Synaptic Labs
Co-founded an AI education and deployment company with my brother, grew it from zero revenue to multiple six figures, then handed it off fully in January 2026.
What it was
An AI education and deployment company focused on making AI practical and accessible. I co-founded it in April 2023 with my brother and handed it off to him fully in January 2026.
I came in from the go-to-market side. I was full-time at HubSpot, so I understood how to take a product to market, run a CRM, build the website, and handle the marketing and sales end. Early on that was most of my job: product market fit mapping, running and selling the first education offerings, and standing the whole business up on the HubSpot platform.
What I did
- Built and ran a bootcamp program in partnership with HubSpot Academy that put over a thousand learners through hands-on, eight-week applied AI projects with real companies. I owned curriculum, facilitation, iteration, and the partner relationships behind it.
- Earned and maintained approved training vendor status under the Massachusetts Workforce Training Fund Express Program (Commonwealth Corporation), delivering state-funded AI training to eligible Massachusetts employers.
- Advised businesses on building internal AI Centers of Excellence.
- Grew the company from zero revenue to multiple six figures.
How the enablement work actually ran
Under the state program we would do deep dives on AI enablement/ agentic building to lay a really solid foundation for learners on a schedule that fit their needs. That program is strictly educational, so delivery was standard enablement on whatever the team was already using, usually Claude or ChatGPT.
Each engagement ends with a capstone project. Workshop style, the team builds something real rather than watching a demo. Then we came back, talked through what they had built, and gave direction on making it better.
If a company wanted more bespoke solutioning we would then spin up a consulting SOWs and go into their departments where we started by interviewing people about what their day actually looked like as well as where they were stuck. We would deliver AI adoption roadmaps and implementation services to make sure they weren’t just spinning their wheels with no meaningful progress.
With these we had more time where we could interview more deeply, then find the people who were naturally inclined to build and enable them specifically to lead their own departments.
That is really what an AI Center of Excellence is. It starts with internal champions, executive buy-in behind them, and clear guardrails covering ethics and policy.
Why I handed it off
By the end of my involvement the business was running without really needing me in it. We had good people delivering the work, my brother had other developers and a community manager around him, and I had been carrying a day job alongside it for three years. I decided that the best thing for the longevity of the company was to hand it over fully and let him reinvest my share of the profits back into the business.
Through this experience I really realized that I prefer to dig in with an established team longer term and help take them to the next level of their AI maturity, with the ultimate goal of creating sustainable internal practices that persist with or without me.