Our Story

Shawn never meant to end up in technology. His hands were built for fixing things—as a firefighter pulling people from wreckage, a tow truck driver hauling broken-down dreams off highways, and as a mechanic bringing dead engines back to life.

After selling everything they owned, Shawn and his high school sweetheart (now wife) packed up and left Michigan for Florida with wild dreams. He ran the local shop for the biggest tire, battery, and repair chain in the country—the kind of place where he came home every night smelling like motor oil and tire rubber.

Then fate walked through his shop door.

Six months after trading his wrench for a headset, Shawn got summoned to a conference room that would change his life forever.

He walked into what he thought was a routine meeting and found himself face-to-face with company leadership and a team of IBM architects planning an enterprise-wide transformation. He had no idea why he was there—the technical discussion might as well have been ancient Greek.

Then he understood: he wasn't there for his tech knowledge. He was there because he understood operations. While the architects spoke in acronyms, his job was to translate: "How will this affect the morning rush? What happens when the system goes down during Black Friday?"

That's when he discovered his superpower: he could see both sides of the technology curtain.

What followed was two decades of the most incredible education you could imagine.

Shawn traveled the world architecting solutions for Fortune 100 companies and federal agencies. He built technology infrastructure for professional sports stadiums. He guided global retail mergers through digital transformations. He stood in war rooms during cyber breaches.

He learned secrets that would make your head spin. He saw budgets that could fund small countries. He watched technology decisions get made that would affect millions of people—often by people who had never actually met one of those affected millions.

But most importantly, he learned something that haunts him to this day: the biggest players in technology actively design systems to keep smaller players out.

It's not malicious—it's systemic. Enterprise technology is built for enterprise buyers. The complexity, the costs, the vendor relationships, the implementation timelines—all of it creates a moat around capabilities that could revolutionize any business, if only they could access them.

In 2024, Shawn achieved 135% of his sales target at a global technology company. He won awards. He was living the dream of enterprise success.

Then, on a Friday morning at 10:30 AM, his phone rang. "We're letting you go," his boss said in a two-minute conversation that ended twenty years of enterprise loyalty.

By 11 AM, he was unemployed for the first time since he was seventeen.

After the shock wore off, Shawn decided to attend local business networking events to see how "the other side" uses technology.

He walked out of his first event with unbridled rage.

It was like stepping back 10 years minimum in time. The number of shocked looks when he'd ask "why don't you do it this way?" followed by "can that be done?" or "isn't that expensive?" genuinely rocked him to his core.

How do the people who account for 43% of U.S. GDP not even understand the fundamentals of today's technology?

Then it dawned on him: the industry had productized that knowledge. They locked it away behind complexity and cost barriers.

That was the moment Thalamus was born.

At that same networking event, Shawn won a raffle prize donated by Josh Giddings, a mortgage loan officer with an unusual philosophy: technology should enhance people, not replace them.

Josh had spent 20 years fighting the same battle from a different angle. While Shawn was behind the enterprise curtain, Josh was in the trenches with small business owners—watching them drown in jargon, buried in paperwork, and made to feel stupid for not understanding processes that were intentionally overcomplicated.

Josh became the yin to Shawn's yang. Shawn had the anger; Josh had the calm. Shawn was the introvert who wanted to tear down systems; Josh was the extrovert who wanted to lift people up. Shawn spoke in architecture and infrastructure; Josh spoke in relationships and impact.

But they both spoke the same language where it mattered: transparency, accessibility, and the belief that complexity is a choice, not a requirement.

Thalamus AI was born from that clarity. Not from ambition, but from rage at a system designed to keep the best capabilities locked away.

Small and medium businesses generate intelligence 24/7. Nobody ever taught them what to do with it.

Their website analytics sit in Google Analytics. They look at visitor counts. That's it.

Their sales data sits in QuickBooks. They use it for taxes. That's it.

Meanwhile, enterprises blend ALL this data together and see things you can't imagine: which customers are most profitable, what marketing actually drives revenue, when to launch products based on seasonal patterns, which services to expand vs. which to kill.

This isn't just a business problem. It's a social justice issue.

The same 90% of creative minds locked out of technology innovation could revolutionize education, healthcare, local communities, and industries we haven't even imagined—if someone removed the artificial barriers.