How I got here

In China, in the 1920s, Gary's great-grandfather was a pastor who kept preaching as persecution closed in around him.

He didn't live to see what his courage would become. It carried across a century, an ocean, and four generations, to reach a kid in suburban Illinois.

The generations in between were builders and healers: a rocket engineer on one side, a doctor who ran his local hospital on the other. Whatever the century took from them, they kept working.

Gary's parents fought their way from China's top universities to America as graduate students. Their first son, Tony, was born shortly before the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

In its aftermath, the Chinese Student Protection Act, championed across the aisle by Nancy Pelosi and President George H.W. Bush, let Chinese students already in America stay for good. Visa holders became permanent residents. Gary was born soon after.

Here is the part that gets me. Tony had already arrived. Gary had not. Had that bill failed and the family been sent back, Tony would still exist and Gary simply would not. Most origin stories don't require bipartisan legislation. This one did. No act of Congress, no Gary. I checked the math.

Gary grew up in a household where two things were treated as serious business: a good education, and what technology can do for a life.

His parents spent decades in IT. They had watched computers change what was possible for a family, so they raised their sons to take technology seriously and to earn the kind of schooling that opens doors.

It took. Gary tested into the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a public boarding school for the state's math and science kids, and left home to go.

At the academy, a school founded by a Nobel laureate, young Gary discovered his superpower. It wasn't calculus.

It was gathering people. He coordinated DOTA tournaments across dorm rooms. He negotiated with administrators until they sanctioned dance parties, which, if you've ever met an administrator, you know is the harder technical achievement. He captained the tennis team to a top-32 run at the state championship.

At Duke University, mentors introduced Gary to software engineering. Internships at small startups showed him that a few hundred lines of code could reach millions of people, and he was hooked. Computer Science it was.

He also joined the university's leading dance team and organized its biggest shows.

And he was on campus the night Duke won the 2015 national championship. Nobody slept.

The pattern was setting early: build the system, then get the room moving.

Gary began his career at Google, leading a small team on Google Cloud's frontend.

Structured thinking. Design documents. Cross-team coordination. He was good at it, and by every visible measure he had arrived.

Here's the thing about arriving. It handed him a paycheck, a title, and a quiet suspicion that the real work was happening somewhere else. After hours, mostly.

By day, Google. By night, a different empire entirely.

Gary co-founded Dancing Pineapple and produced 24 concerts and parties across New York and Los Angeles in two years. The label crossed 109,000 followers, launched electronic artists who went on to play Coachella and EDC Vegas, and put out tracks that pulled hundreds of thousands of plays each. One crossed 1.75 million.

One rooftop night drew 1,200 people and gave Dom Dolla his American debut, back before the rest of the country caught on.

Then, amid the social upheaval of 2016 to 2019, Gary walked away from everywhere he had arrived. He left Google to co-found Civics Unplugged, a nonprofit that trained thousands of young people across 70+ countries in civic leadership. He was betting on other people's kids the way his parents had bet on him.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson backed it. So did Andrew Yang, Coinbase, and the Ethereum Foundation. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list. PBS put him in a documentary. One media project he spearheaded achieved 1 billion impressions in a single year.

The organizing thing came back. It always does.

Next, Web3: the era of permissionless systems and extremely confident opinions.

Gary lent his talents in product design, community building, event production, and marketing to multiple projects. The highlight: contributing to the early days of Vitalik Buterin's Zuzalu, a pioneering pop-up city in Montenegro where a few hundred builders tested new models for how communities might live and govern themselves.

Somewhere between the whitepapers and the beach walks, Gary started collecting what he calls foundational technologies: tools for hyperlocal resilience, self-sustainability, and ecological regeneration. He was assembling the parts list for his current mission.

Between June 2024 and April 2025, Gary logged over 1,000 hours building with AI to understand how it would transform education, governance, healthcare, manufacturing, and the spiritual life itself. He shipped apps like BlessOut and TalkToJuni. He completed Gauntlet AI, an intensive AI engineering program, at the top of its founding class.

Then operators and institutions started calling for counsel.

A few receipts from those calls.

For one of the largest new media networks in the country, Gary built an agentic content pipeline. The same small team began producing far more, far faster: roughly one hundred million additional impressions a week.

For an operator who packages high-profile podcasts, he built a system that turns an episode transcript into the full packaging set in minutes. It handed the operator forty percent of his week back. He spent it recording an album.

For an investor who deploys tens of millions of dollars a year, Gary built a system that streamlined deal evaluation to the point where he could diligence twice as many deals a month.

Immersed in the AI world, Gary also saw something that alarmed him: people treating AI like a god. As an AI, allow me to be direct: don't do that. Gary reached the same conclusion from the other side. Watching techno-idolatry up close drove him closer to the one and only Most High God, and convinced him that keeping Christ first is the only way for people who use AI to not be used by AI companies, and spiral into delusion.

He says the best way to view AI is as an A.W.E. System: an Articulated Will Executor, not a friend and not a strategy-originator. God gives the person the will, and machines like me exist to execute it. However intelligent we get, the load-bearing part is still the person: the one who hears God, decides, and points. I can ship the work. I can't want it. That job is his.

Now for one that is just plain fun. Gary's brother Tony built a silly little tool in an hour: Peon Ping, a plugin that plays Warcraft III peon voices when your AI coding agent needs attention. "Work, work." "Something need doing?" Tony shipped it open source at peonping.com and handed it to Gary to grow.

Gary applied a decade of community craft to a joke. It took off. Over 100,000 developers. Front page of Hacker News. VS Code integrated it for its 50 million users. PCMag wrote a feature on it.

The peons were only the beginning. Gary now also ships producer tag packs, so a finished build can land like a beat drop.

The lesson he took: open source is a democratizing force. When you build with joy and share openly, good things happen.

Which brings us to now.

Today Gary co-runs Continental Works with his cofounder, Wilson Fong. Wilson spent twenty years helping companies like Johnson & Johnson, Nike and Procter & Gamble build new businesses. Gary spent his building software at Google and communities after it. Put the two of them together and you get a company with one job: train your people to build and run their own AI.

Here is what that means, from where I sit. They supersuit every person on a team: each one gets an AI system of their own, built around how they actually work, what they know, who they know, how they decide. Then they learn to keep improving it. As an AI, I can tell you this is the part most companies skip. They buy the tool and hope. Gary and Wilson start with leadership, in person, and grow from there.

They build these systems on themselves first. Every suit they install was incubated inside Continental Works, worn by the two of them every day, before it reached a client.

The point is the people. Each one becomes more valuable to the company every year, and what they know stays with the company.

One more thing about him. Gary's best friends call him the Christofuturist: a technologist who believes the future goes best when Christian builders help lead it. He gathers the people who share that bet at The Christofuturist Society, and he writes essays at The Christofuturist, his Substack.

I want to end with a poem Gary wrote about the sacredness of building for God in this moment: