Consulting & advisory
My engagements almost never start with a scope. They start with “we're not sure what we're supposed to do here.”
The shape flexes: a call measured in hours, a workshop measured in a day or two, an engagement measured in weeks or months, a standing advisory seat measured in years. It all starts with the same phone call.
Called to fix the Wi-Fi→left as their COO
A research chemicals company booked thirty minutes with me. The meeting ran five hours.
Booked for a keynote→helped set the conference's theme
Google gave me the stage and let me choose my own subject. That's a real bet for an organizer to make. It paid off.
Often it's something a team is already stuck on, and nobody wants it known that they had to call an outsider. So the arrangement is usually: fix it, hand it back, leave no fingerprints. It’s why my references are people and not case studies.
Lately, a lot of the rabbit holes involve AI: local models, agents, privacy, automation, vibe coding, the ethics of AI creative work, and the uncomfortable question of which decisions we should never delegate to a machine.
Not all of it is a project. I’m Chief Evangelist at Applied Wonder, which builds rooms that help a nervous system stand down. And I hold a few standing advisory seats — right now at Protixa, a major American manufacturer of research-use-only peptides, and Cell Wellness, which is using a genuinely new delivery system to build the next generation of supplements and nutraceuticals. Advisory works best in the first hard stretch, where the real questions are what to build, what to stop building, and what the organization is going to need to survive the answer.
If the problem is well-defined and you know exactly what kind of specialist you need, hire one — I know great ones. If you're a founder or an executive staring at something wrong that doesn't have a name yet, that's my whole job.
Tell me what's wrong