Nathan Staffel

I grew up on a homestead in the Texas Hill Country, a place where the land teaches you about constraint and possibility in equal measure. After college I joined the FBI and spent the next eleven years there, first in surveillance and counterintelligence, then running my own investigations. Somewhere in the back of a surveillance van, watching the patterns of human behavior unfold across long nights, I taught myself to code. The Bureau's technology was a mess, a collection of systems that failed under the weight of real demands, so I built something better, something that worked when it mattered. Headquarters adopted it, and I ended up spending two years under the CTO trying to modernize how the place worked, learning that transformation requires understanding both the system and the people who depend on it.

When I left, I spent five years in startups before founding Revenant AI. We build automation systems for law firms, research teams, and analysts who need reliable output when the stakes are high.

I also write and produce The Wanting, an audio horror anthology. The stories are set in 1870s Colorado gold country and the coal mines of West Virginia. I write them, narrate them, and engineer the audio.

I live in Colorado now, building a homestead and climbing when I am not working.

This site is something I built. It hosts the fiction, the deep dives, and an infinite feed of forgotten history and strange science. I wanted something at my URL that does something rather than describing what I have done.