About

I got my first computer at eight and was dialing into BBSes by fourteen. I studied computer science. My first real career move was joining Microsoft in ‘97 as an Internet Evangelist on their first browser team, back when “the internet” was still a hard pitch to corporate buyers.

I’ve been on the commercial side of technology the market hasn’t caught up to for 30 years. Early hosting infrastructure at Exodus, IoT hardware into big-box retail, personal data sovereignty, and Bitcoin payments at Bottlepay, NYDIG, and Amboss. The product changes every few years. The challenge doesn’t: the technology works, the market doesn’t understand it yet, and someone has to bridge the gap.

Along the way I watched the internet get captured. The open platforms I’d helped grow became surveillance systems and extraction machines. Broken money led to broken incentives, and everything downstream followed. That experience shapes what I choose to work on now, and what I write about.

Today I consult and advise founders in AI, Bitcoin, and frontier tech. Fractional roles, project-based work, and advisory boards. The essays here come from that work, and from three decades of it before.

Advisory Boards

I take a small number of advisory board seats with startups building at the frontier—AI, Bitcoin, decentralized infrastructure. Equity-based, long-horizon. If you’re building something real and want experienced eyes on your go-to-market, let’s talk.

What People Say

Shawn is our go-to when it comes to business development and enterprise sales. He does an amazing job relating his experiences and applying frameworks to the problems we’re looking to solve. He’s responsive and flexible, and he naturally makes connections relevant for our business.

Shawn is an exceptional asset in any business context, especially so in Bitcoin-focused companies like ours. His guidance is practical, drawn from deep experience, and beneficial for both immediate action and long-term goals.

Shawn’s expertise in Bitcoin business strategy has been crucial in developing BDK’s outreach. As a developer, I struggle with project promotion, but Shawn helped me identify and communicate our value effectively. I highly recommend Shawn to anyone starting or growing a Bitcoin project.