“My job was keeping a race boat alive in the ocean. Now it's keeping businesses running. Excuses don't float.”
My father was an electrical engineer, so I was tinkering from a very young age. It's in the blood — I inherited a diverse skillset and a serious work ethic, and I've been building on top of both my entire career.
Then, at eight, sailing — and almost immediately, modifying everything I sailed to make it faster. That never stopped. It's still the method today: watch how a thing works, then make it work better.
In my early twenties I moved to Newport, Rhode Island to sail full time. What followed was a career offshore — boats up to 155 feet, tens of thousands of ocean miles, a world championship, and programs that included Volvo Ocean Race and America's Cup teams. My job beyond the sailing: keep everything on the boat working, and fix what broke, at sea, in whatever mood the ocean was in.
The boats led everywhere else. Racing programs travel inside container workshops, and I helped build them.
That thread ran to PUMA City — at the time the largest mobile retail structure in the world, built to tour with the Volvo Ocean Race. A few weeks in a container factory in China on the management side, designing the audio, video and IT infrastructure. Then part of the lead team for installation and de-installation, working anything with wires once the doors opened. Most of the content running on those screens was mine.
After that, shore bases for two America's Cup teams. I was part of the container design and build, and handled the electrical design and installation — the systems that let a base ship anywhere and plug in. One program was a full base build, on site start to finish. The other was half the containers.
An ROV startup in oil and gas: R&D, special projects, ROV engineering, project management, and the camera work. A stretch with Oceaneering. Schmidt Ocean Institute.
HeavyAperture officially began in 2019 — but the divisions were running long before they had names. That's how everything in my career begins: one capability pulling in the next. Content. Design. Engineering. Additive manufacturing. And now AI: the layer on top of everything three decades on the tools taught me.
Same career. Wider aperture.
There was no one moment. Keeping a race boat alive teaches you a range nobody warns you about — you have to know how to sew and how to tear down a diesel engine, sometimes in the same watch. Ashore, the stack kept growing: running programs, managing projects, building the spares kits, planning the next upgrade — new electronics one season, hull modifications the next.
ROV work was the same life in a different ocean. Container workshops. Offshore rotations. Every spare on board, because an oil rig expects 100% uptime and doesn't care what that takes.
And I always had a camera with me. Eventually it was just on the end of a tether.
“I've been building systems designed to deploy anywhere on Earth since before the software industry had a name for it.”
HeavyAperture's five divisions aren't a services menu. They're chapters of the same career — every one field-tested somewhere unreasonable.
The call: fly into Panama, boat out to an exclusive resort off the west coast, and finish the full off-grid electrical system on a luxury floating accommodation. The kind of job where the site is a boat ride offshore and the hardware store is whatever you brought.
A high-performance foiling sailboat needed its electrical enclosure replaced — and the only way in was a small circular port in the hull. Enclosures are square. The off-the-shelf workaround means stacking cables through shared glands, and that's a leak waiting to happen. One cable, one gland. No exceptions.
So: reverse-engineer the wiring, design to the round hole, keep it compact and light, make serviceability priority one. The result: an acrylic tube with engineering-grade printed endcaps and internal structure, all-new electrical inside — essentially an ROV subsea can, minus the need to survive at depth. One career informing the next.
Standing in the boarding line at Logan, headed to Houston for one job, when the call came about another: northern Saskatchewan, wheels-up in under 48 hours, a recovery operation on a frozen lake. Multiple ROVs, tons of gear, three weeks on the ice at −20 — cameras freezing, machines freezing, and one job underneath it all: keep everything working while keeping yourself working.
The first time AI stopped being a toy, I was fighting heat buildup printing polycarbonate — the kind of problem that usually eats a day in forum threads and scrapped parts. I worked it with AI on the bench and had it solved in a fraction of the time. Noted, interesting.
Then came the side quest that rewired me. I wanted to pull live data off the Victron power system in my truck and put it on a screen. Idea to working simulation in a few hours. That was the day I stopped seeing a chatbot and started seeing a layer — and I wanted it under every part of my business.
Now I build working software alongside the hardware. AI didn't teach me the trades. It multiplies the thirty-five years I already spent learning them.
Health and fitness aren't a hobby line in this bio — they're maintenance. I maintain myself the way I maintained race boats: daily work, nothing deferred. I trained and certified as a fitness trainer — not for a career, but to understand the machine. Still studying it, still training. It's why I can spend a week embedded on your floor — or a day folded into an engine room — and show up sharp the next morning.
Deferred maintenance sinks boats. Same rule applies to the operator.
The focus now is AI development — inside HeavyAperture, and inside BORON05, the product company spinning out of it. Client work runs alongside: walkthroughs, installs, embedded weeks. And in between there's always a new idea on the bench and a printer running. Usually several.
The pattern hasn't changed since the boats: keep everything working, keep upgrading, and let every job sharpen the next one.
If your business makes real things and your evenings disappear into paperwork — I'd like to see your shop.
And know this going in: I'm not trying to put AI in everything. Sometimes what I find is better shop organization, an off-the-shelf tool that already exists, or a different approach to a problem I've seen before — three decades of making operations work came before the AI, and it's all on the table. When the answer isn't AI, that's the answer you get.