HURST / ZERO 3 STRATEGIES
Austin, Texas · Open to worldwide travel and / or relocation

Jonathan Hurst

Leader, operator and deal architect with 20+ years across strategy, finance, corporate development, capital markets, and transformation — who also ships production AI and ML systems and products, and validates data and pipelines against authoritative, audited outputs to reconcile and provide an accurate source of truth. Principal negotiator opposite major bank syndicates, Fortune 10 counterparties, institutional investors, private capital, and counterparties of every category. Embedded Principal — serving from High-Agency Operator to VP or Head of Finance and Head of Strategy; heading up Corporate Development, Commercial Turnarounds, Negotiations, Project Management, and Operational Efficiency — trusted by CEOs, CFOs, Executives, and Boards; often serving as named or de facto Chief of Staff.

CXO · STRATEGIC FINANCE & CORP DEV · CAPITAL MARKETS · INFRASTRUCTURE, ENERGY & AI
jonathan@zero3strategies.com linkedin.com/in/hurstjonathan USMC 2001–2009
FIGURES AS REPORTED IN ENGAGEMENT RECORDS EVIDENCE PROMOTES · HUMANS CHECK
§ 01

Track record

Outcomes as principal — not recommendations. Each entry closed under real counterparties, real covenants, and real operating constraints.

~29× (~$100M on a ~$5M book)

Divested assets others wrote off

Ran the full M&A process on assets experts called unsellable — valuation through close — while keeping post-close operating access, favorable O&M economics, and control rights over critical infrastructure.

M&A · Utility
$250M+

Turnaround infrastructure asset

Capital-spend optimization, O&M overhauls, and direct ownership of in-flight projects — hands-on execution, not sideline advice.

Turnaround · Operations
15–20%+ margin floor

Fortune 10 partnership rebuilt

Restructured a chronic money-loser across EMEA/APAC into the company's highest-margin business line — then scaled it across four EU countries, the Middle East, and Australia.

Partnerships · Global
Syndicate-approved

Covenant architecture

Authored credit-agreement covenant language a major bank syndicate approved — essentially eliminating coverage constraints on a post-bankruptcy asset, using complexity and counterparty incentives to achieve covenant mechanics that allowed the flexibility the business needed to execute the turnaround efficiently, without relying on constant equity infusions or operating in ways detrimental to growth in order to avoid default or breach.

Credit · Structuring
~14 months

Liquidity runway extended

13-week cash flow through 12- and 24-month forecasts for a sub-BBB company; default risk materially removed; FP&A function then built from scratch. Stabilize first, institutionalize second.

Liquidity · FP&A
18+ months hands-on

ABL borrowing base — run personally

Repaired a damaged lender relationship by establishing direct accountability and rebuilding credibility — then took authority over rebuilding the broken ABL borrowing base and submission, becoming the only party the lender would permit to operate it post-repair. Ran it personally, several times a week, and ultimately secured better interest terms and a loosening of covenant restrictions in key areas.

Lender Relations · ABL
$22.9M

Federal grant — originated & won

Conceived a 0→1 growth initiative, designed and validated the market survey, spec'd the asset, and authored the winning USDOT RAISE application (FY2023). Adopted; under construction.

Origination · Public Finance
$56M + $83M

$255M project restructured

Redesigned debt structure, capex, and O&M on a $255M reservoir project — ~$56M in cost savings and ~$83M in cash freed within four years. Everything competitively bid; decided on merit.

Project Finance
Millions recovered

Counterparty audits & clawbacks

Read the contracts, ran the math: mischarged interest, out-of-scope fees, concealed broker payouts, and improper LIBOR→SOFR transitions surfaced and clawed back across engagements.

Audit · Recovery
§ 02

Production systems

~10 shipped AI/ML and quantitative systems — built hands-on with AI coding agents, governed by contract tests, and validated against external oracles. The flagship, stated as a reconciliation:

Quantitative Market Research, Forecasting & Decision Platform

SOLE ARCHITECT · AI-AGENT-DIRECTED BUILD · PYTHON · DUCKDB/POLARS · 100M+ ROW DATA LAKE

Transaction ledger reconstructed from raw primary files5,750,000 txns
Modular pipeline stages, automated nightly rebuild55+
Analytics workbench modules30
Contract tests binding every claimed capability to an on-disk artifact136
External oracle: authoritative settlement statementsindependent
P&L engine vs. authoritative settlement — a reconciliation the vendor's product failedRECONCILED ✓

The engine outperformed — and replaced — a client's commercial SaaS product across reconciliation, accounting, accuracy, prediction, and functionality, after identifying material errors in the product's P&L extract and isolating their root causes. Forecasting operates under trust gates: gradient-boosted quantile models and foundation-model time-series challengers promoted only on skill-vs-naive evidence.

