Ronald Wacker · New York

Fourteen years running a real estate investment and construction business, and the last eighteen months building production AI systems.

ronald@wackermanagement.com

  • 14 yearsPrincipal, owner-operator
  • $20M+Capital managed
  • 30+Projects, four states
  • ASML · NXP · Huawei · SiemensEnterprise sales
  • 6 weeksIdea to live AI platform

The through-line

Real estate, enterprise sales and AI are different environments, and the work in each one runs on the same moves. Three of them:

All nine, each with where it shows up

Work

What I've built.

Five software systems, each built solo by first learning the domain well enough to understand the problem, then designing and shipping the system around it. Every one is documented as the problem, the operating insight, the system, the decisions behind it, the result and its limits, with the architecture open for anyone who wants to read it.

The physical work: five construction projects documented in full

Enterprise sales

  • ASML
  • NXP
  • VDL
  • Huawei
  • Siemens

Understanding a business problem is half the job. The other half is getting a complex organization to pay to solve it. Two years at SThree in Amsterdam selling contract IT infrastructure staffing into enterprise accounts, full cycle.

Pipeline
Self-sourced. Target accounts mapped, then several divisions and levels worked at once until the firm made the preferred-vendor list.
The approval chain
Discovery with the hiring manager to scope demand, then each placement through HR and finance to C-suite sign-off, negotiated, placed and delivered.
Scale
ASML opened and grown into the largest account. Twenty contractors placed and running concurrently at peak.
Record
Promoted to team lead after six months. Hired, coached and led a five-person team while carrying an individual quota. Top 5% of performers, every quota and incentive exceeded.

Real estate investment and construction

Wacker Management was an owned business, not an advisory seat. Every project was bought, financed, built and sold on decisions I made, with my own capital and investors' capital at risk.

Capital
$20M+ managed, own and investor
Scope
30+ investment and construction projects
Geography
Florida, Louisiana, Iowa and Kentucky, run from New York
Responsibility
Acquisition, financing, design, construction, disposition
Complexity
Architects, engineers, contractors, trades, permitting, budgets and scheduling, up to three sites live at once
Judgment
Investment decisions under uncertainty: hidden damage priced blind, budgets built as ranges, the exit set before entry

Five projects documented in full

For hiring teams

Who I am

I ran a real estate investment and construction business for fourteen years: 30+ projects across four states on more than $20M of own and investor capital, each one owned from acquisition to sale. Before that I sold contract IT staffing into ASML, NXP, Siemens and Huawei and led a five-person team while carrying my own quota. Over the last eighteen months I taught myself enough of the technology to design, build and ship production AI systems alone, without an engineering background. None of it came with a playbook, a team or a technology function. When the problem appeared, I had to understand it and build the mechanism that solved it.

What I've built

How I think

The full record