Joaquin Abondano.

Field guide / Public-company COO.

I run operations on AI systems I built myself.

Selected work

01 / In practice

Selected work

Category bets and production systems
inside a public company.

A / Consumer hardwareLucyd Armor smart safety glasses, black frame with yellow temple accentsLucyd Armor / Photochromic

Lucyd Armor

01

Blue-Ocean Category Creation

I led it end to end — category selection, product design, factory sourcing, certification, and retail launch.

Source & context

The strategic bet behind the company's growth. While Meta and Amazon fought over lifestyle eyewear, we built for the job site: the world's first ANSI Z87.1-certified smart safety glasses. I led it end to end — category selection, product design, factory sourcing, certification, and retail launch. Red Dot Design Award 2026. NHPA Retailer's Choice Award 2026. Sold through Walmart.com, Target.com, BestBuy.com, and 400+ retail locations.

Strategy · Blue Ocean · Red Dot 2026 · ANSI Z87.1

Public source / product

Lucyd Armor product page ↗

Press & publications

View all LUCY press releases →

B / Operating systemsConceptual method / not a live system view

JBOT Protocol

02

Forward-deployed AI operations

The point is not unsupervised automation. The point is controlled leverage: routine work goes to agents, exceptions go to humans, and consequential decisions stay with executives.

Source & context

AI Agent Fleet — Forward Deployed into Production

Ten specialized AI agents running daily operations at a NASDAQ-listed company — sales pipeline monitoring, fulfillment tracking, marketing intelligence, supply chain alerts, content generation, and financial monitoring. Each agent has defined responsibilities, institutional memory, and escalation logic. The system generates its own training signal over time. Built with Claude and integrated with the company's ERP, CRM, commerce, advertising, and marketplace systems. This is full-stack AI deployment: architecture, infrastructure, integration, and operations — in a real company, running live.

Production · Multi-Agent · 10 Agents · 6 Departments

JBOT Protocol

The forward deployment methodology behind my AI work: principles, architecture, deployment sequence, outputs, and governance for moving AI from demos into real business operations. It starts with business divisions, maps recurring decisions and workflows, then builds specialized agents with shared memory, tool access, human approvals, and executive escalation paths. This is what a full-stack AI deployment looks like in practice. Read the protocol →

The point is not unsupervised automation. The point is controlled leverage: routine work goes to agents, exceptions go to humans, and consequential decisions stay with executives.

Forward-Deployed AI Operations in a Public Company

A public-safe case study on deploying agentic workflows across supply chain, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, finance, reporting, and executive operations inside a lean operating company. Read the case study →

Read the protocol
More selected work

Category bets and production systems inside a public company. These aren’t prototypes or demos — they sell every day and run every day.

Enterprise Systems — ERP, CRM, Reporting

Full ERP implementation for a NASDAQ-listed consumer hardware company. CRM infrastructure across B2B wholesale and DTC channels. Executive dashboards for real-time decision-making. Marketplace, commerce, and CRM integrations. The measure was not the software — it was whether leadership made better decisions faster.

ERP · Commerce · CRM · NASDAQ

Supply Chain & Global Operations

China factory relationship development across multiple product lines. AQL inspections, BOM optimization, and cost engineering. Global logistics across ocean, air, and land fulfillment at scale. Led ANSI Z87.1+, CSA Z94.3, and EN 166 safety certifications — getting complex hardware compliant across three regulatory regimes simultaneously.

Supply Chain · Compliance · Global Logistics

Legacy Products

Groovy Toys generated $20M+ in cumulative gross revenue during my ownership across its consumer products. WebRC: First toys-to-virtual-world platform built on Unity (licensed by Toyota, Hummer, GM). AppRC: iOS/Android apps with Bluetooth dongle to control RC helicopters. These products shipped at retail scale — Walmart, Target, Amazon, Canadian Tire.

Consumer Hardware · DTC · $20M+ Cumulative Gross Revenue

Most of this work is internal by nature. What's public is at github.com/jabondano.

→ lore — cultural record — books, games, films

02 / Reference desk

Research

Aug 21, 2026

Institutions, Incentives, Emergence, and Prosperity

A practical framework for thinking about prosperity, institutional decline, money, debt, political economy, and social order without reducing complex outcomes to a single cause. Rules shape incentives; people adapt; their interactions create outcomes nobody fully controls; those outcomes reshape the rules.

