Leadership Principles

Customer obsession predates my resume. My first job was actually in sales, at an industrial foodservice company in Atlanta, but the internal system I had to use every day was so clunky that I asked my boss for training so I could rewrite it myself. I did, and it held up: the company still runs on it today, and she sold the business for millions years later.

That instinct became a rule: dogfood the actual system, including the manual workarounds, and meet the people using it, or the project fails. It is why I became Hawaii's first online-licensed Wedding Officiant and added free wedding services to the employee benefits, getting inside the customer's actual moment instead of just the transaction. And it is why, on taking over as President at Hawaii Information Consortium, I built the instinct into the org itself: every agency partner got a Liaison who was simultaneously their relationship manager, their internal advocate, and the person who understood both the old workflow and exactly what the new one saved them.

Colorado's Department of Revenue had their own vendor and pressure from the Governor's office to adopt our platform, but a mandate would have won the account and lost the relationship. We negotiated instead: we would not compete for their business if they made their own services mobile friendly. Eighteen months later they were our second largest partner, and they brought the Department of Public Safety with them.

That same instinct shaped myColorado. The goal was never "ship a digital ID," it was making it usable enough that people reached for it instead of a wallet. That is what let it hold when COVID hit: usage went from 25,000 to 250,000 users in a single month, then 750,000 by the end of summer 2020, with nearly 250 law enforcement agencies willing to accept it as valid identification.

I lived and breathed myColorado. Our government partners knew they had a partner and an advocate in me, not just a vendor, and the companies we worked with had a direct line to me personally. When something broke, I was there to help: cutting through the cruft, working the problem, and clearing the path to a fix, rather than delegating the escalation and waiting for a status update.

ETHDenver and its member-owned cooperative, SporkDAO, had run at a loss for seven years before I came on as Chief of Staff. 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. Cutting costs and letting the culture erode would have been the short-term move.

In Hawaii, when we committed to something big, which was often, our partners knew I would be the one absorbing the fallout if it went wrong. That let them be a little braver and sleep a little better at night. I ran a $10M P&L and over $2B a year in transaction volume as President, a role I held for nine years, not a single fiscal year in isolation. And at Colorado, bringing the Department of Revenue on board was a decision made on behalf of the whole state platform's future, not just my own team's adoption numbers.

It is a competitive world, and vendors are often selling a product that does not actually fit the problem. My rule: a technology transformation should simplify things, not make them more complicated. I can say that comfortably because I have not spent my career at the bleeding edge of frontier tech; if I ever end up at a tabletop fusion company, ask me again.

Simple and explainable also means a process can actually be automated or improved. A process that lives only in an employee's head, or worse a consultant's, is a huge risk, and a surprisingly common one. So inventing was never about shipping a cool widget, it meant solving a real problem in a way that made things better for everyone touching it, and at worst left no one worse off while it improved things for others.

myColorado was the first DMV-issued digital driver license in the United States. There was no domestic playbook for it, so we built one on mobile driver license and verifiable-credential standards with Ping Identity single sign-on, and it became the pattern other states now follow. Earlier in my career I designed and built the first Java-based e-commerce website in production, for AT&T Universal Card in 1996, when "e-commerce" itself was still an invention.

Simplification shows up as often as invention. At Hawaii Information Consortium I initiated the migration of the legacy platform from Perl to Java specifically to give the engineering team a maintainable foundation, and later launched the first personalized, gamified eGovernment experience in the US so residents had one account instead of thirty separate agency logins.

At Hawaii Information Consortium we were repeatedly handed things other people had already failed at, or assumed could not be done at all. Ninety thousand unserved bench warrants had already defeated two prior initiatives and a blue-ribbon commission before I took it on; I was confident, not hopeful, that the people of Hawaii had a right to a working system and that technology could deliver it, and that confidence was earned by knowing the teams involved, not just the plan on paper.

When Hawaii's first State CIO asked me the single thing the state could do to make things better, I did not hesitate: move every state website to AWS, built on WordPress, with the state portal itself rebuilt as a static site generated by Jekyll. Two years later Hawaii won Best of the Web, ranked #1 in the nation for state eGovernment.

At Bufficorn Ventures I built frameworks for evaluating technology readiness, data quality, and go-to-market fit across 50+ portfolio companies, specifically so build, buy, and partner recommendations were grounded in evidence rather than enthusiasm. At Unicorns I built a distributed team across five countries partly to make sure product decisions weren't being made from a single cultural or market vantage point.

The clearest test of judgment on my record is Colorado's Department of Revenue. The obvious move, with the Governor's office pushing for adoption, was to force it. Betting instead on negotiation, that we would not compete for their business if they went mobile-friendly, was a contrarian call that took eighteen months to pay off, but it did.

