The precision of an engineer. A heart devoted to awakening.

Co·Awaken — a modern-day school for awakened relating

co·awaken (v.) — to awaken with; and in awakening with one another, to awaken with life itself.

It began in my own marriage. When I met my wife Kiki, the connection was breathtaking — intimate, electric, and at times deeply challenging. Nothing I had ever built or optimized prepared me for it. The relationship asked for everything, and gave back something infinitely larger: family, home, and a deep secure attachment with life itself.

Co·Awaken is what took form from that crucible: a modern-day school for awakened relating. Partnership is the path I primarily offer — a precise, embodied map of attachment, desire, rupture, and sacred sexuality, where what most relationship work leaves untouched becomes the curriculum. As the school grows, other teachers will bring adjacent paths into the same field.

Intimate partnership is the ultimate transformational system — complex, mysterious, alive.

Dispatches from the lived path

A few times a month I publish essays on Substack — on sex, fatherhood, devotion, and building a company with soul. Written from the lived edge of my own unfolding.

Apr 2026

The Sacred Edge

What happened when I broke an agreement with my wife — and we both stayed. Mar 2026

The First Rung

My daughter just gave me an imprint that’s changing everything about how I relate to fear. Jan 2026

The Engineer Returns

On code, desire, and the contraction that runs through both. Dec 2025

The School That Runs Through My Blood

What my grandfather dreamed, my father built, and I will bring to life.

In a past life, I was The Effective Engineer

I trained as an engineer at MIT, then spent a decade building alongside some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley — at Google, Ooyala, Quora, and Quip. Along the way I wrote The Effective Engineer, a best-selling book on leverage that became a standard text for how engineers turn effort into impact. Later, I co-founded Co Leadership and trained hundreds of leaders across Silicon Valley’s top startups and global companies.

People ask if I left engineering behind. I didn’t. The systems thinking never left — it found a deeper substrate. The same eye that once traced failures through a stack now traces a rupture through a nervous system.

• MIT Computer science — where I learned to think in systems.
• Silicon Valley A decade of building at Google, Ooyala, Quora, and Quip.
• 2015 Published The Effective Engineer — the best-seller people still know me by.
• Co Leadership Co-founded a leadership school for engineers; trained hundreds of tech leaders.
• The descent Ten years apprenticed to intimacy — sacred sexuality, plant medicine, somatics, and the raw laboratory of my own partnership.
• 2024 Ember is born. Fatherhood becomes the teaching.
• 2025 Founded Co·Awaken, from our home in Boulder, Colorado. The engineer returned, with a different blueprint.