Co-founder & Head of Product

I went back to school in 2022 to study applied AI, with the intention of using the final project as a startup vehicle. I called a former customer from Kaseya — an MSP owner I'd worked with closely — and we started meeting every Tuesday and Thursday to map his problems. Not to build anything yet. Just to listen. Those sessions became the foundation of the product.

Small business owners — specifically owner-operators of managed service providers and professional services firms — are running their companies across 8 to 12 disconnected SaaS tools. They have no consolidated view of what's happening. They find out about problems after they've already become customer complaints. The software they use was built to execute work, not to give leadership visibility into it. The root cause isn't a lack of dashboards. It's cognitive load. Just because you have instrumentation doesn't mean you have the bandwidth to use it. Executives are flying blind not because the data doesn't exist, but because no one has made it effortless to consume.

We started with time tracking — the single most painful workflow in managed services, where every billable hour has to be accounted for. We were going to make it smarter with AI. Then we realized people don't want to look at dashboards. They just want to know what's happening. So we pivoted to a Q&A agent: connect your tools, ask questions against the data. Then we realized something sharper — nobody wants to ask questions either. They just want the answer. That's how we arrived at a new category of product: executive awareness. Clairify would be the one place executives can go to know what they need to know.

The UI went through the same evolution. We launched with a feed — standard scroll interface. My co-founder built a prototype in Replit that looked more like Tindr: swipeable cards. I was skeptical. We brought both to our booth at Web Summit Vancouver. The reaction was immediate. People pulled out their phones to show me their unread messages. One person said, 'That's my day. I think you might make my day.' We killed the feed. It cost us six months of rework but it was the right call.

Web Summit Vancouver was our most structured feedback exercise. We had a booth for one day among roughly 150 startups on the floor. I used a wearable recording device to capture every conversation. The positioning — 'productivity tool for CEOs' — worked immediately. People read the sign and walked over. A solopreneur with 237 unread emails was ready to pay $19/month on the spot. An enterprise CEO with 1,500 employees called it 'absolutely amazing initiative.' The consistent signal: executives at every scale have the same problem. The card-swipe interface was the moment that made it real for people. Nobody wanted to visit a website. They wanted to see it work on a phone.

Clairify is an iOS-first mobile app with a companion web interface. It connects to the tools an executive already uses — email, project management, ticketing, CRM — and surfaces what matters, in the order it matters, without requiring the executive to go looking. The core interaction is a card-swipe interface: each card is a summarized, action-ready item. The executive sets their own priorities — what topics they care about, how much detail they want, what time of day they want their briefing. The product adapts to them, not the other way around. The design principle we kept coming back to: we're not building a smarter dashboard. We're reducing the demand on executive attention.

Enterprise and government customers require it, and we built for them from the start. SOC 2 Type 1 took six months and required building internal controls from scratch — access management, incident response, change management, vendor risk. We achieved it. CASA 2 certification from Google was a prerequisite for our Google Workspace integration — a security assessment covering data handling, authentication, and API access. We passed. Microsoft's trust requirements for the M365 integration followed a similar path. None of this was checkbox work. Each certification forced us to think carefully about how the product handles sensitive executive data, and that discipline made the product better.

The GTM strategy started with a market thesis built on Five Whys: MSP profitability has flatlined not because of execution problems, but because leadership lacks visibility. Dashboards exist but cognitive load prevents executives from using them effectively. No one in the market was addressing the executive experience directly — everyone was building for operators. That was our blue ocean. We named the category 'executive intelligence' and positioned against the cognitive load problem, not the inbox problem. The ICP was MSP owner-operators first, then professional services, then any small business executive. The outbound motion was direct: target the owner, not the IT team.

I led a team of 12 — engineers, designers, and contractors — across the full product lifecycle. Priorities were set using a decision matrix framework I carried over from mechanical engineering: weight the criteria, score the options, remove the gut-feel bias. Risk was managed using failure mode and effects analysis — for every feature we committed to, we mapped the ways it could fail, the impact on the user or the system, and what we'd do to prevent it. The engineering team always knew the full three-phase vision, not just the current sprint. You don't hand someone a single puzzle piece without showing them the box.

The hardest part of building from zero isn't the technology. It's staying focused on a specific customer while building something that could serve many. Every pivot — the UI, the compliance work, the go-to-market strategy — was a consequence of taking the product seriously enough to do it right. The rework was expensive. It was also correct.