Aaron Williams

He saw the wave before it had a name.

Aaron Williams started coding at 16. By the late 1990s, he was writing routing code for real-time internet voice systems at a time when most people were still tethered to long-distance phone plans and the idea of routing calls over the internet was considered fringe, if not faintly ridiculous.

Skype launched four years later. The wave had a name.

In 2004, Aaron joined Microsoft at 24 as a Technical Program Manager on MSN Messenger (later Windows Live Messenger). This wasn't a side project. MSN Messenger was one of the most widely used products Microsoft had ever shipped, carrying hundreds of millions of conversations a day. Aaron was there for the engineering, the scale, and the complicated, fascinating work of making something feel effortless for ordinary people while running on infrastructure that could buckle at any point.

From there, he moved to Accenture as a management consultant, where he built training programs for Microsoft consultants, translating technical complexity into learning that actually landed for practitioners in the field. It sharpened a skill he'd carry forward: making hard things legible to people who don't live and breathe them.

A decade of high-trust advisory work.

After Accenture, Aaron served for 8 years as the trusted technology advisor to a prominent Seattle-area executive (under NDA). He was the person that someone with everything on the line called when technology decisions mattered. That kind of trust isn't given. It's earned, slowly, by being right when it counts and honest when it's uncomfortable.

8 years in the biotech trenches.

Then he went independent. Aaron has spent the last 8 years running a boutique IT consulting company in Seattle, focused primarily on the biotech industry. Biotechs are demanding clients: high stakes, fast-moving, deeply technical, operating under regulatory pressure that leaves no margin for error. It is not the kind of work you can phone in.

Then he started building with AI directly.

Over the past few years, Aaron has used AI tools as a core part of his own development and client work, treating them as genuine accelerants rather than novelties. The results were concrete and measurable.

The people building with AI were getting results that would have taken years otherwise. The people waiting to understand it perfectly were falling behind.

Why Barnabas Coaching.

The pattern Aaron has seen more than once — in early internet voice infrastructure in the '90s, in algorithmic trading systems, in Microsoft-scale consumer products, and now in AI — is the same: a technology that seems complicated and uncertain at first, followed by a rapid shift in which early movers establish durable advantages and late movers spend years catching up. The window for early-mover advantage isn't open forever.

Barnabas Coaching exists because most Seattle business owners are smart, capable people who don't have time to become AI experts, and shouldn't have to. What they need is a trusted advisor who can tell them what's real, what's worth betting on, and what to do first. Someone who has been in the weeds, has built things, has made the wrong calls and learned from them, and can translate all of that into a plan that fits their specific business.

That's the job Aaron is here to do.