About
The longer version
The rest of this site is about work. This page is about how I got to it.
Enterprise first
I started in enterprise development — at CED, and then at Prudential. Big systems, long release trains, code that other people's jobs depended on. It is not a glamorous way to learn, but it is a thorough one: you find out quickly that most software problems are really communication problems, and that the person who can explain a tradeoff in plain language is worth more than the person who can only implement it.
The other thing that work gave me was a low tolerance for hand-waving. In a large organisation you can ship something that nobody measures and never find out whether it helped. I got tired of that. It is why every site I build now gets a real performance number attached to it, and why I would rather tell a client an agent is not worth building than sell them one.
Before that: an audience
Earlier on I spent a long stretch in competitive gaming, and a good chunk of it streaming. It reads like an odd line on a founder page until you consider what it actually is: you go live, in real time, with no edit button, and either people stay or they leave. You learn to hold attention, to read a room you cannot see, and to be unbothered when something breaks on camera.
I use that more than I expected to. A cold call with a property manager and a three-hour stream have the same underlying problem — you have a very short window to be worth listening to, and no amount of preparation substitutes for being at ease.
Three sports, one habit
Track, basketball and soccer. Track taught me the thing I am most grateful for: that progress is mostly boring, and that the work you do on a day you do not feel like it is the work that counts. Basketball and soccer taught the opposite half — that you can be the fittest person on the pitch and still lose because you would not pass.
I still train. It is the only reliable way I have found to keep running three things at once without getting brittle about any of them.
What I am building now
Three things, all out of Bergen County, NJ.
site-factory — fast, honest websites for local businesses. Most of the small-business web near me is either a decade-old page that does not work on a phone or a template on a subscription nobody can cancel. There is a lot of room between those.
AI voice agents — the practical end of the AI wave. A dental practice that misses calls at 6pm does not need a chatbot on its website; it needs the phone answered. That is a solvable problem now, and it was not two years ago.
Alcove Markets — curated smart markets in luxury residential buildings. This one came from noticing that the amenity floor of a very nice building is often the least considered part of it, and that the fix costs the building nothing.
If any of that is useful to you, or you just want to compare notes, I am at ryan@raghubans.com. I answer my own email.