SeanD.info

About Me

I am a builder. I have built businesses, robots, teams, vehicles, individuals, art, architectures, strategies, furniture, products and futures. I enjoy the creativity of building, taking a set of resources and transforming them into something which is greater than the sum of their parts.

I innovate and support innovation. Ever since I was a young child I have had curiosity for how things worked, be it mechanical mechanisms, electronics, software, chemistry, processes, people, teams or organisations. I learned that I could study them and learn the fundamental patterns and that the art of the possible is achieved very often by borrowing ideas from one sphere and applying them to another.

I fix things. Problem solving is one of my greatest joys in life. Something does not have to be broken and non-functional to be fixed. Making things perform better than they were initially designed is part of fixing. In part of my life this is known as hacking, but I prefer the term fixing as hacks tend to be short lived, a fix can be permanent.

I am global. I spend most of my time between San Francisco, Silicon Valley and San Jose. I live and work in an area where we get to see some version of everyone's possible futures being developed and tested in real time. Prior to coming to the US I was based in the UK but have always worked in technology roles that take me all over the world. For the last 20 years I have been in global roles ensuring that whatever I work on does not just represent the world I experience on my doorstep.

I have wide interests. When not working I build things, either solo, in small collaborations or as part of Seems Reasonable a collective of engineers I founded with Aren Hill. I also make art, take photographs and make furniture. I love to learn new things, audiobooks and podcasts fill the nooks and crannies in my day.

Things I have built

Trebuchet

Each year my family hosts a Friendsgiving for Seems Reasonable. In 2025 the pre dinner entertainment combined a box of small carving pumpkins left over from another event, some surplus construction lumber, building materials, some CAD and three evenings to create a trebuchet.

Google Security Command Center (SCC)

What was supposed to be a 12 to 18 month project that started as the pandemic kicked off became one of the best experiences of my life. Bringing technologies that had been hidden in internal tooling to Google Cloud customers and then building on that base to add innovative ways to secure cloud workloads. We became very good at displacing incumbents and caught the attention of some innovators who saw what we were doing and did it, and eventually a lot more for all of the clouds. Some people have questioned me on if building a business that resulted in you having to acquire a competitor for $32B should be something to be proud of. I think it is.

Seems Reasonable

Sometimes what you build is not tangible, it is a shared idea. One of the things I do is to enable others, through investment, mentor and coaching and sometimes by creating an environment where things can happen. After the experience of taking our small team to Battlebots World Championship III Aren Hill and I built out a team. A team with incredibly diverse skills and interests but sharing common goals around building cool stuff and having fun. Three years later we won the World Championship with Tantrum and Blip the Grant Imahara Award for Best Design and more recently the Twins won Battlebots Pro League.

Granite

Granite at Symantec was one of the largest private clouds ever created. Built in partnership with VMWare, Cisco and NetApp it enabled engineers to build virtual data centers with access to specific physical devices such as tape drives and storage no matter where they were in the world. I led a small team who did what all of the best teams do, they owned the solution. Scale and complexity broke pretty much everything at some point. The application of lateral thinking and hard work made it into a robust platform.

Go-Karts

The brief is simple, design, build and race an electric go-kart within a small budget and a simple, if not at times strange, set of rules. The biggest rule being that the kart must either be based on a Power Wheels toy, or something that should be a Power Wheels toy. Cramming a full sized adult into a Little Tikes car that now has more electric drive than some small cars is considered normal. Some I have helped build have welded chassis made out of exotic alloys and another plywood and lots of screws with decorations made from almost everything you can imagine. Building them is fun, racing them even at San Mateo or Orlando during heavy rainstorms puts the biggest smiles on faces you can imagine.

Machine Shops

Always a work in progress but just like in business the environment that you build in is important. A workshop is a very physical space that enables you to experiment with tools, layout and best practices. I have built shops that were optimized for many people working together and ones like my current one that are focused on working for me and an assistant. Building and the near constant need to re-build a shop provides therapy but also teaches very transferable skills.

Battleboats

One of the advantages of having a swimming pool and access to a large group of people with diverse skills is that it enables you to take an idea sparked by the two cheap RC boats you keep to entertain the dogs and build it into an annual event. Even better is when others copy the idea. Imagine being given a kit that consists of two underwater motors with propellers wired up to all the electronics you need to control them. You have a few hours to create something that floats and moves and then compete in various competitive events. One of the best ever was a pair of Crocs zip tied together, less successful ones have included a bunch of bananas and a stick.