19 Years
in the field.
Still in it.

A moment in a briefing room.

I watched a co-worker — someone smart, capable, experienced — using AI wrong. Confidently wrong. And they had no idea.

That moment is the whole reason Mountain Labs exists. Not because AI is complicated. It isn't, not really. Not once someone teaches you the right foundation. But that foundation isn't being taught. The free education is incomplete. The paid education is expensive, technical, and built for developers, not for the person running a business, managing a team, or trying to stay relevant in their field.

Nearly two decades spent working in multiple fields simultaneously.

I run Clear Mountain Provisions, a small candle company in Gainesville, Virginia. I pour wax. I answer customer emails. I argue with a shipping label printer on Wednesday mornings. That's one of the jobs.

Another is nearly nineteen years of military intelligence with the New York Army National Guard — currently a Sergeant First Class and Master Intelligence Analyst — and eleven years of cybersecurity since 2015. I deployed to Kuwait under Operation Enduring Freedom in 2011. In 2018 I deployed again, this time as a civilian intelligence professional, to Bagram, Afghanistan, embedded with Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan (SOJTF-A) and NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan (NSOCC-A). The military service and the civilian work have run in parallel for almost two decades — they aren't a backstory to each other.

Today I lead a cyber intelligence and insider-threat program supporting DHS / USCIS, build production agentic AI systems for intelligence workflows, and run Makers Manager — the SaaS platform for the handcrafted artisan community where I'm CEO, Co-Founder, and the one building it, with AI as my entire development team.

"Mountain Labs is taught from inside the work — small business, intelligence, building AI systems, the day-to-day. Because that's the only way this material gets understood deeply enough to be used."

An obligation, not a venture.

The people around me — peers, fellow business owners, colleagues — were falling behind. Not because they weren't smart. Because nobody had taught them what AI is, what it does, and how to use it without being fooled by it.

Every course was either free and shallow or paid and inaccessible. Every guide was built around one platform, one tool, and one company's agenda. Mountain Labs is the education that didn't exist — built by someone who needed it himself and who still, every day, runs the systems and does the work he teaches others to navigate.

Build the thing you wish existed.

Mountain Labs isn't the first time I have built something like this. But, it's the first time I have taken it public. In 2019, I founded the Center for Cyber Intelligence as a personal project, and built the Cyber Intelligence Framework — a vendor-neutral model for how to actually run a cyber intelligence program. It's still out there, but mostly it's been my working toolkit, used as the spine of every CTI program I've stood up since.

I'm also currently developing a Control Framework for GenAI in Cyber Threat Intelligence Artificial (AICI), a solo research project on how the intelligence community should integrate AI responsibly. It's a work in progress, not a published standard, built with the same instincts that brought Mountain Labs to life.

"Build the thing you wished existed when you needed it. Use it. Hand it to the people who could also use it."

Mountain Labs is made for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and working professionals — the people who need an honest education on AI, and who aren't being served by the people currently selling it to them.

A second home.

Outside of work, I'm an independent music producer and engineer through Clear Mountain Records (and finishing a BA in Music Production at the Berklee College of Music). I'm a landscape and nature photographer, a rock climber, a snowboarder, and an outdoor enthusiast. The mountains and wilderness around Northern Virginia are a second home, and the literal source of the "Mountain" in Mountain Labs.