GOVERNANCE: EVIDENCE PROMOTES · HUMANS HOLD VETO, PROVENANCE, AND SOLE EXECUTION AUTHORITY
2,304-test scan — original, FDR-controlled, split-half-validated research isolating an exogenous driver that conditions the variance of a key market outcome at multi-month lead (r = −0.50, p ≈ 5×10⁻⁶) — a tail-risk signal the market prices flat.
7,214 pairs, edge = 0.000 — proved the market's clearing engine enforces a no-arbitrage parity relationship exactly; shipped the proof as a permanent data-corruption tripwire.
~540× asymmetry — nonlinear (U-curve) behavioral response layer that regime-conditions every scenario; demand-destruction "counterflow" screen validated against a real out-of-sample shock.

Live Operational-Market Monitor

Python · JavaScript · Streamlit · OAuth 2.0

~24 authenticated real-time data products fused into a 158-feature analytical matrix; an original large-customer utilization proxy detecting industrial step-load activation from sub-hourly demand steps; nightly Ridge-based statistical reporting with drift detection; transformer forecasting behind a deterministic fallback so a model outage never takes down the live dashboard.

validated by daily projection-vs-settlement backtest

Prediction-Market Surveillance

Python · production CLI · pip-installable

Detects statistically anomalous pre-resolution trading across two live prediction markets — robust rolling z-scores (median/MAD), Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction, permutation-tested R². Runs unattended on a 15-minute cycle with encrypted credentials and multi-channel alerting.

live $3.1M market · q < 1e-30 · ~23% of forward movement explained (p = 0.004)

Pre-Event Equity Surveillance

Node.js · SEC EDGAR · FINRA Reg SHO

Regulator-style workflow from public data: hand-rolled supervised logistic regression (L2, class weighting) over an 18-feature signal model with per-alert attribution; 11-ETF macro-regime state vector; walk-forward-only evaluation with rolling retraining.

walk-forward-only — no look-ahead, by construction

Counterparty SaaS Reconciliation & Validation Engine

Hybrid LLM + deterministic · production

LLM-based term and data extraction paired with rule-based validation and an independent statistical anomaly layer, reconciling third-party SaaS outputs against audited settlement data as the external oracle.

identified material errors in a commercial SaaS product — root causes isolated

FlowNote / FlowNote Medical

Swift · Python · Ollama · shipped — Apple TestFlight

Local-first voice capture across Windows, web, iPhone, and Mac: on-device transcription, local-LLM cleanup with deterministic fallback, custom keyboard extension, conflict-resolved offline sync. Medical variant: encrypted vault, per-action audit logging, cloud-AI PHI processing blocked by default behind a HIPAA/BAA gate.

privacy-by-default architecture

Agent Operating Rulesets

Production skills for frontier coding agents

Evidence-based rulesets covering persuasion (translated from twelve peer-reviewed studies), provenance binding, first-principles evaluation, deduplication, and tiering — with quantified scoring rubrics, deployed across hundreds of historical work products.

research-grounded · enforceable · scored
§ EX

Selected work

Client work stays confidential; structure doesn't have to. Seven interactive exhibits — representative schematics with real architecture and real scale, every name and figure stripped, the structural counts taken from the actual artifacts.

165 tabs · 5 currencies

A success asserted by those paid to assert it

A global partner program rebuilt until the P&L finally existed — then renegotiated on the levers the model exposed, and scaled into five new markets.

~130 units × 120+ weeks

Acquired broken. Rebuilt whole.

A company acquired with broken financials, rebuilt unit-by-unit and week-by-week — and a valuation four independent lenses had to agree on before the number was allowed to mean anything.

Red → green

Resource need to project-finance viability

The same asset structured three ways — coverage stays red and unbankable until debt service is sculpted and the maintenance reserve placed right, then clears the covenant green across.

94 nightly stages · 891 tests

The system that refuses to fool itself

A production power-market research system — 263M rows, five model classes, and a falsification layer whose headline numbers are deliberately zeros.

VIEW SELECTED EXHIBITS → SEVEN ENGAGEMENTS · COMPLEXITY REDUCED TO GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION

§ 03

Operating doctrine

The same moves, across two decades — deals, turnarounds, policy, and code.

Read the document. Run the math.

Primary-source evidence over conventional optics: reconstruct the true economics, expose hidden constraints and margin leakage, and find the value levers others price flat.

