Founder by Day, Host by Night
People ask how I ended up running a bar and building software at the same time. The honest answer is that both jobs are the same job: you build something, you open the doors, and you find out quickly whether people want what you made.
I didn’t start here. I started as an engineer in Pittsburgh, writing software for schools, manufacturers, and healthcare providers. That work grew into architecture and team leadership, and in 2006 I joined EMC. Over the next four years, based in Hong Kong, I built EMC’s consulting practice across Asia Pacific and Japan from zero to a $45M+ annualized business, working in 22 countries. After that I spent a decade as an independent consultant and interim executive, helping other people run their companies.
Running other people’s companies teaches you a lot. Running your own teaches you faster.
A bar is the most honest business I know. There is no quarterly report to hide behind. Every night the room tells you the truth: the register, the regulars, the empty seats. If the music is wrong, you hear about it. If a drink is slow, you see it. The feedback loop is measured in minutes, and you can’t argue with it.
Software is slower to confess. A product can look fine for months while nobody uses it. So I run software the way the bar taught me: watch what people actually do, fix the small things before they become the story, and don’t confuse a good week with a good business.
These days my work splits in two. At Summitspoint I’m building Seraverra / CrawlReady, a tool that shows agencies how AI search engines see their clients’ websites — and what to fix when the answer is “barely at all.” At Maddie’s Lab, which I co-founded, we build apps for small businesses on Clover: receipt printing, expense capture, inventory. And at P Town Bar in Pittsburgh, I host — staff, vendors, inventory, and a room full of people who will tell me exactly how we’re doing.
People sometimes treat the bar as the side project and the software as the real work. It isn’t. The bar is where I learned operations with my hands. The software is where I apply it at scale. One keeps the other honest.
This site is where both live. I’ll write here about building products, running a venue, and what each side keeps teaching me about the other.