Catalyzing individuals and organizations to create positive impact.
I believe the world gets better when more people have the tools, support, and confidence to build things.
So I build things. And I help others build things. And sometimes I build the things that help others build things.
The form keeps changing — startup incubators, artisan enterprises, peace-tech platforms, AI tools. The intention doesn't.
- 🌴 New chapter: I'm VP of Platform & Member Engagement at Embarc Collective, the startup hub in Downtown Tampa — building the programs, partnerships, and operating infrastructure that help Florida founders get from idea to scale.
- 🗺️ Currently building the Florida Startup Ecosystem Map — an independent, source-linked map of who does what and where across Florida. (more below ↓)
- 🏛️ Previously CEO of VentureStudio, the innovation & incubation platform at Ahmedabad University in India — programs like MentorManthan, BioSangam, BIPASS, and the VentureStudio Fellowship. Before that, Director of Startup Services at Alloy Growth Lab in Greater Cincinnati.
- 🤖 AI optimist — I build AI tools and intelligence platforms for founders, universities, and ecosystems: contxtmd, EduStrat AI, GazetteIQ, MentorManthan, and more.
- 🧵 Co-founded Bagru Textiles — now Studio Bagru — fifteen years connecting Rajasthan's hand block printing artisans to global markets.
- 🕊️ Founded PeaceRise — a peace-tech platform that grew to 200+ partners across 26 countries.
- 💬 Ask me about ecosystem design, mentor networks, university innovation, social enterprise, and building real products with AI.
- 📍 Tampa Bay, Florida — via Ahmedabad, Bagru, Cincinnati, and everywhere in between.
Florida's startup ecosystem is real, but it's scattered across a dozen metros with no single directory of who does what and where. So I'm building one.
An independent, source-linked map of the accelerators, incubators, investors, universities, economic-development organizations, programs, and capital that make up the state — organized by sector, region, and stage.
| 224 | 13 | 19 |
| organizations mapped | regions | sectors |
| 308 | 100% | 0 |
| cited sources | orgs with a source | invented facts |
The trust anchor is mechanical, not aspirational: the build refuses to publish an organization that has no cited source URL. Unknown fields are left blank rather than guessed. A green build is the acceptance gate for every new record.
What's in it
| Surface | What it does |
|---|---|
| Directory | Every organization, filterable by sector · region · stage · type |
| Choropleth map | The whole state by region, with density and hub detail |
| Walkable map | A full-screen, explorable Florida you actually move through |
| "Why Florida" | A sourced economics argument — also a paginated A4 report and PDF, where every figure and footnote is read out of the data at build time |
| Start here | A decision-finder wizard that routes a founder to the right handful of orgs |
| The Glaring Gap | Where the ecosystem's capital and support thin out — and who's working on it |
It foregrounds the four Ambition Accelerated sectors — FinTech (West Palm Beach), Dual-Use/Defense (Miami), HealthTech (Tampa Bay), Resilience (Southwest Florida) — while serving anyone building in Florida.
Built as a zero-dependency static site: one Node script turns JSON + a CSS skin into the whole thing. The report's PDF, the social cards, and a 30-second Remotion reel all read their figures from the same data — so a revised number flows everywhere, and a deleted source fails the render instead of freezing a stale figure into a PNG.
📖 Read the full story — a four-part series I wrote on LinkedIn
Things I've said out loud, mostly about entrepreneurship, craft, and why the two belong in the same sentence.
| Watch | |
|---|---|
| 🎤 | Entrepreneurship in India: from Ego to Eco — a full-length talk on why ecosystems beat individual heroics |
| 🌏 | How can we save indigenous practices from neo-colonialism? — webinar on craft, heritage, and who captures the value |
| 🧵 | Nuno Stories: Bagru Block Print — the craft itself, and the artisans who keep it alive |
| 📺 | PeaceRise on WCPO 9 · Cincy Lifestyle — local TV on a global peace-innovation challenge |
Also on the record: Movers & Makers · Side Hustle City · The Stash Cast · FORBES · Financial Times · NYT Style Magazine · Washington Post · National Geographic
Ecosystem building runs on knowledge that usually stays locked inside incubators. I open-source mine — playbooks, tools, and infrastructure for founders and the people who support them:
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| startup-stack | The documents every startup should have, compiled into an AI-readable knowledge base — templates, prompts, and weekly recap rituals |
| site2deck | Turns any company website into a branded, offline HTML slide deck — design tokens sampled automatically |
| geo-landing-page | Astro landing-page template optimized for search engines and AI crawlers |
| pressroom | Turns organizational updates into newsletters and social content |
| ai-dev | Build a landing page. Build your app. Understand every step. A project-first course for people who aren't developers |
The bigger swings — less a tool than a proposed way for a whole ecosystem to work:
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| open-innovation-stack | A public proposal for shared infrastructure across founders, incubators, universities, mentors, facilities, and funders — common workflows, portable records, and an open Innovation Hub Data Standard |
| stack-kb | A clone-and-own knowledge base for any function of any organization — one spine of ten sections, prepared by interview before it holds a single document. The generalized sibling of startup-stack |
| startup-india-guide | Built in Ahmedabad: an independent, source-linked guide to 69 central-government startup schemes in India, with finder tools that route a founder to the ones they actually qualify for |
If something here is useful to you, a ⭐ helps other builders find it.
"Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say 'We have done this ourselves.'" — Lao Tzu
| 🪷 Be Good | 🤲 Do Good | 🌏 Dream Good |
|---|---|---|
| The inner work. Clarity, discipline, honesty — you cannot lead well or build well from a depleted place. | The outer work. Service, contribution, community — values only matter when they become visible in action. | The long work. Leaving systems better than you found them: more peaceful, more inclusive, more capable of creating opportunity. |
New to Tampa Bay and looking to meet the people building here — founders, operators, and anyone mapping the same terrain.
The form keeps changing. The intention doesn't. ✨
🚚 HORN OK PLEASE