I was born in Canada and grew up in Morocco, in a half-built family home where master woodcarvers shaped walnut and cedar with quiet reverence. They taught me (long before I had words for it) that complex systems are built from small, deliberate moves. The other half of the lesson came from my father, who'd grown up in Canada and had to start over when he came back, rebuilding our family's life from a kitchen-installer's truck. Both turned out to be useful preparation for the rest of it.
I joined Verto Health as employee number two and helped scale the company to eighty. When you're #2 you don't do one job; you design the product, ship the code, write the marketing site, run the demos, win the RFPs, and architect the integrations, because no one else exists yet. By year four my title was "Product Manager" but I'd quietly absorbed the work of designer, software architect, sales engineer, and marketer. Nine years in I'd been every role except CEO.
The work itself turned out to be unusually good preparation for the AI boom. Healthcare informatics is the messiest data domain that exists, full of patient records, clinical workflows, FHIR integrations, OCR on scanned medical documents, and knowledge graphs of disease ontologies. We built systems that turned chaos into structured truth before anyone called it "RAG." I co-authored the patent on dynamic clustering for patient journey reconstruction (WO2025147762A1), built digital twin models that tracked 9.5 million patient encounters, and led the platform that administered 25% of Canada's daily COVID vaccine doses at peak.
When Lovable arrived in 2025, the architectural lessons from watching things get built collided with a tool that lets one person build what used to take a team. I won the global $100K grand prize in six weeks against 5,800 other builders, which mattered less than the validation it gave me: the instincts that scaled Verto (taste, system thinking, repetition with care) translated directly to AI-native solo operation.
I'm a generalist by necessity, an architect by training, and an AI operator by the unusual coincidence that the entire field is now built on the kind of work I've quietly been doing for ten years.
