Operator turned engineer
Daniel Ramirez.
I built a solar company to $130M, then sat down and wrote the software that runs the industry.
The arc
Operator → Engineer → Founder
Co-founder of Strategy Labs AI · full-stack engineer on BriteBuild · former COO of Gold Rush Energy Solutions.
Now
BriteBuild · Strategy Labs
Then
Gold Rush · 11 yrs · $130M
- $130M lifetime revenue
- 722 commits in 15 months
- $1.3M co-op capital raise
- 291+ Postgres migrations
- 1530 → 0 svelte-check warnings
- 630 Svelte components
- 11 years operating Gold Rush
- Rust → WebAssembly placement engine
- 479k insertions across 3.6k files
- El Dorado Hills Startup of the Year, 2018
The arc
One career, three chapters.
I spent a decade running a solar company, watched the tools we depended on get worse instead of better, and decided to write the ones I'd wanted the whole time.
- Then 2013 — 2024
Operator
Co-founded Gold Rush Energy Solutions and ran it as COO for a decade. Drove the company past $130M in lifetime revenue, led the Salesforce enterprise build as SCRUM master and lead developer, and won multiple industry awards before exiting.
$130M revenue - Now 2025 — Present
Engineer
Full-stack engineer at BriteBuild, the SaaS platform I help architect for the residential and commercial solar industry. Largest individual contributor by feature surface area — 722 commits and 291+ database migrations across 15 months of continuous shipping.
722 commits · 15 months - Next 2026 →
Founder
Co-founder of Strategy Labs AI. BriteBuild is the flagship. The bet: domain expertise plus modern AI tooling — Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, agent harnesses — collapses the time between idea and operating system.
Strategy Labs AI
What I build
Five things, shipped end‑to‑end.
FlagshipVertical SaaS · 2025 — present
BriteBuild
Multi-tenant operating system for the solar industry. CRM, design, financing, contracts, scheduling, contractor ops — all on one stack I helped design and ship.
- commits
- 722
- DB migrations
- 291+
- insertions
- 479k
- svelte-check
- 1530 → 0
Strategy Labs AIStudio · 2026
Co-founded studio shipping operator-grade SaaS at agency speed using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and custom agent harnesses. BriteBuild is product zero.
- role
- co-founder
- stack
- SvelteKit · TS · PG
- method
- agent-first
Gold Rush Energy SolutionsOperating company · 2013 — 2024
Co-founded and ran as COO. Built the org from a startup to El Dorado Hills Chamber of Commerce 2018 Startup of the Year and a multi-award-winning regional installer. Exited cleanly.
- lifetime revenue
- $130M
- tenure
- 11 yrs
- awards
- multiple
Placerville Food Co-opCivic · Board service · Present
Vice President & Secretary on the Board of Directors. Led the member-capital raise — roughly $1.3M — to purchase the building the co-op operates out of, securing its long-term home.
- capital raised
- $1.3M
- role
- VP & Secretary
- outcome
- building bought
The Band RoomCivic · 2018 — present
Co-founded an arts and music venue that became the heartbeat of Placerville's cultural scene. Built it the same way I build software — quietly, on purpose.
- role
- co-founder
- town
- Placerville, CA
Stack
The tools, ordered by how often I touch them.
Categorized by era. The operator-era tools earned their place — I shipped a decade with them — but the new stack is what I reach for first now.
Engineering today
What ships every week at BriteBuild.
- TypeScript
- Svelte 5 (runes)
- SvelteKit
- Rust → WebAssembly
- PostgreSQL
- Tailwind CSS
- Python · FastAPI
- Vitest · Playwright
- WebSockets
- AWS · Heroku
- GitHub Actions
- Sentry
AI tooling
The harnesses I reach for first.
- Claude Code
- Codex (OpenAI)
- Cursor
- Gemini 2.5
- Custom agent loops
- DeepSeek (PDF parsing)
- Tesseract OCR
Operator
The decade before the rewrite.
- Salesforce
- Aurora Solar
- ETB
- Tableau
- DocuSign
- QuickBooks
- Workday
- Google Workspace
- Adobe Suite
- Figma
Receipts
Numbers from both halves of the career.
Operator credentials + engineering proof points, side by side. No vague claims, no adjectives.
- $130M
- Lifetime revenue · Gold Rush Energy Solutions
- 722 commits
- BriteBuild · 15 months · 479k insertions
- 1530 → 0
- svelte-check warnings, BriteBuild monorepo
- 291+
- PostgreSQL migrations authored
- 2018
- El Dorado Hills Chamber Startup of the Year
- $1.3M
- Capital raised to buy the Placerville Food Co-op building
Eleven years co-founding and operating a regional solar installer.
Largest individual contributor by feature surface area.
Drove the codebase to zero — and kept it there.
Bitemporal pricing, polymorphic territories, audit triggers across 24 domains.
Plus multi-year recognition through the company’s growth.
Member-funded purchase of the co-op’s home. Serving as Vice President & Secretary on the Board of Directors.
Off keyboard
The rest of the life that makes the work possible.
The Sierra foothills are not a backdrop. They’re the operating environment.
-
Placerville Food Co-op
VP & Secretary · Board of Directors
Led the ~$1.3M member-capital raise to buy the building the co-op operates out of. Now stewarding governance, finance, and the long-term plan.
-
The Band Room
Co-founder
Built a small live-music venue with my hometown. Played there, ran the soundboard, locked up at midnight, opened again Friday.
-
Placerville, California
Home base
Sierra foothills. The same hour-long-drive radius where I grew up, met my wife, raised kids, and started both companies.
Contact
Pitch me something hard. I’ll tell you what it takes.
Best reach is email. I’m awake early, I read every cold inbound, and I'm fastest about projects where domain depth and modern AI tooling change what's possible.