I’m exploring how AI can extend what people are capable of, and building the tools and practices that make that possible.
For twenty years, my work has centered on helping teams accomplish more. I led product design at Fog Creek, helped Khan Academy grow from three people to a few hundred, and spent eight years building Radical Candor.
The organizations were different, but the underlying work was consistent: helping people do things they didn’t yet know they could do.
AI changes the scale of that possibility. One person can now take on work that previously required a team, but the experience is still far from accessible. Most people don’t have a useful mental model for dividing work between themselves and a machine. And the tools often demand too much setup, correction, and cleanup.
So this is the question I’m working on:
How can AI extend human intelligence and judgment rather than replace them?
I’m approaching that question by building and teaching.
Compass has been one of my main test beds. Its platform includes an agent router that dispatches work to specialized coaches, hybrid retrieval across the Radical Candor books, podcast, and articles, multiple model providers, voice input and output, persistent memory, native apps, and a Slack integration.
I also use the same approach to build and maintain the Radical Candor website, internal data pipelines, and the smaller tools that keep the company running.
Most of that is private company work. What follows is the public part.
I don’t think the main difference is speed. It’s having a clear model for the work and tools that stay out of the way. I want to make both easier for other people to access.
In development
A five-session, live-taught course for experienced professionals who want to work effectively with AI.
The course uses one durable mental model: the assistant you build (Brain, Hands, and Memory) and the work you give it (Brief and Mandate).
The model is deliberately tool-agnostic, so it remains useful when the tools change. About three-quarters of each session is hands-on.
Get in touch if you’re interested in bringing it to your team
Open source
A governed verb API for AI agents: audited, permissioned, actor-identified actions with the business logic built in.
I built Charter after repeatedly running into the same problem: giving an agent useful capabilities without giving it more access than it needs. Charter now lets me add narrowly scoped AI capabilities in hours while preserving security and accountability.
Live
An AI feedback coach grounded in Radical Candor.
Compass helps you prepare for difficult conversations by practicing what you want to say before you say it. Its guidance comes from the Radical Candor framework and the body of work behind it, not generic communication advice.
I led a product design team at Fog Creek Software, the company behind Trello and closely involved in the creation of Stack Overflow.
In 2010, I moved to California to help launch Khan Academy. I served as both chief product officer and chief people officer as the organization grew from three people to a few hundred and reached learners around the world.
For the past eight years, I’ve been CEO and co-founder of Radical Candor, working with organizations ranging from early-stage startups to the Fortune 100.