I’m a CEO who grew a ‘boring’ air filter business into a $260 million company, and AI is going to help blue-collar, everyday people just like me

When I was 13, I had a side hustle building websites for local businesses. This was the 1990s. Building a site meant weeks on a dial-up connection, hand-coding HTML line by line, and breaking layouts because you missed a single character. If I made $2,000 in a summer, it was because I gave up nearly every waking hour to do it. My income was capped by how fast I could work.

Around that same time, my grandfather gave me advice that I still come back to: focus on building something people actually need.