That's the short version. Here's the longer one.
I started my career in investment banking, building trading systems and market risk platforms for Tier 1 banks. At Morgan Stanley, I was one of the first engineers building their new interest rate derivatives trading platform — a system I built over four years in C# and Java that's still in production today, and almost unchanged to this day. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, we repurposed that trading system to process all of Lehman's trades for the LSE auction, ensuring Morgan Stanley met its market-making obligation. That's the kind of pressure that teaches you what matters in software architecture. As I was doing the coding, it also gave me a chance to visit Billingsgate Market at 5am and see the fresh fist first hand while grabbing breakfast!
At Deutsche Bank, I was Vice President, where I re-platformed Autobahn — their external FX desktop trading platform — and built a bank-wide regulatory market risk reporting data warehouse. At Credit Suisse, I was Cross Functional Architect for a 1200-person IT department, designing the architecture for market risk regulatory reporting for the Chief Risk Office and sitting on the department's architectural governance board, reviewing every software design for risk reporting.
That investment banking foundation — building systems where latency matters, regulatory requirements are non-negotiable, and failure means real financial loss — shaped everything that came next. I moved into PE-backed technology companies, first as CTO, then as CEO. At Navarik, I led a turnaround of a struggling post-IPO company, built a new real-time data platform, closed multi-million dollar global deals with Shell and Phillips 66, and ultimately led the company through a successful sale to Constellation Software. I then founded TIC Systems after pitching to the VMS Venture Fund, where I doubled revenue, embedded AI into the core SaaS product, migrated a 4-billion record Oracle database to Postgres, and led the company through ISO 27001 certification.
I've navigated the full M&A lifecycle from every seat at the table: as the target company executive being acquired, as the integration lead post-deal, and now as the advisor helping PE firms evaluate their next investment. That range of experience shapes how I work. When I conduct technology due diligence, I'm not just reviewing documentation and interviewing leadership. I'm reading code, assessing architecture decisions, and forming a view on whether the engineering team can deliver what the investment thesis requires. Having built trading platforms under regulatory pressure and scaled SaaS products through acquisitions, I know what good looks like — and I know what "good enough for a slide deck" looks like.
After years of executive leadership, I made a deliberate choice: I went back to building. I wanted my advisory work to be grounded in current, hands-on experience with the technologies I advise on — not knowledge that's five years out of date.
Today I write production Rust, build AI agent systems, run my own mail server and infrastructure, and maintain several open-source projects. I built Mailbuttons — an AI-powered email automation platform — from architecture through to production deployment. I've worked extensively with LLM integration, prompt engineering, and agent architectures. When portfolio companies tell me they're "implementing AI," I can assess whether their plans are realistic because I've done the same work myself.
Codecutter is my full-time technology advisory practice. I work with PE firms and portfolio company boards on technology due diligence, AI strategy, and value creation. I also take on fractional CTO engagements where companies need a technology perspective at the board level but aren't ready for a full-time hire.
If you're looking for an advisor who can speak fluently to both your investment committee and your engineering team, I'd be happy to have a conversation.