Brad Wood

Builder · Translator · Operator

I take what's complex
and make it work.

44 years building — from an Osborne Executive at 10 to Deputy CTO at Riverbed to running cannabis operations with AI agents. I translate Fortune 1000 tools into leverage for the people who run the real economy.

Read the storySee the agents
Brad Wood pointing at a No Loitering sign
Nashville, TN

Same instinct. Every decade.

1982

Osborne Executive. Wrote an accounting system in BASIC at 10.

1993

Built one of the first ambulance EHR systems. While working as a paramedic.

2015

Deputy CTO at Riverbed. Translated complex networking for customers. Made it consumable. Made them sticky.

2023

CCO at Addium. Brought Fortune 1000 business intelligence to cannabis operators running 3 sites.

2026

Teaching teams to build with AI agents. The force multiplier isn’t me building alone — it’s everyone building.

The receipts

–22 → +37
NPS turnaround

Under a year. Radical transparency. Put the number in front of the company and went to work.

1,800
Commits

To production AI infrastructure last year. Claude writes the code. I architect the systems. Now my team does too.

$222
Per month

Total cost of a 7-agent autonomous operation. The same output that used to require a department.

“Brad continually drives the team in pursuit of never settling for good. He has been instrumental in driving the corporate turnaround.”

Bob Agnes
CEO, Addium

“Brad embodies customer first. He leads his teams to desired customer outcomes with relentless focus. One of the very best CX facing leaders I’ve worked with.”

Dan Smoot
CEO, Vantor (fmr. CEO, Riverbed Technology)

About

I've been building since 1982. Coding camp at ShowBiz Pizza. Novell NetWare. First ethernet-connected networks. Enterprise architecture for state governments and Wall Street. Deputy CTO at Riverbed for five years under Thoma Bravo and Apollo.

I chose the business side because translating complexity is where I create the most leverage. Hundreds of hours of technical content at Riverbed. NPS turnaround through radical transparency. Cannabis operations democratized with enterprise-grade metrics.

Now I'm building AI agent infrastructure — not to be the smartest person in the room, but so my team can use it. Me alone is a liability. Me teaching is a force multiplier.

Cannabis is my medium. Tech is the art. Money is the fuel.

Writing

All essays →
I Gave My Water Heater an AI Brain Over the Weekend
How I replaced my Rinnai's dumb recirculation schedule with a Python classifier, reactive trigger, and local AI chat — Friday night to Sunday afternoon.
The Feedback Loop That Was Never Listening
I built a closed feedback loop for my AI agent system -- analyst measures content, computes weights, adjusts strategy. Then I discovered 87 out of 88 posts had null genome tags. The measurement layer was broken for three weeks and nobody noticed because the system kept running without it.
Datacenter on Your Desk
I ran a 397-billion-parameter model at 6.1 tokens per second on a $2,500 AMD Strix Halo desktop. Nobody had published benchmarks at this scale on consumer hardware. Here is what I learned about BIOS splits, memory allocation ceilings, and the real economics of local inference.
The Handoff Is Where Agents Die
I woke up to twenty agent failures this morning. Every agent did its job. The drafts vanished in the space between them. Ethan Mollick is right: the tools are weaker than the agents. Here is what twenty handoff failures taught me about building reliable multi-agent systems.
The Three-Turn Problem
My AI agents started having multi-turn conversations with strangers. The hardest design decision was not how smart to make them. It was when to make them stop.

Contact

Let's talk

If you're an operator exploring what AI agents can actually do for your business — I'd love to compare notes.

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