Cisco Caceres

Cisco Caceres

I Sell Reality Checks

Editor, RoamingPigs Field Manual · Independent technical publication · the story behind the name

'90 Navy veteran, USS Missouri
'95 Built MSNBC’s CMS
'14 30M concurrent connections
'26 Building Abundera
Book a Reality CheckRead My Story

Two Reality Check slots open for Q3 2026 · $15,000 fixed

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What I Sell

Three engagements. Published prices. Selective.

Reality Check

$15,000 fixed

A 90-minute deep-dive on the decision you’re facing, plus an 8 to 12 page written assessment within 48 hours. The entry point for everything else.

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Engagement

from $50,000

Architecture review, voice AI / ASR system review, or a scoped technical rescue. Five to ten business days. Scope and price fixed during the Reality Check.

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Technical Due Diligence

from $75,000

Pre-acquisition or pre-investment technical review. A defensible written report for your investment committee, board, or LP.

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Notable Scars

Systems that taught me what works and what doesn’t

ZettaZing / ECHO

Architected a push platform load-tested to 30 million sustained concurrent connections across 3,000 AWS instances without failure. The architecture was designed around a billion-connection target.

Voice AI / DHS

Deployed speech recognition for the US Coast Guard in environments so noisy that standard ASR failed. This wasn’t a demo; lives were on the line.

Acquisition diligence

IP that had never been protected surfaced late in diligence. The buyer renegotiated and $40M closed at $28M. A 30% haircut, and the discount this work exists to prevent, on either side of the table.

AMBIE

Acoustic intelligence for the places standard ASR gives up: Coast Guard radio, factory floors, anywhere the noise floor eats the signal. In development. The next scar in progress.

Abundera

Financial advocacy platform plus a product family of 20+ surfaces under one federated identity hub: the abundera.ai core, QR, QR Check, QR Pro, Sign, Research, and 14 vertical advocacy sites. Plaid-connected, passkey-only. Built solo and funded. Shipped from zero in months.

MSNBC / Workbench

Built MSNBC’s publishing platform starting in 1995, when web CMSs were barely a category. The web was still young and everything was being invented.

The Short Version

I toggled my first program into an Altair via front-panel switches in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, I ran BBSs when "online" meant dialing in at 300 baud. In the 1990s, I had two full T1 lines running into my house (3 Mbps total, when most people were on dial-up) because I was running servers before "the cloud" existed.

In between, in college and on contract work, I learned on IBM iron: an AS/400 and a 9221 mainframe. I punched cards, and I leased time on the mainframe by the hour. You desk-checked your code before you submitted a deck, because a missing comma didn’t cost you a keystroke, it cost you a day. FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, RPG, REXX.

By the 2000s, I’d upgraded to an 8 Mbps point-to-point microwave link feeding a 60-server data center in my basement, complete with dedicated cooling. I was running "the cloud" before AWS existed.

I spent the 2000s surviving the crash. I spent the 2010s fixing the messes left by "move fast and break things."

I served aboard the USS Missouri during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The Navy taught me that systems don’t care about your feelings. If you ignore physics, ships sink. If you ignore economics, startups die.

I don’t sell “digital transformation.” I sell reality checks.

Operating Principles

The Constitution I Work By

Physics Over Feelings

Latency is bounded by the speed of light. Cost is bounded by supply and demand. Agile and vibe coding change neither, and I have sat in the meetings where somebody tried.

On writing less of it

Every line of code you write is a line you have to debug, secure, and upgrade. Most of the useful advice I have given has been talking somebody out of a feature.

Scar Tissue Over Certifications

I don’t have a certificate that says I know how to scale. I have the scar from a load test that drove my system to 30 million sustained concurrent connections and didn’t break it.

Skepticism is a Service

Vendors oversell and dashboards flatter. My job is reading the code behind the demo and the invoice behind the dashboard.

Margins

Beautiful systems that lose money aren’t beautiful. Ugly code that prints cash is a masterpiece. The QR tools started because a friend was quoted $46 a month for something that costs nothing to serve.

History Repeats

I’ve watched the same mistakes play out across the dot-com crash, the blockchain bubble, and now AI. I ran a consulting shop through the first one, which is why the third feels familiar rather than new.

Career Timeline

Forty-five years of it. These five explain the rest.

