Michael
Martin

I started in a warehouse. Tried college, dropped out. Gas station. Restaurants. A hotel. Retail. Tried college again and ended up getting committed for a week. That one didn’t stick either.

Fine dining did. I climbed through it — banquet halls, then the real thing. Places where how you hold the plate matters, where you remember who’s celebrating their anniversary and you bring the champagne out right. I served celebrities, athletes, heads of state. Somewhere in there I picked up a rule I’ve never shaken: it’s all in the details.

Third try at school, I actually finished. BS in Physics, MTSU, 2019. Spent two years trapping individual lung cancer cells with laser tweezers — literally holding cells with focused light and measuring how they behave. My capstone was an acoustic levitator. Ultrasonic transducers, 3D-printed dome, Arduino, hand-soldered circuits. It made things float with sound. I also accidentally built an acoustic cannon at one point. That part didn’t make it into the final presentation.

After that: landscaping and carpentry, then a data science certificate, then three years at a consulting firm building production AI — LLM pipelines, PySpark migrations, responsible AI evaluations for federal clients. I mentored high schoolers through a congressional app challenge on the side. One got an internship out of it. One won first place. Then my job moved to India so I moved back home.

My wife has a dairy allergy. Every restaurant is a negotiation. I built AllergyFind so she could look up somewhere and just know. It started as a way to stay busy. There’s a real customer in Nashville now and I’m figuring out the rest.

I hike with the dog, take my wife on actual dates, do archery — I’m genuinely good at it. College football. Auto racing. Sometimes I’ll just pick a city I’ve never been to and go walk around it, or disappear into the woods for a few days. No five year plan. Just things I’m building.