Twenty-five years across MedTech, B2B SaaS, marketplaces, and semiconductors. Class III medical devices through clinical trials. Mobile platforms serving millions. Two books, forty essays, and a weekly closed-door peer group founders keep returning to.
Mobile platforms shipped to millions at 99.9% reliability. Billions of dollars in commerce enabled. Class III medical devices through clinical trials.
John is a seriously impressive individual. As an app developer, has produced beautiful, functional and popular apps. As a person, he is one of life’s stars. I met him through the Business of Software Conference where he has been a regular attendee for many years. Over the past few years he has also ‘sponsored’ attendance at the event for recent engineering graduates with the intention of giving someone an introduction into the world of software. Extremely generous with his time and energy.
Mark Littlewood CEO, Business of Software Conference
John brought together a group of people for a 1 hour call that provided more value than a week’s worth of one-off conversations.
Jonathan Zacks Founder & CEO, GoReminders
As a TinySeed mentor, John has provided great insight into many product and business questions I’ve had. We also had several conversations about hiring and managing engineers, and his experienced perspective as an engineering leader was incredibly valuable.
Matt Zunert Founder, DebugBear
John has always been quick to respond to our inquires with his wealth of knowledge and network of subject-matter experts. He’s transparent on what he can provide advice on and when we would recommend another expert. I’m appreciative of all the help he’s provided over the years.
Schoneck Shoaf COO & Co-founder, 1 Second Everyday
I’m a super-fan of everyone and everything related to John and BoS.
Jason Cohen Founder, WP Engine
John is a fantastic software engineer, he gets it done right. I enjoy working with and knowing him. John understands and appreciates good user experiences; he’s a designer’s best friend! Aside from enjoying working together, I enjoy intellectually stimulating conversations with him.
Jesse Guerrero Design Manager, Horizon Metaverse @Meta
Seventeen weekly sessions of the Executive AI Roundtable — closed door, Chatham House Rule, capped at eight CEOs per call. Same operators return month after month. Four of them, on the call:
John’s AI Roundtables are a great place to meet with like-minded practitioners talking through how they’re approaching AI. What’s working and what isn’t, without all the hype.
Nathan TylerCEO, BlinkMetrics
It was an absolute joy. It’s a fun group you set up — I got to learn from everyone here.
Ray DeckFounding Mentor, statechange.ai
What’s really great is that you’ve got smart entrepreneurs turning up. It’s an inside track on what people are experiencing in their organizations.
Mark LittlewoodCEO, Business of Software
Fun and insightful.
Alicia RojasTelos Labs
Public talks, recurring memberships, and the founder communities John works inside.
Raleigh, NC
“Networking for Founders” — the talk on building the relationships behind every funded round, key hire, and clean intro.
Portland, OR
“Managing Cybernetic Organisms” — facilitated an in-person roundtable for bootstrapped SaaS founders on hiring AI agents alongside human hires.
Limited Partner and active mentor. Working with B2B SaaS founders inside the accelerator.
Attendee for over a decade. Scholarship sponsor for engineering-graduate attendance for the next generation of operators.
Speaker, Istanbul. Delivered “Networking for Founders” to the European bootstrapper community.
Founder of the network connecting medical device executives, investors, and advisors.
A sample of the engineering work behind the advisory practice. Anonymized where clients ask; named where they don’t.
A wearable hardware startup brought John in because their previous consultants couldn’t get the system stable enough to test with early adopters. It was crashing every few minutes. The first thing he did was build the diagnostic tools and the simulator the team was missing — so they could finally see what was failing and reproduce it in isolation. Working with their quality engineer, they fixed crashes one by one. Within a few months it went from crashing in seconds to running for hours.
Once it was reliable, partners started using it in real conditions — and that exposed the real product challenge: the lab had never required them to synchronize more than a handful of devices, but field deployments meant simultaneous monitoring at much larger scale. John designed simulators that mimicked real-world deployment conditions, which let the team iterate fast on each performance challenge. They took the system from synchronizing 5 devices simultaneously to 50 — a clean 10x. The platform reached product-market fit, and the partner roster expanded on the back of it.
Concept through clinical trials. The regulated edge of the industry, end to end.
Mobile platforms serving millions of users. Multiple Apple App Store features along the way.
Marketplace and platform infrastructure (HomeAway / Vrbo and others) processing transactions at meaningful scale.
The two communities John has spent the most time inside: founders building a business, and engineers entering the field.
Founder-specific personal finance — concentration risk, paying yourself a real salary, and the retirement accounts small-business owners can use.
For engineersWritten for the technical student. Landing the role, acing technical interviews, and turning the assignment into a defendable resume line.
Forty-plus essays on AI strategy, organizational design, and the gap between hype and what works. Six the Roundtable kept returning to.
Frontier models barely came up. What kept surfacing was the harness operators are building around AI — five systems worth copying.
~6 min read ii.The arbitrage hiding between $5-Copilot rollouts and operator-class agents on top of a written-down operating system.
~8 min read iii.A founder takes one hour with Claude; his developers take four. The fix isn’t tools — it’s a shared team harness.
~5 min read iv.The intern test for AI permissions. The CEO addicted to doing their team’s work. The precondition for any AI rollout.
~7 min read v.When AI lets one founder run a Fortune-50-scale org chart, the rate-limiting skill becomes orchestrating teams of teams.
~6 min read vi.The people pulling ahead with AI aren’t better prompters — they’re better at teaching their tools.
~5 min readBuilt from the same thinking John brings to advisory work.
Draft a starter AI use policy. Covers tools, IP, governance, training, and incident response.
runtime ≈ 3 minScore your exposure when employees paste into AI tools. Get a prioritized fix list.
60 min / weekApply to attend the closed-door weekly call. Eight CEOs. Chatham House. No fee.
The Workshop is where the same thinking gets applied to your business. Three hours with John and seven peer CEOs, plus a private 1-on-1 mapped to your stack. Eight in the room, no more. If it isn’t worth every second, every dollar refunded.
Reserve Your Seat →Or talk to John about an advisory engagement — 3 to 5 active at any time.
