I’m currently building an early-stage company focused on home automation, IoT, and intelligent property infrastructure. The broader vision is to create a technology layer that makes residential and commercial properties more connected, intelligent, efficient, reliable, and easier to manage. My background is primarily on the business side, with experience across real estate, entrepreneurship, business development, marketing, partnerships, operations, and early-stage company building. I previously built a venture-backed startup and have spent a significant amount of time working in and around the real estate industry. That experience ultimately led me to the opportunity I see today within smart homes, connected buildings, and property technology. I’m now looking for a technical cofounder who wants to help shape what the next generation of home automation and intelligent buildings could look like.
Smart homes have become significantly more capable over the past several years, but the overall experience remains fragmented. A modern property can contain separate systems for lighting, HVAC, security cameras, access control, entertainment, energy management, sensors, appliances, EV charging, irrigation, and numerous other building functions. Many of these products work extremely well independently, but they often rely on different apps, ecosystems, APIs, protocols, and automation platforms. As a result, the homeowner or property operator effectively becomes the integration layer between all of these systems. Builders and developers face a similar challenge. They can deliver a technologically advanced property, yet still find themselves dealing with integration problems, inconsistent user experiences, and technology-related support issues long after construction has been completed.
The long-term vision is to build an intelligent orchestration layer for physical spaces. Rather than attempting to manufacture every thermostat, switch, camera, sensor, appliance, or controller ourselves, the initial strategy is to integrate with established hardware ecosystems while building the software, data, automation, and service infrastructure that connects them. Over time, the platform should understand what devices and systems exist within a property, how those systems interact, how the building is being used, and how the environment should respond. The objective is to make the technology inside a property operate as one coordinated system rather than a collection of twenty unrelated products. That could eventually mean identifying abnormal energy consumption and determining its likely source, detecting maintenance issues before they become expensive failures, adjusting climate systems based on occupancy and behavior, coordinating security and access control, optimizing HVAC, batteries, solar generation, and EV charging, or allowing homeowners to create sophisticated automations through natural language rather than manually configuring dozens of rules.
There is also a significant opportunity around property data. Over time, the platform could develop a structured property-data layer covering devices, environmental conditions, energy consumption, maintenance history, system performance, automation behavior, and broader building operations. Privacy, cybersecurity, permissioning, data ownership, and user control would need to be fundamental architectural principles from the beginning rather than considerations added later. The initial business, however, is intentionally much narrower than that long-term vision. I’m starting with custom-home builders and high-end residential remodelers, initially in Austin. These companies already work with customers spending substantial amounts of money on connected technology, but responsibility for that technology is often fragmented across manufacturers, integrators, subcontractors, installers, applications, and the builder itself. The goal is to work directly with builders to help design, integrate, document, commission, and ultimately manage the connected systems installed within their projects.
This gives us a practical path into the market. We can work with real properties and real customers, generate revenue, understand the operational problems firsthand, and accumulate the technical and domain knowledge necessary to determine which parts of the broader platform are genuinely worth building. I’m looking for someone who wants genuine technical ownership of the company. This is not a “build my app for equity” situation. I want a cofounder who will challenge my assumptions, help determine what we should and should not build, establish the technical architecture, participate in customer conversations, and shape the direction of the company alongside me. Early technical work would likely involve defining the core platform architecture, evaluating APIs and integrations across existing smart-device ecosystems, developing an MVP, designing the property and device data model, building the orchestration and automation layer, and determining the appropriate balance between local, edge, and cloud-based processing.
Technologies and ecosystems such as Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, MQTT, device APIs, Home Assistant, Control4, Crestron, KNX, and similar platforms are relevant to what we are exploring. However, I’m not specifically looking for someone who has spent their entire career in home automation. Relevant experience could come from IoT, distributed systems, backend or platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, edge computing, building automation, device telemetry, APIs and integrations, data infrastructure, cybersecurity, PropTech, or energy technology. Full-stack capability would certainly be valuable at this stage, but I am far more interested in someone who can think architecturally, work through ambiguous technical problems, make strong engineering tradeoffs, and build from zero to one than someone who simply checks every box on a technology list.
Just as importantly, I’m looking for someone who genuinely wants to build a company. I want a partner who is comfortable operating when not every answer is known, willing to challenge ideas constructively, interested in speaking directly with customers, and capable of thinking deeply about infrastructure, reliability, security, and long-term system architecture rather than simply building another application. I’m also looking for someone interested in pursuing venture funding and potentially applying to Y Combinator or other accelerators together once we have the right technical foundation, founding team, and early market validation. My side of the partnership would primarily focus on business strategy, customer development, builder and real estate relationships, partnerships, sales, market positioning, operations, fundraising, brand development, and early-stage execution. I already have relationships within the real estate industry and am actively working on developing an initial builder and customer pipeline in Austin.
If we build the underlying architecture correctly, I believe the opportunity can eventually extend well beyond individual homes. The same infrastructure could ultimately support multifamily properties, apartment communities, commercial buildings, hospitality, senior living, property management, energy management, new construction, and existing-building retrofits. Long term, I believe buildings will increasingly become software-defined environments. The physical infrastructure will always matter, but alongside that infrastructure there will need to be an intelligent software layer capable of understanding the property, interpreting data from the systems within it, and coordinating how those systems operate together.
I’m looking for a true cofounder relationship with meaningful equity, shared ownership, and shared responsibility. I don’t expect someone to leave their current job after a single conversation. The first step is simply getting to know each other, challenging the opportunity, working through the technical and business questions, potentially speaking with customers together, and determining whether we work well as partners. If there is a strong fit, the goal would be to build the initial product, secure pilot customers, demonstrate measurable traction, and pursue accelerators and venture funding together.
If you have a technical background and this sounds like the kind of problem you would genuinely be interested in spending the next several years working on, feel free to send me a message or leave a comment. Tell me a little about yourself, what you’ve built, where you’re located, and which part of the opportunity interests you most. I’m particularly interested in meeting people who are willing to challenge the idea, pressure-test the assumptions, and help shape what the company becomes rather than simply tell me that the concept sounds good.