Why I Left Finance to Build the Future of Work
An incredible team of talented builders, dreamers, engineers (and me) are currently working on the missing link in enterprise tech.
I think of it like a “cognitive capital” money printer.
We aren’t just building another SaaS tool. We are engineering a fundamental shift at the intersection of:
AI
Enterprise Architecture
Human-first, Agent-powered
We are building the first true AI Operating System for work. If you are a builder, investor, or leader who wants to maximize the value of AI, you are in the right place.
Connect with me to discuss.
The Matrix of Capital: My 16 Years in Finance
My journey started in the trenches of Investment Banking 16 years ago.
For an intensely energetic and fiercely analytical mind, it was the ultimate playground.
I fell completely in love with the intellectual architecture of finance. I obsessed over engineering the complex, high-velocity machinery required to move massive risk around the globe. It was an intricate, high-stakes dance of allocating capital to where it could do the most good. I viewed finance as the absolute circulatory system of the world… we were the arteries ensuring the “energy” got to the right organs.
But as I climbed the ladder, a nagging, unavoidable friction began to take root.
I looked at the work we were actually doing. We were master-class experts at distribution. We could slice risk into a thousand bespoke tranches. We could teleport capital from New York to Hong Kong in a fraction of a millisecond.
But were we actually creating anything?
I realized that finance, in its purest, most ruthless mechanism, doesn’t bake the pie, it just engineers new ways to slice it. I didn’t want to just move value around a spreadsheet. I wanted to generate it. I wanted to build autonomous systems that didn’t just account for the economy, but actually ignited it.
I realized I was a builder trapped in a banker’s body.
So, I ripped the band-aid off. I left.
The First Pivot: Forcing Machines to Think (2011)
I dove headfirst into technology with a singular, consuming obsession: Systematization.
In 2011 I started experimenting at the bleeding edge of finance and code. I launched a hedge fund. This was an era long before “LLM” was a household acronym and before ChatGPT was even a glimmer in OpenAI’s eye.
But this wasn’t a standard, suit-and-tie fundamental analysis shop. I built a system predicated on machine reading. We were forcing software to digest agonizingly dense financial statements, thousands of pages of 10-Ks and 10-Qs, to extract tradable insights faster than an army of human analysts ever could.
My team and I didn’t have off-the-shelf APIs.
We brute-forced a custom NLP engine using Python to aggressively parse and analyze unstructured text from SEC filings and earnings calls.
We engineered novel sentiment analysis algorithms utilizing a weighted, multi-layered method comprised of TF-IDF, n-grams, and bag-of-words models.
Our goal?
To mathematically quantify “operator confidence” and detect the microscopic, subtle shifts in executive tone or word selection that signaled a change in financial trajectory.
Delivering this system required building relentless ETL pipelines to scrape, ingest, and normalize massive, chaotic datasets, converting raw human language into structured time-series data for algorithmic backtesting. Data engineering at this level is borderline masochistic. A single change anywhere can rupture your entire pipeline.
I absolutely loved every grueling minute of it.
That experience was my first real glimpse behind the curtain of the future. I watched as a machine parsed language, understood deep context, and derived massive value from raw data.
It was primitive by today’s standards, but the revelation was permanent: Technology can do the heavy lifting of human cognition.
The Plumbing of Business: The RevSystems Era (2022)
If the hedge fund taught me about the explosive power of data, my next venture taught me about the crushing friction of human workflows.
I founded RevSystems to solve a systemic disease that infects every enterprise, yet almost no one knows how to cure: The Silo Problem.
We built software that acted as the connective tissue between the disparate, deeply disconnected organs of a business. We forced the CRM (where sales live), the Sales Engagement Platforms (where outreach happens), and the Accounting Platforms (where the financial truth lives) to finally talk to each other.
RevSystems was designed to ruthlessly expose the true effectiveness and efficiency of Go-To-Market motions. It was a brutally honest truth-telling machine.
But in building it, I saw something truly terrifying. I stared directly into the abyss of corporate waste.
