Enterprise Architect
San Francisco, California
About Hank
Hank is Quorum1’s “meta founder”, which means that he was the initial instigator of Quorum1’s creation, contributed many of the foundational concepts, and brought together the original group of founding partners. He continues to play a major role in Quorum1’s ongoing growth & operations, currently serving as both Managing Partner (leader of the Quorum1 Foundation) and Org Point (leader of the Quorum1 Org). In addition to those roles, and in collaboration with other Quorum leaders, Hank is a key steward of Quorum1’s philosophical, technical, and social architecture.
Hank is involved in many key Quorum1 projects, including:
- Rev Tokens - Our investment mechanism.
- The Quorum Financial Model - Our holonic financial design.
- The Formal Governance Model - Our eventual emergent management process.
- The Quorum1 Network - Our skills-focused professional network layer.
- The Workstream - Our stigmergic coordination layer.
- The Quorum1 App Suite - Our custom app stack.
Additional Links
[ LinkedIn | Personal Website | Twitter | Medium ]
Professional Background
Hank is a serial entrepreneur, technical leader, enterprise architect, business operations expert and longtime Salesforce architect / developer. One of the first 500 certified Salesforce admins, Hank has been building business apps with Apex, Visualforce & Lightning since their initial releases, has spoken at Dreamforce and been featured in Salesforce’s own marketing programs.
Hank is a certified transformational leadership coach who has founded 6 companies over the past two decades in industries ranging from education technology to health & wellness to data science. Hank is a full stack web developer who writes code in 12 languages, manages production-scale web applications on AWS, GCP & Heroku and invests considerable effort in staying abreast of modern engineering best practices and software design patterns.
Hank holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego with a focus on Artificial Intelligence, but he has a wide-ranging set of skills & expertise including UI/UX design, professional development, go-to-market strategy, enterprise architecture, cloud application infrastructure, product management, business process design, technical project management, mentorship, microservice architecture, organizational development, game theory, economic mechanism design, customer development, and corporate governance.
Professional Focus Areas
Slack Work
The Slack ecosystem is a major current focus for Hank. He has been working with the Slack platform since 2014 and has built over a dozen apps on top of the platform. He is passionate about Slack not only as a communications tool, but as a unifying interaction layer for all of the internal business operations within a company. In addition to helping clients architect complex solutions utilizing Slack, he also focuses on Slack app design strategy, with a specialization around multi-system user experience design for SaaS apps.
As part of his Quorum1 efforts, Hank has designed, architected, and built several major Slack apps for team coordination, project accounting, and systems integration. He co-authored a blog post, linked below, around Slack app strategy:
Startups
Hank has been in the startup space since 2009. His first startup, Knowledgestreem, attempted to create a living map of all human knowledge (mapping the “skill genome”). From there he pursued a number of different startups in the ed-tech, professional learning, health, and data engineering spaces. Along the way he became a skilled practitioner of the hypothesis-driven lean startup approach (and the customer development approach which preceded it), and got the opportunity to guide and mentor dozens of aspiring founders on their own entrepreneurial journeys. These experiences paved the way for the founding of Quorum1 in 2021.
In addition to founding his own startups and mentoring others, through his multi-decade consulting career Hank has gotten the opportunity to work with over 100 different early-stage organizations across a diverse array of verticals. In his consulting work, Hank has helped high-growth companies implement scalable business processes, re-architect their organizational infrastructure (both technical & social), and streamline their business operations with emerging business tech.
Over the years, Hank has developed an approach that focuses on growing the “social infrastructure” that surrounds new technologies and processes within an organization.
Some of the early-stage companies Hank has worked with over the years have included:
- Skype - Before the Microsoft acquisition.
- Ticketfly - Before the Eventbrite acquisition.
- Turo - In the early stages when they were still called RelayRides.
- Airware - Drone startup that eventually flamed out.
- Virta Health - Successful health tech play focused on Type 2 diabetes reversal.
- Aurora Solar - Successful SaaS unicorn in the solar space.
Most of his own startups produced far more learning than shareholder value, however one of the companies he co-founded, Badge List, continues to operate and drive innovation to the digital learning credential space.
Emergent Org Design
Another key focus area for Hank has been org design theory, with a specific lens towards collective ownership models, cooperative governance, and stigmergic coordination. Hank has spent almost two decades studying swarm theory, game theory, systems theory, economic mechanism design, evolutionary algorithms, democratic theory, cooperative operating structures, corporate governance, and other topics relating to the design & operation of self-adapting human ecosystems.
Hank is a generalist in these spaces and holds no specialized degrees. He focuses on facilitating inter-disciplinary collaboration and supporting broad-scale synthesis of models, frameworks, and concepts between epistemic communities.
Quorum Model Writing
An introductory article laying out the principles of stigmergic coordination for org designers.
One of the original posts laying out the definition and framing of the term “Emergent Orgs”.
One of the original posts attempting to explain the Quorum Model. This shows some the early messaging.
A recent version of the Quorum Model intro deck. This version has emerged in collaboration with many quorum members.
An older version of the Quorum Model intro deck. This version was primarily developed by Hank and shows some of the evolution of the vision and messaging.