CHAPTER 01
Poolside
Founding Product Lead, Sovereign AI & Strategic Partnerships
Aug 2025–present
Owned the Sovereign AI product line, helping grow it from prototype to roughly $3M ARR and 40+ global deployments in about 14 months.
- ~$3M ARRSovereign AI product line, from prototype in about 14 months
- 40+global Sovereign AI deployments
- $44K → $32KSovereign AI system cost, through sourcing, quantization, and architecture
- Helped grow Sovereign AI from prototype to approximately $3M ARR and more than 40 global deployments in roughly 14 months.
- Reduced Sovereign AI system cost by approximately 27%, from approximately $44K to $32K, through hardware sourcing, quantization and architecture decisions.
- Led product and go-to-market work for Sovereign AI with OEM partners including Dell, Supermicro, Nutanix, and Cisco, coordinating engineering priorities for the product line.
End-to-end product ownership
Owned the Sovereign AI product line end to end, reporting to the Chief Product Officer. Responsibilities spanned strategy, roadmap, engineering priorities, pricing and packaging, product economics, go-to-market, partnerships, and enterprise delivery.
Platform development and deployment
After building the initial prototype as Poolside’s first Solutions Architect, I led the work with engineers and Solutions Architects to bring Sovereign AI’s self-contained, single-node RKE2 platform into production, with STIG hardening and Ubuntu/RHEL support.
Sovereign AI engineering and research priorities
Set engineering and applied research priorities for the Sovereign AI product line, working across backend engineering, post-training, and inference. Championed FP8/INT4 quantization and support for next-generation GPUs and NVIDIA GB10 edge systems within that product roadmap.
Customers and strategic programs
Translated enterprise, regulated, and government customer discovery into Sovereign AI roadmap and go-to-market priorities. Separately led product strategy for Poolside’s $2M In-Q-Tel program spanning four government agencies.
Regulated enterprise delivery
A significant share of Sovereign AI deployments served air-gapped and regulated environments. Aligned contract scope, customer requirements and delivery commitments for the product line.
