Before I learned to stare at spreadsheets, I stared at a 6,000-degree arc of fire.
This is the story of a welder who went back to school, a SOX director who asked the right question, and fourteen companies that kept having the same problem.
The 6,000-degree pivot.
I started as a welder. Six years in the heat. I knew my body couldn't do it forever, so when I saw the window into tech in the late '90s, I took it — moving from the welding floor to a Compliance Technician role in high-tech.
I was there for the gold rush. I saw the heights of the dot-com era, and then I watched the bubble burst in 2001. Laid off. Standing at a crossroads with no degree, a skillset that belonged to an industry that had just collapsed, and no obvious next move.
My Dad had one piece of advice:
“Attack what scares you the most. Conquer it and be free of the weight.”
For me, that was college. The accounting degree I'd always told myself wasn't for someone like me. I went and got it, started the Accounting field in 2005, and I never looked back.
The ghost in the logo.
The two decades after that took me through Public Accounting, FP&A at EMC, HR Compensation, and RevOps — finishing at Global Sales Comp at CyberArk.
Fourteen companies. Ten of them closed, merged, or were acquired. Ten times, a logo held the power over my career. I decided a long time ago that wouldn't be the end of the story.
But during that climb, I kept finding the same ghost — office to office, system to system. It didn't matter what the company was called. The drift was always there.
The SOX Director's question.
I love building things. Automation is a hobby. So I built an automated HR reconciliation agent to surface these gaps — and showed it to our SOX Director.
She looked at the design and said it was impressive. Then she looked me in the eye and asked:
Who's making sure the automation isn't creating gaps or missing data?
That was the moment. If a seasoned SOX director is losing sleep over a reconciliation agent, there's a quiet epidemic of anxiety inside every company chasing AI and growth. I watched my team working late on Sundays, holidays, weekends — not because they were bad at their jobs, but because they were afraid of an audit finding a gap they didn't see coming.
That fear costs money. It costs health. And it's completely solvable.
Ending the ulcer economy.
I looked for a tool that connected the gaps and verified the drift automatically. It didn't exist.
So I built it.
OrgDrift exists to do three things:
This isn't just software to me. It's the thing I spent twenty years wishing someone had already built.