Hello from Toronto

Hi everyone, I'm Mike, joining from Toronto, Canada.
I've spent over 30 years working in technology, much of it in enterprise infrastructure, IT operations, incident response, and service reliability, including leadership roles in financial services and other large-scale environments.

These days, I'm focused on building AI systems that can move beyond impressive demos and actually operate reliably, securely, and accountably in the real world.

I'm the founder of AI Syndicate, where I'm developing execution-layer governance for AI systems, particularly in regulated environments. The underlying principle is simple: Distrust by Default. An AI system shouldn't be trusted to execute consequential actions simply because it generated a plausible response. Authorization, enforcement, and independently verifiable evidence need to be built into the execution path.

I'm also building Nexus Code, an open-source, agentic software engineering harness designed around long-running development workflows, specialized agents, durable context, independent review, and evidence-based validation.

A big part of that work involves building and operating my own local AI inference infrastructure, experimenting with open-weight models, and figuring out where local-first AI genuinely makes sense compared with commercial cloud models.

What's working: Taking an engineering-first approach, testing assumptions against actual system behaviour, and building the infrastructure to evaluate AI capabilities rather than relying on benchmarks or vendor claims.

What's challenging: Turning technically credible AI infrastructure into commercially viable products. Building something that works is one problem. Establishing that someone needs it badly enough to pay for it is another.

What I'm hoping to get from this community: Connecting with founders who are actively building, shipping, finding customers, and learning what the market actually values. I'm particularly interested in product-market fit, enterprise AI adoption, practical agent architectures, and the realities of building a sustainable AI business.

I'm happy to share technical lessons, architecture decisions, failures, and what I've learned from operating complex systems in production.

Looking forward to learning from everyone here and contributing where I can.

Mike
Founder, AI Syndicate
Building Nexus Code and practical AI governance infrastructure