I saw brilliant, highly compensated people reduced to human APIs, stuck blindly copying and pasting data. I saw entire sales teams sprinting in the wrong direction because their operational data was divorced from financial reality. I saw that despite billions of dollars poured into shiny SaaS tools, the fundamental “process” of work was profoundly broken.
We had digitized our tools, but we had utterly failed to optimize our flow.
The AI Convergence
This brings us to the present moment. Over the last few years, two parallel tracks in my life violently but beautifully collided.
The Operator’s View: Through RevSystems, I lived the messy, chaotic reality of how enterprises actually operate. I saw the crippling inefficiencies, the blind spots, and the desperate, screaming need for a centralized “control tower.”
The Futurist’s View: I watched the tectonic explosion of Generative AI. I looked back at my 2011 hedge fund and realized that the impossible technology I dreamt of back then had finally arrived.
AI is not just a cute parlor trick for writing emails or generating stock images. It is the missing link in human commerce. It is the only technology capable of bridging the gap between the binary data of our legacy platforms and the fluid, chaotic nuance of human work.
I saw that it was finally possible to build a platform that doesn’t just help enterprises operate faster but fundamentally operates them better.
Introducing Vega: The AiOS for Work
In the fall of 2025, my co-founder Lisa Griffith and I launched Vega AiOS.
Vega is the culmination of everything I have learned, from the frenetic energy of the trading floor to the cold logic of the server room. It is the absolute first platform built on a radical new philosophy: The Trinity of Process, Platform, and People. Vega exists to violently empower organizations to align and optimize all three.
Most legacy work tools today are severely limited. They either:
Track the work (bloated Project Management tools).
Do the work (rigid Automation and Collaboration tools).
Vega does both and injects a layer of omniscient visibility and intelligence that has never existed before.
Viewing the Work: Vega provides the first true god-mode view of work happening across your firm. It doesn’t just tally the “results” of the work, it intimately understands the “actions” in the workflow. It creates a living, breathing digital twin of your organization’s operational pulse.
Influencing the Work: This is the engine room. We didn’t build passive dashboards, we built active engines. Vega utilizes AI-based optimization to proactively suggest and inject changes into your processes. It hunts down bottlenecks and exposes massive optimization opportunities that even the sharpest human manager would miss.
Implementing Automation: Vega closes the loop. It doesn’t just hand you a report saying “this process is slow.” It actively helps you restructure the process or platform while automating the exact manual steps that are choking your growth.
We are building Vega because the modern enterprise is flying blind at Mach 3. We are suffocated by software as we starve for wisdom.
The average 50-person accounting firm has 63 applications.
We are a platform that sits on top of all the other technology and across all the teams, elevating them with an AI Operating System that gets smarter every day.
Vega is clarity in the chaos.
Technology as the Ultimate Human Force
Why am I doing this?
It goes back to that visceral feeling I had when I walked away from finance. I didn’t want to just move money, I wanted to build engines that create real, enduring value.
I fundamentally believe that technology is the greatest force for good in human history. It is the ultimate lever that allows us to do more with less. It’s the mechanism that breaks our admin chains so we can unleash true creativity.
There is a loud, fearful narrative today that AI is going to replace us. I reject that narrative completely. AI is going to elevate us.
I am dedicating my life to maximizing the flow of this technology into the hands of the people who actually move humanity forward:
The Workers: Who deserve to be liberated from soul-crushing, robotic tasks.
The Builders: Who need tools that can finally match the speed of their imaginations.
The Communicators: Who need instruments to cut through the rising noise.
The Leaders: Who need to set all these people up for success in an environment of constant technological acceleration and cultural mutation.
The Road Ahead
We are just getting started.
Lisa and I are building Vega as more than just a software company. We are building the definitive proof of concept for the future of work.
We are accelerating toward a reality where we get our admin time back. This means we have more resources to focus on the uniquely “human” elements of work (initiative, strategy, empathy, creativity, and judgment). Vega lets them take their rightful place on center stage.
If you are a leader trying to understand your own organization, a builder trying to elevate your vision or an investor interested in the future of work, I invite you to follow our journey. Connect with me on LinkedIn or message me here.
Let’s stop just moving risk around. Let’s start building. Let’s make the most of AI.
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