ALYESKA DEVBUSINESS TECHNOLOGY CONSULTINGGet Started FOUNDER / CALEB FORESTAL
Most of the early ideas did not work. Each one taught me something useful, pushed me toward the next problem, and eventually led to Alyeska Dev.
01 / THE FIRST IMPOSSIBLE IDEA
In elementary school, I became convinced that a real hoverboard could work with supercooled magnets and the Earth’s magnetic field. I pitched it to nearly everyone on the playground, certain I would be rich before middle school and arrive by helicopter on the soccer field.
The physics did not cooperate. The idea still gave me something valuable: the belief that if I could imagine something, there had to be some way to build it.
“The details changed. The instinct to build never did.”
02 / LEARNING TO STEP IN
Alaska Youth Court taught me to speak seriously, think on my feet, and enter unfamiliar situations even when I did not feel prepared. After that first case, I spent about a year participating mostly as an attorney.
Three months in Japan and three months in Brazil taught me independence, adaptability, and how different a life can look outside the environment where you grew up.
Small experiments taught me that people will buy when the offer is clear, but also that sales and scale become difficult when one person has to do everything.
03 / THE FIRST REAL BUSINESS
For my senior-year Keystone project, I chose between building a Twitter bot and starting a lawn-care business. I chose lawn care, wrote the plan in a composition notebook, and started knocking on doors with friends who were better at selling than I was.
After graduation, I committed to growing Summit Lawn Care. It was my first LLC, first business insurance policy, first business vehicle, and first attempt at managing customers and a real schedule.
Then the rainy season exposed everything I had not planned for. The schedule slipped, wet equipment became miserable, I burned out, and winter arrived without an exit strategy.
04 / FINDING LEVERAGE
Running a physical service business made the labor problem impossible to ignore. There were only so many lawns one person could mow. Equipment broke. Weather changed. Repetitive work wore people down.
I began planning an autonomous mower using an NVIDIA Jetson, ROS, and Segway wheels. At the same time, early ChatGPT showed me how much capability a small business could gain from one better tool or one piece of knowledge.
Programming became another obsession. I left drag-and-drop builders behind, learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, Python, and eventually built a CRM backend for Summit Lawn Care. Technology stopped feeling like a separate industry. It became leverage.
A first attempt to reduce hard physical labor through robotics.
An early AI-wrapper experiment that forced me to learn production web infrastructure.
A practical system built because my own business needed it.
05 / MOUNTAINS + STARTUPS
After Summit Lawn Care, I spent a winter skiing Alyeska as often as possible. The mountains gave me a feeling of freedom and comfort I rarely found anywhere else.
That eventually became Powder.ly, a startup concept focused on making ski instruction more accessible. I took the idea through Upstart Alpha as my “shoot for the moon” project, then used it as an excuse to spend a winter exploring Colorado’s I-70 corridor.
Powder.ly did not become the company I imagined, but it taught me how founders move between vision, validation, technical limits, and the need to keep building something concrete.
It also gave Alyeska Dev its deeper identity: ambition rooted in Alaska, with the freedom to build beyond it.
06 / ALYESKA DEV
I originally studied business because it seemed like the obvious path for an entrepreneur. After operating a business, I realized I needed technical depth more than another explanation of management. I returned to UAA as a computer science major and began doing paid technical work for businesses around Eagle River.
Programming gave structure to what I had already been teaching myself and introduced me to people who wanted to build difficult things.
I created Alyeska Development to organize the client work that was helping cover room and board near UAA.
Eventually the work became the more demanding education. I left school to focus on building real products for real organizations.
Today I combine operator experience, software development, product thinking, and plain-language consulting to help businesses and founders move forward.
THE THREAD THROUGH IT ALL
The hoverboard, Youth Court, travel, Sprite Cranberry, Summit Lawn Care, the autonomous mower, Relix.ai, Powder.ly, computer science, drones, and Alyeska Dev may look disconnected from the outside.
To me, they are versions of the same instinct: find a problem worth caring about, try to build the answer, and let reality make the idea better.
My long-term ambition is to help reduce dangerous and backbreaking work through AI and robotics, support founders building meaningful technology, and eventually bring more capital and opportunity back to Alaska.
CONTACT / FOLLOW
For founder conversations, technical collaboration, speaking, or a thoughtful introduction, email is the best place to start.
BUILD THE NEXT USEFUL THING
Start with one concrete problem, milestone, or business constraint. I will help you decide what is useful to build next.
Talk With Caleb