I take things apart.

I dismantled radios as a kid to see where the sound lived. That instinct carried me through mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech — and then, because machines are only half the world, to a Master's in Humanities. Literature and thermodynamics are the same job to me: take the system apart, find the logic, tell the truth about what you find.

For years I tutored adults who dreamed of college — many the first in their families to try. A father holding his first acceptance letter is a moment you don't forget. The work earned congressional commendations; the acceptance letters mattered more.

I also mentored teenagers headed the wrong way. The difference between a life derailed and a life transformed is usually one person who won't give up on you.

At Applied Materials I worked on semiconductor manufacturing by day and, by night, drew up Phi Entertainment — a planetarium venue that reconfigures itself: theatre, concert hall, nightclub. That was 2006, seventeen years before the Sphere opened in Las Vegas.

Finding creative collaborators was so hard that I built the missing piece myself: PhiTribe, a network where artists form tribes and evolve the arts together — before Behance filled that space. Neither venture launched. Both taught me to trust what I can see coming.

Days, I write code at Pilot.com. Nights, I build FindTribe: living maps for festivals and marathons, so 100,000 strangers can find their people, their tent, their car. In between there was sentencing data at B.C. McComas — analysis aimed at bias in criminal justice.

Different rooms, same question: does this make the world easier to navigate?