Where it started
Curiosity came before the résumé.
One of my earliest serious ideas was a vertical lift firefighting aircraft. I studied what I could, talked with people around a small airport, drew the system, and cut a model from foam. The design was not practical, but the instinct was already there: see a problem, gather principles from different places, build the whole thing in my mind, and keep refining it until the useful shape appears.
By high school I was reading patents, robotics material, manufacturing equipment documentation, and software references for fun. I still learn that way. I do not need every detail memorized before I can see the architecture; I learn enough of the governing principles to connect fields that are usually kept apart.
What work taught me
Ideas become honest when real people depend on them.
Plant operations at Wheat Montana taught me to care about throughput, waste, staffing, maintenance, and the consequences of a system that fails. Custom work at Stray Bullet and BYU kept me close to craftsmanship, field conditions, and the knowledge that lives in people's hands, not only in software.
Founding Torii Industries and Scan and Sew added customer discovery, fundraising, licensing, commercialization, computer vision, and the reality of carrying an idea all the way from a whiteboard to a person who expects it to work. Today I bring that operator's standard to AI: grounding, records, tools, evaluation, and product judgment matter because a convincing answer is not the same as a useful system.
How I think
I hold the system in my head, swap the pieces, and look for the connection others missed.
I am always asking “what if?” I can visualize a product, process, or architecture, disassemble it mentally, move constraints around, and reject paths before they cost months in the real world. The part I enjoy most comes later: explaining the result and watching someone realize that a problem they have carried for years can work a better way.
