My story

I write things down so I do not have to relearn them.

The long version of how I got here, what I keep building, and why the archive matters more to me than any single venture in it.

Everything below is first-hand. Nothing has been tidied up after the fact.

Who I am

I am an operator who writes. For fifteen years I have started, run, sold and closed small businesses — software, print, physical products and services — and the through-line has never been an industry. It has been a stubborn interest in how decisions actually get made when the information is incomplete and the money is real.

What I build

Tools and media for people who think for a living. Marginalia is annotation software for research-heavy teams. Kindling is a print quarterly about the unglamorous middle of building things. Everything I make tends to look, in the end, a little like a notebook.

The experiences that shaped my thinking

A warehouse lease I signed too early. A sales hire I made before I had a repeatable sale. A profitable business I closed anyway. None of these were disasters. They were expensive, specific lessons that changed how I evaluate the next thing — and I would rather write them down than quietly repeat them.

My professional background

I started in operations at a mid-sized distributor, moved into product, and left to start Atlas Supply in 2021. Since then I have run four ventures, one of which was acquired, one of which I closed, and two of which are active. I have never raised outside capital, which is a constraint and also a bias I try to name.

How I approach business and creativity

Slowly, publicly, and in writing. I test whether an idea survives being explained. I prefer constraints to options, single-player value before multiplayer features, and a small business that compounds over a big one that requires belief. I publish the reasoning before the outcome is known, because a story revised after the fact is not evidence of anything.

What I am working toward

A body of work that is legible — where a reader can trace an idea from a note in a margin to a venture, through its decisions and mistakes, to whatever it became. Bizmoire is that archive, and it is meant to keep growing for a long time.

Chronology

A timeline of projects and turning points

The timeline fills in as ventures gain milestones.

The mailing list

Notes from the middle of building

New ideas, venture updates, lessons that cost me something, podcast episodes and event announcements. No growth-hacking, no daily cadence.