About Sean

Hi, I’m Sean and I’m in pursuit of a more fully self-actualized existence. Here’s what I mean by that: Abraham Maslow gave us a pyramid of fundamental human needs, the layers of which stack to the capstone of self-actualization, or “fully realizing one’s Personal Legend,” as Paolo Coelho would say. I believe though his capstone on the pyramid ends one level short of the fullest form of self-actualization which is helping others to do the same. Assisting others to ascend this pyramid is my focus.

Before I go any further, if you want to follow along with my journey I do a very infrequent email blast with everything I’ve learned. I’m a US expat living in Lisbon, Portugal since 2018. During that time I’ve been to 40+ countries (living for an extended period in ~20) and been fortunate to experience many different cultures. In this roughly-semi-annual update, I document my journey via email with observations, reflections, tools, frameworks, strategies and wisdom gleaned from work and travel. You can read all of my past updates at the bottom of this page and sign up to receive new ones below:

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Who I am

First off I’m an open book. Here’s my Why and my Prime Directives. At my core I’m a tribe uniter. I help others come together and more fully express their natural talents working together. I’m also a teacher and help others learn tactics and strategies that create leverage and allow one to rise above the rat race. The goal is to help as many prospective entrepreneurs and passionate individuals make a transition and achieve escape velocity so that they can go on to do what they were born to do. As cheesy as it sounds, I believe that helping others to rediscover the unique gift they had as a child and contribute it to the world in a more optimal way is what I was put here to do.

IMO entrepreneurship is the ideal vessel for delivering our gift and for-profit ventures are the most effective instruments by which we can amplify our natural talents and sculpt the world around us to be more the way it ought to be. The world’s greatest challenges will be solved not by big faceless corporations but by inspired individuals liberated from day jobs and granted the means to do what they were born to do. There are frameworks I learn and teach to make this a reality.

What I do

I am the founder of The Stone Soup Protocol and a handful of the communities running on it like Problemattic, OpenStartup and Nocode Lisboa. I believe we all have a piece of the puzzle and have created a community coordination platform that seeks to align constituents of intentional communities around the globe for good and facilitate intra and inter tribe collaborations.

Previously I served as the Director of Sales for Pagely and helped grow sales significantly during my tenure playing a nontrivial role in their exit to GoDaddy. I left at the start of Covid to go all-in on building Problemattic. I built that movement and the underlying tech and then made it multi-tenant and possible to serve other communities. This has become the Stone Soup Protocol that we are using in Lisbon to create a Team of Teams approach for solving hard problems. I believe coordinating intentional communities is the thing I’m uniquely positioned to deliver that can have the most beneficial impact for the world if executed properly. I also write the Stone Soup blog where I teach tools and lessons for gaining leverage, host the Problemattic podcast where we discuss community-sourced solutions to wicked problems, lead OpenStartup Community where we build and launch startups with strangers, run Nocode Lisboa where I teach practical AI and automation tools and help organize Startup Weekend Portugal and Polylogue Lightning Talks where we onboard people to entrepreneurship and provide a platform for sharing people’s passions and curiosities respectively.

Prior to working for Pagely I founded a handful of startups, the most famous of which was JumpBox, Inc, a 10-year running company that domesticated open source server applications and made them more accessible to a broader audience. I enjoy knocking out weekend projects via Cursor and Bolt, training Krav Maga kite surfing here in Portugal. I wrote a kid’s book (PDF) way back that has sold exactly 1 copy to date :-) Occasionally I ask/answer questions in various forums like Quora. I’ve served as a mentor to startups via the SEED SPOT, CEI, EvoNexus and Startup Lisboa, Beta-i and Canopy incubators. I’ve spoken at a number of conferences, the talks for which you can watch on my video page. I do periodic angel investing via Grid7. If you have a startup in progress you can pitch me here or best to join OpenStartup and get to know me via that. And if you’re still reading this far then you know I write a lot, sleep little and am notorious for run-on paragraphs.

If we’ve worked together in some capacity connect with me on LinkedIn or Angel List.
If we haven’t met reach out on X or book me for a consultation via Clarity.fm.

Sean featured in the Press

Semi-annual Updates

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