The Person Behind the Paw

Sean
Derr.

Operations leader. Vizsla guardian. Learning to skateboard at an age where he really should know better. Came to Boston for work. Stayed because the city earned it.

Sean and Bertie after romping in the snow

Bertie, post-snow-romp.
She was a fan. Obviously.
@thefloppycougar on Instagram →

Who Is This Guy

The resume says operations.
The person says something
considerably more interesting.

If you get twenty minutes with Sean, you’ll spend the next twenty-two hours thinking about what he said. Which is technically still the same day, but only barely. He’s sharp without needing you to know it, funny without trying, and has the rare habit of actually listening when you’re talking — not just waiting for his turn. He’s also rarely at parties, which probably explains why the conversations are so good when he is.

His friends know him as the person who shows up with a solution before you’ve finished explaining the problem — and then makes the whole thing entertaining somehow. Equal parts fix-it guy and instigator of a good time. Somewhere between Willie Wonka and Bill Nye, and completely at peace with that.

Things That Actually Matter to Him

🐕
Bertie

A Vizsla of contradictions — calm and regal until she isn’t. Her happiness announces itself via full-body squiggle. Her snack preferences lean blueberry and spinach, which she takes as seriously as any of it. She loves her treat ball, has a standing feud with inanimate objects, and runs on a bedtime schedule she enforces herself. Sean doesn’t own her so much as watch over her — a distinction Bertie seems very aware of. The FloppyCougar mascot. The better half of most photos. Non-negotiable.

✍️
Oblivious Logic

The FloppyCougar blog. Thinking out loud about AI, strategy, and the specific joy of building things no one asked for. Five posts in — all of them honest, none of them written to perform well on LinkedIn.

💍
His Wife

The anchor. The person who somehow makes sense of the version of Sean that has a five-year plan and the version that just bought a skateboard on impulse. She doesn’t just tolerate the chaos — she understands it, which is a genuinely rare thing. Listed here fifth only because this page reads better that way. She’s first.

🌍
Building Something Real

FloppyCougar is equal parts creative universe and living proof of concept — what happens when genuine ambition meets AI as a real working tool, not a buzzword. The goal is something in the spirit of what the best creator-economy builders have pulled off: an empire built around a point of view, grown deliberately, one project at a time. The site itself is exhibit A.

The work, briefly — because it’s not the whole story.

It started at home — literally. First job was reviewing loan applications for businesses and places he’d grown up going to. That collision between analytical work and genuine personal investment planted something that never went away.

Grad school brought him to Boston. The path took a few detours — real estate lending, then a portfolio full of arcades, theme parks, and franchise gyms — before landing in health tech. Different industries, same instinct. Find the work that connects, and do it better than anyone expects.

His resume reads like a pencil pusher. Meeting him reads differently. Both are accurate.

Full background on LinkedIn →
AI

This site is the proof of concept.

Every page of FloppyCougar.com — the code, the copy, the brand system, the design — was built with Claude as a core collaborator. Not as a shortcut. As a working methodology.

Structured session handoffs, brand voice development, full web deployment. All of it. This is what AI fluency looks like when it’s actually being used — not talked about in a slide deck.

Claude (Anthropic) Prompt Engineering HTML / CSS Brand Development Session Continuity End-to-End Deployment

You didn’t get quite enough time.
That’s intentional.

Boston, MA — open to the right conversations

Let’s talk.

You know you want to.