First principles. Then second order.

Decompose to what is demonstrably true rather than what convention assumes — then account for the human layer: cognitive bias, incentives, and the behavioral science governing both sides of the table. Model the downstream impact and prepare for it before committing, not after.

Evidence promotes. Humans check.

Statistical gates promote what proves itself; humans hold veto, provenance, and sole execution authority. The doctrine governs the AI systems — and everything else.

Take the low-probability problem.

Distressed businesses, damaged lender relationships, written-off assets, partnerships in collapse — asymmetric outcomes live where the downside has already been priced by everyone else.

Structures must survive reality.

Agreements engineered for downstream operational, legal, and financial consequence — designed to hold under stress, not just to sign. When the playbook fails, build one that is executable.

Sequence matters.

Stabilize liquidity first; build the institutional capability second — so the next quarter doesn't recreate the same crisis. Parallel workstreams, short feedback cycles, explicit decision rights.

Cross the line.

Write the survey methodology. Spec the asset. Audit the rate transition. Build the model yourself. The operator detail is where the value is captured — and where credibility is earned.

§ 04

Career ledger

Continuous record, 2001 → present.

2018 — PRESENT

Principal Consultant (Independent)

Zero 3 Strategies — Austin, TX

Strategic-finance, transformation, and corporate-development engagements as principal advisor and decision-maker to CEOs, CFOs, and Boards — startups to multibillion-dollar global enterprises. Frequently de facto Head of Finance, Head of Strategy, or Chief of Staff; principal negotiator with bank syndicates, Fortune 10 counterparties, institutional investors, and private capital.

2015 — 2018

Vice President, Finance & Corporate Development

LCRA (Lower Colorado River Authority) — Austin, TX

Vertically integrated public utility: power generation (coal, gas, renewables), transmission, wholesale power, water. $950M+ in enterprise value via cost reduction, debt optimization, and corporate development; invited by a major rating agency to help reassess its infrastructure methodology after challenging its global criteria.

2013 — 2015

Director, Innovative Financing & Debt Management Policy

Texas Department of Transportation

Financing and feasibility for multi-billion-dollar public-private partnerships and toll projects — models, credit enhancement, full lifecycle oversight of advisors and investment banks.

2011 — 2013

Head of Policy, Budget & Planning

Office of the Governor, State of Texas

Enterprise-wide authority across a $180B+ budget and 200+ agencies. Personally authored statutory and regulatory language across the State's most consequential domains; architected components of Texas's energy-only market and renewable-incentive frameworks; stood up a statewide disaster-relief voucher program in under 72 hours.

2008 — 2011

Advisor to the Governor, Budget & Fiscal Policy

Office of the Governor, State of Texas

Lead fiscal, economic, and feasibility advisor on the $180B state budget; negotiated funding across energy, infrastructure, technology, and healthcare.

2008

Investment Banking Analyst, Public Finance

First Southwest Company (now HilltopSecurities)

Plans of finance for utility, water, energy, and airport infrastructure — structuring, credit analysis, and execution through bond issuance.

2007

Finance, Budget & Policy Analyst

Texas State Senate

Finance, budget, and project-feasibility analysis across sectors.

2006

Equity & Options Trader

Kershner Trading Group

Real-time equity and options trading on live market data.

2001 — 2009

United States Marine Corps

Enlisted — Active & Reserve

Repeatedly recognized for leadership; selected for special assignments.

Columbia Business SchoolMBA — DUAL DEGREE · 2013–2015
London Business SchoolMBA — DUAL DEGREE · 2013–2015
Texas A&M UniversityBS, POLITICAL SCIENCE · 2001–2005
§ 05

Capabilities index

The working surface, in full. Expand any group. Role-specific CV variants available on request.

