About

The Name

Walking on Cape Cod with my wife in 2018, discussing my decision to leave ADP after twenty-four years. I needed a company name—something cloud-related, but most were taken. She asked, "Well, what's the word for when you see things in a cloud?"

I looked it up. Told her, "I can learn to spell that."

Pareidolia: when you see a face in the clouds, or hear your name being called when it's not. A fancy word for hallucination.

Turns out it was perfect. We're all facing hallucination—in clouds, in patterns, in systems claiming to be fundamentally different when they're running the same cycles we've seen before. Now, in AI.

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What I Do

Pareidolia LLC is a strategy consulting practice focused on infrastructure transitions, governance architecture, and technology evaluation.

I work with organizations navigating shifts in how they build, deploy, and govern systems—whether that's moving to cloud platforms, adopting container orchestration, implementing zero-trust security models, or evaluating autonomous agent platforms.

The pattern is consistent: new technology arrives, promises transformation, and introduces governance problems that weren't visible during early adoption. My work focuses on identifying those problems early, designing governance that scales with deployment reality, and ensuring organizations don't optimize for infrastructure at the expense of control.

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Pattern Recognition

Three decades in infrastructure teaches you to see cycles. Physical servers to VMs. On-premise to SaaS. Monoliths to microservices. Datacenters to cloud. VMs to containers to serverless. Now: deterministic code to autonomous agents.

The infrastructure changes. The adoption curve doesn't.

I spent twenty-four years at ADP—pioneering their first SaaS products, leading cloud modernization roadmaps, architecting systems that scaled to 100PB while maintaining auditability. That work included the harder governance problems: how to maintain security boundaries when infrastructure became ephemeral, how to enforce policy when deployment became self-service, and how to preserve auditability when control planes abstracted implementation details.

The patterns repeat: abstraction promises freedom, optimization creates lock-in, governance gets deferred until failure forces it, and portability costs more than strategic commitment.

Since founding Pareidolia in 2018, I've advised organizations on cloud strategy, security architecture, and technology evaluation—and increasingly, on how to think about autonomous agents and AI governance without repeating the mistakes of previous infrastructure cycles.

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Current Work

Pareidolia LLC — Strategy consulting for infrastructure transitions and governance architecture.

CrossBorder Solutions — Chief Security Architect, leading SOC2 and ISO-27001 compliance programs and security architecture for cross-border payroll systems.

Current ventures — Equilateral.ai (governance for autonomous AI) and HappyHippo.ai (governance for hybrid workforces). Both apply pattern recognition from infrastructure cycles to governance challenges.