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About

Ran the company.
Then built the software.

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 nine years, and taught myself to write software somewhere in the middle — because the tools we needed didn't exist and I got tired of waiting.

After exiting, I built BriteBuild — the platform that does what my old company did by hand — solo, in fourteen months, and sold it. Now I run Strategy Labs AI, where the bet is simple: operator depth plus AI tooling beats headcount.

Timeline

The arc, year by year.

  1. 2015

    Co-founded Gold Rush Energy Solutions

    Started a residential and commercial solar installer in the Sierra foothills with a small co-founding team. No software background. We just decided to build the business.

  2. 2016 — 2020

    Taught myself to ship code

    Salesforce admin work first, then Apex, Lightning Web Components, and SQL. Wrote the company's automation layer in-house instead of hiring it out. Stayed up late reading documentation.

  3. 2018 — 2022

    Scale and recognition

    Chamber of Commerce Startup of the Year, then Small Business of the Year, then four straight years of "Best Solar Company." Built the sales org to 70 outside reps and a national dealer network. Co-founded The Band Room, a live-music venue in town, because the work outside work mattered too.

  4. 2024

    Exited Gold Rush. Founded Strategy Labs AI.

    $130M in lifetime sales, 40 MW installed, nine years in the operating chair. Sold my stake, took the engineering muscle with me, and started the firm the same year.

  5. 2024 — present

    VP & Secretary, Placerville Food Co-op

    Volunteer board service. Co-led the $1.39M purchase of the building the co-op operates from — a member campaign raised $155K+ for the down payment, community financing covered the rest.

  6. Feb 2025

    Started building BriteBuild

    Sat down to write the software the operator-me had wanted the whole time. A thin solar calculator became a multi-tenant platform — CRM, design, pricing, financing, contracts, scheduling — in fourteen months of solo shipping.

  7. 2025

    Started Breakfast Ball

    A golf scorecard and side-games app for weekend foursomes — native iOS and watchOS, settlement engine, voice caddie. In TestFlight beta.

  8. 2026

    Sold BriteBuild

    BriteBuild — built as Strategy Labs' first engagement — was acquired by ShimmerWorks Inc. The firm keeps going: agent systems, on-prem inference, and the builds themselves.

off-keyboard

The rest of the life that makes the work possible.

The Sierra foothills aren't a backdrop. They're the operating environment.

  • Placerville Food Co-op

    VP & Secretary · Board of Directors

    Co-led the $1.39M purchase of the building the co-op operates out of — members raised $155K+ for the down payment. 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, 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