About

Every wave of new technology hits the same wall: the product works before the market knows what to do with it.

I’ve been on the commercial side of technology the market hasn’t caught up to for 30 years, starting on Microsoft’s first browser team. Since then I’ve worked on 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.

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 run Upshift, helping companies commercialize AI before they’re on the wrong side of it, and write Sideband on the infrastructure shifting underneath it all.

What Founders 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, and he naturally makes connections relevant for our business.

Shawn brings great experience, wide-ranging knowledge and deep expertise to the table. He was able to quickly understand our existing strategy, market position and operations, then fine tune and adjust to drive tremendous results.

Shawn’s 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.

Consulting & Advisory

I take on a handful of go-to-market consulting engagements with founders in AI, Bitcoin, and decentralized infrastructure, and I hold a few long-horizon board seats with startups building at the frontier.

Press & Media

For press, conferences, or podcasts, bios and photos are on the media page.