# Zane Roman Cooke

> I build the operating layer for early-stage companies. The ops platforms, agents, and runbooks a small team runs on — built at a venture studio in Austin, across several companies at once, and documented so they outlast me.

I'm Zane. I run the execution layer at Ultranative, a venture studio in Austin: when a founder needs a process, a tool, or a team that doesn't exist yet, I build it, document it, and hand it off. This year that's meant ten production apps, a studio-wide operations platform, and the agent infrastructure a five-person team runs twenty projects on — plus a stretch where the seat spanned sixteen functions, which I measured rather than guessed at. Before this: biomedical engineering, EU MDR remediation at three device companies, an EMT shift through COVID, most of an MD, and co-founding Akture, which reached cash-flow positive in twelve months. I hand off marketing and design; they're not my strengths.

Now (September 2026): Running the Build Program's execution layer at Ultranative: shipping the studio platform and the agent fleet around it, keeping a school kiosk alive every weekday, and running a monthly what-shipped session for the principal. Happy to talk about agent infrastructure for small teams, venture-studio platform work, and applied-AI deployments where one person has to own it end to end.

## Selected work
- [An AI-native operating layer for a venture studio](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/ai-operating-layer): How a five-person studio runs twenty-plus projects with AI as the primary build instrument — context files, a router, twelve skills, agents on an always-on box. (The hardware layer was set up with a contractor; I run it.)
- [Two operations platforms from one template](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/certification-ops-platform): ERRA Certified's platform became the pattern; the studio's is 29 modules on the same bones — audit portal, grant ops, CRM, fund ops, agent operations. (Owner and primary builder of the first; architect of the second — a teammate drives it day to day.)
- [An audited data gateway, and the reconciliation engine on it](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/expense-reconciliation-engine): A read-only, audited MCP gateway over Workspace, and a reconciliation engine evaluated at 90–98% precision against the finance lead's real books — which it corrected. (Inherited at a handoff, rebuilt, custody handed off with the runbook.)
- [iPad kiosk system for a school food-service pilot](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/school-foodservice-kiosk): Six surfaces a kitchen and a lobby run on every weekday. A free tier took two iPads dark once; it has been on a paid tier with a weekly off-platform export and alerting since.
- [Akture — action-capture video for rec-sports facilities](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/akture): Co-founded and ran ops, legal, HR, R&D coordination, and accounting from zero. MVP in six months; cash-flow positive in twelve, on site sales rather than a raise.
- [Measuring one seat: a six-source workload audit](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/workload-audit): When the workload question came up I measured instead of estimating — calendar parsed programmatically, 135 recorded meetings, mail, Slack, 867 build-session transcripts, ~860 commits, overlaps merged. Sixteen functions; nine outside the original charter.

