Defiant
Generalist
In a world of
unrealized specialists.
Modern culture keeps pushing us towards narrow specialization. I embrace being a Generalized Specialist instead.
I grew up inside a high-control religious environment that I didn't fully leave until my thirties. That experience gave me something I didn't expect: the ability to see how control is built and disguised as something normal.
Once I could see it in my own life, I started seeing it everywhere. In relationships and organizations that looked fine from the outside. I founded GenZen in 2016 to help people see it in theirs. The work is getting people free.
In 2017 I left the United States and haven't gone back. Nineteen countries so far, mostly across Europe and Southeast Asia, always slow. I stay long enough to stop being a tourist and start seeing how a place actually works.
The name GenZen started as a nickname. Someone close to me described my style as "gentleman zen" and it stuck. Before GenZen, I studied product and furniture design and ran a custom furniture business. The craft sensibility came first.
Now that AI lets anyone build, the person who knows what good looks like is the one who matters. That's not something you learn from prompts. It comes from years of actually making things. If something exists, it should be made well or not at all.
GenZen
I founded GenZen in 2016. Every initiative under it is an autonomy initiative.
The core practice is counter-exploitation. When trusted relationships, business structures, or family systems get weaponized against the people they're supposed to protect, GenZen maps how control was established and engineers its reversal. We've extracted people from cults, guided executives through federal investigations, identified million-dollar fraud before it closed, and restored family systems shattered by coercive control.
The work is getting people free.
GoKart Studio
I'm one half of GoKart Studio: a collaborative venture designing and developing AI Partnerships for founders and small teams ready to design how AI actually works inside their business.
Sogo is the first product out of it: an open-source initiative to turn VS Code into a full business environment.
Building an AI COO: From First Session to Full Stack
The implementation guide for the AI COO Framework. From a brief that loads automatically to a searchable knowledge vault backed by Supabase.
Read →The AI COO Framework
Your AI could be a real partner. It just needs the right setup. Seven steps to an AI that actually operates, developed over 3+ years of real practice.
Read →The Case for the Generalized Specialist
Why the most important solutions come from people who refuse to stay in one lane.
Read →Since 2017, I've been slow-traveling across 19 countries so far, absorbing cultural perspectives and observing life through the lens of the perpetual foreigner.
Building out the Sogo ecosystem: an open-source initiative built on the conviction that your tools should conform to the way you work. We're making that real by enabling VS Code to become a full business environment, and the AI COO Framework is the methodology behind it.
Learning and testing AI assisted coding. Discovering what's possible to build when coding is no longer the barrier.