From Video Games to Websites to Solar Panels To 1Plan

I’ve spent 30 years building systems that work and work like crazy. Here’s what that taught me about building for real people.

In 1994, I joined an extremely well funded startup, Disney Interactive. From the surface, what a great opportunity, working with the best of breed from every place. There were a lot of smart people, but no truly efficient way to build the products that we were building. My job "Production Supervisor" meant everything went through me. I was responsible for the journey of every asset that we created. I needed a unified system for technical specs, animation, the creation of every single asset. At the time, it was all paper, spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge locked in people’s heads.

I built DREEMS. Disney Really Efficient Everything Management System. It was sexy. It did things. It was a database, a set of workflows, and a lot of careful thinking about how production teams actually work. The kind of system where you break down a script once and know every artifact that your product will have, who made it, who touches it, and how much it costs from idea to screen.

DREEMS is still running. Thirty years later, it’s still part of the backbone that helps them move projects through from ideation to delivery. That wasn’t luck. That was intentional architecture.

The Pattern

After Disney, I brought the same discipline to Tesla, where I worked on preconstruction systems — for residential solar and energy storage projects, it meant figuring out how to work with agencies and utilities that were not kind to the company. I elevated our game. I used relationship building to turn frenemies into advocates. They might not have liked us, but they HAD to work with us.

The pattern was always the same. Walk into a domain with real complexity. Understand how people actually work, not how they say they work. Model the domain accurately. Build something that doesn’t need to be replaced in two years.

The Spark

In 2019, I got a phone bill that didn’t make sense. Extra charges, plan changes I didn’t authorize, fees I couldn’t explain. I spent 45 minutes on the phone sorting it out. And as I hung up, I realized something: I do this for everything. Insurance renewals. Utility rate changes. Subscription creep. Bank fee reviews. It’s a part-time job that nobody signed up for.

I’d spent 25 years building systems for Fortune 500 companies. Disney has one of my systems for building their products. Tesla has a system for putting together residential energy products. But the average American household — managing 47 distinct services, accounts, and obligations — has nothing. Spreadsheets. Email threads. Memory. A folder in a filing cabinet that hasn’t been opened since 2018.

The Research

In 2024, I ran the study that would become the foundation for 1Plan. One thousand homeowners, one simple ask: tell me everything you manage. The responses confirmed what I’d suspected. The average was 47 items across 10 life domains. People were drowning in administrative overhead, and nobody was offering them the kind of operational tools that every Fortune 500 company takes for granted.

Why This Time Is Different

I’ve seen a lot of personal finance apps come and go. They fail for one of three reasons: they try to be everything and end up being nothing, they sell user data to subsidize a free product, or they optimize for engagement instead of outcomes.

1Plan is built on a different premise. Your life is a system. Systems need architecture. Architecture needs someone who’s done this before. I’ve been building systems that outlast me for thirty years. 1Plan is the one I’m building for everyone.