I live in the Chicago suburbs now, though I’ve moved around quite a bit over the years. I’ve called New York, San Diego, and Vancouver home at different points, and I’ve spent extended time in the Philippines, India, and Morocco. Travel has always been a big part of my life.
I did my undergrad at the University of Illinois and then went to Columbia University in New York for grad school in architecture. As a kid, I was always building something, whether it was LEGOs, models, paintings, or sculptures. I even did construction work for a while. That urge to create never really went away. These days, beyond running a business, I spend my free time using AI to build software, making hand-built models, and taking painting classes once a week. I just love creating things, and that’s a big part of what motivates me on a day-to-day basis.
The Journey Began
Before WordPress, I used to do a lot of 3D modelling. In architecture school, I would do 3D blueprints in AutoCAD and Rhino, and then I got into 3D animation. I was also using CodeIgniter to build custom projects on the dev side.
What got me into WordPress was actually outsourcing. I was working with virtual assistants and developers overseas, and I realised there was an opportunity to help other people do the same thing. This was before platforms like Upwork were popular, so with my business partner at the time, we launched a company called EasyOutsource. It was an online job platform for hiring people digitally, and we built it on BuddyPress, which was the most popular social networking plugin for WordPress at the time.
EasyOutsource was acquired in 2014, and around that same time, I started building more and more things for BuddyPress and for communities on WordPress. That eventually led to launching BuddyBoss, which is a fork of BuddyPress with a more polished, feature-rich approach to social networking on WordPress. I ran BuddyBoss for 14 years until it was acquired in 2024. Now I’m focused on Rapyd Cloud, the fastest managed WordPress hosting in the world.
What made me choose WordPress in the first place was just how quickly I could build things on it. As someone who comes from a design background, theming is really intuitive, and the platform is flexible enough to bend it to do whatever you need. I think that flexibility is what draws a lot of people into the WordPress ecosystem, and it’s what kept me here.
The Need for “Rapyd Cloud“
Rapyd Cloud
When my business partner and I were running BuddyBoss, we realised that our customers had some of the hardest sites to host. Unlike traditional WordPress sites that are mostly publishing content, BuddyBoss sites are communities where everyone is logged in. When I’m logged in, and you’re logged in, I have a different profile than you, different messages, different activity. Nothing can be cached in HTML, so the sites would stall and run really slowly. On top of that, the BuddyBoss App is headless through APIs, which added an extra layer of stress on the servers. None of the existing hosts could handle these sites at any real scale.
So we saw an opportunity in the market to build a different type of hosting, one that’s super scalable and built for dynamic sites. As AI gets more involved, more and more sites are going to become dynamic like that. That’s the problem we were trying to solve, and that’s why we launched Rapyd Cloud.
We faced a lot of challenges along the way. Building a hosting company is incredibly difficult. There’s so much infrastructure to coordinate to make it all work. Customer acquisition is tough because you have to convince people to switch from their current host. You have to figure out migrations. You need 24/7 customer support. It’s a very challenging business to operate, and there were a lot of learning curves to get here. Still more to learn as we grow.
As for other WordPress products I’ve been involved with, BuddyBoss is probably the most well-known. It’s one of the most popular community platforms for WordPress. I co-founded that business and ran it for 14 years until it was acquired in 2024.
Stay in Touch
Myself with my Brilliant Team
We’re a fully virtual team. I’ve been running teams remotely since long before COVID made it mainstream, so we don’t have a physical office. Everyone works from home.
Advice for Business Owners
People really need to be aware of how fast AI is transforming product and development-focused businesses. Everyone knows about it, but the shift is massive. It’s as big as going from no internet to internet, or from no iPhone to iPhones, maybe even bigger. I can personally build things in a week or two that would have taken 6 months to build with a full team in the past. Now I can do it myself for about $200 worth of AI tokens. It’s really wild.
There’s a pro and a con to this. The con is that anything you create, someone else can copy very quickly. But the pro is that you can move incredibly fast, experiment, and try things. We’re also entering what I’d call the “Age of the Idea Person.” Years ago, if you were the person with lots of ideas, you were a nuisance because every idea would take years to build. The implementer was the valuable one. Now the person with all the ideas can win, because every idea you have, you can implement pretty quickly.
The game has shifted to marketing. If you’re launching something new, you really have to find an area where you have a go-to-market strategy, because whatever you build, someone else can build too. The people doing really well are the ones who find distribution channels to get exposure to their product, whether that’s partnering with influencers or other people who can drive traffic, or just trying different marketing strategies. Because it’s so fast to iterate now, I’d recommend trying all kinds of stuff until you find something that works.
I don’t think hosting is a good business to get into for someone new. There’s a lot of infrastructure cost, it’s highly competitive, and it’s very hard to launch. We were able to do it because we had cash flow from BuddyBoss to finance what we were building, and we had a customer base who really needed better hosting. For someone starting fresh, it’s a very hard business.
