Entrepreneurship

I've spent the last decade trying to make the world a better place through the companies I've founded. There have been some ups and downs, successes and failures, but through it all I've seen the best of American businesses and continued to grow as an engineer and leader.

Startup Scorecard		🦄
From	2023 -	📅
Raised	$ private	💰
Startups	> 530	📈
Eco. Impact	> $16,000,000	🏛️
Team	12	⚙️
Pat. Pending	1	🧪

Make Startups

Make Startups is an organization dedicated to the mission of increasing entrepreneurship activity in the United States.

We run a 3-month long bootcamp teaching new startup founders the basics and have developed AI-powered tools to make it easier than ever to operate a new business and gain access to capital.

Over the past 10 years, our non-profit foundation has served over 530 startups and helped those founders design, launch, and scale their new business. I joined the non-profit, MakeStartups.org, in early 2023 after shutting down Docket. What was supposed to be a part-time job to build a custom learning management system (LMS) to help them track student data, the LLM revolution had begun and we decided to spin out a for-profit software startup to combine my software solution to their educational program.

CofounderOS

We launched CofounderOS in October of 2023 at the Startup Champions Network Fall Summit and have been growing like crazy ever since.

Our product lives at an interesting intersection between startups and ESOs ESO stands for Entrepreneur Support Organization and is any type of organization that exists to train, mentor, and support new venture creation and entrepreneurship. and we're close to launching the third pillar of our platform -- Capital Access.

By providing the best tools to the startups, and easy cohort management and economic impact reporting analytics to the ESOs, and improve dealflow access to the capital partners, Make Startups and CofounderOS will revolutionize how startups in the United States get started. We're going to prove that: ... and then, the entire planet.

Anyone, Anywhere can Make Startups

Docket

A friend from American Family Ventures, Shreyas Gosalia, reached out to see if I could help him build a product and start a new company to tackle the messy, fragmented world of corporate legal teams. While working at AmFam Ventures, he noticed that the corporate legal department was one of the few corporate divisions that didn't have a best-in-class software product to help them manage their workflows.

From that initial conversation, we embarked on a four year journey trying to build THE legal tool for the entire industry.

Startup Scorecard		🏆
From	2019 - 2023	📅
Raised	> $1,400,000	💰
500 Startups	Batch25	🥳
Team	4	👨‍💻
Matters	> 7000	📜

Docket was an innovative project management, matter management, workflow automation, and collaboration tool designed to help legal teams manage their daily activities and take control of the thousands of legal requests flowing through their department every year.

We were accepted into Batch25 at 500 Startups 500 Startups was a world-class accelerator and we got immense value out of that relationship and experience. How they treat startups in the accelerator is a huge inspiration that I try to provide to all of our founders at Make Startups. and had an awesome time building what would eventually become the Docket platform -- a Matter Management platform and legal system of record for all legal requests inside large corporations.

We had gained some traction and had some inbound M&A interest, but the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank happened at the least opportune time in the middle of late-stage acquisition talks with several large LegalTech firms and we decided to shut down the company and explore other opportunities.

I love code

I'm very passionate about writing software to make the world a better place, and nothing embodies that quite like Open Source contributions. I agree with most of the principles of the Open Source movement, just with slightly less fervor than some of my peers.

More than a hobby, less than a lifestyle...

I love building businesses with software, so I think there must exist a place between rigid adherence to Free Software principles and closed-source walled gardens. Whenever possible, I release and contribute to Open Source projects that I am passionate about, and take a pragmatic approach to companies built using proprietary software.

Follow me on Github

PHPainfree

Library
Docs	web docs
Source	Github
Fork	PHPainfree
Star	Star

I started PHPainfree on April 21st, 2010 to win an argument with Mike Wales. At the time, he was a hardcore evangelist for Code Igniter and I was ... and still am a proponent of "get-the-hell-out-of-my-way-and-just-let-me-write-code" as a primary philosophy.

While my stance has softened (somewhat), I still firmly believe that the software engineering industry has a very bad habit of rigid adherence to frameworks to our detriment. Having worked professionally from the late 90s to today, I've seen frameworks come and go, and the only thing they seem to ever bring to the table is a guarantee of technical debt. Today's React app is yesterday's Ruby on Rails.

We Are Programmers

I wanted a "framework" that stayed out of my way and just let me focus on writing code, so PHPainfree was born. Written to be intentionally small and minimalistic, I've successfully used PHPainfree to be my secret weapon for the past 14 years. Whenever I need to build a web-based product, PHPainfree has let me build something fast, scalable, and capable of doing just what needs to be done and not spend hours fighting with opaque documentation and bizarre framework methods.

With the power and speed of PHP version 8, speedy development environments powered by Docker, and lightweight modern interactivity provided by what HTML should have added to the specification, PHPainfree2 was born.

Get it today at php.programming-is-easy and on Github at @Programming-Is-Easy/PHPainfree.

TabPad

I live inside my browser. One thing that has always frustrated me is that I'll often need to type in a complicated URL or need to reference some notes while typing. Before browsers like Google Chrome turned their URL bar into a complicated "let's actually do a Google Search" smart bar, I'd type little notes like IP addresses and such in the address bar to reference on the page.

I was playing around with Chrome Extensions and decided that what I really wanted was a nice persistent "notepad" built in to my browser. Both Chrome and Firefox allow you to override the default page displayed when you open a new tab, and that was the inspiration for TabPad.

Extension
Chrome	Web Store
Source	Github
Firefox	MZ Addons
FF Source	Github