Cisco Caceres

Cisco Caceres

I Sell Reality Checks

45+ Years Experience
8+ Patents
30M Concurrent Connections
Navy Veteran
Book a Reality CheckRead My Story
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The Short Version

I toggled my first program into an Altair via front-panel switches in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, I ran BBSs when "online" meant dialing in at 300 baud. In the 1990s, I had two full T1 lines running into my house (3 Mbps total, when most people were on dial-up) because I was running servers before "the cloud" existed.

By the 2000s, I'd upgraded to an 8 Mbps point-to-point microwave link feeding a 60-server data center in my basement, complete with dedicated cooling. I was running "the cloud" before AWS existed.

I spent the 2000s surviving the crash. I spent the 2010s fixing the messes left by "move fast and break things."

I served aboard the USS Missouri during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The Navy taught me that systems don't care about your feelings. If you ignore physics, ships sink. If you ignore economics, startups die.

I don't sell "digital transformation." I sell reality checks.

Why "RoamingPigs"?

My late wife MJ and I donated everything we owned and traveled the world together for over eight years—until COVID forced us to pause. Just our backpacks and each other. We lived in Vietnam, made Tokyo's Shinjuku our favorite haunt, explored South Korea, found the best street vendors in Bangkok—chasing great food wherever we went. We called ourselves the Roaming Pigs.

It was the most rewarding and meaningful time of my life.

I created The Mariajuanita Guzman Art Foundation in her memory, and I started RoamingPigs to help fund it. This is my tribute to her.

The spirit carries forward into how I work: go where the good stuff is, commit fully, never half-measure anything. I don't sit still. I don't stay in the corporate pen. I go where the problem is.

Operating Principles

The Constitution I Work By

Physics Over Feelings

Latency is determined by the speed of light. Costs are determined by supply and demand. No amount of "Agile" or "Vibe Coding" can negotiate with these realities.

Code is a Liability

Every line of code you write is a line you have to debug, secure, and upgrade. The best architect is the one who talks you out of building the feature.

Scar Tissue Over Certifications

I don't have a certificate that says I know how to scale. I have the scar from when my system hit 30 million concurrent connections and didn't crash.

Skepticism is a Service

Vendors lie. Dashboards lie. AI hallucinations lie. My job is to be the professional skeptic who checks the chrome://sandbox and reads the assembly.

Margins Over Architecture

Beautiful systems that lose money aren't beautiful. Ugly code that prints cash is a masterpiece. I optimize for survival, not elegance.

History Repeats

I've watched the same mistakes play out across the dot-com crash, the blockchain bubble, and now AI. Pattern recognition beats novelty every time.

Notable Scars

Systems that taught me what works and what doesn't

ZettaZing / ECHO

Architected a push platform that handled 30 million concurrent connections (simulated via 3,000 AWS instances). It didn't break. Designed to scale to billions.

Voice AI / DHS

Deployed speech recognition for the US Coast Guard in environments so noisy that standard ASR failed. This wasn't a demo; lives were on the line.

AMBIE

Acoustic intelligence for environments where standard ASR fails. Maintaining 90-95% accuracy where commercial systems drop to 14-40%. The next scar in progress.

Abundera

Financial advocacy platform plus a product family of 20+ surfaces under one federated identity hub: QR, QR Pro, Sign, Research, and 14 vertical advocacy sites. Plaid-connected, passkey-only, shipped from zero in months.

MSNBC / Workbench

Built content management systems before "CMS" was a term. MSNBC's publishing platform in the mid-90s, when the web was still young and everything was being invented.

