My career did not start with IT. It started with noticing things early, paying attention to opportunities before they had a clean category, and trying to figure out whether there was something real inside them.
That is less tidy than the LinkedIn version, but it is more true. I was usually close to the signal before the market had made it obvious, and I could normally get far enough to learn the shape of the opportunity, sell something, wire something together, or become useful before anyone handed me a title for it.
The part I understand better now is that curiosity is not the same thing as conviction. I was willing to research, test, sell, and move early, but I did not always believe enough to go all in when the signal was right in front of me.
That changed at Zengar.
I kept finding things early
Around 2010, when I was 20, I was selling e-cigarettes before almost anyone I knew had seen one in person. It was not a grand thesis about nicotine markets or consumer hardware. It was more basic than that. I saw something new, got curious, figured out where to get it, and found people who wanted it.
It was the kind of thing I tended to notice early: useful enough that people would pay attention once they saw it, early enough that most people had no frame for it yet, and still far enough ahead of normal consumer awareness that there was room to move before the market caught up.
The same thing happened again in 2015, when I was deep in Bitcoin and Ethereum research. I got far enough that I ordered a BTC miner, then cancelled it because the sellers were taking too long and difficulty was rising while I waited. In the moment, cancelling felt rational. The window was moving, the economics were changing, and I did not want late hardware showing up after the opportunity had already compressed.
Looking back, that decision is a pretty clean example of the pattern. I saw the thing early enough, understood enough to act, and still did not quite believe enough to stay in the trade.
Resourceful is not the same as all in
I have usually been able to do pretty well by being resourceful and early to the party. Find the major opportunity before everyone and their taxi driver is talking about it, learn enough to be useful, move before the market becomes obvious, and there is usually some value there if you are willing to do the unglamorous part yourself.
That works, but only up to a point, because being early without conviction turns into a long list of almosts.
Almost caught the wave, almost held the position, almost built the thing before it was obvious, almost got the big break.
I used to frame that mostly as luck, and some of it probably was, because timing is real and nobody catches every wave cleanly. But the more honest version is that I often did not believe enough to go all in. I was willing to research, test, sell, wire things together, and be useful, but I was less willing to plant my feet and say, this is the arena.
Zengar changed that.
Zengar gave the curiosity somewhere to go
When I started working at Zengar, I was finally in an environment that saw my potential before I had fully named it myself. It was small enough that the gaps were visible, serious enough that filling the right one mattered, and flexible enough that I could keep moving toward the work with the most leverage.
I came in through technical support in 2021, working with Neuroptimal users, customer relationships, and Windows support. That title was real, but it was never the whole job for long. The useful work kept appearing in the gaps between departments.
Marketing needed something. Tech needed something. Support needed something. Operations needed something. I had already worked across enough different parts of a business that I was not worried about whether the work fit a clean job description, and before Zengar I had also worked in patient care as a hospital patient transporter. That might still be the coolest job I have had. The pay was terrible. The work was not.
That mix matters because it changed how I looked at systems. I was not seeing a website, a support queue, a clinic workflow, or a marketing funnel as separate worlds. I was seeing handoffs. Every handoff had cost, delay, confusion, or opportunity inside it.
That is where digital infrastructure starts for me.
The job became filling the highest-value gap
At Zengar, I started leaning in harder.
Not in the vague “let me help with the computer thing” way. It was more specific than that, and usually tied to some cost, bottleneck, or process that had become normal because nobody had time to pull it apart.
You are paying $200 an hour for a freelancer to do what? Let me figure that out.
This API is costing how much? Let’s look at how we can gate those flows better.
Why is this manual? Why does this person need to copy the same data into three places? Why is the tool allowed to run when nobody is ready to act on the output?
That is the work that moved me from technical support into senior web development, and eventually into Head of Digital Infrastructure and Automations. The title caught up after the pattern was already obvious, because the job had become less about owning one tool and more about finding the place where a small technical move could remove a lot of drag.
The work was not one clean lane. WooCommerce, WordPress, Cloudflare, automations, customer support systems, operational triage, marketing surfaces, API costs, internal tooling. None of those are especially impressive in isolation, but together they become the system behind the system.
That is what I mean when I talk about digital infrastructure.
What digital infrastructure means at my desk
Digital infrastructure is not a finance term to me. It is not a rack of servers either.
It is the connective tissue between the parts of a business that already exist: the website that sells, the support team that absorbs pain, the marketing system that creates demand, the operations team that has to fulfill promises, and the customer experience that exposes whether the whole thing is actually working.
In practice, that meant looking at the handoffs instead of just the tools. Sometimes the right move was replacing expensive outside work with internal capability, sometimes it was gating an API so cost matched intent, sometimes it was leaving a human approval step in place because full automation would create quiet damage, and sometimes it was choosing WordPress or WooCommerce because the boring tool already sat in the middle of the business graph.
That is also why I do not separate AI from infrastructure. AI is useful when it lands inside the system with the right controls. It is expensive noise when it floats above the work as a demo.
The part that finally clicked
The difference at Zengar was not that I suddenly became curious. I had always been curious.
The difference was that curiosity finally had a place to compound. I was trusted enough to look for gaps, and close enough to the business to know which gaps mattered. That combination changed everything.
I stopped waiting for the big break to arrive as one dramatic event. The break was the environment. The work was noticing the highest-value gap, taking it seriously, and building enough trust to own the next one.
That is the career arc I actually recognize.
Not “I started in IT and escaped it.”
More like: I kept following useful signals, almost went all in a few times, then finally landed somewhere that made going all in feel obvious.
That is where I am today.
