I turned 40 this year. To mark it, I finally did something I'd been putting off for two decades: I built a place of my own. This site is it.
I've spent my whole career being the person behind other people's wins — the one who quietly makes the thing work. paulsapio.com is the first time I've stepped out from behind the curtain to say, plainly: here's what I do, and here's how I got here. So let me start at the beginning.
Lake Ronkonkoma to a Google help desk
I was born in Lake Ronkonkoma, New York, and I got into technology absurdly early. Straight out of high school, a small Google subsidiary recruited me into their IT department in Arizona. I was a teenager with a help-desk badge inside one of the most important companies on earth, and I was hooked.
I put myself through school on the back of that job — a BS in Computer Science from Arizona State, then a master's in Cloud Computing and Cybersecurity from WGU. Four years there while I studied, learning on real systems what most people only read about.
Where I learned the business behind the technology
Then Delta Career Education, a large college group, recruited me to stand up a call center in the heart of Arizona. That was the turn that shaped everything. I walked in as the tech guy and walked out understanding a business.
It's also where I met my mentor.
He saw something in me early that I couldn't see in myself. Not just that I could cut through a problem with technology — plenty of people can do that — but that I could sit with a messy, complicated business need and actually find the solution. He gave it a name: the fixer. Bring Paul a problem, he'll figure out how to solve it. I've worn that label ever since.
He didn't stop at business, either. He taught me leadership — which, I'll be honest, I hated at the time. It was like the talk your parents give you about saving money: you roll your eyes, you nod, and then fifteen years later it lands all at once and you realize they were right the whole time. His business instincts were that good. I'm lucky I listened.
Because here's the thing almost no one teaches you: the bridge. I'm a technologist who can sit across from a C-level executive, explain exactly what's broken and how we fix it, and never once make them feel lost. I'm told that bridge — from deep technical work to plain executive language — is rare for people who come up the way I did. I owe a huge amount of who I am to the man who built it in me.
My first taste of building
ChatDrive — my first company, started with that same mentor — was where I got my first real taste of development and workflow design, long before AI made any of it easy. It helps schools enroll and qualify more students through live chat. For years after, I consulted my way through education and small business, fixing tech wherever it was broken.
The seat I'm in now
Eventually I was introduced to Mikhail Education, where I'm the CIO today. I took the VP of IT role in 2018 and was promoted to CIO in 2022, and I genuinely love it.
The reason is the people who own and run it. I walked in knowing IT and nothing else — none of the functional areas, none of the operational machinery. MEC didn't keep me in my lane. They let me dig into every part of the business and every part of education itself, until I understood how a large-scale company actually runs from the inside. I have my hands in every department now, and that view — the whole board instead of just my corner — is the rarest gift a technologist can be handed.
2022: the year I saw the world change
Right at the tail end of COVID, I was spending most of my waking hours online, and I started going deep on AI while it was still early and unglamorous. I got lucky: a community spot opened up at OpenAI, I applied, and I got in. I was testing these models before the hype — before everyone had an opinion. The first time it truly clicked, I knew, quietly and with total certainty, that the world had just changed.
Fast-forward to today and I'm a full-stack AI engineer. Not "build me a website." End-to-end SaaS that saves companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've shipped a fully deployed mobile app, built my own AI text editor, and created an AI agent that walks students through the entire FAFSA and in-house financing process.
Honestly? I feel dangerous. Like there's very little I couldn't build if I set my mind to it. I suspect that's the feeling my father has carried his whole life — there has never been a thing that man couldn't do. I owe him an enormous debt; he made me the man I am. Between him and my mentor, I got two masterclasses most people never get: how to build, and how to lead.
Why this site exists
Let me be clear about one thing: I'm not looking for a job — I love where I am. That said, I'm always open to contract work, and I'm happy to help. If you've got a problem in security, networking, AI, or SaaS development, that's exactly the kind of thing I like to fix. Reach out.
I built this for a bigger reason, though. The world has shifted, and most companies haven't caught up. Your VP of IT, your CIO — those people should be spending real time on how AI and AI agents can improve every process you run. Too few are. And not enough people are learning this skillset at all. This site is my attempt to show what becomes possible when you do.
There's one more thing I'm building, and it's the one I care about most: a free AI school for teenagers, so kids can be set up for success before the world races past them. My mentor did that for me once. This is me trying to pay it forward.
I'll leave you with the line that's been rattling around my head, from Nvidia's Jensen Huang:
You're not going to lose your job to an AI — you're going to lose it to someone who uses AI.
I'd rather be the person who uses it. So would you. Let's get to work.
Paul Sapio is the CIO of Mikhail Education and a full-stack AI engineer. Start a conversation.