The founder’s mindset (and why it matters when you work with me)
What I mean by “founder mindset,” why it’s valuable, and the receipts across my ventures that show I’ve run the full business cycle — repeatedly.
Lumate was an adtech and real-time media trading venture that emerged from the Interdisciplinary Design Collaborative (IDC) and the mobile app studio era (IDC Projects). It became the “AdTrade” chapter: high-throughput systems for buying, selling, and pricing digital media, built under real constraints.
The work combined product strategy, technical architecture, fundraising, and operational execution — plus the hard lessons that come from operating inside capital structure, market pressure, and technical complexity at the same time.
If you want the cohesive narrative version, start with: The Lumate Arc.
IDC Projects: the student-run mobile app and game studio
How IDC Projects shipped 25+ mobile apps, built Memory Matches into a $1M+ franchise, and became the product-and-data engine that eventually grew into Lumate.
Lumate AdTrade — Algorithmic Ad Media Trading Platform
As co-founder, led a 10-engineer team to build a demand-side and supply-side platform that operated as a real-time market-maker in programmatic advertising —...
Machine Learning Pipeline for Automated Ad Pricing
Before TensorFlow existed, built a continuously-learning SQL-based machine learning system that optimized real-time bid pricing for programmatic advertising —...
The Lumate Arc: From Student App Studio to Adtech Venture
A public overview of how Lumate grew out of student projects, became a high-scale mobile advertising platform, hit structural limits, and reshaped what came next.
Microservices Architecture (Docker, ECS, Terraform)
Designed and built a containerized, auto-scaling microservices framework on AWS in 2014 — supporting services in Python, Node, Rust, and OpenResty with multi-region capability.
Agile Team Management as Engineering Manager
Helped a team of 10 engineers adopt issue tracking, documentation, sprint planning, standups, demos, and retrospectives. Introduced workstreams based on team...
AWS Infrastructure Cost Reduction — FinOps with Custom Tableau Dashboards
Built Tableau dashboards from AWS Cost and Usage Reports to give leadership visibility into cloud spend using Tableau, Tableau Server, AWS Athena, S3, and...
Capital Innovators — Startup Accelerator Participation
Participated in a 6-month startup accelerator in St. Louis as CEO/Founder of Lumate, refining business model and go-to-market strategy with mentorship from...
Sharded Redis Cluster for High-Capacity Low-Latency Buffer
Configured a 54-node, 1TB in-memory Redis cluster with Twemproxy for real-time ad-bidding data throughput, handling extremely high concurrent reads and writes...