The Evidence. Everything below is real, verifiable, and load-bearing.
Aardvark
A creator affiliate platform, live in production, with subscribers who pay actual money (the harshest code review there is). Cole is a founder and the entire engineering department: a Next.js/React/TypeScript app, Postgres on Supabase with row-level security, a Chrome Manifest V3 extension, and a Stripe billing pipeline he owns end to end. Highlights include a bidirectional partner integration (encrypted JWE handoff tokens, shared-secret webhooks both ways, idempotent signup callbacks) and the time he traced a revenue-affecting cancellation bug to permission-scoped writes failing silently, which is the worst way to fail. He also builds AI agent tooling with hard guardrails: no prod pushes, no schema migrations, no destructive database calls. The robots work here. They do not get keys.
MyPI, Pekin Insurance
Founding engineer on MyPI, a ground-up rebuild of an insurance claims platform: React and TypeScript over Java REST and PostgreSQL, team of five. Also built an identity-resolution tool scoring registrations against up to 10,000 LexisNexis records, and wrote a recurring newsletter column pairing seasonal recipes with technical humor. Insurance: rarely thrilling. Correct: always.
GottaGo
A React Native app that guides you to the nearest public restroom, with filters for wheelchair access and baby changing tables. Is it glamorous? No. Has it briefly been the single most important app on someone's phone? Absolutely. Great engineering meets people where they are, and sometimes where they are is urgent.
Seen enough? Head back to the pitch.