Justin Gelinas hated school. Not because he wasn't smart, because the box was too small.

Then a teacher named Laurie took him on a field trip to a design studio in Burlington, Vermont. Tribe Called Quest was playing. There was a half pipe in the basement. Twenty-somethings were designing brand strategy for Burton Snowboards on an open floor plan. And Justin walked out knowing exactly what he wanted to build.

That one field trip set off a lifelong pursuit of the unconventional, from DJing at 13, to building creative technology companies, to now founding TAHO: middleware that's making AI infrastructure faster, cheaper, and more efficient at a moment when the world desperately needs it.

In this episode, we get into:

• Why the cookie cutter school path never fit — and what happened when he found his version of it

• How music and business are more alike than anyone admits

• The role his entrepreneurial mom played in shaping how he saw work

• Building and selling a company right before the AI wave hit

• Why the infrastructure powering AI today was built for a world that no longer exists

• What TAHO is doing to solve the compute crisis — and why data centers running at "full capacity" are actually only at 50%

• His three pillars for every product decision: faster, more affordable, universally adaptable

If you've ever known in your gut that the conventional path wasn't yours — this one will hit.