I’m Waziri Garuba. Most people call me Waz.
I’m an AI systems architect in Austin, Texas, and the founder of Harlem Labs Advisory. The work is simple to say and hard to do. I take the data an operator has scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes and apps, turn it into the numbers the business actually runs on, and build the automation underneath them. Then I hand it over, so the team can run it without me.
I spent nearly a decade in finance: trading at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, an MBA at Columbia as a Morgan Stanley Fellow, then carbon markets and renewable-energy banking in São Paulo and New York.
The name came first, in 2012, with my first consulting contract: the Downtown Project in Las Vegas, where Tony Hsieh suggested it. In 2013 I made Harlem Labs official, in Harlem, because that’s where I was living and building. The name stayed when I moved to Austin. It’s still a lab. Things get built here, tested, and taken apart.
harlemlabs.com is the business. This site captures my personal field notes and reflections.
It’s where I write down what happens when I build. For clients, for my kids, and for myself. Some of it is technical. Some of it is about money, health and family, because that’s where most of my building happens.
A few places to start:
- The Three Deaths of a Project. My projects used to die in three places. This is how that stopped.
- Seven Days on the Terminal. One measured week running a fleet of AI agents. The receipts, not the pitch.
- Siri Is Now Collaborating with My Agent. A live demo in front of a room of operators, and what it means now that the model is becoming a setting.
- Creators, Not Consumers. Three kids, three real companies, and the decision every family is making right now.
There are twenty of these so far. The full list is on the home page.
I teach The Operator’s Map, a program for owner-operators who need AI working inside the business they already run. I’m a member of the AI Think Trust. I’m President of the Automatic Wins Chapter, and I talked through GRIOT, my own agent system, on Umbrex’s Unleashed podcast, episode 657.
There are other people named Waziri Garuba, including a politician in Nigeria. I’m not him. If you found this page looking for the one who builds AI systems in Austin, you’re in the right place.
Email waziri@harlemlabs.com. I’m on LinkedIn as Waziri Garuba. The firm is at harlemlabs.com.