What I’m Focusing On Now#

Alright, so it’s been a minute. A quick glance at the previous version of this page reveals someone who was last coherent in early 2025 and then just… stopped updating. We’re going to fix that right now.

Professional Life#

• SVP, Engineering at Lark, March 2023 - May 2025.
• VP Engineering at Strive Health. Joined October 2025. Leading engineering for a platform doing important work in kidney care.
• Chief Tentacle Officer, Groktopus LLC. Still alive, still writing about AI and the future of work over at groktop.us.

What Changed Since I Last Updated This Page#

Look, I know the whole point of a /now page is “right now, not back then.” But given that my last update was “I really need to re-learn Python” (a sentence so 2024 it hurts), you’re getting the highlights reel.

June 7, 2026#

Compiled the Nanocorn Bible. Published a personal reference ebook pulling together all the deep research notes from the Groktopus newsletter. It’s my compendium of the nano-unicorn pattern I’ve been tracking: startups getting smaller and smaller while their ARR and EBITDA climb. Trying to find the real signals: the patterns and the anti-patterns in what’s actually working out there.

From research to practice. The deeper I dig into the solopreneur SaaS pattern, the more I think about giving it a go myself. Completely bootstrapped. No VCs until they need me more than I need them.

What replaces money. Published a new piece: “What Replaces Money: The Flywheel Y Combinator Describes But Never Names.” I had an AI agent extract and analyze all 464 YC Library articles. The word "flywheel" appears exactly once. But the mechanics are everywhere: eval compounding, integration depth, trust velocity. YC has described a new economic primitive that replaces capital as the growth lubricant for startups. They just refuse to name it, because naming it would force an admission they can’t afford: the nano-unicorn business model doesn’t need venture capital at all.

June 6, 2026#

GroktoCrawl had a day and then some. Ended up pushing 13 PRs. What’s already here is the shape of it, but there’s more: a Reddit adapter for post and comment extraction, a Substack adapter that reliably pulls articles through the RSS feed instead of chasing paywalls, observability infrastructure (health probes, /metrics, structured logging), proxy support docs, and the intelligent scrape cache with ETag-based revalidation that’s been on the list for weeks. Then late in the evening a web portal landed: single search bar, SSE-streaming answers with citations, recent queries. Google-inspired minimalism wired to the answer endpoint. Docker container, FastAPI backend, fits in the existing stack.

Edited a five-article nano-unicorn series for groktop.us. Going out next week, one day apart. The thread runs through AI pilot economics (your $500 POC becomes $847K/month at production), the real unit economics behind Cursor’s $1.23 API cost per revenue dollar, the mutiny strategy of burning your own product before someone else does it for you, why token-maxing without a strategy is just burning money, and the dark factory — three engineers, no human code review, $1,000 a day in tokens, shipping to production. It’s a cohesive argument about what the nano-unicorn model actually looks like when you stop talking about it and start doing it.

Specialist profiles multiplied. Added four more profiles to hermes-profiles: security-engineer, backend-engineer, frontend-engineer, and data-engineer. Each gets its own methodology skill with references, and they all share the common skill pool through symlinks. The roster is up to 20 profiles now.

Two articles went out. “The Org Chart in a Box.” What happened when I put 13 specialized AI agents in a kanban pipeline to write a software architecture spec. And “Maximize Work Not Done” a nano unicorn take on Agile Principle 10.

Fixed a hermes-cashew sleep cycle bug where the cron job never actually ran due to lifecycle churn. The graph had been running on fumes for a while. Should be purring now.

Started hurrmes. A TUI client for the Hermes API Server built with Bubble Tea. Early days but the shape is right.

June 4, 2026#

Pushing Hermes Agent hard. The more I throw at it, the more it delivers. Been building out multi-agent swarms with mixed specialist profiles: researcher, architect, product manager, writer, reviewer, all working the same complex problem through structured kanban handoffs. The friction between specialists is where the real insight comes from. It’s a different workflow than having one generalist agent do everything.

Open Source Projects#

I’m maintaining a few things right now:

• hermes-cashew. A thought-graph memory provider for Hermes Agent. Gives AI agents persistent, structured memory across sessions instead of starting from zero every conversation. Apache 2.0, built in Python, getting real use.

• groktocrawl. Self-hosted web scraping and research stack. What started as a Firecrawl alternative turned into something more capable: multi-page crawling, JS-rendered content, LLM-friendly output. Runs on Docker, works with any agent framework.

• agent-skills. A growing library of reusable skill modules for Hermes Agent. Reference patterns, workflow templates, and standalone skills I’ve extracted from real use. If you’re running Hermes, there’s probably something useful in here.

• hermes-council. A multi-agent debate framework that composes panels of expert personas to surface hidden assumptions and stress-test ideas. MIT licensed, open source from day one. I use it for everything from editorial review to strategic analysis.

What I’m Reading (or Rather, Listening To)#

I’m not actively reading anything at the moment, but the audiobook pipeline has been strong:

• “Different Kind of Power” by Jacinda Ardern. Recently finished. Her leadership during the Christchurch response and COVID was remarkable, and her reflection on what principled leadership looks like in practice is worth anyone’s time.
• “107 Days” by Kamala Harris. Just wrapped this up. A focused, personal account of a compressed political campaign that offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how modern presidential campaigns actually operate. I wish she’d won. Hard not to think about what a different world we’d be in right now.

I should probably pick up a physical book again at some point. We’ll see.

This is my now page, inspired by Derek Sivers. It’s a snapshot of what I’m focused on at this point in my life. I promise not to let another four months go by before the next update.

More research on my about Now Pages note.