A letter from John Davison

Taught myself to drive ships as a Logistics Officer in the US Navy. Learned Mandarin at a university in Dalian, China. Sat in the first coding bootcamp that mattered. Sharing the patterns is the point.

Same instinct that got me driving ships now points at engineering orgs: I’m a fractional CTO — one who sells AND builds — and I don’t sail alone. My crew is small, elite, and hand-picked on battle-honed instinct — the unfair advantage I hand to founders.

We keep the burn low, the output high, and the systems honest — sometimes that means new ground, sometimes it means pulling an agentic mess back out of the wreckage. You bring the problems, we bring the A-Team.

Testimonial from Cliff Franco, CEO and 3x Founder. — Cliff Franco · CEO, 3x FounderFive ✨

00 First principles

True north in a world of hype.

Management gets paid for doing the right work, not for doing no work.
The difference between good talent and top talent will make or break the endeavor.
Every line of code is a liability. AIs have yet to get that memo.
Profitability starts on day zero. Costs managed from the first day are a necessity, not a cleanup project.
Inspecting quality at the end of the line is the opposite of how Toyota and kaizen work. Build it in.
Speed comes from never having to go back. The long-term cost of rework is like asking for an incurable disease.
Rails and Postgres on a platform-as-a-service is where almost every stack should start. Earn your complexity.
Figure out what can kill you and avoid it. Success becomes a function of staying alive.

Our principles, your anchor.

01 The hot takes

Everyone has an AI opinion. Here’s what I’ll actually say.

Building and scaling any useful Agent is way harder than LinkedIn makes it out to be.
Building and scaling any RAG pipeline is way harder than LinkedIn makes it out to be.
Agentic engineering improves velocity for everyone — it only improves quality for senior engineers.
People are sleeping on the massive unlock that is Claude Code + Ruby on Rails. Just ask Garry Tan.
Given a well-understood problem, I can personally build an MVP in a week — one that scales to millions of users with zero technical debt.
World-class engineering will always be a process of discovering the unknown. That discovery is slow but steady.
The gap between experienced engineers using agentic cloud compute and first-timers touching the vibe stack is as wide as the Milky Way.
Do you have a Kami? Probably not. She’s a ridiculously good visual designer and I have the only one. Adobe called her “one of the best contractors we’ve ever worked with” — almost three years into that contract. Ask to see the reference.

If three or more of those landed, you’ll want in. Join the newsletter →

02 What I actually do

A managed software services business. 40,000 hours delivered.

The work splits roughly into three:

Ruthless scope discipline

Something can always be removed. That’s how we extend your runway.

Accountable engineering

Senior devs, strict AI guardrails. Agentic velocity without the hydra.

Talent, talent, and more talent

Phil Jackson, Quincy Jones, StartupLandia.

03 Receipts

A track record, not a highlight reel.

2010 – 2018

Helped launch Brightwheel (now $700M valuation) and HappiLabs (exited to Science Exchange, 2025). Worked with Twitch, Appcelerator, Roostify, CrowdSound, CodeUnion, and Lyte.

2019 – Present

Obsessed with 0-to-1 product engineering. Helped numerous founders stay on the high-output, low-burn-rate path — and helped several take over their own engineering with the AI stack.

Testimonial from Lindsay Guzowski, CEO of The Crucible: John has a clear and masterfully simple approach to understanding the payoffs and pitfalls of agentic engineering. — Lindsay Guzowski · CEO, The Crucible5-year client

Testimonial from Jeremy Antoniuk, Founder & CEO, Scalafai. — Jeremy Antoniuk · Founder & CEO, Scalafai2-year client

Testimonial from Brian Holmes about thoughtfulness and honesty in shipping agentic systems. — Brian Holmes · Multi-Agent AI Operating SystemsFounder

04 Built to solve our own problems

We build the tools we wish existed.

Not side projects — good operators kill those. These are things we built because we needed them, kept because they make us better at the work, and the reason we got into this industry in the first place.

Product · In market

himessage.ai

Had enough of LinkedIn “relationship” development? Ready to reclaim your connection to actual humans? HiMessage is the easiest way to create tight communication feedback loops with the people you meet at events — and it’s massively useful to me every week.

Try it / join beta

Tool · We run on it daily

time.startuplandia.io

Built to replace Harvest — partly because their pricing went nuts and I didn’t want the dependency, but mostly as a testbed: agentic/MCP tools that profile how humans actually work with AI, so we can serve clients with more efficiency, more awareness, and more effective spend.

Take a look

05 The community

Hype-free, original thinking, invites to my own and recommended events, and connection to people actively building their version of a profitable future.

I read every reply. Unsubscribe anytime.

Thanks! — John