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Mike Saia

MIKE SAIA

Builder | Armchair Economist | Pixel Art Connoisseur

Georgia Tech alum living in NYC. Obsessed with creating cool stuff, identifying bottlenecks, and learning the latest tech (currently addicted to Claude Code). Love talking tech, economics, indie & house music, and Saints football. Technical Business Consultant at Palo Alto Networks.

This site highlights what I build after hours for fun, with professional highlights in the Journey section. For strictly business, feel free to reach out for my resume.

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Builds

Projects & Creations

Private Beta

ShortestPath

Always-on AI agents as a managed service

A management platform for deploying, configuring, and monitoring domain-specific AI agents for small and mid-size businesses. Wraps the OpenClaw runtime so each agent reaches customers natively over WhatsApp, Slack, email, and Telegram. Operator provisions an agent from the dashboard, writes a few skills, and hands off a working teammate. Go backend, React frontend, Docker-per-tenant, hot-reload config, per-customer cost attribution.

shortestpath.ai
Private Beta

Fortwo

Finance, for two.

A couples finance app with an AI advisor that actually knows you both, your accounts, your goals, and your whole picture. Splits the small stuff (Plaid + claim/split), answers the big questions (a Gemini advisor with 37 tools across emergency funds, tax, retirement, rewards), and plans trips you can book on your combined points (77 transfer partners, 9 award charts). Kristina and I use it ourselves.

fortwo.money

Other Stuff

Concept

Bops

Music discovery & taste credentialing

A mix of Beli and Reddit for music and podcasts. Share media you love, save recommendations directly to Spotify, and earn karma when others save your recommendations.

Mini Fantasy Football Draft AI Parser

Fantasy Football Draft AI Parser

A Claude-powered Google Apps Script that analyzes available players in real-time using Sleeper's APIs and updates a personal draft board. Click the image for a demo, or try it here.

Mini Gender Reveal Betting Pool

Gender Reveal Betting Pool

A Google Apps Script web app for friends and family to place bets on baby gender reveals. Automated tracking, leaderboard, and payout calculations.

Live

This site!

I built this site from scratch and am hosting it on GitHub Pages. Check out the repo here.

Past

Linkd Supply

Co-founded B2B group purchasing platform. Led product discovery through 100+ customer interviews, developed automated lead generation system, and participated in Georgia Tech CREATE-X accelerator. Here was a preview video my co-founders and I made in college explaining the concept.

Past

Climate Impact Reporting for UPS

As a part of my senior design for graduation from Georgia Tech, I built out an Alteryx analytical app that standardized emissions reporting against all UPS subsidiaries and delivered the total climate impact in a single CSV file. See a UX demo of the app here

Future Ideas

Vote for what I should build next!

College Consulting x Applied AI

Think Crimson College Consulting, but more accessible and always available. LLM-powered platform to guide high school students in university selection and financial aid applications.

Show don't tell product feedback

Upload a PDF or screenshot of an area of your application where you'd like to receive feedback from non-technical business users. Allow an LLM to reproduce a wireframe of the application making all components on the page commentable. Reproduce that component and behavior on screen for the business user to sign off on. Receive acceptance and immediately translate this feedback into user stories (ultra precise, no ambiguity). Honestly Claude Design kind of beats this whole thing. It can render a page from an existing or new project, take comment feedback, iterate on it with an LLM, and hand off to agentic coding tools for implementation. It's legit.

Crowdsourced Public Development

An app enabling citizens to report infrastructure damage for government renovation work prioritization. My brother-in-law owns a company that does commercial maintenance contracts and mentioned he wasn't really sure about the quality of the leads he was getting, which is how this idea came up.

LLM-enabled SOP Updates

My brother works in natural gas compliance and we've been kicking around how to automate the worst part of it. The idea: fine-tune a foundational LLM to update Standard Operating Procedures whenever the Code of Federal Regulations changes, so a reg update doesn't burn a quarter of busywork.

My AI Development Journey

Phase 1: The Copy/Paste Era

October 2024

Started with Claude 3.5 Sonnet copy/paste workflow. Learning basic prompt engineering, iterating on outputs manually, and understanding how to communicate with LLMs effectively. Writing 30% of my code.

Phase 1.5: First MCP Experiments

November 2024

Started adding MCPs to Claude right after release. GitHub MCP was my first. Began leveraging Claude for my CI/CD pipeline for personal projects.

Phase 2: IDE Integration Era

January - December 2025

Transitioned to Cursor/Windsurf. Added Supabase MCP and Figma MCP. Learned code modularity for context windows and scalability patterns. Many failed projects, but each taught valuable lessons. Writing 10% of my code manually.

Phase 3: Claude Code Era

January 2026 - Present

Shipped Yoked, Fortwo, and ShortestPath. Running Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI in parallel with iOS Simulator MCP for rapid visual feedback on mobile development. Full agentic workflows, advanced MCP orchestration. Writing 0 lines of code manually.

