Zero
Founder, engineer, product lead, available for contract work
Hi, I'm Peter Bray. I bootstrap software companies and the products inside them, mostly in B2B and enterprise. Three sold so far.
Most recently, I sold my AI-enhanced regulatory intelligence company to LegitScript and stayed on as Chief Innovation Officer. There, I pivoted the platform into an anti-money-laundering product for financial institutions.
Before that, I built a digital product and engineering organization at Starbucks, authored the five-year roadmap, and drove digital loyalty adoption past 50% participation. Earlier still, Moz acquired the social media analytics company I'd bootstrapped. I've also been Principal Investigator on eight US Air Force and DoD research contracts, building practical AI applications. One progressed from Phase I to Phase III, adopted by the Inspector General of the Air Force. Another secured buy-in from the Chief Legal Officer.
Across this work I've delivered custom software to Fortune 500 customers including Google, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, and Allianz.
Bootstrapped to the Fortune 500
The pattern I keep coming back to is small teams shipping serious work to large customers. Bootstrapped, focused, no VC theater. I've reached the Fortune 500 this way with tiny teams, and it's the shape I think most AI work belongs in right now. Whether you're a big company trying to ship something real without the consultancy machine, or a small team punching above your weight, that's the work I want.
Available, selectively
Zero to one is where I do my best work, and what I take on for clients. Discovery, design, architecture, build, ship. I can run a team or be the team. I'm best on ambiguous projects with real stakes, where someone has to own the strategy and the build at once.
Lately most of that has been bringing AI projects to life inside enterprises, often with teams that haven't built much with AI yet: a single integration, an executive team's first deployment, a custom evaluation harness, a native app. The hard part is usually less the model and more the organization around it.
Other areas where I've done a lot of the work:
- Crawling and large-scale data pipelines, usually in service of compliance, risk, and regulatory problems. Most of my client work in the last decade has landed here.
- Hands-on across the stack. TypeScript and Node on AWS or GCP, Puppeteer and proxy management for pulling structure out of messy web sources, and Swift for native iOS and macOS apps.
If you have a hard problem and a short runway, that's the kind of work I want.
Get in touch
Tell me what you're working on.