I built Ghost to work the way I work.
Find the problem. Learn everything about it. Build something. Put it against reality. Work out what was wrong. Keep what survived. Do it again. I have operated that way my whole adult life, and eventually I needed software that operated the same way.
I named RSLVD long before Ghost existed, and it meant something simpler then: stay resolved, finish what is open. It means more to me now. Almost everything I work on starts unresolved. A market I do not understand yet. A signal I do not trust. A decision nobody can quite explain. Ghost is the layer I built underneath all of it so I could resolve those things without losing what they taught me. RSLVD is where I show the work.
RSLVD is mine to drive, but it is not a one-man show. When something needs a developer, a designer, finance, 3D, or branding, I bring in people who are genuinely good at that one thing. The weight behind it is real.
I grew up simple, in Connecticut. Good parents, a normal childhood. I was on my own young, and everything I built after that started from zero.
It was good conditioning. I worked full time and put myself through school: community college, then Eastern Connecticut State, then UConn, where I fell in with computer science majors who needed design help. They forced me to code. I am still grateful.
At 22 I moved to San Diego, and at 23 I started my first business. A year later I landed in Louisville, and Kentucky has been home ever since. I sold that first company and started Forest Giant.
My training was design before it was anything else. Photography in college, a graphic design minor, then years going deep on UX and leadership facilitation. Design was never just the deliverable for me. It was how I learned to read a whole business at once.
Forest Giant is where that compounded. We did UX, product, and brand work for big companies and shipped real product inside their stacks. It was a lot of reps, reading businesses from the inside.
It was good work. It was also slow. Stakeholder sign-offs, research rounds, design cycles, the telephone game between everyone who had to weigh in. A prototype took four to six months for research, design, and the first real build.
Twenty years in Louisville puts you inside bourbon culture whether you plan it or not. Barrels age in warehouses all over this state, and nobody could tell you what was happening inside a single one of them. In 2018 that itch became Roth River: sensors that read the barrel while the spirit ages, live data from an industry that never had any. In 2019 I left Forest Giant to chase it full time.
Then 2020 hit and Forest Giant crashed. It was a rough stretch, and I will not pretend otherwise. I kept moving. Out of COVID I started Char3, a design and development studio for apps and brands, and that work helped me bootstrap Roth River.
Then AI arrived, and the move was obvious: go all in, learn it, build with it. Somewhere in there I realized what I was learning was worth sharing. That is where RSLVD comes in: one focused place for building the future of technology in AI, and the company that now holds all of this together.
Naming it was easy. I went back to what that first year on my own taught me: stay resolved. I have carried that through every chapter since.
Agents changed the math. The same operator, with the right tools and the right background, can stand up most of a prototype themselves. The rate at which one person or a small team can build something real, put it in front of people, and iterate is hard to believe until you live it. Velocity is the word business already understands, and that was the gain.
It was also the easy one, and it arrived for everybody on the same day. What I care about now is the part that does not show up with a subscription: what my systems remember, what my people overruled, and what actually happened after. That is the only piece of this that compounds.
Agents are amazing, and what drives them is human intellect. A kid asks a chatbot for a book report and gets slop. Point the same tools at a real understanding of how a business works and you get something else entirely.
So it is still about the people. Just fewer of them.
Which is why what I protect is the record of what those people decided. When an expert overrules one of my systems and says why, that judgment gets written down and it stays. The people are the edge. The record is how the edge survives the week they are busy.
One model, separate walls.
A portfolio of ventures at every stage, from operating to in build, with a few I’m not ready to talk about yet.
Never one shared system. When a venture needs it, it gets its own brain, walled off from the rest. I connect the dots on the reusable patterns and playbooks, never the proprietary data. The learnings travel. The secrets stay home.
The work I have been part of has built real businesses, scaled a few, and carried some to acquisition, always because of the teams behind it. What changed is the count. The same kind of outcome now takes far fewer people, with far more agency over what gets made.
That grind never went away, it just changed targets. Today it points at AI. Every model release, every new tool, every pattern that looks like an unlock, I am on it the week it ships.
Almost none of it survives contact, and that is fine. Testing is cheap now. What makes it worth anything is that the few things which hold get written down and wired in, so I never have to learn them twice.
That’s the short version.
The long version is the field notes, where I write down how this actually works, month by month. Or just tell me what you’re working on.