Hello.
I'm Roger. I run seven ventures across herbal medicine, AI consulting, SaaS, and high-ticket sales mentorship — operated solo from a single review-and-approve system I built for myself. This is the longer story.
Mycologist · Herbalist · AI engineer · Operator
Most of what I do now started with not feeling well.
I grew up in Massachusetts with severe digestive issues I never quite outgrew. I was a patient at Children's Hospital. My parents divorced when I was in eighth grade, and the years that followed were a revolving door of pharmaceuticals — high-dose ADHD medications, stimulants, SSRIs — chasing symptoms instead of causes.
In high school I caught one of the worst cases of mononucleosis my doctors had seen. I lost forty pounds, missed over a hundred and eighty combined school days, and spent months wearing sunglasses indoors because of the light sensitivity. Lyme disease showed up on top of it. I'd been a competitive cross-country runner since third grade — set state records in fifth through eighth — plus baseball and high school lacrosse. Mono ended all of it.
I finished my final high school exams two days before moving into college in Vermont.
When I turned eighteen, still dragging the residue of every prescription I'd been on for years, I came home for another round of tests and decided to stop taking everything cold turkey. Around the same time I was introduced to mushrooms for the first time. Something cracked open. I started reading everything I could on alternative medicine. I started foraging. I started making my own tinctures and balms because I couldn't afford to keep buying the supplements I needed and I had a hunch I could do better anyway.
I haven't taken pharmaceutical medication in over twelve years.
Twelve years of staying close to the plants — and the businesses that eventually grew from them.
After Green Mountain College — degree in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Production, philosophy minor — I moved south and worked under Tradd and Olga Cotter at Mushroom Mountain. Tradd is one of the most respected mycology educators in the country. I trained there for a stretch before circumstances pulled me back to Massachusetts.
I went to work at the largest Lowe's nursery in the state, eventually managing over a hundred acres of cultivated native North American plant varieties. I did a brief stint in cannabis and didn't like the culture. I built greenhouses professionally and walked away from that one too — I didn't want to spend my career working at height on glass. I got NASM-certified and started training people. I still do. Fitness is daily life, not a phase.
Through all of it I never stopped studying mushrooms or making medicine. I've been working with shilajit for the last eight to ten years alongside the mushroom work.
In 2020 I founded Mushroom Magic LLC and built it out of whatever I'd saved. The world was bad and the timing was good. From Mushroom Magic came Fruiting Bodies, the premium functional mushroom brand that sponsored the Telluride Mushroom Festival and MAPS two years back-to-back. The herbal medicine work spun off into Optimal Alchemy LLC, the brand I've been deepening for a while now.
HerbOS came when the practitioner gap I kept seeing made me build my own answer to it. Reliable Digital came when the service businesses around me started asking me to fix the same revenue leaks every time. Accelerate Mentorship came when Keith Rouillon and I needed trained closers who actually understood the company they were closing for. The AI operations platform that runs all four of my brands — and now its productized form, Hireforge — came because I was running out of hours in the day.
PRISM, the Human Design SaaS, is the venture furthest from the herbal lane. It's also the most fun.
The slow accumulation. None of it shortcut.
I read more than most people. It's the only way I've found to learn fast in fields that don't show up in a typical curriculum.
Education
B.S. Sustainable Agriculture & Food Production, minor in Philosophy — Green Mountain College, Vermont
Certifications
NASM Certified Personal Trainer
Currently studying
Wild Rose College of Herbal Medicine (Registered → Clinical Herbalist track) · Domus Hermeticus School of Alchemy
Memberships
American Herbalists Guild · International Alchemists Guild (under Dennis William Hauck)
Trained under
Tradd Cotter, Mushroom Mountain
Practice depth
12+ years mycology · 8–10 years working with shilajit
What the day-to-day actually looks like.
Building
Hireforge — productizing the operator-AI stack
Training
Pursuing clinical herbalist certification at Wild Rose
Coaching
Personal training clients · Accelerate Mentorship cohorts
Speaking
Mushroom festivals and events nationwide
Practicing
Daily meditation since 18 · five-day-a-week training
Reading
More than most people
If you'd told me at sixteen, sick and overprescribed, that I'd end up here, I wouldn't have believed any of it.
If you'd told me at nineteen, foraging and making tinctures in a kitchen because I couldn't afford to buy them, that I'd end up here — I'd have probably believed it. That part was always inevitable. The internet just made it bigger.
Two ways forward.
The Letter is long-form essays on building quietly across botanicals and software. The strategy call is direct: thirty minutes, 1:1, on whatever you're trying to figure out.