Curiosity for me was never just "what's out there," it was "how, technically, are we actually solving this," and whether what we built could be simplified, reused, or turned into a product of its own. That is what the 2014 eHawaii.gov relaunch was: the first personalized and gamified eGovernment experience in the US, showing residents and businesses how much paper, gas, and money they had saved by transacting online, a single notification system spanning every state and county service, and, finally, a Hawaiian-language version of the portal.

My career has moved through state government, payments, Web3 community governance, and now AI-first product development, each a genuine domain switch rather than a lateral move within one industry. I still build daily with generative AI, TypeScript, and Solidity, because strategy without hands on the keyboard drifts; a CSM certification and an ITIL 4 Foundation in progress are the smaller, ongoing version of the same habit.

The clearest evidence of curiosity for its own sake is probably my Master of Science in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a field with no direct line to any job on this resume. I pursued it because the subject interested me, not because a role required it.

Nearly every Liaison and Director at Hawaii Information Consortium came up through the company rather than in from outside: Customer Service Rep to Customer Service Manager to Manager of CMS, Developer to Lead Developer to Director of Software Development, Project Manager to Partner Liaison to Director of Operations, Senior Liaison/Developer to Junior SysAdmin to SysAdmin to Manager of DevOps. When someone wanted to grow into a role that did not exist yet, I let them design it, and sometimes it actually worked; when it did not, I helped them find something that fit better elsewhere. The clearest proof this was real and not just talk: when I stepped down as President in 2016, I promoted from inside rather than hiring out, the sitting Chief Liaison became Director of Portal Operations, and the sitting Director of Portal Operations became President. The org grew from 18 to 54 people along the way and was named a Best Place to Work four years running by Hawaii Business Magazine, still the number I care about more than headcount. Earlier, as Director of Software Development there, I scaled the engineering team from 5 to 9 developers by introducing structure and standards rather than just adding bodies.

Colorado ran the opposite play for the same reason. State government already had a deep bench of senior IT talent, so instead of competing for it, I built the Transformation Office out of junior, high-potential people: 10 hires in year one, three of them transfers from other departments who had been underperforming but showed promise, six converted from contractor to full-time. Seven of the ten advanced into new roles, inside the office or elsewhere in state government, which is the actual scorecard I use for whether a team is developing people or just staffing a project.

At Unicorns, building a distributed team across five countries meant hiring for a fully remote, asynchronous org from day one, and putting delivery processes and governance frameworks in place so new hires had something real to plug into.

Hawaii Information Consortium maintained PCI-DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, CJIS, and SOX compliance simultaneously, across a platform processing over $2B a year, with zero breaches, while still shipping on delivery timelines. That combination, speed and a clean compliance record at the same time, only holds if standards are enforced continuously rather than audited in after the fact.

At SporkDAO, the standards problem was financial and cultural rather than technical: implementing KPI tracking and governance so that financial mismanagement, the actual defect behind seven years of losses, could not simply recur once the immediate crisis passed. And as Director of Software Development at NIC Hawaii, I put in place the code-review and engineering standards practices that turned a siloed team into one with a shared bar for quality.

A Bitcoin payment system I built for Hawaii's newly licensed cannabis dispensaries got killed when the state's Banking Commissioner changed the rules to require paper checks instead. The insight behind it did not die with the project: electronic, cash-equivalent payments were a genuine unlock for businesses the banking system wouldn't touch, and it became the bet I built Wampei's custodyless cashiering model on.

Three incumbents wanted to own the digital identity space and were shipping bad products, so I stepped directly into it instead of ceding the market. Betting on a state-run digital driver license before any other US state had shipped one was a bet with no reference case to point to. It required convincing agencies, law enforcement, and residents to trust something that did not exist anywhere else in the country yet; while we built it, those same companies visited the Governor's office quarterly to warn him what an embarrassment our approach would be. The scale of the ambition was matched by the scale of the eventual platform: 2M+ users, the first DMV-issued digital driver license in the US, and now the most widely used digital driver license in the country.

Taking Hawaii's government services from 43rd to 1st in the nation was not a incremental-improvement goal, it required rebuilding the approach to eGovernment from the ground up across 120+ services and 30+ agencies. And ETHDenver, at 20,000+ participants from 115 countries, is the world's largest open-source technology event; being responsible for its technology, finances, and governance meant operating at that scale, not a smaller version of it.

We migrated 57 call centers from Genesys to Amazon Connect in 4 months, proving the AI omnichannel approach one center at a time until the results pulled the rest of the rollout forward rather than waiting for a single big-bang cutover. When COVID hit, myColorado scaled from 25,000 to 250,000 users in a single month because the team moved on infrastructure and partnerships (including COVID vaccination verification delivered for under $500K) as the need appeared, not after a planning cycle caught up to it.

