Build better products. Run a stronger business

Before committing capital to a full build, it pays to know who will use the product, what it must accomplish, and what the business can afford. I help answer those questions and turn them into clear requirements, an engineering plan, and inexpensive early tests that settle risky decisions before they become expensive to undo.

That work spans CAD and engineering analysis, software, supplier selection, and organizing the mechanical, electrical, and software contributors—deciding where off-the-shelf parts will do the job and where custom design is worth the effort.

At DeepDiveBio, I co-founded the company, designed the early mechanics, and led the team that shipped evaluation thermal cyclers. At Telesis Bio, I built and led the innovation team that delivered three beta synthesis instruments. At Mimulus, the task was earlier: define a DNA-storage service, connect its technical stages to a realistic budget, and build interactive software so customers and investors could see how it worked.

A robot can move a sample to the exact right spot and still ruin the preparation. A sensor can log clean numbers without giving a researcher the measurement they actually need. I start with what the experiment or chemical process requires, then design the hardware, controls, measurements, and operator steps around it.

In practice, that means turning a finicky manual bench protocol into custom fixtures, fluidic and thermal controls, calibration tools, and operator software that hold up in daily use. My work includes adapting a stored liquid-handling robot for battery research at Wildcat, automating 12-hour flame experiments at UC San Diego, and integrating three synthesis instruments into Synthetic Genomics’ DBC workcell.

When an operation falls behind or struggles with quality, I work alongside the team on the floor to see where jobs actually stall. Sometimes the bottleneck is a machine or a chemical step; just as often, it comes down to staffing, supplier packaging, maintenance, or disconnected records that make failures hard to trace.

At Telesis Bio, I brought engineers, chemists, and operators into one unified production team, scaling output to six million DNA bases per quarter with above 99.8% first-pass yield. At Racer, I wrote the quality manual and built a custom web app to track controlled documents, raw-material lots, and batch records without a bloated software subscription.

A strong technical product still needs a clear path to revenue. I help figure out which customers feel the problem most acutely, what proof they need before switching, and how their organization actually buys—adjusting positioning, pricing, sales channels, or the service model to fit.

At Racer, I connected publication-based prospecting with scientific marketing, university purchase-order checkout, and six distribution and marketplace agreements. At Eton, I reorganized sales across four branches and worked with the team to grow specialty oligo sales by 50% using capabilities already in our labs. At BenchSwap, I turned founder-community outreach into our first placed customer, an agreed recurring placement fee, and our first invoice while developing host, equipment, and lab-services relationships.

What are you trying to build or fix, and what is getting in the way? We can talk through the problem and decide whether a focused project or an ongoing role makes sense.