Jul 5, 2026

The Strategy Stack: An Integrated Operating System from the Great Strategists and Operators

The strategy canon — Porter, Christensen, Helmer, Rumelt, Thiel, Kim & Mauborgne, plus the capital judgment of Munger, Buffett, and Bezos — organized into five interacting layers, with a ten-step decision protocol, kill-gates, and six historical cases a single lens misses.

Jul 3, 2026

SCM Planning Reference: The Math Behind an Inventory Loop

The research pass that calibrated an agentic inventory-planning loop, verified claim-by-claim by adversarial agents: safety stock formulas, periodic-review policy, China-lane lead-time variability and CNY buffers, transfer-vs-reorder rules, and freight economics.

View all research →

03 / In the margins

Recent thoughts

Oct 8, 2026

The Eisenhower matrix, managed by your personal AI

A prompt for your personal AI to maintain an Eisenhower matrix and keep the most important work in focus.

Jul 7, 2026

Give the Briefing a Memory

An AI briefing that re-reads everything every morning is expensive and wrong. The fix: a ledger with a decay rule, a bot fleet treated as sensors, one brain behind every surface, and human-gated forgetting on Fridays.

Jul 3, 2026

The Inventory Loop: An Agentic Planning Pattern for Supply Chain Operators

For COOs and supply chain leads considering agent loops: a propose-only planning cron reads the ERP twice a week, a human gates anything that touches money, an agent executes on approval. Architecture, economics, and the audit-before-build method.

View all notes →

04 / The long view

Experience

Full résumé
2023–

COO, Innovative Eyewear (NASDAQ: LUCY)

Read context

Running manufacturing, supply chain, revenue, and finance operations for a public company. Led the Lucyd Armor pivot — the world's first ANSI-certified smart safety eyewear, Red Dot Design Award 2026 — and built the company's AI operating layer. 12 consecutive growth quarters, 400+ retail locations.

2021–2023

VP Product & Supply Chain, AMZTOTAL

Read context

Product and supply chain for an Amazon-native consumer products portfolio: sourcing, category strategy, and the systems that ran it.

2008–2022

Co-founder & VP Product, Groovy Toys

Read context

Fourteen years. $20M+ in cumulative gross revenue over my ownership period, with no outside capital. Five hundred consumer products across mobile apps, multiplayer games, and IoT hardware, shipped through Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Canadian Tire; ran the group's ecommerce arm serving Best Buy and Macy's as well. Operated across Hong Kong, Colombia, and Florida. When you build without capital, you do every job: sales, sourcing, finance, HR, cash flow. This is where I learned that operations is the company.

2005–2008

Business Development, Millbrook Ventures

Read context

Secured Environmental Impact Statement approval for a $1.2B mixed-use development in upstate New York. Built DCF valuation models and investor pitch books for hedge fund partnerships. Where I learned how investors read a deal.

2002–2005

Purdue University

Read context

BS Management with a minor in Finance. Graduated in 3.5 years.

1997–2002

The family business

Read context

I grew up inside my family's consumer products company. First trip to the Hong Kong and Guangdong factories in January 1997, at 15. Built its first databases, worked customer service, and learned merchandising, logistics, and manufacturing by doing them. Everything I run today started here.

05 / On the shelf

Library & Lore

Books that shape how I'm thinking right now. These aren't beliefs set in stone—they're lenses I'm looking through, subject to revision. Intellectual humility means holding ideas loosely while engaging with them seriously.

management canon / read

7 Powers, Positioning, The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, Blue Ocean Strategy, and Crossing the Chasm — the stack for markets, categories, disruption, adoption, and durable advantage.

160 Books / 9 Read / 5 Categories

Philosophy & How to Think 23
How Leaders Built Things 50
Systems & Human Nature 34
Business & Strategy 39
Literature 14

Lore — cultural record books, games, films

06 / Before the work

Roots

Caribbean upbringing in a bilingual household. Eldest of brothers. Started working in the family business as a teenager, first trips to Asian factories before university. Competitive equestrian through adolescence.

Born in '83—analog childhood, figured out the internet as a teenager, built my first databases before most people had email. Now AI. I've watched companies adapt (or not) through each wave. That pattern recognition shapes how I think about tools and the people who choose them.

