About me

I'm James Warrick. I write here about business, technology, and markets — mostly about how those three things intersect, and what happens when they do.

What I do

I'm a co-founder of Corso, where we build post-purchase software for e-commerce merchants — returns, warranties, registrations, shipping protection, and the operational machinery behind them. We started in January 2022, and we've been deliberate about two things: hiring excellent people and then getting out of their way, and staying profitable so we control our own destiny.

How I got here

My career has mostly been about using technology to make businesses work better — sometimes by building the software myself, sometimes by leading the teams that do.

Before Corso I spent nearly two decades in the passenger transportation industry. This was across taxicab operations, special and medical transportation, and student logistics. During that time I managed operations, customer relations, and product and engineering leadership. I ran a 24/7 service center with more than two hundred representatives. I owned relationships with customers who individually represented over $100M in annual revenue, in a sector where compliance was relentless and the rules created a lot of work. Then I led product management and modernization work, moving systems off-premises and rebuilding them with a mix of internal and outsourced teams.

I didn't arrive at software from a computer science background — I arrived from the operations floor, where you just had to get stuff done and a nimble approach to software was a huge point of leverage.

I also spent eight years in the Utah Army National Guard as an aviation operations specialist, including a deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where I learned things that are hard to learn anywhere else.

Technology and design

I wrote my first program in Apple BASIC in elementary school, and dabbled in a ton of different technologies for a long time before finding myself writing code full-time. Along the way I developed a love for visual design — Aldus FreeHand in middle school (just to show how long it's been), then Quark, Photoshop, and web design back when <blink> and <marquee> were still fighting it out. I got involved in writing code again largely because I was tired of my UI designs being implemented poorly by people who were great engineers but didn't understand or care about the UX of the software they were writing.

I'm a generalist. I know enough to go deep when I need to, and I'd rather use a boring, well-understood tool than an exciting one. Postgres unless there's a reason not to. Buy before you build. Save the excitement for your vacation rather than for your on-call rotation.

My use of generative AI

I use AI extensively to write software, and AI does a lot to help keep this site progressing technically. I try to keep a balancing act in my use of AI, and this summary can serve as a guideline for understanding exactly how I do and don't use it.

AI does no wholesale writing of any of my content.
I use AI to help formulate some of my arguments, to help make sure they hold up and to help me fully explore where I might be wrong.
I also use AI for research purposes.
I use AI for spelling and grammar checks, and some light editing.
Any AI writing that does get introduced is heavily reviewed and edited by me, such that it is mine in the end even if a sentence or two gets some help from an LLM.
I love em dashes and have used them my whole life, any em dashes in my writing here are completely my own.
Any AI-isms you read are almost certainly my own natural way of writing things.
The only AI-generated images here are those that I have explicitly generated and published with the intent of exploring generative AI. The images I use are freely licensed (and credited if you want to learn more about the artist), but I don't have a way of knowing for sure whether generative AI was used anywhere in their creation.

I use this site to think about different topics as much as for any other purpose, and I find that AI usage almost completely bypasses this benefit. The way I have chosen to use AI is not a value statement on how anybody else chooses to use it themselves.

You can find me on LinkedIn, or subscribe to the blog or markets commentary feeds.