Foundations first.
Everything else follows.
I’m Kaz. I build technology for founders, teams and businesses who want it done properly, and I build it differently from almost everyone else. This page is about why.
You can only build as high as the foundations allow
Most technology is built top-down: start with the screen someone asked for, then work out where the data lives, then discover it doesn’t. It looks great in the demo and stops growing at the second floor. I build the other way round. Try it.
A tower 10 floors high on foundations 3 deep, in the wind.
Standing.
Try it without me: push the height and watch the wind find out what the foundations can carry. Then press Build with Kaz. However high you go, the foundations go as deep as the building needs. That’s the job. The foundations are the architecture, the framework and, above all, the data: invisible in a demo, and they decide everything after it.
I focus on the foundations, so you can focus on the dream.
A craftsman’s approach to software
Japanese craft has a word for the master who has spent decades on a single discipline: takumi. I’m not claiming the title, but I build by the same ideas. These six are the ones I hold myself to.
TakumiThe master craftsman
One person who understands the whole object, from what it’s for to how it’ll be maintained. The details nobody puts in a brief, such as two people editing the same record at once, are where systems fall over, and where craft shows.
Why it comes out better
Because one person is accountable and responsible for anything and everything. Nothing gets lost in a hand-off, nobody optimises their bit at the expense of the system, and the person who agreed what it should do is the one who proves it does.
Because the experience is real. Telco systems serving millions, financial platforms where a wrong number is a regulatory problem, operations with sixty people depending on them. AI does the labour now, and the judgement comes from all of that.
Where it comes from
Co-founder and CTO, Daedalus
Data engineering and architecture for B2B financial-services ventures. Before that, co-founder and CTO at Wathe (real-time risk metrics for lending) and Datawok (AI analytics before AI was mainstream).
Lead ML engineer, a top-10 global telco
A real-time natural-language call-steering system for 8.6 million customers, and £3.5m of measured benefit – annually – from models in production.
Head of operations
Corporate services providing bespoke tailoring, dry-cleaning and fleet logistics network with sixty staff across over 300 sites. Where I learned that the system on paper and the one people use are rarely the same.
MSci Physics, String Theory
The true meaning of ‘architecture-first’ comes from mathematical first principles, and dissecting the principles of the universe by hand on paper.