The long arc.

I went to Drexel University to study commerce and engineering - a combination that, in retrospect, set the tone for every company I have built since. While I was still in school, I started a small managed-technology-services company that worked with regional organizations. It was a good business that I ran with no training, no mentor, and a great deal of stubbornness.

What I learned in those years had almost nothing to do with technology and everything to do with what it feels like to be responsible for an outcome. Clients are not patient with your education. Payroll is not patient with your education. The work either gets done or it doesn't.

In 2012 I founded AEFIS - an assessment management platform for higher education. The premise was simple and unfashionable: universities were measuring the wrong things, in the wrong ways, and the existing tools treated assessment as a feature rather than a craft.

We started with three people. We bootstrapped. We were insistently unsexy in a market full of glossy EdTech ambition. For a long stretch, the company looked like very little was happening - which is the texture of slow compounding work when you're inside it.

What we were doing, quietly, was earning the right to be serious. We were learning the institutional language of higher ed, the politics of accreditation, the way that decisions actually get made on a university campus. There is no shortcut for that.

Between 2016 and 2020, AEFIS became something we hadn't quite imagined when we started. We were named to the Philadelphia 100^® twice - first in 2016 and again in 2017 - as one of the region's fastest-growing private companies. More importantly, the way that leading universities thought about assessment had begun to shift, and we had something to do with that.

I keep one image from that period: standing in front of a room full of provosts and assessment directors who, a few years earlier, hadn't returned my emails. They had questions. They had problems we were uniquely positioned to solve. The slow work had quietly built a relationship with the field.

The pandemic compressed years of organizational change into weeks. We rebuilt AEFIS as a fully distributed company across three continents, redesigned how the team collaborated, and emerged - against most reasonable expectations - significantly more productive than before. The team's resilience in that stretch is one of the things I will carry with me for the rest of my career.

The numbers, written down now, look almost too clean.

In 2021 we sold the company to private equity after reaching about $4M ARR, producing meaningful returns for early angel and seed investors. The exit is the line on the resume. The chapter is what built the people I most want to keep working with.

After the AEFIS exit, I stepped back from operating for a while. I read, wrote, and spent time with operators, technologists, researchers, and people thinking seriously about AI, organizations, and human work. Some of those essays were private notes at the time, and a few have started to become useful now.

What was forming, slowly, was a category. AI was beginning to do extraordinary things at the individual level - and almost nothing at the team level. The miracles were private. The work, at the level of organizations, was still being done the same old way. That gap is the thing I could not stop thinking about. It eventually had a name: Shared Intelligence.

I started Sociail to build the thing the essays kept pointing to: a shared workspace where people and AI teammates work from the same room, against the same memory, in the same permissioned context. The first act, AEFIS, was about changing how universities measure what students learn. The second act, Sociail, is about changing what it means for a team to think.

We are pre-launch as of this writing. The infrastructure is running. The first collaboration architecture is in place. The product surface is being polished through active Design Partner projects with teams already doing serious AI-heavy work. Early Access opens June 1, 2026.

If the first chapter was about being responsible for an outcome, and the long middle chapters were about earning the right to be serious in a domain, this chapter is about building something I have wanted to use for years - and hoping that a small, opinionated group of people want to use it too.