Hi there! I help build and launch software companies. This is a collection of what I'm working on.

I'm lucky enough to be a co-founder of the DeveloperTown Family of Companies. Most people know DeveloperTown as a consulting company focused on helping companies design, build, and launch technology products to solve some of their largest problem or to tackle some of their most aggressive opportunities. But we also helped launch some startups in our co-founder studio called DT Starts. We have a number of other companies (real estate, capital, other services, and saas products); and I cover some of them below. My role is mostly to make sure we're all pointed in the same direction (if you know my partners, that isn't always easy). And occasionally I still get to jump in and help our clients develop market-winning strategies for their products.

I'm one of the co-founders of Start Something Ventures. We invest in early stage companies, with a primary focus on B2B SaaS companies operating in the Midwest. It’s an angel group - not a formal fund. We’re just getting started, so if you reach out to us be patient (we will get better once we figure out our process), but investments can range from $50k to $200k and once we’ve made the decision to invest we try really hard to fund within 30 days.

I'm the founder of Tenant Tracker. We launched Tenant Tracker in 2014 with the goal of simplifying the way commercial real-estate landlords and tenants collaborate with each other around tenant coordination. Today, the Tenant Tracker team has grown past me, and there's an awesome full-time leadership team growing and scaling the business. Now I'm just an advisor and board member, and they occasionally let me help out with fundraising, sales, and strategic partnerships. Tenant Tracker is easily one of my favorite examples to talk about as an example of launching a truly minimum-viable-product (MVP), leveraging customer capital for early growth, and customer-driven development. The team has always exhibited and lived many of the product and business related principles and values we talk about at DeveloperTown.   

I'm one of the co-founders of FullStack. FullStack helps early-stage companies scale faster by providing the services needed to support your team (payroll, benefits, HR, and compliance). We support companies as small as one person, and some 100+. We try to focus on technology companies, which allows us to leverage our deep experience in the space - allowing us to help with pooled recruiting for common technology roles, provide insights around competitive benefits, provide advice around best practices for commissions and stock options for key roles, and leveraging various technologies to make it easier to support your team. FullStack is still young, and we hope to be able to do a ton more in the coming years. If you're launching a tech company, let's chat. We would love to grow along side you. 

Waterly is one of my favorite DeveloperTown joint-ventures. Today Waterly helps small municipalities simplify the process of collecting data on their daily rounds related to basic EPA reporting. In the future, Waterly will be one of the many platforms cities, states, and governments use to better manage one of our most precious resources. We launched Waterly with Baxter and Woodman out of Illinois, and it's lead by a passionate leader with a vision to make a huge impact in the coming water crisis. I'm an investor and board-member in Waterly, and they occasionally let me help with sales and overall business strategy. 

A number of years ago my family decided to start a hobby farm. We currently raise sheep, pigs, turkeys, chickens, and bees. The focus is not to make money as a farmer. Our goal is to create an awesome environment where we can raise our two boys (Patrick and Thomas) in an unconventional way where they can experience responsibility, meaningful work, entrepreneurship, nature and science, and expereince about every power-tool you can imagine. (That last one sometimes gets me in trouble with my wife.) Patrick and I launched a podcast where we talk about the farm, his experiences growing up, and my experiences being a dad. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher.

A number of years ago, I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about software testing. If you'd like to review that content, you can do so here: