My Journey & Story
The path from first venture to transforming healthcare technology
Entrepreneurship isn't a career path—it's a way of seeing the world. You look at problems and see possibilities. You look at inefficiencies and see opportunities. For nearly two decades, that lens has shaped every professional decision I've made, leading me eventually to healthcare technology and the founding of AxiaASC.
Growing Up at the Dawn of the Internet
If you came of age in the 1990s, you witnessed something unprecedented: the birth of a new world. I was a teenager when the internet went from an obscure academic network to the defining technology of our generation. Those formative years shaped everything about how I think about technology, innovation, and possibility.
"You've Got Mail" and the Digital Frontier
My first taste of the internet came through AOL—that iconic dial-up screech, the anticipation as the connection handshake completed, and finally: "You've Got Mail." AOL chat rooms were my introduction to the idea that geography didn't matter anymore. You could talk to someone across the country, or across the world, instantly. For a teenager in the pre-social-media era, this was revolutionary.
Those early days were raw and experimental. There were no rules because nobody had written them yet. Websites looked like digital ransom notes—animated GIFs, marquee text, hit counters proudly displaying double-digit visitors. But beneath the chaos was something electric: anyone could build something and put it in front of the entire world.
View Source: The Original Tutorial
I learned HTML the way most of us did back then—right-click, "View Source." No bootcamps, no YouTube tutorials, no Stack Overflow. You found a website you liked, looked at the code, and reverse-engineered how it worked. Then you experimented. Broke things. Fixed them. Built something slightly better. That iterative process became my default approach to learning anything.
My first "websites" were hosted on Geocities and Angelfire—free hosting services that let anyone carve out their corner of the web. I built fan pages, experimented with JavaScript (mostly annoying alert boxes and cursor trails), and learned that creating something and sharing it with strangers was deeply satisfying.
The Bandwidth Evolution
The jump from dial-up to DSL was transformative. No more tying up the phone line. No more getting kicked offline when someone picked up the receiver. Always-on internet changed how you thought about being online. It wasn't a destination you "went to"—it became ambient, woven into daily life. That shift from scarcity to abundance in connectivity foreshadowed how I'd later think about software: remove friction, and usage explodes.
I remember downloading my first MP3—it took hours over dial-up. I remember the first time a webpage loaded with actual photos instead of just text. I remember ICQ, AIM, and the birth of the buddy list. Each technological leap felt like magic.
"Growing up when the internet was being invented taught me that the impossible becomes possible faster than anyone expects. What seems like science fiction today is tomorrow's infrastructure."
The dot-com boom happened during my high school years. Companies were raising millions on ideas scribbled on napkins. Most of them failed spectacularly, but the ones that survived—Amazon, Google, eBay—redefined entire industries. Watching that cycle of wild optimism, crash, and eventual maturation taught me that hype cycles are real, but so is the underlying transformation they represent.
From Consumer to Creator
What made the early internet special wasn't just consuming content—it was the low barrier to creation. Today's platforms are polished but constrained. Back then, the web was messy, ugly, and gloriously open. If you could write HTML, you had the same publishing power as a corporation.
That democratization of creation shaped my worldview. Technology's greatest promise isn't efficiency—it's empowerment. The best tools don't just help you do things faster; they let you do things that were previously impossible. That principle guides everything I build today.
From dial-up to DSL to cable to fiber to 5G—I've lived through every major connectivity transition. From static HTML to Web 2.0 to mobile-first to AI-native applications. Each wave brought skeptics who said "this changes nothing" and true believers who claimed "this changes everything." Usually, the truth was somewhere in between, but the cumulative effect has been nothing short of transformational.
Those years as a teenage netizen—building bad websites, exploring chat rooms, watching an industry birth itself in real-time—instilled a permanent sense of technological optimism. The internet in 1995 was primitive. The internet in 2025 would be unrecognizable to my teenage self. And the internet in 2055 will be equally unimaginable to us now. Being present for the beginning gave me faith in the trajectory.
The Beginning: Learning by Doing
My entrepreneurial education didn't happen in a classroom. It happened in the trenches of early-stage ventures, where every dollar matters and every decision has consequences. I learned to code because we couldn't afford developers. I learned marketing because we couldn't afford agencies. I learned sales because if I didn't close deals, nobody ate.
Those early years taught me that resourcefulness beats resources. A scrappy team with the right mindset can outmaneuver well-funded competitors who've never had to fight for survival. That lesson still informs how I build companies today.
Affiliate Marketing & Digital Growth
My entry into the business world came through performance marketing at FASTLIFE LLC. Affiliate marketing is unforgiving—your results are measured in real-time, and the market tells you immediately whether your ideas work. It was a crash course in data-driven decision making, conversion optimization, and the importance of understanding customer psychology.
EmailOversight: B2B & Partnerships
Moving into business development at EmailOversight shifted my focus from consumer transactions to enterprise relationships. Email deliverability isn't glamorous, but it's critical infrastructure for every business. This role taught me the value of solving problems that aren't exciting but are essential—a lesson that directly informed my later work in healthcare.
Building Smash.com: DTC & E-Commerce
Co-founding Smash.com was my first experience building a consumer brand from the ground up. The fitness supplement space is brutally competitive—established players with massive marketing budgets, fierce customer loyalty, and sophisticated supply chains. Entering that market required finding edges wherever we could.
We focused on quality formulations and honest marketing in an industry plagued by dubious claims and questionable ingredients. Building the e-commerce platform taught me about user experience, conversion optimization, and the importance of building trust with customers who have endless alternatives.
"The best products tell the truth about what they are. Marketing that overpromises might generate first purchases, but it destroys repeat business."
Smash.com reinforced a principle I'd carry forward: success in any market comes from deeply understanding your customer's actual needs, not what you assume they want. The fitness community taught me about aspiration, commitment, and the psychology of self-improvement—insights that translate directly to healthcare.
The Healthcare Pivot: Finding Purpose
The decision to focus on healthcare technology wasn't sudden—it was a gradual realization that the skills I'd developed were perfectly suited to an industry desperately needing innovation. Healthcare is resistant to change, burdened by regulation, and yet profoundly important. The challenges are immense, but so is the potential impact.
I spent months talking to healthcare professionals before writing a single line of code. Surgeons, administrators, nurses, billing specialists—anyone who would share their daily frustrations. What I heard was consistent: the software designed to help them often made their jobs harder. Systems didn't talk to each other. Interfaces were designed by engineers who'd never set foot in an operating room.
Why Ambulatory Surgery Centers?
ASCs represent the future of healthcare delivery. Procedures that once required hospital stays are now safely performed outpatient, reducing costs and improving patient experience. But the software serving these facilities was built for hospitals and awkwardly adapted, not purpose-built for ASC workflows.
I saw an opportunity: build technology specifically for ambulatory surgery centers, designed from the ground up around their unique needs, leveraging AI to automate the tedious while preserving human judgment for the critical.
AxiaASC: The Current Chapter
Founding AxiaASC in 2024 was the culmination of everything I'd learned. Every lesson from affiliate marketing about understanding customer psychology. Every insight from B2B sales about building long-term relationships. Every principle from DTC about quality and trust. All of it applied to a sector where getting it right actually improves patient outcomes.
Our mission is straightforward: give ambulatory surgery centers the intelligent tools they need to operate efficiently, so healthcare professionals can focus on what matters—patient care. We use AI not to replace human judgment but to eliminate the administrative burden that pulls talented people away from their highest-value work.
Founder & CEO, AxiaASC
Leading product strategy, technology development, and company vision. Building a team that shares our commitment to transforming healthcare operations through intelligent software. Working directly with ASC partners to ensure our solutions solve real problems.
We're still early. The product is evolving, the market is learning about us, and every day brings new challenges. But the feedback from surgery centers using our platform confirms we're on the right path. When an administrator tells me we've saved them hours each week, or a scheduler says our AI caught a conflict they would have missed—that's why we do this.
Building with AI: The OpenAI API Journey
When I first started experimenting with the OpenAI API, it felt like those early days of the internet all over again—raw potential waiting to be shaped into something useful. The technology was powerful but untamed. The documentation was dense. The possibilities were overwhelming. It was exactly the kind of challenge I'd been looking for.
From Concept to Production
My first OpenAI integrations were experimental—chatbots that answered FAQs, text analysis tools, content generation pipelines. Each project taught me something new about prompt engineering, token optimization, and the art of getting consistent, reliable outputs from large language models. The learning curve was steep, but the payoff was immediate.
What struck me most about working with OpenAI's API wasn't just the capability—it was the accessibility. Here was technology that would have required a PhD team and millions in compute infrastructure just years earlier, now available through a simple API call. That democratization of AI capability mirrors what the early web did for publishing. The barriers to entry collapsed.
Applying LLMs to Real Problems
At AxiaASC, OpenAI's API became a foundational tool for building intelligent features. Automated scheduling suggestions. Natural language interfaces for complex queries. Document analysis that turns hours of manual review into seconds. The key was always the same: use AI to handle the tedious so humans can focus on the critical.
Working with GPT models taught me that the technology is only as good as how you frame the problem. A well-crafted system prompt beats a powerful model with poor instructions. Context windows matter. Temperature settings matter. The difference between a prototype and a production system is in these details.
"AI development isn't about replacing human intelligence—it's about amplifying it. The best AI tools make experts more productive, not obsolete."
Lessons from Building AI Products
After hundreds of hours working with OpenAI's API, certain truths emerged. First, start with the user problem, not the technology. It's tempting to build features because they're possible, not because they're needed. Second, reliability trumps capability. A simpler model that works consistently beats a powerful model that occasionally fails spectacularly.
Third, and most importantly: AI should feel invisible. The best implementations don't announce themselves. They simply make the product better. When a user says "this software just works," that's the goal—even if there's sophisticated AI under the hood making it work.
The AI landscape evolves rapidly. New models, new capabilities, new APIs. Staying current requires constant learning and willingness to rebuild what you just built. But that's what makes it exciting. We're still in the early chapters of what AI can do for healthcare and beyond.
What's Next
The next chapter is being written. Healthcare technology is evolving faster than ever, with AI capabilities expanding what's possible. Our focus remains on ambulatory surgery centers, but the principles we're developing—AI that augments rather than replaces, interfaces that respect users' time, systems that integrate rather than isolate—apply broadly.
My goal isn't to build the biggest company. It's to build something that genuinely improves healthcare delivery, that makes providers' lives easier, and that ultimately benefits patients. If we do that well, the business results will follow.
Nearly two decades in, I'm more energized than ever. The problems are harder, the stakes are higher, and the work is more meaningful. That's exactly where I want to be.