I know the room I am in. Functional food. Sports nutrition. Wellness adjacent. Some part of you expects me to say I do not eat McDonald's. That I do a sixteen-hour fast and only break it on cold-pressed kale grown by a man named Ferran.
I will not.
On a Saturday afternoon in Jávea, with two small kids who are five minutes from a meltdown and a wife who has earned a break, I will drive directly to the McDonald's on the carretera, and I will buy a Big Mac and a small Coke and a fries, and I will sit on the plastic seat and watch my children eat chicken nuggets in a state of complete grace. And I will be happy.
Here is what nobody in the wellness room wants to talk about.
Exhibit A. Jávea, last Saturday.
I run companies in the wellness adjacent space and I love McDonald's. These are not in conflict. They are the same instinct. Build the thing that works, every time, for every person, and price it so people can afford to keep coming back.
There is a particular anxiety that comes with knowing you can build something.
It does not switch off.
It does not care that the day is over. It does not care that the kids are asleep. It does not care that you have a glass of wine in your hand and a nice view of the sea.
It only cares that something exists in your head and does not exist in the world. And that this is a problem you are going to have until you make it.
I have followed that pressure for twenty years. Through California. Through Florida. Into Barcelona, then into Jávea. Through marriages and recessions and the births of children. Most people learn to ignore it. I never figured out how.
The gap between a hard idea and a working version of it is only ever closed by other people. Not just any people. Inspired ones.
People who walk into the room already half in love with the work. People who argue about a feature nobody asked for at a Friday dinner. People who would rather talk shop than do almost anything else.
Find them. Refuse to waste their time. Make the room around them better than the day before.
That is the actual job.
Connecting health-driven brands with the right shelves across the EU. International by default. Nothing about it works in only one country, which is the entire point.
pricemart.eu → A field guide to the AI agents I built to run it →A few days each year of friends, founders, and friends-of-founders riding bikes, building things, and arguing about the right thing to ship. A Costa Blanca summer ritual, on purpose.
The plumbing nobody sees and everyone benefits from. Custom MCP servers and scheduled tasks that keep small operations honest while the team is asleep.
wildbreeze.io →
An illustrated nine-station field guide to AI agents for the people who run small businesses. Six short stations get you familiar with how agents work. Three workshop benches at the end let you actually design one for yourself, with auto-saved forms that export to a build-ready Markdown packet.
Take the tour →
An illustrated six-station companion to the agent workshop, applied to the research production line. Five short stations teach the skill-thinking habit (spot, cut, schema, compress, joint), each with a small interactive exercise drawn from real lab work — XRD phase ID, literature cartography, control experiment design, reviewer-response classification. The builder bench at the end produces a real research skill as a downloadable Markdown file, autosaved as you type.
Take the tour →Twenty years of slow drift, west to east. California to Florida to Barcelona. And now Jávea, the place I will probably die in, if the orange grove keeps fruiting.
First job at a digital PR agency. Learned that everything is a deadline, including the deadlines you give yourself.
Recruiter for a software performance company. Learned to read a room.
Deputy CEO at Studio98. App development for the largest furniture retailers in the United States. Learned what a production team is, and what one isn't.
Director of Technology at an e-commerce platform serving 1.5 million SKUs. Learned how to ship across languages, currencies, and warehouse providers.
Building a small portfolio of functional-food and software ideas. Mostly outside, mostly with two kids underfoot, mostly happier than I have been at any prior stop on this list.
In 2018 I walked into a temple complex in Kamakura on the way to a friend's wedding and stood in front of a four-panel painted screen of two tigers under a pine. I have not been able to forget it. When my son was born I called him Tiger. He moves through the world the way that screen does. Present. Unhurried. A little bit fierce.
I am a long way from where I started. California, then Florida, then a slow settling into the Mediterranean. But the people closest to me have not moved in any meaningful sense. My brothers and their families are the through-line. They keep me honest about what actually matters when the rest of it goes loud.
We landed in Jávea because it had the things a working family needs and nothing it doesn't. A sea. A mountain (Montgó, photogenic on bad days and unbelievable on good ones). An orange grove in the back garden that flowers white in February. Enough quiet to think.
If you ever find yourself in Jávea with small kids of your own, I keep a running field guide to our weekends here. Beaches, markets, the lighthouse walk, an honest opinion on every playground within thirty minutes.