I’m finding more and more that what is actually important to me is building strong relationships with founders and leaders who are building towards something that I am aligned with and genuinely want to see in the world. It’s through these relationships that I can enter into their context and wholeheartedly serve.

This way of working is not exactly normal and so I am deeply right for some people - exactly what they’ve been looking for and simply not for others. I am super okay with this.

Engineering consultants typically have a very specific role, with predefined service buckets and labels of what they offer, a very clear definition of done, and then, well, it’s done. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this, there is a time and place for it and for some this is exactly what they are looking for.

I am offering something a little different, I am joining in on solving what is difficult and takes time. Entering into into amorphous, complex, shifting problems - bringing a wide array of tools, experiences and perspectives in order to help us get through it.

This is a shift from me providing a service for you, and instead moving towards what happens when it becomes us, a we thing. This enables more context share, more trust and support that takes on many forms. More like what you’d receive from a co-founder, someone who is deep in it with you, pondering solutions not just in meetings when “I’m working” but when on a walk or talking with a friend, who is able to see the micro and macro at once.

It’s immersion.

A founder I am working with had a powerful insight that has created a shift in the product, he sketched out the idea with Claude Code, the idea is expressed but the code was pretty hairy. I came in a few days later and properly set the project up, put in a mono repo structure, set up the tooling for testing, and reorganized the codebase so that Claude has a clear direction into how it should be writing future code. This is simply what the immediate now asked for and how I could help them.

In this moment while I’m in the monastery, I’m in the background, cultivating perspective, connecting dots, providing light guidance and coding when it’s needed. In other moments I may be fully in person, heads down helping with a feature or a particular launch or facilitating ideation sessions or difficult conversations, or retreats - it’s unclear where the road leads exactly, but what is important is I am in it with them.

I’m here to be in your corner, in it with you, thinking with you and building with you across the myriad layers of what it takes to actually build and ship something that the world can use and wants.