Earlier in my career, as Director of Portal Operations at NIC Hawaii, we migrated 450+ state websites to AWS in 12 months, treating the migration as a reversible, iterate-as-you-go project rather than a multi-year study.

This is the principle where my evidence is honestly thinner than the others, but it is real. COVID vaccination verification was integrated directly with Colorado's digital ID for under $500K, through a partnership with the state health department rather than a from-scratch build. At Unicorns, we have run product and technology for a platform serving 170+ business customers and 30,000+ end users on $425K in secured funding, which is a small base relative to that footprint.

At Bufficorn Ventures, the advisory mandate to 50+ portfolio companies was explicitly to prioritize high-impact AI use cases with clear ROI rather than adoption for its own sake, which is the same constraints-breed-resourcefulness logic applied to other people's capital instead of my own budget.

This is the principle closest to how I would describe my own working style: turning skeptics into champions, repeatedly, by listening to the actual objection instead of overriding it. Colorado's Department of Revenue went from the platform's largest skeptic to its second largest adopter, and brought Public Safety with them, because we listened to what they actually needed instead of pushing a mandate.

Hawaii's 90,000-warrant backlog had already defeated two prior initiatives and a blue-ribbon commission by the time I got involved. The Attorney General's Office was the biggest skeptic of a third attempt. We found the agencies with the most urgent pain, delivered quick, visible wins for them first, and let that success build trust across the rest. The AG's Office ended up hosting a celebration for the project: "I've never seen government agencies work together like this."

Building this site's own data forced a small but honest example of this habit: several of the metrics on my resume have conflicting source figures (250+ versus 450+ websites migrated to AWS, 22 versus 57 call centers migrated to Amazon Connect). Rather than publish the more impressive number, I flagged the conflicts and used the more conservative, better-supported figure in every case.

That same instinct ran the actual work. Managing 7+ concurrent transformation initiatives across 50+ Colorado agencies, or a $10M P&L with $2B+ in annual transaction volume at Hawaii Information Consortium, only stays under control if you are still looking at the details yourself rather than trusting the rollup numbers alone.

With the Governor's office pushing for the Department of Revenue to simply adopt Colorado's platform, the comfortable move was to let that pressure do the work. I disagreed with that approach and proposed negotiation instead: we would not compete for their business if they modernized on their own terms. That took longer and required defending a slower path to skeptical stakeholders, but it produced a partner rather than a compliance exercise.

Hawaii's warrant backlog had already defeated two prior top-down initiatives and a blue-ribbon commission before I took it on. Rather than run a third version of the same mandate-driven approach, we committed to a bottom-up, earn-it-agency-by-agency strategy instead, against the working assumption of what "fixing" the backlog should look like.

myColorado reached 2M+ users and became the first DMV-issued digital driver license in the US. Hawaii's government services rating went from 43rd to 1st in the nation, earning 42 national and international awards along the way. ETHDenver turned seven years of losses into a $1.3M surplus in its first profitable year, with an NPS of 59.6. Migrating 57 call centers to Amazon Connect cut handling time 40%.

None of those were single-quarter wins: the Hawaii turnaround played out over more than a decade, the Colorado platform survived a pandemic-driven 30x usage spike without failing, and the ETHDenver result required governance changes that had to hold past the first good year to mean anything.

Hawaii Information Consortium was named a Best Place to Work four years running by Hawaii Business Magazine while I was growing the organization from 18 to 54 people, which is the outside validation I trust more than my own account of it. Building that many cross-functional teams, engineering, product, operations, government relations, only works if people are actually growing into bigger roles as the org scales, not just being added to headcount.

At Unicorns, building a fully distributed team across five countries meant designing delivery processes and governance from scratch for a remote-first team, rather than retrofitting a policy written for an office. It is a smaller-scale version of the same commitment: making sure the structure works for the people in it, not just for the roadmap.

Handling over $2B a year in public transaction volume at Hawaii Information Consortium came with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, CJIS, and SOX obligations to residents whose only interaction with the platform was trusting it with their money and their health data, maintained with zero breaches across that scale. At Colorado, COVID vaccination verification was built directly into the digital ID for under $500K specifically because that was a public-health moment where speed and cost mattered to real people, not a product decision made in the abstract.

At SporkDAO, the responsibility ran toward the community itself: implementing transparency controls so the board and general members could see the co-op's actual financial position, and treating the volunteer culture that built ETHDenver as something to protect while professionalizing its finances, not something to extract value from on the way to a surplus.