Why I Founded AndMaverick

I have been told what I could and couldn't do my entire career.

By bosses who confused managing me with containing me. By industries that drew invisible borders around who deserved to work with whom. By a consulting world that decided clients lived in certain geographies, spoke certain languages, and operated within certain familiar frameworks, and that everything outside that perimeter was too complicated, too risky, or simply not worth the effort.

I founded AndMaverick because I stopped believing any of that was true.

The Question Nobody Was Asking

For every western company that defaults to a western AI model without seriously evaluating what's being built in Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, or Singapore, why?

Not why as a provocation. Why as a genuine question. What assumption is sitting underneath that decision? What brilliance is being left on the table because the model didn't come with familiar branding or an English language press release?

I have spent my career at the intersection of technology and global markets. What I have seen, consistently, is that the most interesting thinking is not concentrated in one place. It never has been. The assumption that it is has cost companies more than they will ever calculate, in missed partnerships, inferior systems, and strategies built on a partial picture of what is actually possible.

AndMaverick was founded on a different assumption entirely.

Intelligence is not a geography. Brilliance does not carry a passport. And the best AI operating model for your organization might be built on infrastructure, research, or methodology that your current advisors have never seriously considered because it came from somewhere they weren't looking.

On Borders

The consulting world has an unofficial rule about geography.

Work with clients here. Not there. This market is mature. That one is complicated. Stick to what you know, where you know it, with people who operate the way you operate.

I have never understood this.

Not because borders aren't real, they are. Regulatory environments differ. Cultural contexts matter enormously in AI deployment. Language shapes how intelligence systems are built and how they fail.

But those are reasons to develop deeper global fluency, not reasons to stay home.

AndMaverick works where the work is. With organizations that are building seriously, thinking ambitiously, and willing to engage with the full complexity of what deploying AI at scale actually requires. That has never been limited to one continent, one language, or one type of company.

It has taken me to conversations I never would have had inside a conventional firm. And those conversations have made the work better every single time.

On Second Place

AndMaverick is not a place to come in second.

I do not mean that as competitive posturing. I mean it as a design principle.

I choose who I work with. Not because I am indifferent to opportunity but because quality of collaboration is not a luxury. It is the condition under which the best work happens. I have worked alongside enough exceptional people to know the difference between a room where everyone is reaching and a room where people are managing expectations downward.

I do not work in the second kind of room anymore.

The clients I take on are the ones where I genuinely believe we can build something that matters. Where the leadership team has the courage to act on what the intelligence surfaces, not just the appetite to commission the study. Where the question being asked is hard enough to be worth answering.

That is not arrogance. That is the only way I know how to do work I am proud of.

On People

Here is the thing nobody tells you about building a global AI consultancy.

It is fundamentally about people.

Not models. Not orchestration architecture. Not frameworks, however useful those are. The reason any of it works is because somewhere in the chain there are human beings who trust each other enough to make hard decisions together under uncertainty.

I love this work because I love the people it brings me into contact with. Across cultures, languages, industries, and organizational types. The CFO in Frankfurt trying to make sense of an AI landscape that changes faster than her planning cycles. The engineering team in Tokyo building something that has no direct precedent. The organization in Jakarta deploying AI responsibly in a context where the stakes are genuinely high and the western playbook simply does not apply.

Every one of those conversations has made me a better thinker. And that is not incidental to why I founded AndMaverick. It is central to it.

I trust in the goodness of companies. I trust in the capability of people who are given the room to actually use it. And I built AndMaverick to be the kind of firm that earns that trust by bringing everything it has to the table every single time.

No second place. No artificial borders. No inherited assumptions about whose intelligence counts.

Just the work. Done properly. Everywhere it needs to be done.

Andrew Quillen is the founder and Principal AI Strategist of AndMaverick, a global Enterprise AI Orchestration consultancy. If this resonates with how you think about building, visit andmaverick.com.