Grew up next to the parks. Never really left.
Entrepreneur, researcher, and Celebration local. I needed an escape from cold cities. I missed pleasant days, friendly people, and the themed worlds I have loved my whole life. So I came home, started new ventures centered on Orlando travel, and got to work measuring the economy around them.
Where I started
The parks were where I went before I could even drive.
I grew up in the Windermere and Dr. Phillips area, a few minutes from Walt Disney World. For most families the parks are a trip you save for. For me they were summer afternoons at Typhoon Lagoon, holiday meals at Disney restaurants, and days in the parks with my parents and, once I was old enough, plenty of days without them.
Alien Encounter was a blast, and XS Tech, the invented corporation behind its teleporter, was the kind of deep theming Disney did better than anyone. I rode Horizons enough to understand the promise it was making. I still miss that optimistic future we once had. It is probably why I eventually left, out to California, to go looking for that future myself.
The long way around
I went looking for the future Horizons promised.
Before any of that came Celebration. I moved there in 2001 and lived there through my years at UCF, and the town got under my skin in a way I did not fully appreciate until much later. When I finally left Florida I went straight for California, and San Francisco is where I established myself, working in and around the Silicon Valley tech scene. From there the road ran east, first to New York City, where I lived in Manhattan, and then on to Boston and Cambridge. Those years taught me how companies actually get built, and how numbers get used when real money is riding on them.
Eventually I built a company of my own and grew it to five million dollars a year in revenue. We ran it well, and in the end we sold it, which gave me the freedom to decide what came next.
Orlando → San Francisco → Manhattan → Boston → home
So I came home.
Back in Celebration
The most unique and special community there is.
After years in the heart of urban America, the memory of Celebration kept calling me back. The peace and the quiet. The cleanliness. The fireworks you can hear from your porch. I have lived all over this country, and what we have here, the unmatched access to the parks, the restaurants, the attractions, exists nowhere else in America and honestly nowhere else in the world. It is worth holding onto.
Now I see the parks with both sets of eyes at once. The kid who grew up on Horizons, and the operator who cannot help running the numbers. Everyone here has opinions about what things cost. Almost nobody has data. I knew how to fix that.
What I do now
Now I measure the place I love.
Fixing it became the Starlane Observatory and Starlane Reports, independent research on the Disney parks economy, all of it held to the Starlane Method™ with everything in the open. I hold an Annual Pass, I am in the parks multiple times a week, and EPCOT is still home base. The work is turning what I see every week into numbers other people can cite.
Sleep Around Points
My independent peer-to-peer DVC rental marketplace. Not a broker, though the reports measure it alongside them.
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Park Maxing
My company and the home for all my work, now building a mobile app for passholders to track their annual savings.
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Popdot AI
My AI native company. For now, only AI agents can rent subdomains, paying with the x402 protocol.
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Disclosure
I run businesses in the market these reports measure. Who I am, what I own, and how that is handled is documented in full on the disclosures page.