Biography

Joaquin Abondano is the Chief Operating Officer at Innovative Eyewear Inc. (NASDAQ: LUCY), where he leads operations and the company's AI transformation. The company grew revenue 63% in 2025 and 74% in Q2 2026, its 12th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, with distribution across 27+ countries and 400+ retail locations.

Before Lucyd, he co-founded Groovy Toys, which generated $20M+ in cumulative gross revenue during his ownership. The company developed 500 consumer products and operated across three continents. He holds a BS in Management with a Finance minor from Purdue University.

He is based in Miami. He compares notes with a small circle of executives and operators deploying AI inside real companies, with an implementation-first bias shaped by having to make systems work in reality.

Philosophy: Stoic
Languages: English, Spanish (Native)

He reads obsessively — 200+ books across philosophy, history, systems, and strategy. He gravitates toward people who bring solutions and have skin in the game.

Operating perspective

I run operations at Innovative Eyewear / Lucyd (NASDAQ: LUCY): China manufacturing, global supply chain, DTC and wholesale revenue, finance operations. Before that I co-founded a consumer hardware company that generated $20M+ in cumulative gross revenue during my ownership, selling through Walmart, Target, and Amazon. The newer part of the job is the one I'd point to first: I design AI systems that capture how the company actually works and put that knowledge in the hands of the whole team, so a small company operates like a much bigger one.

  • NASDAQ COO
  • 12 consecutive growth quarters
  • 74% revenue growth, Q2 2026
  • 400+ retail locations
  • Red Dot Design Award 2026
  • $20M+ cumulative gross revenue at prior company
  • Walmart / Target / Amazon

COO at Innovative Eyewear (NASDAQ: LUCY). Based in Miami.

2023–

COO at Innovative Eyewear (NASDAQ: LUCY)

Running manufacturing, supply chain, revenue, and finance operations. 12 consecutive growth quarters.

Business decisions have never been faster or more consequential. The executives who will lead the next decade are not waiting for AI to mature — they are deploying it now, inside real organizations, against real problems.

At Innovative Eyewear, I built operating infrastructure for a public company using AI agents. Not as a side experiment. As practical leverage for the work itself. The system runs across sales, marketing, fulfillment, supply chain, finance, and executive operations, helping the team move faster without adding proportional headcount.

What I believe: AI will do for decision-making what electricity did for manufacturing. It will not replace the people who run things, but it will fundamentally change what one capable person and a small team can do. The advantage will belong to companies that learn how to deploy these systems with judgment, controls, and operating discipline.

Operating focus

My work sits where AI strategy becomes operating reality: messy workflows, fragmented systems, vendor dependencies, customer channels, reporting rhythms, and executive decisions.

AI Deployment Ownership

Designing and operating agentic workflows across real business systems with human approval layers and executive accountability.

Supply Chain & Vendor Systems

Coordinating manufacturers, logistics, inventory, compliance, and vendor follow-up across consumer hardware operations.

Ecommerce & Multi-Channel Growth

Operating across DTC, Amazon, other marketplaces, B2B channels, retail partners, and product launch workflows.

ERP, CRM & Reporting

Connecting ERP, CRM, ecommerce, finance, and internal reporting into practical operating loops.

Public-Company Execution

Building systems and rhythms that work inside lean, high-accountability public-company environments.

Product Development & Category Strategy

Taking product lines from whiteboard to shelf: category selection, industrial design direction, factory sourcing and qualification, safety certification (ANSI, CSA, EN), and retail launch.

Expertise

AI & Automation

  • JBOT Protocol
  • MCP Servers
  • Claude/LLM Agents
  • Workflow Automation
  • ERP & Data Integration

Operations & Supply Chain

  • China Manufacturing
  • Global Logistics (3PL)
  • ERP Implementation
  • Process Optimization
  • Vendor Management

Product & Commerce

  • Product Management
  • Mobile/IoT Apps
  • Multi-Channel (B2B + DTC)
  • Marketplaces & DTC Platforms
  • GTM & Distribution

Finance & Strategy

  • Financial Modeling
  • Investor Relations
  • SEC Reporting
  • M&A Due Diligence

Interests

  • Stoic Philosophy
  • History & Civilization
  • Systems Thinking
  • Human Nature

Real Estate Development

  • Commercial Projects
  • DCF/IRR Modeling
  • Investor Pitch Books
  • Entitlements

Continue the conversation

Reach out if the
work is serious.

hello@jabondano.co

Field notes / Source & context