He was on the team that made AI possible.
Now he's building the framework to prove it can work for everyone.

BotSteps' founder holds a BSECE from Ohio University, with additional electronics coursework at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He started his career at Ohio University's Avionics Engineering Center — working in the lab where GPS mapping was being developed in a joint program with MIT, Princeton, NASA, and the FAA. Navigation intelligence for a world that didn't yet know it needed it, before Google Maps existed.

That led to Boeing, writing C/C++ for fighter jet avionics — F-15 and F/A-18 jets for the U.S. Air Force. Software and hardware integration at the highest-stakes level, before "full-stack developer" was a job title.

He moved into industrial automation at Barry-Wehmiller Design Group — the #8 System Integrator in the country, built on 150+ acquisitions and the philosophy that treating employees like family isn't soft, it's strategy. He designed and managed construction of industrial automation systems including robotics for global manufacturing facilities.

In Silicon Valley, he worked directly for Martin Cooper — inventor of the cell phone — building high-speed mobile internet chipsets at a wireless startup. “I remember driving down Highway 101 in San Jose, amazed we had internet in a moving vehicle. Nobody had iPhones yet. We didn't know what we were building toward.”

He then joined Axis Systems and Ikos — two emulation startups building the parallel supercomputing hardware that would eventually make GPU-based AI possible. He managed R&D engineering teams, wrote MRD product plans, and ran enterprise sales to Apple, Sun Microsystems, and others. With $80 million on the line, the executives of Axis Systems chose one engineer to stand in the boardroom and give the technical presentation and demo to close the acquisition. They chose him. He closed it. Axis was acquired by Verisity Design, an Israeli company, for $80 million. Verisity was subsequently acquired by Cadence Design Systems for $300 million. Ikos was separately acquired by Mentor Graphics, now Siemens.

Cadence's Palladium emulators — descended from the work done at Axis — became the foundation for NVIDIA's GPU design workflow. Every AI model trained on an NVIDIA chip has that lineage. He was on the team that helped make it possible.

He went into real estate. In 2008–2011, the same dynamic — greed at the top, Wall Street deregulation, overcorrection in California building codes — cost him nearly $1 million. He lost everything. (See The Big Short for the macro story. He lived the personal one.)

For 15 years he lost faith in the system. He ran businesses, worked alongside gig workers, and watched what the platform economy actually does to the people at the bottom of it. That experience didn't make him cynical. It made him specific about what he wanted to build.

At DeuceScoop — the first ACF test case — scoopers make $100/hour gross per route. The industry pays $15–20/hr. AI handles the overhead that eats that margin. When robots eventually replace the work itself, the plan is to give workers equity in the robot that replaced them — so they keep getting paid.