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Cogitations n.

  1. an act of reflection or meditation; contemplation.
  2. the facility of thinking.
  3. a thought, scheme, or plan.
    (Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, 1999)

Backtick -- Coming Soon

  • Definition: An AI-powered founder operating system that combines proven startup playbooks, a community of real peer decisions, and a private team knowledge base — so founders can build, learn from others at the same stage, and give their teams one place to find every answer.

  • Target Audience:

    • Solo Founders: Access battle-tested frameworks from Irv Shapiro's 40+ years of founding and scaling companies — including a $100M exit at DialogTech and growing Metamor to 500+ employees. Playbooks cover hiring, culture, fundraising, product strategy, and building with AI, with AI-guided explanations tailored to your specific stage and constraints.
    • Growing Teams: A living knowledge system for publishing SOPs, onboarding guides, and operational playbooks. Team members ask questions directly on plays; admins answer (with AI Assist that drafts from existing content), and every Q&A becomes a permanent FAQ entry — turning daily decisions into how the company runs.

  • Key Features:

    • Custom AI Assistant: Context-aware AI grounded in your company's own playbooks — not the generic web. For team workspaces, AI only references your private content. Includes click-to-explain for any text, free-form Ask AI queries, and structured AI Decision Plans that deliver situation assessment, a decision framework, a recommended path, and risk warnings.
    • Interactive & Scalable: Goes far beyond static courses. Playbooks are structured as versioned "plays" with Markdown editing and Vimeo video support. A Spaces layer lets founders share real business situations — with stage, revenue, team size, and what's already been tried — collect peer perspectives, and document outcomes, all auto-tagged by AI theme.
    • Founder Spaces: A community where founders post real scenarios and read what others at the same stage actually did. Structured context fields replace vague questions; AI tags every scenario by theme (hiring, pricing, fundraising, etc.); outcomes close the loop on what worked.
    • Living Team SOPs: Private team workspaces where playbooks evolve through real use. Members ask questions on plays, admins answer with AI Assist, and Q&As accumulate as searchable FAQ entries — so documentation improves every time someone needs it.
    • Flexible AI Usage: Free tier includes 10 AI queries/month; Premium ($29/mo) includes 150; Team ($79/mo) includes 300 shared queries. Users and teams can also connect their own Gemini API key for unlimited usage.

  • URL: backtick.live

I Create to Live

My life has always felt like a journey through building: ideas born, experiments launched, lessons learned — over and over. From my days with punch cards and mainframes, to founding companies, to now post-corporate adventure, I’ve followed one guidepost: create, learn, teach.

“If I’m not building, I’m not breathing.”

For over 40 years, I led in the corporate world: founding companies, scaling teams, and driving growth at the intersection of science, engineering, and business. Today, in retirement, I’m still creating — through coding, teaching, making, and exploring ideas that excite me.

A Timeline of Companies & Creation

Here are the major waypoints — the companies I started or led, how they grew, and what I learned along the way:

Company / Venture What & When Outcomes & Lessons
Irv Shapiro & Associates (ISA) Early 1980s – After ~5 years at DEC, I founded this as a consulting firm. Focused on software consulting/engineering services to Fortune 5000 companies. Taught me how to build client trust, deliver under deadline, and hire engineers. Seeded the idea of scale in service businesses.
Metamor Mid–Late 1980s – Grew out of ISA; expanded consulting scope until the company had over 500 consultants serving a global client base. Ultimately sold to Corestaff. Scaling people is harder than scaling code — culture, structure, and alignment matter as much as technical quality.
Edventions Mid 1990s – Before most people even knew what the Internet was, I co-founded Edventions to provide safe Internet access and homeschool connections for elementary schools. We served over 125 schools nationwide. A bold bet on the future of education and technology. Ultimately sold to Edison Schools. Lesson: timing matters, and being early can be both exhilarating and challenging.
DialogTech 2007–2021 – Founded as the next leap forward, DialogTech became a marketing automation leader delivering voice analytics. We gave marketers the power to track, route, and analyze inbound calls — connecting digital ad spend with real conversations. Under my leadership, revenue approached $40 million and the company was cash flow positive. In 2021, DialogTech was acquired by Invoca for $100 million. Lesson: When you give businesses visibility into their customer conversations, you change how they market and sell.
MakeWithTech 2018–Present – Post-corporate project — community + maker space + learning hub. Tutorials, 3D printing, electronics, lasers, and sharing experiments. Built a passionate community, tens of thousands of YouTube subscribers, thousands of forum members. Some projects succeeded, some didn’t. I learned again: community & authenticity matter more than polished perfection. Monetization is necessary but not sufficient to define value.
Savta.ai
Site no longer available.		 2024–2025 – Exploring what tradition and tangibility still matter in an increasingly digital world. Physical cards, memories, and connection. While I determined this was not financially viable, it was a wonderful learning experience. savta.ai Already showing me that the questions — not just the technology — are what I enjoy most: what connects us, what feels human.
Sefaria Tutor
shoresh.cogitations.com		 2026-Present – Applying the power of AI to traditional Jewish texts. With access to millions of examples, large language models do a good job at translating nuanced text and breaking down the grammar of Hebrew and Aramaic texts. sefaria-tutor.cogitations.com Ongoing. I have always struggled with biblical Hebrew, so I built a site to apply the power of AI to the classical biblical texts available at sefaria.org.
backtick.live Backtick is an AI augmented founders toolkit to speed the steps from idea to viable company. Ongoing.
Technology Consultations I assist venture capital funds in their evaluation of potential investments in AI-based technology companies and help AI company founders as an executive coach. Ongoing.

Learning, Teaching, Creating — Always Together

After decades in leadership and product building, I find that my richest rewards now come from sharing: writing what I’ve learned (warts & all), teaching what I’m exploring, and creating in public.

  • I post blog reflections: sometimes on success, often on what went wrong. Because “failure” is just a data point.
  • I build small tools or experiments not because I need them, but because they clarify ideas.
  • I teach through YouTube, tutorials, and community forums — not to show off, but so someone might think: I can do that too.

Retirement, Reinvented

“Retirement” sounds like rest. For me, it’s the chance to re-orient. To stop doing what I have to, and focus on what I want to. I’m free from quarterly targets, but I’m not free from vision. I’m free to experiment. To build things that wouldn’t have seemed “scalable” but feel deeply satisfying.

“Every hobby carries the seed of something more.”

Sometimes projects succeed. Sometimes they don’t. But every one of them tells me more about people, technology, and myself.

Featured Reflections

Here are stories where I’ve pulled back the curtain — the decisions, regrets, surprises:

Let’s Make Something Together

If you've got an idea, a question, a project, or just a curiosity: reach out. Let’s build, tinker, and iterate together. Because even in retirement, I believe the most important work is the work that pushes boundaries — of technology, of business, of what we think is possible.

Connect & Explore

“My greatest creations may be experiments that never made it — because those failures paved the way for everything else.”

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