About
A decade of operating,
then I learned to ship.
I'm Daniel. I grew up in Placerville, California, an hour above Sacramento in the foothills. I co-founded a solar company in my twenties, ran it as COO for eleven years, and learned to write software somewhere in the middle of that.
Now I'm the full-stack engineer behind BriteBuild — the SaaS platform that runs what my old company used to do by hand — and the co-founder of Strategy Labs AI, the studio betting that operator depth plus AI tooling is the unfair advantage of the next decade.
Timeline
The arc, year by year.
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2013
Co-founded Gold Rush Energy Solutions
Started a residential and commercial solar installer in Placerville with a small co-founding team. No software background. We just decided to build the business.
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2014 — 2018
Taught myself to ship code
Started with Salesforce admin work, then Apex, then Lightning Web Components, then SQL. Wrote the org's automation layer in-house instead of hiring it out. Stayed up late reading documentation.
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2018
Awards. Co-founded The Band Room.
Gold Rush named El Dorado Hills Chamber of Commerce 2018 Startup of the Year. Same year I co-founded a small live-music venue in town because the work outside work mattered too.
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2020 — 2023
Built the D2C solar tool
Designed and built a kWh-based, instant-quote, customer-facing flow that bypassed the traditional lead funnel. White-labeled it for real estate agents and adjacent contractors.
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2024
Exited Gold Rush
Eleven years in, $130M of lifetime revenue, multiple awards. Time to use the engineering muscle for something new.
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Feb 2025
Joined BriteBuild full-time
Switched from operating to engineering full-time. Sat down to write the software the operator-me had wanted the whole time.
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2025 — present
VP & Secretary, Placerville Food Co-op
Volunteer board service. Helped lead the ~$1.3M member-capital raise that bought the building the co-op operates from — putting the real estate behind the grocery in members’ hands.
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2026
Co-founded Strategy Labs AI
BriteBuild is product zero. The studio is the long arc — operator-grade SaaS, shipped at agent-augmented speeds.
off-keyboard
The rest of the life that makes the work possible.
The Sierra foothills aren't a backdrop. They're the operating environment.
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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.
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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.
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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, read every cold inbound, and move fastest on projects where domain depth plus modern AI tooling changes what's possible.
$ curl -X POST pterodaniel.com/contact \ -H "Subject: let's build" \ -d @your-idea.md → 200 OK // reply within a day