ericpendleton.com

Rev. Oct 2026 · Boston

G. Eric Pendleton

Communication · Learning & systems · Practical AI

Boston · remote-first
Fluent French · conversational Spanish
Fractional, contract or project work

The gap between knowing and doing is where I work.

I connect what people need to know with what they need to do.

Sometimes that means explaining something complicated so people can make a better decision. Sometimes it's training, research, a clearer process, or a tool that didn't exist yesterday.

I've done it in pharmaceuticals, finance, technology and entertainment. Different industries, same goal: turn complexity into clarity, and clarity into action.

Try a few things while you're here. Explore the work, take an app for a spin, or give FitCheck a job description or project brief. It'll compare the work with my experience, show where I fit, and tell you where I don't.

Explore the work FitCheck About me Contact LinkedIn ↗

01Working systems

Four recent builds. Three are public. Go poke at them.

There's no magic prompt. These took hundreds of hours and thousands of decisions, plus the occasional argument with a machine that was quite sure it had finished.

I defined the products, designed the experiences, wrote the specifications, and directed development. AI generated the code; I tested what it produced, challenged the failures, and decided what was ready to ship.

An extra sense for what you're hearing.

LiveCue

LiveCue adds a layer of understanding to fast-moving conversations. As you listen, it transcribes what you're hearing and surfaces context for unfamiliar names, acronyms, technical terms and references as they come up. Glance at an explanation without interrupting the conversation, or look back at the transcript when something flies past. No frantic Googling. No pretending you know what pari passu means.

v1.7.0-dev.31Web appAudio not stored

Chrome or Edge, on a laptop or a phone (not Safari yet). Add it to your home screen and it opens like an app.

Try it ↗

How it was built, in two weeks

In complicated meetings, technical, financial and legal terms can arrive faster than anyone can look them up. Looking away to research one detail means missing the next three.

I wanted another layer of understanding that worked alongside the conversation, without constantly pulling my attention away.

I defined the product and the interface, directed the AI-assisted development, tested it in real meetings, and used independent reviews to challenge each release. The first working version went from concept to reality in two weeks.

The demo runs without a key. Live use requires your own Gemini API key, which stays in your browser rather than being stored on the site's server.

Take the conn.

Enterprise-D Flight Deck

A starship flight and tactical simulator. Scan anomalies, rescue derelicts, beam people around, blow things up. Fly the ship yourself, or let the crew take the helm, Captain.

Started September 10, 2026Build 110Browser

Any modern browser, on a laptop or a phone. Built by someone who doesn't write code; the story of how is below.

Try it ↗

Why I built it, and how

Started September 10, 2026 · Build 110

Why

I wanted to play an old Star Trek game on my Mac. The surviving Windows version wasn't worth wrestling into submission, and the online alternatives weren't what I wanted.

I'm not much of a gamer. I wanted to explore the Enterprise, admire the ship, fly it myself, or hand the helm to the crew.

On September 10, 2026, I decided to build my own.

How

The game became the experiment. Could someone who doesn't write code direct AI to build something truly complex, then test it, debug it from its own flight logs, and keep piling on features without losing control?

I set the direction and wrote the specs. I played every build and read the telemetry, and shaped the ship's sound in a custom Audio Lab I built for it. ChatGPT and Codex wrote the code. Claude and Gemini reviewed each build independently before release. Saucer separation, fleet behavior, docking, mobile controls and far too many edge cases came out of that loop.

Turns out, yes. Build 110.

Unofficial, non-commercial fan project. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Paramount or CBS Studios.

Meridian, the interactive project briefing: a fictional campus whose funding routes are clearer, with the capital picture of senior facility, sponsor capital, public incentives and site control.

Infrastructure Project Briefing Interactive demo

A meeting is only useful if something happens afterward.

Complex projects throw off meetings, documents, decisions, changing assumptions and open questions. The hard part isn't recording it all. It's knowing what changed, what's confirmed, what's still conditional, and who does what next.

I designed an AI-assisted workflow that turns recordings and source documents into one coherent project briefing. Every consequential claim is checked against its source. The result connects information to decisions, responsibilities and next steps.

Fictionalized demonstration: names, people, numbers and records are invented. The underlying workflow reflects a real approach to managing complex projects.

Explore the demo ↗

The Hub In daily use, still growing

Because “where the hell did I leave that?” is not a workflow.

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are useful collaborators. The problem is that each works with its own context, while the information I need is scattered across conversations, email and documents.

So I built a shared project record: a Drive folder, a sheet and a protocol document. The AI systems work from the same decisions, action items and reference documents instead of reconstructing everything from memory; Gmail and Drive are the sources they read from. Less searching for what happened last, more time doing what comes next. Going from frantic to organized is good for your blood pressure.

