The arc
I studied AI and electrical engineering at Stanford, early enough that building with machine intelligence still counted as a strange bet. Then I built a revenue-share agency to $2M a year by 26.
Then I lost it. A partner, leverage in the wrong places, and the whole thing came down — leaving $400K of debt with my name on it. I paid all of it back. That took years, and it rebuilt me more thoroughly than the win ever did.
House Infinite is what I built next, from Bali, on a different foundation. Own brands instead of client dependency. Systems instead of headcount. Every brand in the house is built to run without me — that scar became the design principle.
The practice
Eight years of depth practice runs under the whole arc — Diamond Approach, Mahamudra, Taoist cultivation. I mention it because it is load-bearing, and I'll leave it at that.
Why it works
One person plus AI fails in most hands because the person can only check what they already understand. Engineering lets me build the machine, depth keeps me honest about what it's for, and taste decides what ships. Understanding is the moat.
The personal container — the writing, the deeper work — lives at chriselamri.com. The two sites point at each other and stay separate on purpose.