Leadership, Strategy & Decision-Making
  • C-suite advisory; Board materials; executive operating cadence; KPI systems
  • Cross-functional leadership across legal, finance, operations, and technical teams
  • First principles, creative problem solving, and deal structuring that outperforms convention while remaining operationally and legally executable
  • Problem decomposition; driver-based modeling, scenario and sensitivity analysis
  • Systems thinking and downstream / second-order impact analysis; cognitive-bias identification and mitigation
  • Executive presence, crisis leadership, discretion; fast domain fluency and diagnosis-to-delivery in unfamiliar territory
  • Change leadership for systems, process, and automation adoption
  • Agile, iterative execution: structures complex, ambiguous problems into discrete, prioritized workstreams; establishes clear ownership and decision rights; aligns incentives; tests assumptions through short feedback cycles; and adjusts resources and sequencing based on evidence and outcomes
  • Building, leading, and retaining high performers; mentorship and high-accountability operating cadences
M&A, Deal Architecture & Value Creation
  • Complex multi-party negotiations and contract architecture; M&A, carve-outs, divestitures, and restructuring
  • Investment thesis, valuation, diligence, and deal structuring; negotiation, closing, integration, and synergy realization
  • Commercial, financial, and operational due diligence; counterparty strategy, incentive analysis, audit, and billing recovery
  • Global commercial agreements and cross-border counterparty structuring; post-transaction operating arrangements and continuity
  • Turnaround, restructuring, and performance improvement
  • Business development, partnership origination, and joint-venture structuring
  • Value-creation planning and 100-day / post-investment operating discipline
Capital Markets, Credit, Treasury & Risk
  • Credit-agreement and covenant engineering; project finance and non-recourse structuring
  • ABL / borrowing-base operations; eligible collateral, advance rates, reporting, repair
  • Liquidity forecasting, 13-week cash flow, stress testing; treasury policy, controls, and investment-policy governance
  • Bond and commercial-paper programs, refundings, debt-service modeling; capital allocation and investment decision-making
  • Interest-rate hedging, swaps, derivatives, annuity structures; commodity-adjacent exposure and counterparty limits
  • Rating-agency strategy, surveillance, and credit roadshows; bank syndicate management, lender negotiations, refinancing flexibility
  • Multi-year, integrated cash forecasting with tiered reserves policy (regulatory/contractual vs. board) and sensitivity analysis
  • Multi-entity debt-allocation models reconciling par, interest, and defeasance
Commercial, GTM & Strategic Finance; FP&A & Enterprise Performance
  • Strategic finance and FP&A; annual operating plans (AOP), long-range planning, driver-based forecasting, scenario and sensitivity analysis, performance management, and variance analysis
  • Product and enterprise pricing; recurring-revenue forecasting and SaaS unit economics — ARR, MRR, NRR, bookings, retention and renewal, expansion and churn, gross margin, contract duration, and cash conversion
  • GTM finance, commercial finance, revenue operations, monetization, bookings and billings, backlog, cohort and retention economics, sales-capacity planning, and enterprise sales-cycle modeling
  • New-venture business planning, 0 → 1 forecasting, and pro forma construction for pre-revenue and pre-launch businesses
  • M&A candidate evaluation, acquisition pipeline development, post-acquisition integration; pricing, monetization, and product/market strategy
  • Enterprise portfolio management and PMO leadership; transformation governance, operating cadence, OKRs/KPIs, change management, and cross-functional execution
  • Enterprise Risk Management (ERM); internal controls, insurance and risk-transfer strategy, cybersecurity and privacy risk, regulatory compliance, and business continuity
  • Fundraising strategy and debt capital raising; investor relations, rating-agency engagement, Board reporting, executive decision support, and financing strategy
  • Enterprise financial-planning systems, KPI architecture, dashboards, data visualization, finance governance, controls, and model review
Brand, Narrative, Research & Creative Direction
  • Investor decks and fundraising narrative built as an argument: market-structure thesis, demand-curve and TAM construction, phased go-to-market that de-risks each subsequent stage, unit-economic advantage, option value, and a use-of-funds ask tied to milestones
  • Category and product positioning; messaging architecture, naming, and the through-line that holds a deck, a label, and a sales conversation together
  • Creative direction through to finished output — packaging and label design, visual identity, and deck design executed personally, not briefed out
  • Primary market research: survey instrument design, statistical framework, methodology validation, sampling, and analysis — research built to withstand scrutiny rather than confirm a preference
  • Public relations and narrative strategy; executive communications, stakeholder messaging, and thought-leadership positioning
  • Go-to-market strategy and launch planning; channel strategy, pricing and monetization, and demand-generation sequencing
Infrastructure, Energy & Public Finance
  • Generation across the full stack: combined-cycle and peaking gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, utility-scale wind and solar, and battery storage — heat rates, forced-outage and derate assumptions, fuel supply and transport, dispatch economics, and unit-level operating cost build-ups
