In 1997, I was 25 years old, recently married, grieving my father-in-law, and holding my newborn son when I launched my first company — an internet service provider called Horizon Internet on Florida's Gulf Coast.
I built the infrastructure myself. Fully fiber-optic digital backend serving 11 cities, at a time when most regional ISPs were still running copper. My customers included the inventor of The Clapper, the team that essentially created the commercial mortgage-backed securities market, and a man trying to build a mile-long stateless ship that would circle the globe forever.
It was the late '90s. Everything felt possible.
I sold Horizon in 2000, right before the dot-com crash vaporized most of the companies in my space. That timing wasn't luck — it was pattern recognition. I could see the economics shifting and I moved before they shifted on top of me.
That instinct — knowing when something is about to break before it breaks — is the reason PathToShip exists.
Every Major Wave, From the Inside
After Horizon, I went to work for one of my own ISP customers: a team of former Nomura Securities executives who had helped invent the CMBS market and were now building a technology-driven commercial mortgage auction platform called Precept Corp. I started as their infrastructure lead and became CTO. When Cohen Financial acquired Precept, I was retained as Chief Information Officer — running technology strategy for a national commercial real estate capital markets firm, sitting on the executive committee, processing over $5 billion in annual transactions.
Then 2008 happened. The very financial instruments my colleagues had helped pioneer at Nomura became the toxic assets that cratered the global economy. I was CIO at ground zero of the commercial real estate collapse.
I rebuilt. I always rebuild.
Patents, Cloud Migrations, and Enterprise-Scale Healthcare Infrastructure
At IMACC, a restoration and remediation contractor network, I designed and built a patent-pending real-time dispatch engine — a spatial data system that routed contractors based on multi-criteria rules. Three patents were awarded. I also migrated the entire platform to Microsoft Azure, making it one of the earlier enterprise cloud adoption programs in its industry.
At Grant Thornton, I led the firm's Office 365 and Azure hybrid cloud implementation — migrating a 6,500-user, multistate organization and personally managing the testing and sign-off of 499 enterprise applications for compatibility. This was 2013. Most companies were still debating whether cloud was safe for enterprise workloads. We were the ones proving it was.
At Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, I served as Senior Technical Program Manager on the national data warehouse — the system that aggregated healthcare data across Blue Cross Blue Shield franchises nationwide, including the infrastructure that supported Affordable Care Act compliance. I directed a Java 8 migration across 1,500 servers and implemented PHI/PII encryption to meet HIPAA requirements. One of the largest healthcare data warehouses in the country, touching the records of millions of Americans. When something went wrong at that scale, it wasn't a GitHub issue — it was a congressional inquiry.
A Decade Inside the Machine That Powers AI
In late 2015, I joined Amazon Web Services. I stayed for a decade.
Not because it was easy. Because it was the front row seat to the most consequential infrastructure shift since the internet itself.
I rose from Senior Technical Account Manager to Enterprise Support Leader for some of AWS's most strategic digital native customers. I led a global team of 30 technical professionals across the Americas and EMEA. I won AWS TAM of the Year in 2016 (selected from every TAM globally) and Enterprise Support Manager of the Year in 2018.
But the experience that matters most for PathToShip is what happened starting around 2022: GPU compute allocation during the AI supply crisis.
For three years, I was directly involved in securing P3, P4, and P5 GPU instances for customers training frontier AI models — the companies building the large language models that power the tools people are using today. I watched the scarcity, the negotiations, the architectural decisions that determined which companies could train and which ones couldn't. I sat in the room where hyperscale AI infrastructure was being rationed.
I didn't just observe the AI revolution. I helped allocate the compute that made it possible.
And Then There's Crypto. The Chapter That Taught Me the Most.
There's a chapter of my career I don't talk about often. In Bitcoin's earliest days, I was a member of DCAO — the Digital Cryptocurrency Advancement Organization, an invite-only group of roughly 12 to 20 people. The other members included Vitalik Buterin (before he wrote the Ethereum whitepaper), Arthur Britto (co-creator of Ripple), and the founders of Kraken and BitPay.
That was the founding circle of what became a multi-trillion dollar industry. I was in the room.
Then I lost everything to one of Bitcoin's first Ponzi schemes — Trendon Shavers and Bitcoin Savings and Trust. I later testified in the Department of Justice case against him. I had to teach the FBI how Bitcoin worked, because in 2013, almost nobody in federal law enforcement understood it yet.
I share this not for sympathy, but because it's the most important thing I've ever learned about trust. I know what it feels like to believe in something that looks right on the surface and discover too late that it's broken underneath. I know what it costs when the thing you trusted wasn't what it appeared to be.
That experience is baked into PathToShip's DNA. Every design decision — the minimal permissions, the immediate token revocation, the fact that your code never leaves your machine on the free tier — comes from someone who learned the price of misplaced trust the hard way.
Why I Built This, and Why Now
Here's the pattern I keep seeing:
A transformative technology emerges. It democratizes something that used to require deep expertise. People rush in. Most of them don't know what they don't know. And then things break — sometimes catastrophically — because nobody built the guardrails before the stampede.
I watched it happen with ISPs in the '90s. I watched it happen with cloud adoption in the 2010s. I watched it happen with crypto. I watched it from inside AWS as companies raced to deploy AI workloads on infrastructure that wasn't ready.
It's happening again right now with AI-generated code.
Tools like Bolt, Lovable, Cursor, and Replit have made it possible for anyone to build a working application in hours. That's genuinely extraordinary. But 45% of AI-generated code contains security vulnerabilities. The enterprise security tools that could catch those flaws cost tens of thousands of dollars and assume you have an engineering team to interpret the results. The AI coding platforms themselves have a fundamental conflict of interest — they're not incentivized to tell you how broken your code might be.
Nobody built the independent, affordable tool that non-technical founders need to know if their app is safe to ship.
So I built it. I vibe-coded it, actually — using the same AI tools whose output PathToShip is designed to evaluate. There's a certain poetry in that. I used the new paradigm to build the safety net for the new paradigm.
30 Years of Pattern Recognition in One Score
PathToShip scans your codebase across seven dimensions — security, production readiness, infrastructure, architecture, scalability, code quality, and cost optimization — and produces a single score from 0 to 100.
That scoring framework isn't arbitrary. It's informed by decades of watching systems succeed and fail at enterprise scale. I've seen what breaks a billion-dollar transaction processing pipeline. I've seen what breaks a 1,500-server healthcare data warehouse. I've seen what breaks when a customer's AI training job hits GPU memory limits at 2 AM and there's no monitoring in place.
The things that break at scale are almost never the things that look broken in development. PathToShip is built to find the invisible gaps — the ones that only matter when real people start using your product.
Trust Is Earned
Your code never leaves your machine on the free tier. We don't store it. We don't train on it. We architecturally eliminated the need for trust by making it impossible for us to access your source code in the first place.
I've spent my career handling sensitive systems — HIPAA-regulated healthcare data, billion-dollar financial pipelines, the infrastructure configurations of some of the world's largest cloud spenders. I understand what trust means when the stakes are real. I built PathToShip with that same standard.
Every app has a path to production. Some paths are short. Some need work. But every founder deserves to know where they stand before they invite the world in.
Your app works. Now find out if it's ready.
Scan your code free at pathtoship.com