Insights on Building Mission-Driven Organizations
Practical lessons from 15+ years of leadership across nonprofits, real estate, and healthtech. Topics include AI implementation, nonprofit operations, business systems, and what it takes to scale organizations without losing your mission.
GEO Is Like Feeding a Sourdough Starter
For the last year, I’ve been trying to find a metaphor that actually explains what Generative Engine Optimization really is.
Not the SEO-adjacent explanations. Not the dashboards. Not the keyword substitutions or citation games. But what it feels like to do this work correctly over time.
The closest analogy I’ve found is this:
Generative Engine Optimization is like feeding a sourdough starter.
Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.
Collapsing the Skill Stack: How AI Turned a 10-Person Team Into One Operator
For most of the last 30 years, building anything meaningful required stitching together specialists. You needed a writer, a designer, a developer, a marketer, an ops person, a data analyst, a customer support lead, and usually a project manager to hold it all together. The work was not actually that complicated, but the coordination was. The bottleneck was never intelligence. It was friction.
AI removed that friction.
How AI Can Strengthen Nonprofit Operations Without Replacing Human Relationship Work
When I first started at Stupid Cancer, I took the CEO’s Outlook contacts from years of his personal advocacy work and manually entered every single one into SugarCRM. Line by line. Name, email, organization, phone number. Copy, paste, save. It took hours. And none of it felt connected to the mission. It was my first real glimpse into something every nonprofit eventually discovers. The work you care about is always competing with the work you can’t avoid.
For years, that kind of administrative drag was just part of the job. You powered through it. You made peace with the backlog. You assumed the operational chaos was permanent. The calls you didn’t return. The follow ups you meant to send. The donor updates that slipped because your CRM was a mess. It was constant.