Looking Forward

The Future

Interested in exploring Gas Town and finding a real compelling OpenClaw bot use case. I believe when combined orchestration platforms like OpenAI's Frontier / Gas Town alongside OpenClaw like agents running on their own machines could be extremely exciting as this allows for insane amounts of work to be done just on mobile without it needing to occur on device. Running this sort of setup not is prohibitively expesnive (as of Feb 2026) but the sheer chip and energy demand will create supply, people will innovate, and prices will come down. You hear about items like this on X and it is easy to believe everything digital will be solved quickly. From my experience leading large enterprise technology implementations, I think of the "the future is here, it's just not equally distributed" idiom. I believe enabling others to adopt these tools will be a massive opportunity over the next 5 - 10 years.

Journey

The Professional Path

Technical Business Consultant

Palo Alto Networks
July 2025 to Present

Serving as a trusted business partner to both technical and non-technical teams — leading and influencing without direct control. Dev teams value my ability to speak their language, debug at a granular level, and discuss architecture. Business teams appreciate how I translate complexity into clarity.

Acting as both a technical product manager and a GTM engineer. I use agentic CLI tools and DAG-style workflow automation to build bespoke tooling for our sellers and the teams that support them, the kind of work that typically wouldn't make it through a traditional eng backlog but still needs to exist. Ten months in I pitched and got resourcing for an internal initiative to automate Tier 1 customer service across our sales tools. It takes a TextQL shaped approach: semantic meaning on our sales data tied to business rules to assemble the right context for any seller or support team question. A working demo is live internally, and along the way I got my whole team access to the agentic tools we needed to actually move at this speed.

  • Building an AI-powered resource allocation platform serving 40K+ requests across 2,000+ resources
  • Developing AI workflows for technical designs enabling 1,500+ sellers to deliver faster, more accurate solutions
  • Owning the tool roadmap for the global technical organization, aligning cross-functional stakeholders across engineering, sales, and operations

Technology Strategy Senior Associate

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
January 2023 to July 2025

As a Senior, I led teams and owned outcomes across major tech initiatives — from launching new products to managing $10M+ programs. I managed multiple junior staff across engagements, led a 3-person dev team shipping an NLP contract analysis tool, and coordinated 30+ engineers on a $1B acquisition integration. Built processes from the ground up for financial and resource management while staying close to the technical work.

Some of my proudest moments came from solving problems nobody asked me to fix:

  • Our client needed to align a new acquisition with enterprise tech ops and cybersecurity standards but lacked implementation guidance. After spending weeks on discovery with app owners and security leads, I built an automated onboarding survey that triggered Jira workflows and assigned compliance tasks to the right teams. The client was so impressed they locked us in for their next acquisition integration, securing a $1M+ deal.
  • Our client's Quote-to-Cash implementation was losing customers due to a messy email-based escalation process. I took the initiative to build an automated intake system using PowerAutomate and Python that pinged relevant business and engineering teams via chat, tracked approvals, and maintained a prioritized backlog. The tool has processed 800+ escalations to date and helped retain $10M+ in at-risk recurring revenue.

Cloud & Digital Strategy Associate

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
August 2021 to January 2023

As an associate, I dug into assessment work across Tech, Financial Services, and Telecom industries. Some key projects included:

  • A large creative technology company's approach to "return to office" after covid, answering questions like "How do you enable employees to collaborate effectively when half the team is in office and the other half is working remotely?"
  • A large payment processor's approach to future proofing their employee onboarding and directory services whose growth strategy was inorganic, acquisition based
  • PwC's approach to designing an outsourcing strategy for a massive financial services engagement that included talent from 4 continents

Promoted in only a year and a half to senior associate!

Software Engineer Contractor - Advanced Technology

UPS
March 2021 to July 2021

After graduating in fall 2020 and taking a 2-month siesta to snowboard all of the mountains on the IKON pass out west with friends, I found a contractor role at the advanced technology group at UPS.

  • Developed a PoC for a self-service package inventory iOS application that serves both location administrators and end customers using the OutSystems platform. The self-service UPS kiosk locations you see today began with that PoC!
  • Built a new system for tracking and maintaining reference to UPS' patents
  • Explored Waymo's autonomous driving APIs and proposed use cases to UPS R&D for an Autonomous Package Delivery Proof of Concept

Skills & Tools

Languages & Frameworks

Python TypeScript JavaScript / Node.js Go SQL React / React Native Django FastAPI Expo

Methodologies

Agile Program Management Product Management Product Strategy System Design Cloud Infrastructure Prompt Engineering User Research Data Analysis

Software & Tools

Claude Code Codex Gemini CLI Claude MCP Cursor / Windsurf n8n Docker Figma Linear GitHub Supabase AWS GCP Jira Tableau Power Automate

Adventures

Life Outside the Terminal

The background to all my commutes...

A few things I've been thinking about lately...

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