About

Twenty years, not in a straight line.

I'm Daniel Rae. I run Paper Rocket from Wānaka. Twenty years across software, sales, operations, infrastructure and lately a great deal of AI.

The route here

01
Software
How a thing is actually built, and what it costs to change it two years later.
02
Sales
What a customer hears, and why a good product still sits there not selling.
03
Operations
Where the work really goes, and which step everyone has quietly built a workaround for.
04
Infrastructure
Accounts, domains, mail, permissions. The layer nobody owns until the morning it breaks.
05
AI
What it can genuinely do once it can see your information, and the jobs it has no business touching.

On a CV that reads as a lack of focus. In practice it's the qualification. The failures that cost businesses real money almost never sit inside one discipline, they sit in the space between four of them, where each specialist can reasonably say it isn't their part.

So I can hold the commercial conversation with the owner, the practical one with the team who have to use the thing, and the technical one with whoever builds it. Very little gets lost in translation because there aren't many translations.