Who you’re working with.

About

I’m Jeremy Irons. I grew up in Alaska, which mostly meant being outside whether or not the weather agreed. I went to Montana State and studied aerospace engineering and music, and spent as much time in the backcountry as I did in the lab. I was buried in an avalanche out there and walked away from it, which recalibrated a few things.

After school I went to New York and worked at Creative Engineering, a product development consultancy that gets hired when a company has an idea and no realistic path to a manufactured object. It is the best training there is. You get handed problems from every industry at once and you are expected to be useful by the end of the week. In my years there I worked on heart ablation catheters, children’s toys, industrial equipment, medical devices for people whose hands don’t work well anymore, and a functioning Iron Man suit for the US government, among many other projects.

What I actually learned is that the idea is not the hard part. The hard part is the long stretch between a sketch and a production tool, where a thousand small decisions about draft angles and wall thickness and tolerance stacks quietly determine whether you have a product or an expensive mistake. Nobody puts that stretch in the pitch deck. It is where the money and the eight months go. I got good at it. Several of the things I designed are patented and in production right now (US 11,800,911, US 2023/0414408, US 2024/0417940).

Eventually the firm asked me to open their West Coast office, so I came to Los Angeles. Then I had an accident and a long recovery from post-concussion syndrome, and the way back involved meditation seriously enough that I ended up teaching it. During that stretch I taught myself to code, mostly because I wanted to build the thing I had needed and nobody had built it. So I made a mindfulness app. Then another one. Then a Japanese-learning app, a dating app, a posture assessment tool for coaches.

The pandemic turned that into real work. I built the ordering and fulfillment system for a zero-waste grocery store and the dispatch system for a delivery operation coordinating fifty kitchens. Both were businesses that would have fallen over without the software. That is a different kind of pressure than a product launch and I liked it.

Now I do all of it. Industrial design and CAD when someone has a physical product. Flutter and React Native when they need an app. And increasingly, AI systems that take the repetitive operational work off a small team, which is the same job I have always done, moved one layer up. I run my own companies on those systems before I sell them to anyone.

Patents in production. Apps in the store. Operations running today. People usually call me when their engineering team is underwater, or when they don’t have one and never will.