When I was about twelve, I got a pen for Christmas with my initials engraved on the barrel: BWG. I remember turning it over in my hand and thinking it would be cool to have my own company one day. I didn't care how big it was, and I had no picture of what it would do. I was taken with seeing my name on something. The idea was simple: it would be mine, it would be useful to people, and I'd be proud of it.
Tomorrow we finish moving Gadoci Consulting into its first office, sixteen months after we started. I've been walking past the space for weeks, and I still stop on my way out to take another look.
We played company
Around the same time, my brothers and I used to play "company." We stacked a few plastic shelves into something that passed for a desk, sat around it, and held meetings. I couldn't tell you what the meetings were about. We liked sitting at a table together, working on something that was ours.
The pen sat on display in my room for a while. When my family moved to Texas, it came with me. Through high school it lived in smaller and smaller boxes, but I kept it. Then my parents divorced the summer before I left for college, and in the scramble to figure out what to do with all my stuff, the pen got lost.
Smaller boxes
The idea had a similar life. In college I started Austin2night, a site where my friends wrote daily guides to what was happening around town for college students, and Big Fry IMS, a web and marketing shop my roommate and I ran to give small businesses a big presence. After college I became a financial advisor, and it went well. Being around people who had built real companies, people like Brett Hurt, made the thing I'd imagined at twelve feel possible. At thirty, with a nine-month-old at home and my wife pregnant with our second, I left advising to build something of my own. It felt like now or never.
It didn't work the way I hoped. For the next seventeen years I worked hard at a lot of different things and kept building on the side. There was Wodstack, a CrossFit tracking app that grew to thousands of users; Paprika.sh, an opinionated website builder I coded while sick with the flu; and PitchFish, a marketplace where sales reps could pay prospects directly for a meeting. I helped a friend build SparkShelf, a wooden shelf with a wireless phone charger inside, and my kids and I made Moment Coins, wooden coins for marking a kid's rite-of-passage moments, which was its own reward. Some got a little traction. None of them really broke out. Without ever deciding to, I kept moving the idea into smaller boxes.
Around forty I nearly set it down. I told my wife I felt like I was supposed to wait, and it didn't feel good to say out loud. I wondered whether there was more left for me, and whether I still had the energy to go after it.
The note
AI showed up in late 2022, and it fit how I think and work in a way nothing had before. At data.world, friends I trusted gave me room to run with it, and I became VP of AI Operations.
Even so, by early 2025 I was restless. Late one Friday night in February, I sat down and wrote a long note to myself. The first line reads "Vision of the next me."
That note was a pep talk. I painted a picture of what the next version of me might look like and argued with myself about why I wasn't there yet. I'd built good things over the years, and I said so plainly: "I've created great stuff. Those things aren't breaking me out." I was doing well, and I was thankful for it. What frustrated me was the sense that I wasn't using what I'd been given to its full potential, and that the person most in the way was me. "Maybe it's time to step into just being me," I wrote. I didn't know yet what that would look like, and I told myself to stop worrying about the how and take the chance.
The rest of the note read like a set of instructions. Make the big move. Be brave. Lean into AI Operations. Find places to speak about it. Step up and lead, and use whatever I had for as much good as I could. Underneath all of it, I was telling myself that the story wasn't over and that I deserved another run.
I didn't know data.world was about to be acquired. I didn't have a plan for a company. I had a note on my phone. A few months later the acquisition happened, and I had to decide what came next.
There's a verse I've leaned on through this whole stretch, Exodus 4:12: "Now go! I will be with you as you speak, and I will instruct you in what to say" (NLT). What I love about it is the order. The first instruction is to go, and the help comes after you've started. So that summer I started Gadoci Consulting, without much more than the note and that verse.
Sixteen months
For years I've told other people that you know you're headed in the right direction when the work is hard but not complicated. I'm not sure I believed it myself until now. These sixteen months are the hardest I've ever worked, and I've never known a subject better. In that note I also wrote that it would be "way easier than I think," and that turned out to be right too. The work has been hard, but for once I haven't had to drag it forward. After seventeen years of pushing things uphill, this one took on a life of its own.
What surprised me is how the obstacles kept resolving. Early on I wondered how we'd build real IP in a field this new. One thing led to another, and we built it. I worried about finding people I could trust to do this work with me. People started showing up, and a team came together that I'd put in front of any client we have.
Today that team works across departments in large organizations, helping people put AI into the work they do every day. Some of that work is education, some is changing a process, and some is building the tools that make it possible. Seeing our people take ownership of those relationships and carry the work forward has been one of the most satisfying parts of building this company.
Clients took a chance on us, and every contract we've signed has been extended. I'm prouder of that than anything else we've done. It means the work is useful to the people who pay for it, which was the whole idea back when the idea was just a pen. For the first time in my career, the problems I hit kept having answers on the other side of them, and I don't think I can take credit for all of that.
I'm forty-eight. It took most of my life for the technology, my experience, and the skills I'd been sharpening to land in the same place at the same time.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow we finish moving in. The office is an old fire station on a corner, next door to the house where our best friends lived through the years we were all raising young kids, a short walk from my house and from the place we eat dinner every night. What gets me when I stop on my way out is simpler than the building. At twelve I wanted to see my name on something. The pen had my initials. Now that name is on a company that wouldn't exist without the team that builds it with me.
This is going well, and there's still a lot of work in front of us, every day and for years to come. Part of that is the work our team does, and part of it is timing: companies need real help putting AI to work, and we were ready when they started asking. I don't take any of it for granted. If it all ended today, it would still have been worth it. I've proved something to myself that I'd been chasing since that Christmas, and my wife carried more of the weight in those years than anyone will see. I also have plenty left to prove, and I'm excited to keep growing this company for our clients and for the people on our team. It feels like it all came together, and we're just getting started.
I lost the pen a long time ago, but I'm glad the spirit of it never stopped pursuing me.