Ventures

Gives a business one view of its calls, sales and ad spend, so the owner can see which marketing brings in customers.

Live with a pilot venue.

• An AI answers the phone when no one can, books and changes bookings, and hands the call to a person when asked.
• Talk of injury, legal trouble or insurance gets no AI answer. A person is alerted right away.
• Each business's data is walled off inside the database itself, and the app refuses to start if that wall is missing.
• A release will not go out while a call is in progress.

Staffing software for multi-location businesses, on web, iOS and Android, that I am joining as a co-founder after mapping the whole system.

Private beta, by invitation.

• Managers build and publish schedules. Staff claim open shifts, swap shifts and ask for time off.
• Floor staff clock in at a shared kiosk with a PIN.
• Hours flow to QuickBooks payroll, and sales sit next to labor cost.
• An AI assistant answers questions about hours, pay, schedules and expiring documents.

The next step of Mainstay: an AI voice agent that picks up a business's calls almost at once.

Not taking real calls yet.

• An owner types a phone number, website or name and talks to an agent that has already found their business.
• Every sentence is checked before it is spoken, in English and Spanish. A sentence that fails is dropped, never rewritten.
• What a caller says is never treated as a fact about the business.

A desktop mentor that helps people learn a job by doing it: it sees the task and gives the smallest hint that helps, even offline.

Built, not deployed. Work is paused for now.

• Built to work fully offline, for places like correctional facilities where the internet is off limits.
• The coach model is squeezed to about one bit per weight, so it runs on a plain CPU.
• Hints come in steps, and a hint never gives away the protected answer.
• It reads only the window being worked in, never password fields, and the server never receives screen images or audio.

A marketing system that finds customers for small businesses and reports its results in booked jobs.

Plans and decisions only. No code yet.

• It judges itself by booked jobs and revenue, not vanity numbers.
• It runs on my own businesses first, then beta clients, then as an agency service.
• Nothing is sent, posted or spent until the owner approves it.
• The goal is 30 minutes a week or less of the owner’s time.

Early research into a business that would serve US nursing homes.

Research only. No product chosen yet.

• The research ends with one idea, chosen from many.
• Evidence comes from live sources, and real voices come first: staff, residents, families and operators.
• No idea may make residents’ lives worse to save money.