Feb 2026 - Present
Founder & CTO, Abundera
Financial advocacy platform plus product family: QR, QR Pro, Sign, Research, and 14 vertical advocacy surfaces
Oct 2025 - Present
Founder, AMBIE
Acoustic intelligence ASR for high-noise environments
Aug 1995 - Nov 1998
Software Developer, Microsoft/MSNBC
Built Workbench CMS
Oct 1990 - Aug 1992
Navy Veteran, USS Missouri
Desert Shield/Storm, Decommissioning crew
Late 1970s - 1980s
BBS Sysop
Running bulletin boards when online meant 300 baud
The whole timeline

Current Ventures

Three of them here. The rest are on the ventures page.

Abundera

Financial advocacy platform. Analyzes your full financial picture and acts on your behalf — catching overcharges, drafting dispute letters, flagging billing errors, negotiating medical bills. Plaid-connected, passkey-only, and the federation hub for the QR and Sign family.

Barbarians

Software studio for startups. Building products that work, not products that demo well.

RoamingPigs

Independent technical publication. Home of the Field Manual: 170+ articles on what actually works in tech.

All the ventures

Logical Art

Interactive explanations of difficult machines. 113 built, five on the bench.

A hole punched in card stock in 1928 and a neural network trained in a browser tab are the same idea a century apart. Everything in the studio sits somewhere on that line, and all of it runs. The numbers are live, the failure modes are the real ones, and nothing is faked for the screenshot.

Pieces are sized in three tiers. A bit is one idea, about a minute of your time. A nibble is a single mechanism you can take apart and put back together. A byte is a whole machine, big enough to earn its own domain.

See every machinelogicalart.us →

Five more are on the bench.

  • 1962 The System Call The same instruction runs in one mode and traps in the other, and the trap is the only door..
  • 1965 The Semaphore The count is the permission, and no process has to know which other one is waiting..
  • 1969 Page Replacement Giving a program more memory can make it fault more, and the obvious algorithm is where it happens..
  • 1991 Catastrophic Cancellation Subtracting two close numbers throws away the digits you still needed..
  • 2014 Consensus One of them is elected to speak, and the decision survives losing it..

logicalart.us →

From the Field Manual

Lessons from 45+ years of building systems that work

AI & Tech

Your AI Vendor Is Lying to You

Every accuracy claim on that slide deck was measured under perfect conditions you’ll never have. Here’s how to test what they won’t show you.

Browse All 170+ Articles →

Patents & Recognition

  • System and method for data analytics for communications in a walkie-talkie network (US 11,924,717 — granted 2024)
  • Data encryption method (filed 2011, US 13/638,570)
  • Dynamic configuration of context-sensitive personal sites and membership channels (filed 2001, US 2002/0174201)
  • Adaptive environment-aware speech recognition (provisional, filed October 2025)

Seventy-three more provisional applications are on file across the Abundera product family. The USPTO does not publish provisionals, and they stay confidential unless a later application or granted patent makes one accessible, so you can't verify these today the way you can the four above. Ask, and I'll show you the receipts.

Battle "E" Ribbon
National Defense Service Medal
Southwest Asia Service Medal (2 Bronze Stars)
Sea Service Deployment Ribbon
Letter of Commendation, Commanding Officer of the USS Missouri

Off the Clock

The person behind the reality checks

Before MJ and I left the country in 2015, I had a retro gaming collection that filled a room: pretty much every console ever made, thousands of games and accessories. It started with the classic text adventures - Colossal Cave, the Zorks, Hitchhiker’s Guide - then most of the old Sierra Online catalog and the Ultimas, years before Sierra became my first tech employer. Wolfenstein, Quake, Doom and GTA got the serious hours later; the last game I finished was Borderlands 2, and I’m slowly finding my way back in whenever time allows. Alongside it all sat an 8,000-book library and thousands of Blu-rays and DVDs, since digitized.

I watched a lot of anime over the years, with One Piece, Naruto and all the Dragon Balls among the old favorites, and collected a lot of manga, including stacks of Shonen Jump. The comics shelf ran from the classic Marvel and DC runs through Usagi Yojimbo and most of the Dark Horse catalog to The Boys and The Walking Dead. I read every Conan the Barbarian book from every author who wrote one, the whole Wheel of Time, and Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy. Fantasy and science fiction are home territory.

We called ourselves the RoamingPigs because we loved to travel and eat. I will still eat pretty much anything, anywhere.

Book a Reality Check

I am expensive because I am fast, and I am fast because I have seen your problem before. If you want a "Yes Man" to validate your roadmap, hire a Big 4 consultancy. If you want to know why your cloud bill is $50k/month or why your AI agent is hallucinating, call me.

Start the Conversationcisco@ciscocaceres.com
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