About
Why I build lean, and build it myself.
For years I did everything you are supposed to do. Top of my class in computer science, twice. A good consulting job, then a better-paid one with the title to match. By every measure that was supposed to count, I was winning. Inside, I was miserable.
Most of the work felt irrelevant, buried under politics and noise, and I told myself that was simply what work was. Then my mother got sick. I spent her last months answering emails from waiting rooms while she slipped away beside me. After that I could not keep pretending the work mattered.
A few weeks later, they asked me to leave. A Slack message, at 7 PM, and a payout to close it quickly. It did not land as a blow. It landed as relief.
Because that was the day I stopped chasing the wrong scoreboard.
How I build now
I did not want a bigger title or a bigger team. I wanted to build small, useful things, make good money from them, and own my time while I did it. So that is what I have done ever since. Every business I have built, I have built alone. No team, no investors, no head office. Not because I don't enjoy working with others, I do. But because most businesses carry far more weight than they need to.
I learned to care about what is left over, not what comes in: a lean operation that keeps most of what it earns beats a bigger one that bleeds it back out in overhead.
Headcount is not the goal. Leverage is.
None of this meant leaving real engineering behind. I have spent ten years building software: consultant then cloud architect at Reply, senior engineer at Bending Spoons, and today designing and building apps for San Raffaele, one of Italy's top hospitals.
I still write code every week.
What has changed is that AI now does a growing share of the work that used to take a whole team. That is the part I find genuinely exciting. Not because it is fashionable, but because it finally lets a small operation do serious things.
Most of the people I work with have been sold AI before. A demo that dazzled, a tool nobody opened twice, a bill that kept arriving. I get it. That is exactly the bloat I spent years cutting out of my own work.
These days I do the same thing for other owners. I look at a business the way I look at a system: work out what is really going on, find the change with the highest payoff, and build it. I find where AI can take real work off your plate, and I ship it, the same way I do for myself. No course to sell you, no plan to teach you my job.
If you run a lean business and you want AI to take real work off your plate, without the hype, this is the work I like best.
10+ years building for
- Reply
- Bending Spoons
- San Raffaele
Let's talk
If any of this sounds like your business, let's talk.
A short call, twenty minutes, no pitch. I'll tell you honestly whether there's something here worth doing.