02Garside's Ice Cream, Saco, Maine

The ice cream stand that became a business laboratory

Garside's Ice Cream in Saco, Maine: a small white stand with a blue script sign and a line of customers at the serving windows on a sunny day.

OperationsProduct developmentHiringTrainingEmployee manualPricingVendor negotiationsMarket research

My family owned Garside's, which has made its own ice cream on Ferry Road since 1956, for decades. I developed the recipes, trained the employees, managed operations, set the prices and did just about everything else, including mowing the lawn.

When customer traffic began declining, I wanted to understand why. So I made the business the subject of my master's research: customer surveys, interviews, focus groups, vendor pricing, historical sales and weather data. The findings challenged some obvious explanations and exposed problems we could actually fix.

The resulting plan focused on consistency, product variety, customer retention and training. One immediate change, renegotiating our dairy pricing, cut a key ingredient from $26 to $16 a bag and saved more than $7,000 a season. It was a practical lesson in separating what a business can control from what it can't.

I didn't just sling ice cream. But I absolutely slung ice cream.

The early years were growth. When my family bought the stand, the summer I finished high school, it had a loyal following, thirteen flavors and unpredictable hours. We set regular hours, upgraded the cream and expanded the flavors; revenue rose 800% over the next two seasons. I wrote about a hundred recipes, starting with Mint Chocolate Chip the first summer, and thirteen flavors became forty. Much of it I did on weekends from Boston. We sold the stand in 2018.

The decline came much later. The stand records every order, every day, in a notebook, and by the 2000s decades of those records showed customer traffic falling. The market around us was changing, too: tourism along the Maine coast had softened, the country was counting cholesterol, and fast-food chains were selling inexpensive sundaes.

To understand what was driving the decline and where we could make a difference, I made Garside's the subject of my master's capstone: two surveys, 314 respondents; fourteen customer interviews and focus groups; a vendor-pricing review; state weather data; and a season observing the business at the serving windows. A third survey followed in 2017.

The historical data didn't support weather as the principal explanation: four of the best ice cream summers in the record produced no bump. Customers didn't point to the economy either: 87% said it hadn't changed how often they came.
Customers didn't point to the product: 95% rated Garside's equal to or better than Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's, and 58% said better.
The research pointed to four likely causes. Three belonged to the market: Maine's tourism slump after 2001, a public eating less ice cream for its arteries, and a cheaper sundae at the drive-through. The fourth was ours: hours trimmed at both ends, and running out of basics like sugar cones. Once a customer is lost, getting them back is the hard part.
So the plan worked on what we controlled: consistency and promotion. Fifteen points, most of them cheap: new flavors every week (62% asked for them), a flavor contest (winner: Mosquito Ripple), weekday specials, gift certificates, the old hours restored, and a rewritten training manual.
The first move paid before the paper was finished. We asked the dairy for volume pricing. The base mix went from $26 a bag to $16 overnight, saving over $7,000 a season.

The Scoop

Employee manual · 10 pages · PDF · 0.9 MB

A good operating plan isn't worth much if the next employee doesn't know how to carry it out. Point five of the plan: I rewrote our employee manual to make procedures, expectations and customer-service standards clear from day one, from opening and closing checklists to the "arc" scooping technique and what to do about a Grumpster. It became the foundation for each season's training. Training meant showing them the work, letting them practice, and checking that they could carry it out. This is the 2015 edition.

View ↗ Download

03Demonstrations

I'd rather show you.

The examples are composites. The details are invented; the questions come from twenty years of documentation, training and regulated work. The questions I ask before writing a word are the actual work.

The same facts have to land with four people who need different things from them. One version, four edits. The edits are where the judgment is.

The facts

SOP-0421 rev 7 goes effective Monday, November 2. The cleaning check moves to before batch-record sign-off. Retraining is required. Rev 6 is withdrawn the same day.

Asked first

Does the effective date fall before the last training session? No. The last session is Thursday, four days before.
Can anyone still reach rev 6, including printed copies? Not in the system after Monday. Printed copies are the gap.
Does the system block execution without a training record, or only warn? It blocks.
Which shift is exposed? Nights. They train last, so if Thursday slips, one shift runs uncovered.
How will we know it worked? A completion record shows attendance, not capability. Each operator observed on the new step in week one; deviations on the step reviewed at 30 days for anything training missed.

Written for

Operator on the floor

Starting Monday, November 2, the cleaning check in SOP-0421 changes. You'll record the swab result before you sign the batch record, not after. Your training is Thursday. Until you've completed it, you can't run the step. Rev 6 disappears from the system Monday, so don't print copies.

Date first. The change in one sentence. The gate as a consequence, not a rule. The last line anticipates the workaround.

The facts

On the 15th the bank issued a commitment letter for the company's warehouse purchase. Two conditions remain: an appraisal at or above the price, and a clean environmental report. Neither is back. No funds have been released. The seller wants to close on the 30th.

