same meeting.
How I think
A few rules I actually operate by:
- Subtract to succeed. The fastest way to improve a company is usually to remove something. If we cut half these activities, would results materially change? Usually not.
- Distribution beats product. Product proves possibility. Distribution creates reality.
- Structure over heroics. If delegation fails, it’s rarely a trust problem. It’s a structure problem. Ownership and metrics get written down.
- Judge the process, not the personality. I stopped asking whether people are stars. I ask whether the system lets good people win.
- Talk last. Frame it in sixty seconds. Decide, assign, clarify.
- Good, not perfect. Then finish. Then let it compound.
What I think about
- Outcomes, not seats. Software priced per seat is giving way to work priced per result. I think most businesses will buy outcomes within a few years, and most vendors aren’t ready.
- AI as labor, not as a feature. The interesting agents don’t sit next to a person. They either do the work, or make the person doing it dramatically better.
- When the machine should stop. Knowing where AI hands off to a human matters as much as what it can do. I spoke about this at HubSpot UNBOUND 2026.
- Small teams, big output. How a company of sixty runs like a company of six hundred, and why that’s mostly about operating cadence, not tools.
- Trust in business communication. Why people stopped picking up the phone, and what it takes to earn the answer back.
What I do
Day to day, I run Aloware.
On the side, through RavenRock Ventures, I back a small number of early ventures that other people build and run. I pick, I help wherever I can, and I stay out of the way.
Outside work: lifting, tennis, and a kayak whenever there’s water.