I’ve been keeb on the internet since 1997. A girl at school called me her little keebler because I am short. I shortened it as a joke. It has stuck since then - it’s my name to my closest friends and colleagues.
I come from a family of builders. I watched my parents build a construction company from the ground up - my mom handled the back office, my dad handled the front. Together, they lifted themselves from poverty and did their best to make sure we knew the stakes - work hard, build a family, don’t regret a minute of it.
You could say it’s part of my DNA to grind; I’ve been building since I was 8. My parents went on vacation and left blank checks for groceries. I used one to sign up for AOL. Within weeks I was in Private Room: VB, reverse-engineering progs — Visual Basic tools that punted people offline, faked profiles, automated chat commands. The culture was simple: show what you’ve got, let people build on it, and your handle means something. Status came from what you shipped. Not credentials. Not titles.
My brother died on March 26, 1997. He was 17. I was 11.
If I was addicted to tech before, I am obsessed now. Programming is my escape.
Everything after that sentence is what happened when the kid who escaped into code grew up and walked into the rooms where infrastructure categories got built.
The pattern
Docker — employee #6, built the community and partner ecosystem from nothing. Then Rancher, MariaDB, Kentik, System Initiative. Same pattern every time: get in early, learn the technology by using it harder than anyone else in the room, then use that knowledge as a weapon. I was one of the first people to run Docker in production — hosting a blog like this one on Linode, custom compiling a Linux kernel so containers would actually work. The obsession comes first. The deals follow.
The hacker never left. While I was closing deals that signaled inevitability to the market, I was also writing a Go keylogger that hooks WIN32 APIs, automating Proxmox clusters with Claude, running local LLMs against my media library, and operating the homelab that serves this site. Every night, back to the terminal. I read everything, research everything, and spend most of my waking time figuring out how to combine new technology into something that doesn’t exist yet. Dreaming about what could be, then executing against it, is nirvana.
Today
I’m not an executive who got technical. I’m a builder since age 8 who happened to also be world-class at the relationship work that wires companies together. The hacker came first. The dealmaker came second. Both run at the same time now, every day.
I spent 13 years doing this for other people’s companies. Today, my co-founders and I are building our own. SWAMP — the first product whose primary user is an AI agent. Repeatable automation through typed models, extensible into any system, secrets that never leave your machine, perfect memory at the highest resolution.