Servant Leadership

On taking over as President at Hawaii Information Consortium, I put a Liaison in front of every agency partner, one person who was simultaneously the relationship manager, the internal advocate, and the one who understood the old workflow well enough to know what the new one actually needed to save. Colorado's Department of Revenue came to the table as a skeptic; listening to what they actually needed, mobile friendly services on their own terms, not a mandate, was what turned them into our second largest partner within eighteen months.

I became Hawaii's first online-licensed Wedding Officiant and added free wedding services to the employee benefits package, getting inside a customer's actual moment rather than just processing a transaction. The Department of Health digital services I later led at Hawaii Information Consortium, birth and death certificates, marriage permits, real-time death reporting to the Social Security Administration, touch people at the most important and most painful moments of their lives, and the systems were built with that in mind.

ETHDenver and SporkDAO had run at a loss for seven years, and the community culture that made the event special was also what made it hard to govern. Putting in financial controls, KPI tracking, and governance turned that into a $1.3M surplus in the first profitable year, without breaking the volunteer culture that made the event work in the first place. Cutting costs and letting that culture erode would have solved the money problem and created a worse one.

Defining Colorado's cloud-first policy around AWS and GCP, ahead of any forcing event, put the state's infrastructure in a position to scale when it actually needed to. That awareness paid off directly: when COVID hit, myColorado absorbed a jump from 25,000 to 250,000 users in a single month, and the statewide contact-center migration to Amazon Connect gave agents the ability to work remotely right as it became necessary.

The Department of Revenue had their own vendor and Governor's-office pressure to adopt myColorado's platform, but a mandate would have won the account and lost the relationship. We negotiated instead: no competing for their business if they made their own services mobile friendly. Eighteen months later they were our second largest partner and brought the Department of Public Safety with them, persuasion outperforming a mandate.

The goal for myColorado was never "ship a digital ID," it was making it usable enough that people reached for it instead of a wallet, which is the only reason it held when 750,000 residents were using it by the end of summer 2020. ColoradoJam took the same kind of leap: an incubator funded by a DAO, Bufficorn Ventures, to underwrite government technology pilots that neither a startup nor a procurement office could otherwise afford to try. MyUnicornAccount extends that instinct now, hiding wallets, gas fees, and chains entirely behind a branded account.

Colorado's cloud-first policy and myColorado's verifiable-credential architecture were both in place before COVID made mobile-first identity and remote work operationally necessary, not after. At Hawaii Information Consortium, migrating 450+ state websites to AWS in 12 months modernized the infrastructure before it became a liability, not once it already was one.

I ran a $10M P&L and over $2B a year in transaction volume as President of Hawaii Information Consortium for nine years, maintaining PCI-DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, CJIS, and SOX compliance with zero breaches the entire time. At SporkDAO, that meant transparency controls so the board and the co-op's general members, not just me, could see the organization's real financial position. Neither was ever about protecting my own authority; both were about the institution outliving any one leader's tenure in it.

Headcount was never the real measure at Hawaii Information Consortium. Every staff member, senior people included, spent two-plus hours a week on direct customer support, so growth stayed grounded in the actual work rather than title inflation. Every week, a different staffer ran a Lunch and Learn presenting their own work, a new technology, or an idea they wanted to pitch. The company paid for certifications and college courses, and offered Improv and Presentation classes for the soft skills a technical career does not teach on its own. Mentorship was a job requirement for every senior staffer, not a nice-to-have. The organization did grow from 18 to 54 staff along the way and was named Best Place to Work four years running by Hawaii Business Magazine, but that was the byproduct of the growth commitment, not the goal of it.

At Bufficorn Ventures, I guided 50+ portfolio companies on integrating AI into their own operations rather than handing them a solution. Unicorns is built the same way: a distributed team across five countries with real delivery processes and governance, not a founder doing everything personally.

SporkDAO is a member-owned cooperative, and my job as Chief of Staff was to make its finances and governance legible to that community, not just to a board. ColoradoJam built a working community across a line that rarely gets bridged at all: state government agencies and Web3 startups, funded by a DAO instead of taxpayer money. And the Liaison model at Hawaii Information Consortium made every one of 30+ government agencies feel like a member of the same delivery organization instead of an external customer being sold to.