Asked first

What exactly did the bank commit to, in its words? A loan for the purchase, subject to both conditions. Nothing funds until they clear.
What happens if a condition fails? The commitment lapses. A low appraisal means renegotiating the price or bringing more cash.
Is the seller's date in the contract yet? No. It's a request.
Who in this chain will read "committed" as "closed"? The seller, the movers, and anyone who hears it secondhand.

Written for

Investors and partners

The bank issued its commitment on the 15th. That's a gate cleared, not a closing. No money has moved. Closing depends on two reports that aren't back yet: the appraisal and the environmental. If the appraisal comes in low, we renegotiate the price or bring more cash.

The second sentence is the whole job. "No money has moved" states the fact everyone would otherwise infer wrongly. The last sentence names the one outcome that changes the plan.

04Learning & performance

Before we build the training, what's getting in the way?

Before building a course, I look at what people need to do, what gets in their way, and what improvement would look like.

A customer-service manager asks for a course: "Onboarding is taking too long." Here is what three new hires said. Select what you're hearing; more than one can be true.

Each points somewhere different. Training fits one of them.

Behind the approach

Learning for Competence, white paper, February 2018, sole author. The performance model and the three rings. It already argued against deviation rates as a measure of training; the rest of this panel is how I'd put it today.
Training Needs Analysis worksheet, 2019. Starts from the business outcome and asks which competencies are trainable at all.
Training Development Guide, 2019. Demonstration, supervised practice, and a signed final assessment.

05Work samples

Two PDFs, an article and a cartoon walk into a bar…

What do they have in common? Complicated material and different audiences.
(And in the cartoon, there’s a cat!)

West Side Kitchen, Paris

Whiteboard video · YouTube

A whiteboard video for a longtime friend's American-style sandwich café and caterer in Paris's 17th arrondissement, which he ran for 25 years. Friendly sandwiches. Delivered.

Watch on YouTube ↗

Selected Work Samples

14 pages · PDF · 2 MB · August 2026

Eight samples from twenty years inside corporate L&D, plus the early AI record. Each opens on its own page:

View ↗ Download

First page of the finance writing samples

Finance Emails and Blog Articles

4 pages · PDF · 0.8 MB · 2023

Four client pieces written for Pendleton Financing, my commercial-lending brokerage: why lenders want an LLC as the borrower, adaptive reuse, getting started in long-term rentals, and 1031 exchanges. Plain English for people about to sign something.

View ↗ Download

5 Steps to Unlocking the Value in Unstructured Big Data

Article · Quirk's Media · April 2017

Five practical things to do with the text nobody reads: survey comments, call transcripts, support tickets, social posts. Written for marketing researchers at a point when "text analytics" was a vendor promise more than a practice. Still holds up: the lessons are business strategy and operating habits, not the tools.

Read at Quirk's ↗

06How I work with AI

AI made me dramatically faster. It also gave me more places to lose the thread.

So every project runs on four habits from years of regulated work: define the requirements, review independently, test the results, and keep a traceable record. Choose one to see it applied to a real problem.

Case · LiveCue · September 30, 2026

The 56 words that disappeared.

In a session I ran to test LiveCue, a long passage appeared as live text. When I pressed Stop, the speech service's final transcript came back shorter, with earlier wording changed, and the app threw away the last 56 words it had already shown. The repair keeps them, marked as unconfirmed.

01 · Spec before build

Start with the problem, the audience and a clear definition of success. The specification can evolve, but the purpose shouldn't get lost.

The rule: never discard words the listener has already seen. Keep the speech service's final text exactly as delivered, and show anything it dropped separately, marked unconfirmed, because a live draft is not proof of accuracy.

Reenactment · sample wording

On screen while talking

Thanks, everyone. Before we wrap, the launch moves to the fourteenth. The venue holds three hundred, and invitations go out Friday. Replies are due by the first.

Final text from the speech service

Thanks, everybody. Before we wrap, the launch moves to the fourteenth.

Saved transcript

Thanks, everybody. Before we wrap, the launch moves to the fourteenth.

The last two sentences, already shown on screen, are gone.

unconfirmed draft · provider final omitted later draft textThe venue holds three hundred, and invitations go out Friday. Replies are due by the first.

Evidence and limits

From the LiveCue repair report of September 30, 2026, on a desktop Chrome session of release candidate 5. Last live draft: 1,323 characters. Final from the speech service: 877 characters, with earlier wording changed. The distinct ending it omitted: 267 characters, 56 words. After the repair, replaying the recorded sequence kept all 267 in the visible transcript and the export.

Not established: that recognition is complete or accurate, that every provider path behaves the same, or a fresh live test. The kept words are what the service sent as provisional text; their accuracy is not confirmed. The October 21 check confirms the safeguard's code is in the deployed release, not its behavior in a new session. The wording in the reenactment is invented.

