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.
Sogo
Your productivity data lives on someone else's server, in someone else's format. You pay monthly rent to access your own work.
Sogo is a VS Code extension I co-developed that brings structured databases into the editor. Tables, kanban boards, calendars, galleries. Each database saves as a file on your filesystem. Any AI agent already running in VS Code reads and writes those files directly. No API. No account. No cloud dependency.
Open source. Local first. Your data stays yours.
AI Partnership Design
Most people use AI like a search engine with manners. Open a chat, explain your business from scratch, get a decent answer, close the tab. Next morning, start all over again. And again.
GenZen runs on an agentic-centric system I built over three years. Instead of bolting AI onto a dozen apps that don't talk to each other, I designed our operations so AI works as a native partner with full context. One environment. Our data on our filesystem. An AI that knows the business because it lives inside it. I published the methodology as the AI COO Framework.
Now I help other founders build the same thing for their businesses.
Your tools should conform to your work. Not the other way around.
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.
Developing the AI powered COO
Learning and testing AI assisted coding. Discovering what's possible to build when coding is no longer the barrier.