Thirteen years as Officer-in-Charge of program instruction at the Central Intelligence Agency. Founder of ARES Watch Company. Architect of Foundership. The framework grew out of a lived practice — built before it was written, written so it could be deployed.
Foundership did not start in a classroom. It started at a workbench, in a training facility, in a fire station, in a courtroom, in a high-stakes operations room — and twenty-some years later in an MBA program where the leadership literature kept describing what to do to a team, and never quite naming what the operator was carrying.
ARES is an eight-year-old vertically integrated American micro-manufacturer of operator-grade dive watches. I founded the company in 2018 and currently operate it with a team of six. The valuation in current resume materials reflects $15 million.
The company is the framework's most rigorous case study because I built both. ARES is what Foundership looks like at the maker's side — the manufacturing philosophy, the trust contract with the operator who buys the watch, the standard that doesn't get a vote.
Raised by a twenty-seven-year Lieutenant of the Seattle Fire Department. Army veteran of Vietnam. Recipient of the Silver Star. The standard the household held — operational discipline, real consequence, no excuse for the work — was the standard that later carried into the program of instruction, into ARES, and into the framework.
The framework is, in part, an effort to name what was already operating in the men and women who raised me. They had no language for it. They held it anyway. The Institute is for the operators who are still holding it without language.
Service as a United States Air Marshal in the post-9/11 expansion. First commercial product developed and licensed to SureFire while still in uniform. The pattern of the operator who builds the tool while still in the arena was established early.
Years as a police officer. A rescue from a burning building. The operator-grade environments that taught what operates inside a person under consequence — and what the literature on leadership rarely names because it rarely tests it.
Thirteen years as Officer-in-Charge of program instruction at the Central Intelligence Agency. Curriculum design, instructor development, rubric construction, deliberate practice under consequence, the architecture of a program that produced operators who had to function when the environment was real.
The Five Tenets — nobody is coming to save you; everything is your responsibility; save what needs to be saved; kill what needs to be killed; always be working — were operational principles before they were a framework. The Field Guide is them translated into civilian register; the Killhouse is the engagement that runs them at team scale.
MBA candidate at York St John University, with conferral scheduled for November 2026. Dissertation under Dr. Tankiso Liedong: a phenomenological four-case study operationalizing the Founder's Gap. The dissertation is the empirical bridge between the framework's theoretical core and the operating practice the Institute deploys.
PhD candidate at the University of Gloucestershire, commencing January 2027. The doctoral program is the formal research vehicle for Foundership's empirical development — original-theory work, field study with partner organizations, peer-reviewed publication. The 2030 conferral coincides with the planned transition to faculty positioning at a research institution.
One management course per quarter at Skagit Valley College, beginning fall 2026 — under the practitioner-scholar model the long-arc plan supports. The undergraduate teaching presence preserves the operator-grade reading of the framework while the doctoral work develops the academic record.
The Foundership Institute is the operating entity that holds the framework's intellectual property, runs the Killhouse engagements, publishes the canon, and licenses the practitioner products to distribution partners. It is the formal vehicle for the commercial and academic life of the framework.
The Institute is currently establishing partner relationships with Black Rifle Coffee Company (operator-veteran cohort), Ramsey Solutions / EntreLeadership (small-business founder cohort), and other accredited channels selected by trust capital, not by reach. The work is licensed; it is not given away.
The framework names what operators have been doing without language for it. The Institute is the vehicle that puts the language in operators' hands.
Field Guide, Deck, Journal, and the 2025 book are available for individual operators through the Institute and through accredited partner channels. Inquiry begins the order conversation.
Two-day on-site facilitated engagement for founder-led leadership teams of five to twelve. Scheduling begins with an inquiry conversation — sizing the engagement, dating against a ninety-day cycle, naming the team.
Partner-branded co-editions of the printed artifacts, white-labeled engagement formats, cohort-scale licensing. Inquiry opens a conversation about trust contract, not a transaction.
The published canon is citable. The dissertation work is in progress and available for citation by request. Research partnerships are entered selectively, after delivered work establishes trust.
The framework is here when you're ready for it. It does not promise transformation. It names what operators have been doing without language for it — and gives you a discipline for using it.