The Vision
I build technology that helps people become more truthful, more connected, and more present to one another — rather than less.
If you’re reading this, you probably know me — and you’ve maybe wondered what I’m actually building, or why I left a comfortable path to do it. This is the honest version. The end goal isn’t an app. It’s a place.
Where I’m coming from
I’m a software engineer and a founder. I previously co-founded TeachMe.To, where I was the only engineer, and built it from nothing to profitability and a $2M Series A. Today I build under OtterHalf, mostly from Bangkok, focused on Southeast Asia — because the best way to build for a place is to live in it.
I ship fast, and I lean hard on the new generation of AI tooling to move at a speed that wasn’t possible even a couple of years ago. That speed matters, because what I’m trying to build is big, and I’d like to see it finished in my lifetime.
What I believe
Every product I build refuses something its industry treats as normal. Most AI is built to flatter you and keep you hooked. Most marketplaces take a cut of relationships they didn’t create. Most social and dating apps make money from your attention and your loneliness.
I build the other version of each — AI that’s honest with you, marketplaces that pay the people doing the actual work, and products made for real presence instead of endless engagement.
Underneath all of it is one conviction: a person is an end, not a resource to be optimized. Truth over flattery. Dignity over extraction. Communion over engagement. That conviction comes from my faith, and it’s the standard I hold my own work to — including when it costs me.
The work
Three products, built in order.
They’re sequential. Each one funds, seeds, or makes the next one possible. None of them is the destination — they’re the path to it.
The engine
Boardbox
A workspace assistant for people who do serious knowledge work. Unlike most AI tools, it’s built to be honest with you instead of just agreeable, and it actually remembers who you are and what you’re working on. It helps you think and get real work done rather than keeping you entertained.
Its job in the plan: pay the bills. Boardbox is what I’m building right now with my cofounder, Jeremy. If it works, it buys us the freedom to build everything downstream without needing anyone’s permission.
The seed
WithCoach
A marketplace for finding and booking coaches and tutors — language, fitness, music, anything. The teacher keeps everything they charge; the student pays a small platform fee. It connects people around real things they’re doing together, in the real world.
Its job in the plan: solve the cold-start problem. Social networks usually die because the first people show up and find no one there. WithCoach produces real, verified users who already share interests and already meet in person — so what comes next launches warm instead of empty.
The network
Raft
An app for meeting people in real life around things you actually want to do — with live translation built in so language is never the barrier, and a slower, more intentional approach to friendship and dating. It turns strangers into friends, and friends into lasting relationships.
Its job in the plan: be the connective tissue. Raft is the platform everything upstream exists to make possible — and its physical form is where this whole thing has been heading.
The point of all of it
Raft Cities
Raft is the digital layer. The City is the physical one.
Raft Cities are purpose-built communities, designed so the ordinary path of daily life leads toward connection, health, and belonging instead of isolation. The aim is simple and old: to rebuild the way humans were always meant to live — together, interdependent, and known — for people who would otherwise be alone in a condo, ordering delivery and staring at a screen.
A ladder, not a product.
The spine of a Raft City is a set of stepping stones that carry someone from arriving to owning a home — without ever forcing them to leave.
Clean, affordable, traveler-friendly. The way in — and how the culture gets set from day one.
The first step into actually living there.
A small home of your own, inside the community.
The long-term home, where you raise a family.
What makes it different from any normal housing market is that the rungs connect. Pay into a starter house for two years and that money isn’t gone when you move up — it carries forward as equity toward the family house, the way a mortgage builds ownership, except tied to the community instead of the open market. Someone can arrive at twenty-two with a backpack and raise their kids in the same place at thirty-five.
Built around shared life.
Communal kitchens where people cook together. Common floors where a neighbor notices when you’ve gone quiet for three days. Floors of men who actually know each other’s struggles, where accountability comes from being close rather than from a program. The single mom whose neighbors watch her kids while she’s at the clinic. The older man who would have died alone but shares meals every day.
Coffee shops, a gym, a clinic, a grocery, a place to gather and pray — third spaces that exist not to sell you something, but to put you in the same room as other people, again and again, until strangers become neighbors. And food grown on-site, in aquaponics domes, with real work for anyone who wants it.
A real restart.
There’s also a genuine restart for people who’ve run out of them. A dedicated building, hostel-style, with counselors on site — kept separate for everyone’s safety, because some people arrive with serious addiction or hard histories. But separate doesn’t mean cast out. They eat the City’s food, use an affordable clinic built for what they actually need, and have the dignity of being inside the community instead of sequestered from it. Anyone who wants to can trade work in the kitchens and the domes for housing, and step onto the same ladder as everyone else. A real restart — not a 7am eviction from a shelter cot.
Designed to repeat.
Everything is built to be built again — standard rooms, repeatable houses, modular domes — so a first City that works in Bangkok can go up again in Vietnam, the Philippines, and eventually the United States. Not fancy, because fancy doesn’t scale. Well-built and standardized, because that does.
The frame I keep coming back to is an old one — a city on a hill. Not a branded religious compound, but a community whose fruit is obvious enough that the tree doesn’t need explaining: less depression, less addiction, people who were on the street now working, neighbors who help each other by default. The kind of place others hear about and want for themselves.
How it fits together
Boardbox pays for it.WithCoach populates it.Raft is the point — and Raft Cities is where it becomes real.
Software funds the communities. The communities prove the model. The model scales. That’s the whole plan, in order.
It isn’t a startup. It’s a generational project — and it’s what I intend to spend my life building.