My career has never been a straight line. United States Naval Academy, the Navy, defense contracting, video games, Second Life, EMI, Meta, Google, SmartNews, plus a smattering of startups in between. Being intensely curious and mission driven, I’ve been fortunate to have a career spanning multiple, epochal changes.

We’re in one now, the largest and most consequential of my lifetime. It’s exciting and my plan to start 2026 had been pretty simple: write, code, and explore some new ideas.

Then I had a morning conversation with Grant Demaree, the co-founder and CEO of Onebrief. Right away I knew — like walking into Linden Lab 25 years ago — that my career was about to dramatically change again.

I am deeply honored and humbled by the opportunity to join Onebrief as CTO.

Onebrief

Onebrief was founded in 2019 to reinvent modern military command. Our mission is to provide military leaders with the tools for superhuman understanding, collaboration, decision-making, and output, using simulation, shared knowledge platforms, gaming, and AI.

If you built a company in a lab to align with my history and expertise, you would have created Onebrief. More importantly, in an increasingly dangerous, multi-polar world, Onebrief is uniquely positioned to help commanders make the best possible decisions at the right moments.

My friend Fred and I regularly talk about mission in the framework of teams and leadership. “Mission, people, me” has always been my approach to solving the hardest problems, and I can think of virtually no mission of higher importance than aligning the breakneck pace of AI with the nearly unimaginable complexity and responsibilities the United States military faces every day.

USNA

Having grown up during the Cold War and recognizing how lucky I was to be born in the U.S., it seemed almost inevitable that I would serve in the military.

Unlike many of my classmates, it wasn’t a family trade, though my Dad’s long career was rooted in national security. He started in the Army Corps of Engineers during Korea before building cameras for national security and scientific missions including Corona, Gambit, Hexagon, Apollo, Viking, the LFC, and many others. His work connected me to the space race and patriotic service from an early age.

Let’s be honest, at 18 years old, Top Gun, The Hunt for Red October, and a burning need to get as far away from home as possible all mattered, too. Obviously, I chose the premier branch of service and was at I-Day at USNA in summer of 1988 with 1,450 other members of the class of 1992.

While a few of my classmates are still in uniform, I think we are now outnumbered by children who followed in their parents’ footsteps. Just this factor alone would be enough to justify my desire to join Onebrief, a company so committed to helping military leaders make better decisions and ensuring more of them make it home from deployment safely.

But command is about to change profoundly and I am stoked to be a part of the transformation.

AI

The transformations of the last five years, driven by generative AI and Large Language Models, are unlike anything we have experienced. This shift is on par with the birth of aviation, the national electrical grid, or the automobile. From my early work with LLMs and generative product experiences at Google to building a fully agentic news app, I have spent years delivering products that leverage the newly possible.

None of us know exactly where AI is going to be a year or two from now. As I mentioned yesterday, whether you believe AGI falls on “accomplished” or “we’re on the fundamentally wrong path”, it is clear that AI enables fundamentally new experiences, even more capabilities are coming, and it creates a nearly unimaginably vast attack surface.

So, on the one hand, no target is more important or valuable than military commands and decision makers. And on the other, simulation, gaming, and agents create entirely novel opportunities for better information flows, collaboration, and decision making.

How could I possibly not work on these challenges?

Next steps

I’m currently eyeballs deep in the onboarding process at Onebrief, listening and learning. If you are a product or infra engineer, PM, or designer with a love of web development, incredibly dynamic challenges, and distributed teams, give a shout. And if you are an AI researcher or practitioner who’s made the leap to bet on where transformers will take us, I want to talk to you as well.

Together we can make command superhuman.

And for my many classmates and friends still in uniform, know that you have a new tech support point of contact at Onebrief.