Roblox games for clout
Built games for Star Wars and Halo groups. Paid in clout.
I liked building things people used.
Co-founding PaddockGTM. We place operator-grade GTM Engineers at startups and B2B SaaS companies. It was born from distilling the consulting work of my biological brother, a 2x YC founding GTM engineer. We produce value-first content that attracts talent, then we vet them and place them in engagements that make sense.
Built games for Star Wars and Halo groups. Paid in clout.
I liked building things people used.
Fell in love with code. Read Flow, learned Blender and 3D animation, spent two years building games in Unity. Never shipped.
Learned how to build systems in my sleep. “Like building sand castles in the sky with your mind.”
Technical chair for my 9K-member Interact district. Helped raise $39K for a well project in Honduras.
First reps building for a real audience. Owned critical tech infra. Mentored by entrepreneurs, engineers, and philanthropists.
AWS cert, deep learning, UC Berkeley AI Hackathon, Cal Hacks, React and Next.js, freelance websites. Met my first high-agency people.
Being around them reset what I thought was possible.
Ex-PE operators and VC-backed talent, advised by the CTO of Mandolin. Built an omnichannel AI agent (voice, SMS, email) that qualified and booked leads. Dropped out for it. 8am to midnight, ~20 features a day.
Hardest problem: testing the agent. Now called agentic test harnesses.
Every CTO mentor said finish undergrad. I went to UC Irvine and felt like a kid. Built for service businesses on the side; one landing page helped convert $40K in a month.
My most useful work was outside the classroom.
Got kicked out (nothing devious). Lived with friends, freelanced, learned sales. Planned an IT firm, then a 3PL niche. A logistics founder told me to do something stable. Fixed things at home.
Picking a market for stability meant fighting incumbents for scraps.
Website as a service. Built an AI agent platform for editing lead sites; ran product and delivery from 0 to 1.
Strong operations on a simple problem can carry a business.
Teaching people to pivot into GTM engineering, with my brother. I shut it down: I'd rather get paid by businesses than put people on payment plans.
Thesis held, found a higher impact vehicle.
Same thesis, plus a conversation with a freelance recruiter making $500–700K a year.
Where the dots connect. Thesis ↑