AI can rewrite 500 pages in an afternoon. Checking page 340 is still a person’s job.

07About

Where the discipline comes from

I've spent much of my career helping people understand complicated things well enough to act on them: learning programs, technical and business translation, knowledge systems, operations, and the documents behind consequential decisions.

The question is always the same: what do people need to understand, what are they trying to do, and what's in the way? AI now lets me go past the explanation and build the tool.

The technology is new. The judgment behind it isn't.

NowLunchbox Labs, an animation studio: partner and executive producer. Development, production, business materials and complex decisions, including a human-governed, multi-model AI review of contracts, financial records and investor materials. Gaia Eco Developments, regenerative infrastructure: equity partner. Investor narratives, executive briefings, and the material that connects funding strategy with execution.

BeforeCorporate training and quality systems at Takeda, Alexion, Shire and Citizens Bank: an enterprise train-the-trainer program, competency-based GxP training with role-based qualification, and a 500-page knowledge system for a lending platform used by about 2,000 people. Training, documentation and communications in pharmaceuticals, banking, technology and government.

FranceSix years: teaching, then corporate communications and company-wide English training at bioMérieux in Lyon. Fluent French. Conversational Spanish. Boston, remote-first.

Currently: Partner and Executive Producer, Lunchbox Labs · Equity Partner, Gaia Eco Developments

FitCheck

Have a role or project in mind?

Give FitCheck the description. It'll look for relevant experience, identify possible gaps, and suggest where a conversation might be useful. It won't pretend I'm qualified for something I'm not.

Answers come from an AI assistant working only from a career brief I approved. They aren't commitments. For scope, availability and rates, contact me directly. Your text is sent to an AI service to generate the assessment; this site does not save it. Please don't include confidential or sensitive information in the description.

Education: M.S., Business Management, Emmanuel College · M.A., French Language and Literature, Washington University in St. Louis, Teaching Fellowship · B.A., French Language and Literature, Colby College, Psychology minor

Born in Waterville, and raised in Saco, Maine. Only child. My father taught history and directed athletics at Deering High School in Portland.

The summer I finished high school, my family bought Garside's, a seasonal ice cream stand on the Saco River. I made the ice cream, wrote the recipes, hired and trained the crews, painted the building and mowed the grass. I kept doing that on weekends from Boston for years, to help my mother. She passed and I sold it in 2018.

Thornton Academy, Phillips Exeter, then Colby, where I studied French and sang tenor with the Colby 8. Then France: two years in Avignon running a school's term abroad, which I rebuilt from scratch; summers directing immersion programs for Dartmouth's Rassias program and Washington University; a stretch in Caen, Normandy.

Grad school in St. Louis, where I taught French at the Alliance Française and performed in rock musicals on the side. A biomedical-diagnostics company hired me to teach its engineers French, translate all kinds of business and technical materials, then moved me to its global headquarters in Lyon for corporate communications and company-wide English training. Six years in France all told. People still take me for French.

Boston since. Software, banking, state government, pharma, in that order, mostly teaching people to use complicated systems and writing the documents that keep regulated work honest, and compliant. A few years running my own commercial-lending brokerage. Now a partner and executive producer at an animation studio with a feature in production, and an equity partner in an advanced infrastructure venture.

Also: fourth of sixteen finalists on The Next MJ Millionaire, an Amazon Prime business-competition reality show, pitching an ice cream concept called “chill.” SAG-AFTRA eligible. Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar at Exeter. Formally practiced and always terrible at: tennis, piano, skiing, and windsurfing. Still a damn good singer. Maine accent available on request.

08Contact

Have something complicated that needs to work better?

I help organizations turn complex information into clear communication, effective learning, better decisions and practical tools. Available for fractional, contract and project work in executive communications, learning and enablement, research, technical writing, English–French translation, and AI-assisted workflows.

LinkedIn ↗ Boston · remote-first · fluent French

↑ Top

G. Eric Pendleton

Four recent builds. Three are public. Go poke at them.

LiveCue

Enterprise-D Flight Deck

Why

How

Infrastructure Project Briefing Interactive demo

The Hub In daily use, still growing

The ice cream stand that became a business laboratory

The Scoop

I'd rather show you.

Operator on the floor

QA manager

Site head

Auditor

Investors and partners

Counsel

Operations lead

Board

A procedure with a double negative

A lender's email

An IT policy

A price sign at an ice cream stand

Before we build the training, what's getting in the way?

Two PDFs, an article and a cartoon walk into a bar…

West Side Kitchen, Paris

Selected Work Samples

Finance Emails and Blog Articles

5 Steps to Unlocking the Value in Unstructured Big Data

AI made me dramatically faster. It also gave me more places to lose the thread.

The 56 words that disappeared.

Where the discipline comes from

Have something complicated that needs to work better?