About Paul Crinigan, Founder of AI Apps API

Learning business from the floor

Before I built anything that scaled, I ran businesses you could walk into. I owned a bar at 23 and two restaurants by 25. That is where I learned how a business actually works, from inventory and staffing to the part most software people never see, what it really costs you when something breaks on a busy night. I have built operations software ever since with that floor-level view in mind.

Building the early web

When ecommerce was brand new, I built afcommerce, one of the first shopping cart platforms on the internet and among the first built on a modular developer architecture, so anyone could extend it the way developers later would on platforms like WordPress. It integrated every major payment provider of the era, including PayPal, Authorize.net, WorldPay, VeriSign, and Google Checkout. Years after I had moved on, people were still running it and still talking about it in developer forums. You can read the longer afcommerce story here.

Around the same time I built amazingflash, one of the first website builders of its kind, and the place the "af" in afcommerce comes from. I also ran a small hosting company on my own hardware, two racks in a data center, for a couple of years, because I wanted to understand the entire stack, not just the code sitting on top of it.

Software that shipped, and got acquired

I built an email marketing platform and ran it for years. It was acquired by Matomy Media, who brought me on for two years, and I kept a license and kept building with it afterward. Along the way I shipped on nearly every new platform as it appeared, including one of the first voice apps that let you control a game just by speaking to it. I also spent those years catching and fixing bugs in the platforms I built on, the kind where you file a report and months later the vendor writes back to say you were right. Going that deep is simply how I work.

Then I spent five years making games. I taught myself Unity and C# and shipped five of them, including animated characters with synced lip and eye movement, a technique I still use in my work today.

Why AI, and why this site

I was automating systems long before AI made it fashionable, so when the tools finally caught up, I already knew exactly what to do with them. I work at the level of how these models actually function, embeddings, hidden states, attention passes, mixture-of-experts, not just prompting them from the outside. I built Adaptive Recall, a persistent memory system for AI, with a patent-pending method behind it. I run a network of focused sites, each one powered by the same systems I write about here. And I am currently running an experiment in modeling self-awareness inside a language model, because some questions are too interesting to leave alone.

My career has touched a lot of industries, and for a long time that looked scattered. AI is the first thing that lets one person operate across all of them at once. That is what AI Apps API is, the place where everything I have built over 27 years finally runs together.