He tried law. Then management consulting. Then a venture-backed parking startup. None of it delivered the sense of purpose he was chasing. The law felt alienating, consulting ended with him being let go, and startup life offered speed and ownership but no deeper meaning. The real pivot came on a Christmas Day trip to San Francisco, when he walked into the Tenderloin and saw what he later described as the bleakest scene he had ever encountered - set against a city where one in every 14,000 residents is a billionaire.
The contrast sharpened a conviction he now states bluntly: while inequality widened over the past decade, technology focused on making the already comfortable a little more comfortable. Faster takeout, better ad targeting, slicker convenience. Useful, but not a heroic use of some of the best engineering talent on earth. Meanwhile, the people who most needed help were still getting tangled in systems that barely functioned.
The scale of the problem in public services
He points to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as a case in point. In fiscal year 2025, SNAP served an average of 42.1 million people each month, or 12.3% of the U.S. population. The USDA reported a national payment error rate of 10.62%, equal to $10.1 billion in improper payments. Most of that was overpayment, but some was underpayment too - eligible families not getting what they were owed.
That, for him, is the real software problem. Paperwork, outdated systems, handwritten notes and exhausted workers drive errors in public services. A 2025 federal study found child welfare caseworkers spend 4.3 hours a day on paperwork and documentation, and national annual turnover runs around 30%.
Building tools for frontline staff
Rather than chase another consumer startup, he built AI tools for frontline staff and the vulnerable people they serve. The tools target the administrative burden directly - not replacing caseworkers, but cutting the time they spend wrestling with forms and documentation. Agencies in a dozen U.S. states now report cutting that admin burden in half. For government managers watching turnover eat into institutional knowledge, that kind of reduction changes the arithmetic on retention and service quality.
The approach sidesteps the usual Silicon Valley instinct to build shiny consumer products. As our AI Agent Courses curriculum emphasizes, the highest-impact automation often hides in unglamorous workflows that nobody outside the organization ever sees. The cleanest use of AI is still helping people wade through forms so they can do the actual job.
Why this matters for government and HR leaders
For managers inside state agencies and large HR organizations, the numbers are hard to ignore. When caseworkers lose 4.3 hours a day to paperwork and one-third of the workforce turns over annually, the math on hiring and training alone becomes punishing. Tools that halve admin time don't just save money - they give experienced staff a reason to stay. The lesson from this founder's path is not that technology solves everything, but that aiming it at the right problem - the grinding, unsexy friction inside public systems - yields returns that a faster food delivery app never will. For anyone overseeing AI for Government Courses or workforce planning, the priority is clear: target the paperwork, not the person doing it.
Your membership also unlocks:
