I’m an embedded & AI engineer on what I’m calling an entrepreneurial sabbatical. After years working in cybersecurity and embedded systems—building firmware, device drivers, and shipping products to paying customers—I’ve shifted focus. Instead of optimizing for the next consulting gig or the next promotion, I’m optimizing for asymmetric upside: building products, making small bets, and thinking in systems.

This blog is part of that shift.

Who I Am and What I’m Building

I’ve spent most of my career in embedded systems and AI. I’ve written firmware that runs on bare metal, built device drivers, worked with RTOS and Yocto, and shipped computer vision models that run on-device. I’ve also done the full-stack thing—React Native apps, AWS infrastructure, GraphQL APIs. But the consulting model, while reliable, has a ceiling. It’s linear income, linear growth.

So I’m building products instead.

hDrop is a hydration-tracking wearable I built with embedded firmware and a companion app. It’s shipped to paying customers. It’s not a unicorn, but it’s real—hardware, firmware, app, the whole stack. It taught me about manufacturing, supply chains, and the brutal reality of hardware margins.

Caribbean Gecko is a diaspora-focused merch brand. It started as an experiment: can I build a Shopify storefront, automate a print-on-demand workflow, and create something that resonates with people from the Caribbean? It’s small, but it’s taught me about brand, marketing, and the power of community.

Gridment is still early-stage, but it’s the one I’m most excited about. It’s a fintech platform for Caribbean and Central American entrepreneurs. The problem is simple: building a business in these regions is harder than it should be. Payments are fragmented, banking is slow, and the tools that work in the US or Europe don’t quite fit. Gridment is my attempt to fix that—better payments, better tools, better infrastructure for entrepreneurs who are building real businesses.

These aren’t just side projects. They’re experiments in building products with asymmetric upside. Each one teaches me something different about product, market, and execution.

Why I’m Writing

I’m writing for three reasons:

1. To think in systems and in public.

The best engineers I know think in systems. They see connections, dependencies, feedback loops. They understand that a small change in one part of the system can cascade through the whole thing. The same is true for building products and building a business. Writing forces me to articulate those systems, to make the implicit explicit, to see the patterns I might otherwise miss.

Writing in public adds accountability. It’s easy to have great ideas in private. It’s harder to put them out there, to be wrong, to iterate. But that’s where the learning happens.

2. To compound credibility and relationships over 5–10 years.

I’m not writing for next month’s traffic. I’m writing for the person who finds this blog in 2028, or 2030, and thinks: “This person has been thinking about these problems for a long time. They understand the space. I should reach out.”

Credibility compounds. Every post is a small bet. Some will resonate. Some won’t. But over time, the signal accumulates. The relationships compound. The opportunities compound.

3. To document the journey from engineer/consultant to founder/investor.

Most engineers think like consultants: optimize for the next project, the next client, the next paycheck. Founders think differently: they optimize for equity, for leverage, for asymmetric upside. Investors think differently still: they optimize for portfolio effects, for optionality, for the long tail.

I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m still an engineer at heart—I love building things, solving hard problems, shipping code. But I’m learning to think like a founder: to see products, not projects; to think in equity, not invoices; to make bets, not just execute.

This blog is a record of that transition. It’s messy. It’s incomplete. But it’s honest.

What This Blog Will Cover

I’m planning to write about five main themes:

1. Systems thinking and “billionaire-style” mental models applied to a normal-human life.

I read a lot of books by people who’ve built massive businesses or made massive bets. They think in systems, in leverage, in compounding. But most of their advice is abstract: “think long-term,” “build moats,” “optimize for optionality.” I want to make it concrete. How do you apply these mental models when you’re not a billionaire? When you’re just an engineer trying to build something? When you have constraints—time, money, risk tolerance—that the billionaires don’t?

2. Building products in embedded, AI, and fintech with asymmetric upside.

I’ve shipped products in all three of these spaces. Each has different dynamics. Embedded is capital-intensive but has high barriers to entry. AI is moving fast, but the moats are shifting. Fintech is regulated, complex, but the problems are real and the markets are huge.

I’ll write about what I’m learning: what works, what doesn’t, where the leverage is, where the traps are.

3. Lessons from bootstrapping, real estate, and small experiments.

I’m not just building software. I’m also learning about real estate, about small businesses, about experiments like Caribbean Gecko. These aren’t distractions—they’re part of the same system. They teach me about cash flow, about margins, about what it actually takes to build a business that works.

4. Long-term vision around empowering entrepreneurs in the Caribbean/Central America.

This is personal. I’m from the region. I see the potential, but I also see the friction. The infrastructure isn’t there. The tools aren’t there. The capital isn’t there. But the people are there. The ideas are there. The markets are there.

Gridment is one attempt to fix this. But it’s bigger than one product. It’s about building the infrastructure—payments, banking, tools—that lets entrepreneurs in these regions build the businesses they want to build.

5. The meta-journey: going from engineer to founder.

This is the meta-theme. How do you actually make the transition? What does it look like day-to-day? What are the hard parts? What are the easy parts? What do you wish you’d known earlier?

I don’t have all the answers. But I’m documenting the process.

What’s Next

If you’re reading this, you’re early. This blog is just getting started. I’m planning to write regularly—maybe once a week, maybe more, maybe less. I’m not optimizing for consistency. I’m optimizing for quality and for learning.

If you’re working on similar problems—building products in embedded, AI, or fintech; thinking about systems and leverage; building businesses in the Caribbean or Central America—I’d love to hear from you. Reach out. Let’s connect. Let’s collaborate.

If you’re from the region and you’re building something, especially reach out. We need more builders. We need more people thinking in systems, making bets, building products.

This is the beginning. Let’s see where it goes.