I help founders live, work, & create with greater wisdom.
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AI is making it trivially easy to build. The hard problems are no longer technical. They’re cultural.
About
The headwaters problem
Most founders skip the space between receiving a vision and acting on it. They collapse the insight into the first familiar form, pour energy from extractive sources, and repeat inherited patterns. Even when they know better.
My qualification for this work is a series of spectacular failures.
As co-founder and CEO of Siempo, I led a pioneering Public Benefit Corporation that developed an award-winning, open-source humane smartphone interface. We were early to the conversation that became the responsible innovation movement. What that experience taught me about holistic vision enactment became the foundation for what and how I create today.
After leading education at Center for Humane Technology, I started School of Wise Innovation as a home for these inquiries at the intersection of early stage entrepreneurship and inner development – through courses, retreats, a yearlong cultivator program, and a growing community of practice. Alongside SWI, I'm developing The Vision Guide to support tech founders and wisdom school creators from the very beginning.
Work With Me
Three ways
I work with people at the delicate vision stage, where everything that happens has an outsized influence on what unfolds.
1:1 Vision Advisory For founders and creators in the first year of a new vision. We work together to separate the flash from the container, examine what's driving you, and find the form that serves the vision. 3-month engagement · Virtual or in-person
Workshops & Speaking Interactive sessions for conferences, gatherings, retreats, and organizations. Participants walk away with a physical vision guide and a diagnostic for their current project. Past venues include FTC, Full Bloom, Berkeley, Wharton, NYU, Mozilla. 60–90 minutes · In-person preferred
Custom Vision Guide Editions Co-creating culturally translated booklets for your community, organization, or tradition. Each edition is developed in partnership with people close to that wisdom. 2–4 month partnership
This work is for people at the beginning of something — a new venture, a creative project, a life transition — who sense that how they begin will shape everything that follows. If you're holding a vision for something new and want to bring it to life in ways that are better for all touched – I'd love to chat.
Writing
Selected essays
On AI, discernment, and what the next era of building actually demands May 10,000 Wisdom Schools Bloom
The case for reimagining innovation education from the root Accelerator —> Cultivator
Change the language, change the culture Autobiography of a Silicon Valley Savior
The confession that started this work The Ethical Startup Playbook
A practical framework for founders who want to build without reproducing what they're trying to fix
