№ 01Founder · CTO · Author
Profile
I build AI-native products and the engineering organizations that ship them.
Four-time startup CTO. More than twenty years in technology, more than ten of them leading, and I was putting machine learning into production long before it was rebranded as AI.
Lately the work is all agentic: at my current startup, three engineers shipped two full products with AI writing the tickets, drafting the first-pass code, and reviewing every pull request alongside the humans.
- raised across my startups
- $220M+
- valuation, $170M round
- $1B
- ML models in production
- 40+
- people led, three continents
- 130
If you're building something where AI is the product and not the garnish, let's talk.
№ 022026True-crime podcast
Missing Scientists
A true-crime investigation into eleven American scientists dead or missing since 2022, all with access to the country's most sensitive research.
It is also the first shipped product of The Narrative, my long game in AI news, built to answer a simple question: what can one engineer and an agent fleet actually ship? Research agent swarms worked the case files. AI drafted and critiqued every script; humans edited and fact-checked. The pipeline designed the voices, scored the show, and built episode one's video edition from roughly 250 cinematic frames, each one a camera move through a generated still.
Episode one pulled 3,600 plays on Apple Podcasts alone with zero promotion, beating every one of the nearly 200 episodes of my flagship show.
The hosts don't exist. The downloads do.
№ 032025AI-native media company
The Blur
My AI-native media company, built inside the dissolving boundary between human and AI and covering the moment as a culture story, not a tech beat.
The shows are the product; the agentic infrastructure behind them is the point: fleets of deep-research agents, custom synthetic voices, generated music and cinematic video, automated editing and distribution reaching past 100,000 people a month, with pre-production roughly 80% automated and climbing.
It is the home of They Might Be Self-Aware and of the Doomsday Clock, which tracks the distance between human and machine, updated every Monday.
It also has a staff. Not all of them are human. I don't always say which.
№ 042024AI podcast · twice weekly
They Might Be Self-Aware
A twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture — and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware?
Daniel Bishop and I host: two people who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered. No benchmark recitals, no "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify.
Every episode starts with a real story — a Claude release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls — then chases it somewhere stranger and more human than the headline. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur.
Nearly 200 episodes in, and the question is still open.
№ 052024News feedpaused
The NEXT Sync
A breaking-news feed for the future that's already here.
William Gibson observed that the future is already here, "just not very evenly distributed"; this project hunts the places it's leaking through — AI, robotics, space, the strange edges of science and culture — and files the report. It was also my first experiment in AI-assembled news, the earliest ancestor of The Narrative.
Currently paused. The future, inconveniently, is not.
№ 062024AI news company
The Narrative
The long game: an AI-driven news company where thousands of specialized outlets, each run by its own AI editor, will cover the micro-communities mass media can't reach, with the depth and integrity of traditional journalism and the scale of software.
Most of what I've built since 2024 has quietly been R&D for it. The NEXT Sync was the first test. They Might Be Self-Aware and The Blur built the production stack. Missing Scientists, its first shipped product, proved the pipeline could carry a show people actually download.
The vision hasn't moved. The technology is finally catching up.
№ 072021Exhibition · oil + NFT
Past The Point of No Return
An exhibition of ten oil paintings pulled from New York City's raw underbelly, each released simultaneously as a one-of-one NFT.
The titles carry the register — "Blue Destiny," "Beat The Devil," "Every Man's A King" — life past the boundaries most people never test.
My first collision of traditional media and digital provenance: real paint, real canvas, and a blockchain ledger arguing about which one is the original.
№ 082019Podcastpaused
ONE with Hunter Powers
A podcast built on a single constraint: one idea per episode, explored until it paid off.
Each episode took a single concept from business, technology, or personal growth and worked it until it was usable. The format was the thesis: depth beats coverage.
The show is on pause, but the constraint still shows up in everything I make.
№ 092013Bestselling book
The Book
Instant Nokogiri is my book on parsing and scraping the web with Ruby, published by Packt in 2013, back when getting data meant going out and taking it from the HTML yourself.
It teaches Nokogiri, the parsing engine at the heart of practically every Ruby scraper, from first selector to working data pipeline. It climbed into Amazon's top ten and became a best-selling programming title.
A period piece now, and I'm fond of it: my whole career has been teaching machines to read.
№ 101998Holding company
Wire The Planet
Started in 1998, when I was 16 — a web shop that grew to a team of 11 and shipped 25+ commercial sites.
It has been the holding company for my technology experiments ever since. Now it is assembling itself into something new: an agentic brand agency.
The agents are already at work.