I’d focus on apps and things you can build with one person or a small team of two or three. I’d also say the age of SaaS businesses that charge per seat is basically dead. No one’s going to pay $50 a seat times 20 seats when they can just rebuild your whole product in a month. Business models are changing very quickly, and you have to be aware of that. And if you’re not deep into AI yet, get deep into AI immediately. Go get Claude Code and just start learning it and dive in.
WordPress & Beyond
We’re working on an integration with Cloudflare right now that will be live very soon, providing an even more robust CDN and making it easier to get a new account set up with the CDN already integrated. Long term, we want to reach a broader market and keep improving our performance. We have a lot planned behind the scenes to stay ahead and remain the fastest host on the market.
In five years, the thing that’s going to dramatically change WordPress is AI. I don’t think people will be buying themes as much, because it’s already easy to build one from scratch with AI once you know what you’re doing. Same with plugins. The quality and diversity of software for WordPress is going to go up dramatically, and a lot of DIY people are going to be doing all kinds of things without hiring anybody.
I also think headless WordPress is going to become much bigger. Rapyd Cloud was built for headless from the start. The BuddyBoss App, which is part of the history and DNA of the company, is a headless product we built our infrastructure around. It used to be that building a mobile app or a React web experience was complicated and expensive. Now you can fire up Claude Code and create a React web app in an afternoon. I see more people leaving the traditional PHP / HTML format of WordPress and building custom applications, using WordPress purely as a backend CMS.
As for threats from competitors, the number one competitor is AI itself. A lot of people use WordPress because it’s easy to set up and build on, but you can also use AI to build anything with prompts. More people are going to reach for AI first instead of WordPress or any other pre-built software. At the same time, WordPress plugins are going to become more powerful because AI helps developers build faster. If you want something really sophisticated, you will still be better off with WordPress. But for a simple marketing site or blog, more people are just going to build that with AI, since they can modify the design with prompts without touching any code.
My Love for the WordPress Community
Yes, I attend WordCamps regularly. I’ve been to WordCamp Asia in Thailand, WordCamps in the Philippines, Chicago, and San Diego, WordCamp US in Portland, WordCamp Europe in Paris, and plenty of others. I’ll probably be attending the next one in Mumbai.
I also went to PressConf in Tempe, Arizona, last year, and it was incredible. I really recommend that event.
I think WordCamps are incredibly beneficial. You can meet with other business owners, and that’s where partnerships are formed and where you get ideas. It’s not really a place to get customers so much as it’s a place to meet other people building in the space. Also, if you have a distributed team, which is very common in WordPress, it’s an opportunity for you and your team members to all meet and hang out in person.
In terms of best friends in the community, too many to count. I know so many people in the industry that I don’t want to call out anyone specifically, but I’m pretty well-connected with a lot of people in the WordPress ecosystem.
How I Keep Myself Updated
I spend most of my time in three places: YouTube, LinkedIn, and AI.
I’ve been kind of addicted to YouTube for a long time now. Not just WordPress content, but a lot about AI development, business strategy, and other topics I’m curious about. That’s where I do a lot of my learning. If you’re a founder, I highly recommend the Starter Story channel.
LinkedIn is more about connecting directly with people. I’m often messaging with other founders there. I’m not that interested in reading posts, because most of it is just people talking about how great their achievements are. But it’s a really valuable place to connect one-on-one with other business owners, and that’s where most of them hang out.
The place I probably learn the most these days is from AI. I used to use ChatGPT, but I’ve switched almost entirely to Claude. I’m in AI all day asking questions and working through problems. I have the Claude app on my phone and talk to it through voice constantly. There’s just so much you can learn from it.
I Have a Life Other Than Work
During my free time, I love to travel and do outdoor activities. I’m really into skiing, and I’m about to head to Big Sky, Montana, for a trip. I go on a boys’ ski trip every year, usually somewhere in Colorado, though last year we skied in France. I also go on a boys’ fishing trip every year up in northern Canada. I was just in La Paz, Mexico, last week, which was incredible.
My favourite travel destination recently was La Paz. It was just super beautiful and relaxed. But my favourite destination I’ve ever been to was Nepal. You’re hiking in the Himalayas with the most beautiful scenery imaginable, pitch-black skies with incredible stargazing, and amazing food. I absolutely loved being there.
Of course, I also love spending time with my family and raising my kids. I have three girls, including a 2-month-old baby.
And for pets, I have a cat named Juni.
I Reward Myself by
As I mentioned earlier, whenever possible, I like to travel and see the world. That’s usually how I reward myself when something goes well. Of course, I also love spending time with my family, whether that’s taking them on a vacation or just doing something small. When I have a break between work, the little things mean a lot, like taking my kids to the playground, going to the park, or sledging in the winter.
Connect With Me
You can find me on LinkedIn
