zach.dev
StartupCities
StoresData
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LearnClaude
Who?I'm a software engineer and entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill in the role of founder or early team member as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
Wait... what is this site?
This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Have fun exploring!
Click the Start Menu to learn more.
Contact:hello @ zach.dev
I'm Bullish on Google AI
The endless OpenAI / Anthropic drama carousel distracts from how Google might be the big winner of the AI race.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is fantastic. It's a seriously smart model and much faster and less annoying than Claude. Token costs on models like Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite are absolutely unbeatable for the performance.
Gemma 4 is America's best open source model. Nano Banana is unrivaled for image gen. Even the new built-in music creator is on par with Suno. Their coding harnesses (Gemini CLI and Antigravity CLI) get better by the week.
For security reasons, I've had multiple clients ask me to exclusively use Gemini as a coding agent and as an AI integration into their products. People trust Google.
Google has a huge hardware arm to build their own chips and lots of practice with data centers. They built TensorFlow. They INVENTED the Transformer!
Google has enormous distribution into businesses and to consumers. They have insane data assets and highly diversified sources of revenue. And they're low drama in the AI race.
The big IPOs overshadow everything. Many people's narratives are stuck in 2022, when ChatGPT seemed to catch Google flat footed. Reality has changed. I'm bullish on Google AI.