Career Timeline

Feb 2026 - Present
Founder, Abundera
Financial advocacy platform plus product family: QR, QR Pro, Sign, Research, and 14 vertical advocacy surfaces
Feb 2026 - Present
Founder, Trivlet
High-speed competitive trivia. 10,000+ packs, real-time multiplayer
Oct 2025 - Present
Founder, AMBIE
Acoustic intelligence ASR for high-noise environments
Oct 2021 - Present
Founder & CEO, Barbarians Inc
Software studio for startups
Nov 2020 - Jun 2023
Chief Software Architect, FortifID
Re-architected the identity platform for scale and modularity. Designed and coded most of it; built the scalable micro-services that integrate with third-party identity and verification APIs.
Nov 2018 - Nov 2024
Co-Founder & CTO, Voice AI Startup
Co-founded and led all technology for a Bay Area voice AI company. Hands-on across every part of the platform, including deployments for US Coast Guard and DHS in environments where standard ASR fails.
May 2017 - Nov 2018
CTO, SmartEar
Hands-on architecture across mobile clients, desktop, firmware, API/SDK, and server. Designed and coded a large share of it personally.
Jan 2014 - May 2017
CTO, ZettaZing
Built ECHO push platform from scratch — data format, transport, servers. 3,000 AWS instances simulated 30M sustained concurrent connections without a hitch.
Feb 2004 - Jun 2014
CTO, Einstrong
Acquired SmartChannels, expanded into prediction markets. Company dissolved in 2014.
Apr 1998 - Feb 2004
CTO, SmartChannels
Designed and built an integrated CMS / CRM / project collaboration / personalization / web publishing platform. A lot of the features that defined the social networks of the next decade, ~10 years early.
Jun 1996 - Feb 2004
CEO & CTO, Core Logic Software
Dot-com era consultancy. Clients including AirTouch Cellular, The Sci-Fi Channel, Tales from the Crypt, Preston Gates & Ellis, Interwest Bank, Onvia, EProject, Girvin Design. Products: Mortar Maker (Warheads SE), CoreBA animated graphics format, RUM challenge-response spam solution.
Jan 2000 - Dec 2000
Software Development Consultant, Benefits Technologies
Web-enabled a manual flexible-benefits portal. IIS, VC++, ADO, ASP, MDAC, SQL Server.
Oct 1997 - Dec 2000
Software Development Consultant, Accelerated Media
Their on-call for whatever they couldn't staff in-house: fixing and extending existing apps and sites, standing up and troubleshooting servers, building complete solutions from scratch.
Jan 1998 - Mar 1998
Software Development Consultant, Trendwest Resorts
Migrated them from mainframe to PC. Designed the main database — 100+ tables, 600+ stored procedures in SQL Server.
Aug 1995 - Nov 1998
Software Developer, Microsoft/MSNBC
Built Workbench CMS
Jan 1994 - Aug 1995
Software Quality Engineer, Spry, Inc.
The company that shipped "Internet in a Box" — one of the earliest commercial on-ramps to the Web. Code-based testing plus a small experimental beat where I wrote a web crawler, an NNTP crawler, and internal tools. Spry sold to CompuServe for $100M.
Jul 1993 - Sep 1993
Software Test Engineer, Aldus Corporation
Mostly tested PageMaker.
Sep 1992 - Nov 1992
Software Test Engineer, Sierra Online
Tested games, mostly the Bright Star Technology titles.
Oct 1990 - Aug 1992
Gunner's Mate, US Navy, USS Missouri
Desert Shield/Storm, Decommissioning crew
Late 1970s - 1980s
BBS Sysop
Running bulletin boards when online meant 300 baud

Current Ventures

AMBIE

Acoustic intelligence ASR. Real-time speech recognition that maintains 90-95% accuracy in high-noise environments where commercial systems fail.

Auralytic

Voice analytics platform. Extracting actionable intelligence from conversations at scale—speaker identification, sentiment, compliance, and real-time insights.

Abundera

Financial advocacy platform. Analyzes your full financial picture and acts on your behalf — catching overcharges, drafting dispute letters, flagging billing errors, negotiating medical bills. Plaid-connected, passkey-only, and the federation hub for every product below.

Abundera QR

Free QR codes that never expire. 125+ code types, batch CSV, 20+ payment formats, gradient styles, PDF/PNG/SVG export. Runs entirely in your browser. No signup, no tracking, nothing leaves your device.

Abundera QR Pro

Dynamic QR codes with analytics, white-label custom domains, team workspaces, and API access. Same engine as the free tool, with the scan data and branding that businesses need.

Abundera Sign

E-signatures without the enterprise tax. Fast, secure document signing built for founders and small teams who need contracts closed, not upsold.

Abundera Research

Independent research and open data on consumer financial loss — billing errors, benefits gaps, medical debt, and the advocacy patterns that actually move money back to people.

Abundera Verticals

Fourteen advocacy surfaces, each focused on one place people lose money: auto, benefits, business, claims, credit, debt, estate, housing, id, ip, letters, rentals, students, and tax.

Trivlet

High-speed competitive trivia where faster answers score more. 10,000+ packs, real-time multiplayer, and a ranking system that rewards knowledge and speed.

RoamingPigs

Technology consulting that sees it through. Home of the Field Manual—160+ articles on what actually works in tech.

Barbarians

Software studio for startups. Building products that work, not products that demo well.

SmartChannels

Self-hosted AI agent platform. One assistant across 7 channels with persistent memory and local-first intelligence.

From the Field Manual

Lessons from 45+ years of building systems that work

AI & Tech

Your AI Vendor Is Lying to You

Every accuracy claim on that slide deck was measured under perfect conditions you'll never have. Here's how to test what they won't show you.

Browse All 160+ Articles →

Currently Building

What I'm working on right now

Active Development

Abundera

Financial advocacy platform plus a product family that already ships: free and paid QR (qr / pro.qr), e-signature (Sign), independent research (.org), and 14 vertical advocacy surfaces under one federated identity hub. Plaid-connected, passkey-only, white-label ready.

Cloudflare PagesWorkersD1PlaidPasskeysStripe
See the family →
Active Development

AMBIE

Acoustic intelligence for high-noise environments. Building an ASR system that maintains 90-95% accuracy where commercial solutions fail at 14-40%.

PythonWhisperFiLMCloudflare Workers
Follow the progress →

Patents & Recognition

Battle "E" Ribbon
National Defense Service Medal
Southwest Asia Service Medal (2 Bronze Stars)

Book a Reality Check

I am expensive because I am fast, and I am fast because I have seen your problem before. If you want a "Yes Man" to validate your roadmap, hire a Big 4 consultancy. If you want to know why your cloud bill is $50k/month or why your AI agent is hallucinating, call me.

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