## All work
- [An AI-native operating layer for a venture studio](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/ai-operating-layer) — Infrastructure, Live, 2026. The system that lets a five-person studio run twenty-plus projects with AI as the primary build instrument: a context-file layer every session loads, a router and project index that resolve spoken names to folders, per-project rules and resume-here docs, a dozen custom skills, and a memory architecture that survives folder moves.
- [Operations platform for a clean-food certification nonprofit](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/certification-ops-platform) — Product, Live, 2026. The internal platform for ERRA Certified — audit operations with a no-login partner portal, certification pipeline, grant alerts and AI-scored auto-discovery, LOI drafting, CRM, a media-intelligence module, branded document generation, and a DocSend-style deck room. It became the template every other dashboard copies.
- [A 29-module operations platform for the studio](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/studio-ops-platform) — Product, Live, 2026. The studio-wide hub spanning fund operations and the build program with role-based access: Mastermind (a CEO needs-you queue refreshing every 15 minutes), Ask Lead (an AI research chat that routes questions to specialist agents (reads, drafts, asks — never sends, pays, or signs), a people CRM aggregating investments, documents and email per person, per-vehicle fund dashboards, capital calls and K-1 tracking, carry calculators, executive-assistant modules, and agent operations with contracts and approvals.
- [iPad kiosk system for a school food-service pilot](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/school-foodservice-kiosk) — Product, Live, 2026. Menu, ingredient and allergen display with a diner survey — plus the operational back end a kitchen actually needs: waste and throughput logging, staff hours, food-safety temperature records, and a lobby display. A public weekly-menu site for parents ships alongside it.
- [Corporate-card reconciliation engine](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/expense-reconciliation-engine) — Automation & agents, Shipped, 2026. A review queue that matches card lines to receipts, calendar, and notes pulled through an audited read-only gateway, with evidence tiers and trip clustering. Evaluated at 90–98% precision against the finance lead's real books — which it corrected.
- [Audited read-only MCP gateway to Workspace data](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/workspace-context-gateway) — Infrastructure, Live, 2026. One access layer over Calendar, Gmail, and receipts that other tools call instead of each wiring its own OAuth — per-consumer bearer tokens, a policy file, and an audit table of every call.
- [Mastermind — a needs-you queue for the CEO](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/ceo-queue) — Product, Live, 2026. Everything aimed at one person, in one place: today's focus, needs-you, missed, calendar — ingested every 15 minutes from Slack, Notion and mail, installable on a phone. Next layer: answer from the queue (yes / no / a drafted reply, snooze).
- [Pre-meeting brief agent](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/premeeting-brief-agent) — Automation & agents, Live, 2026. A text-triggered agent that delivers a brief before every meeting, adds contacts to the CRM from a text, and handles reminders and summaries. 661 CRM profiles enriched to seed it; a planned custom enrichment backend was dropped in favor of the tool's native one — buy the feature, don't build it.
- [Slack-reachable agents on an always-on office machine](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/agents-on-dedicated-hardware) — Infrastructure, Live, 2026. Two agent gateways (Hermes for the org, Zeus for me) plus a research bot on an always-on Mac mini: scheduled crons, an action-items tracker and Slack digest, a channel monitor, an org agent with mail access. Wrote the local-inference routing rule for the box — speech-to-text, embeddings and bulk classification local; judgment on cloud models — with the memory-bandwidth arithmetic behind it.
- [The entity "brain" pattern](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/entity-brain) — Infrastructure, Shipped, 2026. A replicable architecture for giving each portfolio company a corpus-in-repo with scheduled refresh and layered surfaces — Slack bot, dashboard module, shared AI project export. Proven on Noble Pacific's deal corpus; the shared project is an export of the brain, not the brain.
- [Valuation engine and projection model for Noble Pacific](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/valuation-engine) — Analysis, Shipped, 2026. A valuation engine with scenario zones and a financing/projection model for Noble Pacific, a California cannabis operator in the portfolio — packaged as a shared corpus the CEO could query, the first instance of the entity-brain pattern.
- [Carry-waterfall model across the SpaceX and xAI vehicles](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/carry-waterfall-model) — Analysis, Shipped, 2026. One interactive model with a price slider across the studio's SpaceX and xAI secondary vehicles, replacing near-duplicate workbook tabs. Deployed behind basic auth.
- [Market, monetization and valuation model for OpenLock](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/consultancy-market-model) — Analysis, Shipped, 2026. OpenLock is a data-and-AI engineering consultancy concept ("you don't have an AI problem, you have a data problem"). I own the market lane: a three-round research cadence producing an interactive model in two cuts — TAM, pricing, recurring mix, valuation ranges.
- [Statewide school-district outreach list](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/district-outreach-list) — Analysis, Shipped, 2026. 133 target districts for a clean-food funding push with verified superintendent and charter contacts, a county-margin selection method, and a public state-data endpoint that yields every district's superintendent, email and enrollment in one CSV — so nobody hand-researches those contacts again.
- [A reusable prospect-targeting skill](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/prospect-targeting-skill) — Automation & agents, Live, 2026. Research and rank investors, partners, sites, or districts for any portfolio company — first built for the UNBH bridge raise — and emit an outreach-ready sheet with fit scores and warm-intro paths. Run profiles per use case, a signal-scan mode ("who's in market now"), and a private-run mode for local-only output.
- [Forming and registering a nonprofit and its for-profit arm](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/nonprofit-formation) — Operations, Shipped, 2026. IRS Form 1023, fiscal sponsorship, a certification mark, SAM.gov/UEI registration, state registrations, insurance, taxes, and a wholesale license — the compliance stack a new certification body and its food-service arm need to operate.
- [A registry for a certification Standard across every surface that encodes it](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/standard-registry) — Operations, Live, 2026. Canonical Standard text, version history, and a registry of every place across every build that copies Standard content — audit checklists, portal corpus, RAG index, partner docs, MOU clauses, website copy — with the propagation procedure. A one-clause change is a multi-build edit; the registry makes that visible.
- [Measuring one seat: a six-source workload audit](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/workload-audit) — Analysis, Shipped, Aug 2026. When the workload question came up, I measured instead of estimating: every calendar event parsed programmatically, 135 recorded meetings, sampled mail, Slack, 867 build-session transcripts, and commits across 14 repos — overlaps merged so nothing counted twice. The result sized the seat at sixteen functions and produced a staffing recommendation: hire the operator, not the engineer.
- [Hiring and people operations from zero](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/hiring-tooling) — Operations, Shipped, 2026. Job descriptions and a JD-generation tool live on two dashboards, staffing-agency terms, offer letters, and onboarding for kitchen and operations staff; a hire-vs-temp analysis for a school service.
- [Security program and team training](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/security-program) — Operations, Built, 2026. An 18-slide session, handout, and run-of-show for a small team — deliberately empowering rather than fear-forward — plus a password-manager rollout, credential-rotation checklists, and least-privilege service accounts.
- [Conversation → branded slide deck](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/deck-pipeline) — Automation & agents, Retired, Apr 2026. A web front end, a workflow tier, and a Railway renderer with 14 layouts writing .pptx to Drive. The middle tier went when the automation SaaS was cancelled on usage evidence — the renderer still runs.
- [B2B sourcing marketplace for certified products](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/marketplace) — Web, Built, 2026. Restaurants pursuing certification browse vetted products by Standard category, send inquiries, set recurring orders, upload audits; an admin console runs it. Lead-gen first, no payments in the MVP.
- [Map-based discovery app for certified producers](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/consumer-map-app) — Web, Parked, 2026. React Native / Expo app with PostGIS geospatial queries and Mapbox rendering. MVP shipped, then parked on purpose — with its backend deliberately left to auto-pause and a revival kit in the repo.
- [Akture — action-capture video for rec-sports facilities](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/akture) — Product, Live, May 2024 → present. Facilities install cameras; players get instant clips and livestreams of their games. I co-founded it and ran everything that wasn't the camera firmware — logistics, legal, HR, R&D coordination with international technical partners, accounting — from idea to launch.
- [LightBrighter — an LED matrix desk display](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/lightbrighter) — Hardware, Live, 2026. A Raspberry Pi driving a 64×32 RGB matrix: pixel-art scenes, a Pomodoro timer, live weather with drone-flyable wind alerts, a notification board, and a Claude mode that turns a text prompt into display commands.
- [A cordless AI voice button](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/voice-button) — Hardware, Built, 2026. A big red arcade button in a 3D-printed enclosure that plays and records audio — ESP32-S3, USB-C charging, I2S mic and amp, an OpenSCAD housing. A gift.
- [Things I make for friends](https://zaneromancooke.com/work/things-for-friends) — Operations, Shipped, 2026. A from-zero AI onboarding guide (14 pages plus a starter kit built around the friend's real projects); a career-switch research brief with sixteen routes banded by school time. Not builds — but the same habit: figure it out properly, write it down, hand it over.

