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I grew up in a small business. My father ran a grocery store in Salthill, Galway, Ireland — the kind of place where regulars were family and the staff knew every customer by name. We all worked and pitched in: after school, on weekends, full time every summer and holiday. At the time I thought it was just what families did. Looking back, the way small business owners actually operate — the judgment calls, the trust, the hundred small things they hold in their head — became part of how I see everything. My brother runs the shop today, and it's still that kind of place.

That foundation shaped everything after. Twenty-plus years in Silicon Valley — leading product at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, deploying machine learning at Rakuten that saved millions within months. A once-off opportunity to run a startup program for a Silicon Valley Fortune 500 company led me to starting and building a highly successful business running custom accelerator programs for Cisco, NEC X, NetApp, Alchemist, ZF Group, Ericsson, and SanDisk — and the thread was always the same. The startup teams that won were the ones that worked backwards from the customer. Across 200+ teams, I helped founders find their first customers, figure out product-market fit, and then scale from tens to hundreds to thousands of dollars in monthly revenue. Some landed venture funding; most did not. A few got acquired by companies like Google, Meta, Workday, Rakuten, and many more.

Which brings me to now. It's clear to me — more clear than anything I've seen in twenty years of doing this work — that the real leverage from this wave of AI is going to land with individuals and small businesses, not big companies. At least in the short run. Enterprises are too slow, too political, too committed to the old stack. The people who can actually turn this technology into an unfair advantage are the ones close enough to the work to feel what it changes — the baker, the plumber, the cinema owner, the wedding planner, the dental office. They can move this week. An enterprise can't move this year.

This wave will amplify what those businesses can do — how they serve customers, how they operate, how they compete. In the next few years it'll be obvious to everyone. The businesses that embrace it now will operate on a different level.

I built Bearing to help the people who care about using this technology to enhance what they already do — not replace it. To serve their customers better, strengthen their communities, and run their businesses the way they've always wanted to.