Not the resume you would draft on purpose.

It started at a speakeasy. The No Name Bar in Boulder, a 50-capacity room where I booked live music six nights a week and grew nightly revenue from $200 to $3,000. The venue ran on relationships. Gregory Alan Isakov played secret shows to work on new material several times a year. Nate Cook and The Yawpers held a monthly residency. The Samples would play a show, then individual members would come back to headline on their own. Nathaniel Rateliff sent me a demo. I booked him for $50 and free food. He is selling out Madison Square Garden now.

Seeking earlier nights and a push past my comfort zone, I went to Kampala, Uganda, and taught six subjects across K–12 at a small international school. I wrote a social studies curriculum from scratch because there was not one. Every student passed the IGCSE Writing Exam.

I came back and have been teaching ELA in Eugene, Oregon ever since. Seven years and counting, currently 6th and 8th grade at Prairie Mountain. Every time the district adopted new curriculum, teachers tied themselves in knots trying to adapt. I led development of district-wide ELA power standards: identified the standards that matter most, rewrote them in student-facing language, and built common formative assessments and rubrics. Adopted across all grade levels. It gave our district a solid base from which to be proactive instead of reactive.

I built these because I got tired of tools that treated teachers like they did not understand their own students.

Earlier this year I started building an AI tool to help me write lesson plans, and I could not stop. Eight shipped products in six weeks. The biggest is PANDA: a behavior-and-academics platform for middle school teachers. One noticing framework for the four quadrants PBIS and the gradebook leave out. Built for the kids neither tool was watching. Under the hood: 14 tools across 9 subjects, a Voice Profile system that learns each teacher's writing, all on Google Apps Script and the Claude API.

The gap between what teachers actually need and what product teams imagine they need is one of the most expensive problems in edtech.

I have consulted with school district superintendents and curriculum chairs, bridging practical and theoretical approaches to district-wide AI tool adoption. I understand the buy side: how districts evaluate tools, what makes administrators nervous, what makes them excited, and why the gap between a product demo and actual classroom implementation is where most edtech value gets lost.

That same posture has shown up outside education. I have consulted on California energy policy, producing research and briefings on solar, storage, and the political side of the grid. Different room, same standard. The work has to hold up in front of people who know the terrain better than I do.

I am building PANDA toward something real and looking for the right next chapter. Founder. Consultant. Advisor. Open to the shape.