## Background
- 2026 → Ultranative — Head of Operations & Innovation: The execution layer of a venture studio's Build Program, across several incubations at once.
- 2024 → Akture — co-founder & COO: Action-capture video for rec-sports facilities; MVP in six months, cash-flow positive in twelve.
- 2019 – 2025 R&D engineer — Cardinal Health, Medtronic, Mozarc Medical: Repeatedly handed EU MDD/MDR remediation for revenue-bearing device portfolios across teams in the U.S., China, Mexico, Ireland, and Singapore. That's where the process mapping and controlled documentation come from.
- 2020 – 2024 EMT through COVID, then most of an MD: 500+ patients on the ambulance; then Dell Medical School at UT Austin, including trackside medicine at 30+ Formula 1, MotoGP, and NASCAR races. That's where the flag-what-you-don't-know habit comes from.
- Education: M.S. and B.S., Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut · MD coursework, Dell Medical School, 2021–2024

## Changelog
- 2026-09-21: Site rebuilt: one-screen summary, six selected works, motion — Research pass against 27 comparable sites; home page cut from ~2,450 words to a summary; contact form and a private role tracker added.
- 2026-09-19: Portfolio live at zanercreative.com
- 2026-09-18: Portfolio registry started — 27 builds catalogued with disclosure tiers; this changelog begins.
- 2026-09-15: Quarterly context refresh — Context-file layer, voice guide, tool stack, and people roster re-surveyed against three months of mail and Slack.
- 2026-09-14: Principal build-workshop series started — Monthly 30-minute what-shipped / open-asks / what's-next session with a three-page take-home inventory.
- 2026-09-12: Entity brain architecture — Replicable corpus-in-repo pattern with scheduled refresh and layered surfaces.
- 2026-09-11: Automation SaaS cancelled on usage evidence — Seven workflows archived; the deck pipeline's middle tier retired with it.
- 2026-08-24: Site prototype in a day — A static site built to test a 7-prompt web-build playbook and assess what AI can and can't do on a web build.
- 2026-08-19: Reconciliation engine measured — 90–98% precision against the finance lead's real books.
- 2026-08-14: Workload audit compiled — Six sources, eight weeks, sixteen functions.
- 2026-08-10: Kiosk backend moved to a paid tier — After a free-tier auto-pause took two school iPads dark. Weekly off-platform export with alerting added.
- 2026-08-01: JD Creation tool live on both dashboards

Contact: zane.roman.cooke@gmail.com · https://www.linkedin.com/in/zanecooke/ · https://github.com/ZaCooke