Hi, I'm Michael.

I'm a product engineer: I do the product thinking and I write the code. I've spent the last decade shipping inside teams like Uber, Boston Dynamics, and Samsung, and building my own products on the side.

At Boston Dynamics, I led the rebuild of their global support center from scratch: content strategy, design system, Salesforce and Jira integration, ITAR compliance. At Samsung, I built a sales chat automation for the Galaxy S20 launch that caught at-risk customers in real time and routed them to senior agents. At Uber, I ran a 130-person investigations organization and built R2D2, an internal Slackbot that took over the repetitive parts of triage.

I also build my own products. SailMOB is a browser sailing game with real wind physics, built with React, a hand-written canvas renderer, and Supabase (read the case study). Street Sketch turns any street address into watercolor art. I like making things that work, and teach you something about the world.

I started Ventus Optera because small and mid-size businesses keep hitting the same wall: they've tried AI, but nobody has wired it into the workflows the business runs on. That's implementation work, and it's what I do. I figure out where the hours are going, build the system that takes them back, and show you the numbers. Sometimes that means strategy. Sometimes it means writing code. Usually both.