Door 1 · Meet Mike
An Iowa kid who never stopped building the instrument.
Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa — a town where you fix the thing yourself or it stays broken. That's where the operating system started: systems beat heroics, the median is the enemy, and waste is a moral problem. Everything after — the engineering degree, the Army, the rooms with boards in them, the rack in the basement — is the same instinct, scaled.
— mike · the operator
Iowa to the rack.
— click a chapter, or scroll to scrub →Industrial engineering.
A Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering — graduated with Distinction. Where the operating system started: systems beat heroics, the median is the enemy, and waste is a moral problem. The Lean / Six Sigma Black Belt and the PMP came later — the instinct came first.
DEVIATION.
— pre-order · ships Q4 2027An operator-memoir, and a manual.
312 pages on building a sovereign operating system in public — the doctrine, the engines, the patent drafts, and the discipline of shipping when no one's watching. The companion repo is open-source.
Stages I'd fly to.
— priced after a short conversation · travel within 1,500mi included
"The median is the enemy."
The 30-minute version of the manifesto. Why benchmark-chasing is a trap, how controlled deviation compounds, and what it actually takes to build an operating system that out-runs the average. Built for AI conferences and enterprise leadership summits.
"How to hire a CAIO."
The qualifying-signals talk. What separates a Chief AI Officer who has already shipped — 100+ governed agents in production — from one who is learning on your payroll, and the exact questions a board should ask. Built for boards, PE LP days, and executive search gatherings.
The operator's playbook.
The full anonymized manufacturer case, walked end to end — how a $60M manufacturer turned hardware into a system and parts into a platform: $510k to $1.8M, 21% to 78% margin. Six systems in six months, with the receipts. Built for industry associations and ops summits.
License the apparatus.
— ~5 patent drafts in preparation · non-exclusive defaultDeviate Engine.
40 engines × 3 layers × a Robust-MAD-Z core — the apparatus that produces controlled deviation on the ±30σ ladder. For manufacturing: throughput modeling, yield deviation, and predictive maintenance signals.
Recent writing.
— substack · bi-weeklyThe 100-day window — how I scope.
The seam between deterministic and probabilistic isn't academic. Here's how I price, scope, and ship against the 100-day window.
read on substack →Racking GPUs on residential power.
The build notes. Open-frame rails. UPS sizing math. Why the dog now sleeps through the fans.
read on substack →Why I draft patents before pitching.
If you pitch before you draft, the meeting becomes the prior art. The 30-day rule, and how to invert it.
read on substack →Two emails a month.
The 3am log of an operator running 100+ governed agents in production — AI ops, the Forge process, patent-draft claims, and the math behind the apparatus. Free baseline, paid tier for the deeper architecture write-ups.