Before the Web.
Before Streaming Worked.
Before the Cloud Had a Name.

There was no public World Wide Web.

There was no Google, YouTube, Reddit, Discord, Facebook, AWS, Azure or ChatGPT.

There were computers.
There were telephone lines.

There were modems that screamed, clicked and hissed until two distant machines finally agreed to communicate.

And there were two fourteen-year-old identical twins determined to discover what was waiting on the other end.

Peter and I wrote software, exchanged games and technical information, explored remote systems and operated our own dial-up community:

Whackoland had users, identities, passwords, permissions, private sections, downloadable software, message boards, community rules, security problems and two teenage administrators trying to keep everything running.

We did not call it social media.

We did not call it a digital platform.

We did not call it a cloud community.

We called it a BBS.

Years later, I helped co-found Savvis, built around a better way to move Internet traffic: control more of the route, reduce unnecessary network handoffs, connect more directly to the networks carrying the traffic and engineer around the bottlenecks that prevented reliable audio, video and enterprise applications.

I then helped create Intira, where we moved beneath the network and into the data center. Instead of forcing every company to assemble buildings, power, cooling, circuits, servers, storage, databases, firewalls, backups and specialized operating teams, Intira offered to build and operate the complete environment beneath the application.

We called that model:

NetSourcing

Today, much of the industry would recognize it as an early commercial precursor to managed cloud infrastructure.

Inside Intira, we were also designing facilities for computing densities far beyond the conventional data centers of the period. My design called for approximately seven times the electrical and cooling capacity of the legacy environments we were comparing ourselves with.

We were not training modern large language models, and the term AI data center did not yet exist in its current commercial meaning.

But we were already confronting the physical problem now reshaping the AI infrastructure industry:

More computing in less space.
More electrical demand.
More heat.
More continuous utilization.
More network capacity.
More centralized management.
More pressure to design the building, power, cooling, computing and software as one coordinated system.

Savvis helped improve the road.
Intira helped operate the destination.

Every company after that taught me another part of the distribution and infrastructure problem.

Today, all those pieces have come together in Platformz—a reusable operating foundation designed to connect the systems, people, partners, workflows, data and intelligence required to operate a complex modern business.

Platformz is not simply my newest company.

It is the platform my entire life prepared me to build.