  • Wholesale power and nodal market mechanics: locational marginal pricing, congestion and basis risk, congestion-revenue rights and auction dynamics, ancillary services, real-time versus day-ahead spreads, and the settlement and shift-factor data underneath them
  • Transmission and interconnection: constraint and contingency analysis, curtailment exposure, queue position and upgrade cost allocation, deliverability, and the transmission topology that decides where generation is actually worth building
  • Resource adequacy and capacity-constrained systems: reserve margins, scarcity pricing, load forecasting and weather-driven demand, extreme-event stress cases, and the reliability standards that govern them
  • Power purchase agreements and long-term commercial contracts: fixed-for-floating and shaped structures, hub-versus-busbar settlement, basis and shape risk allocation, curtailment and availability provisions, credit support, tolling arrangements, and offtake negotiation end to end
  • Commodity and rate hedging: swaps, basis swaps, heat-rate call options, collars and costless structures, interest-rate swaps and swaptions, hedge sizing against covenant and budget exposure, mark-to-market and hedge-accounting implications, and counterparty credit limits
  • Debt-service and coverage engineering: multi-year debt-service schedules, senior and subordinate coverage tests, additional-bonds tests, rate covenants and rate-setting to a coverage target, tiered reserve policy, and the sensitivity work that proves the covenant holds in a downside
  • Rating-agency proformas and surveillance: agency-format financial projections, methodology-aligned metric construction, presentation and rationale for management cases, downside and stress scenarios, roadshow materials, and ongoing surveillance reporting
  • Municipal and public finance: revenue-bond and general-obligation structures, refundings and advance refundings, defeasance and escrow verification, commercial-paper and variable-rate programs, capitalized interest through construction, arbitrage and continuing-disclosure discipline
  • Project and non-recourse finance: construction draw schedules and S-curve spend, capitalized interest and contingency sizing, completion and availability risk, independent-engineer and consultant coordination, waterfall and distribution tests, and lender negotiation through financial close
  • Water and wastewater infrastructure: supply and reservoir yield, treatment and conveyance capital programs, consumption and drought scenarios, cost-of-service and rate design, and affordability constraints
  • Transportation and P3: toll roads and availability-payment structures, traffic-and-revenue diligence, concession agreements, risk allocation between public and private parties, and lifecycle handback obligations
  • Data-center and AI-compute infrastructure economics: siting against interconnection and transmission capacity, load ramp and phased energization, power contracting and behind-the-meter options, cooling and water constraints, and capital intensity per megawatt
  • Energy, environmental, water, and public-finance regulatory strategy: rate cases and cost recovery, market-design and interconnection rulemaking, environmental permitting and compliance economics, and legislative engagement from drafting through enactment
  • Quantitative energy research in production: multi-decade nodal price and constraint histories, gradient-boosted and quantile forecasting behind deterministic fallbacks, event studies against extreme weather and outages, and portfolio construction validated against authoritative settlement data
AI, Data & Quantitative Systems
  • AI-agent and hybrid-system engineering: doctrine-driven direction of production-grade, multi-step workflows; LLM-based term and data extraction paired with deterministic validation and an independent statistical anomaly-analysis layer; research-grounded prompt and skill architecture, enforceable rules, and quantified scoring rubrics
  • AI/ML product and platform strategy: LLMOps/MLOps; accuracy-focused responsible-AI and model-governance frameworks across the software development lifecycle; contract tests binding agent claims to on-disk artifacts; provenance and purity tiers; evidence-based promotion and trust gates; human-in-the-loop execution authority
  • Large-scale data and workflow automation: DuckDB, Polars, and Python across 100M+ row data lakes; multi-source ingestion; automated analytical and operational pipelines; scheduled execution and real-time alerting
  • Predictive modeling and forecasting: gradient-boosted quantile models, foundation-model time-series challengers, and transformer forecasting behind deterministic fallbacks, promoted only on skill-vs-naive evidence
  • Quantitative research and anomaly detection: robust z-scores (median/MAD), Benjamini-Hochberg FDR control, permutation testing, split-half and walk-forward validation, and superposed-epoch event studies
  • Tooling: Python, SQL, JavaScript/Node, Streamlit, REST/OAuth 2.0, Git; Codex, Claude Code, Grok, Gemini, and Ollama with GPU-accelerated local inference
Public Sector, Policy & Mission Execution
  • Statewide budget and policy authority; policy-to-execution translation; public-sector procurement cycles
  • Legislative and regulatory drafting; directing legal teams from drafting through passage and enactment
  • Crisis leadership and execution; stakeholder alignment and communications strategy
  • Energy-market, infrastructure, and economic-development policy
  • Defense / veteran mission orientation (USMC)
§ 06

Ways to engage

Executive roles

CXO, strategic finance, corporate development, and transformation leadership — full-time, global. Role-specific resume variants available on request.

Embedded principal

Fractional or interim: de facto Head of Finance, Head of Strategy, Chief of Staff — deal-by-deal or engagement-based through Zero 3 Strategies.

Special situations

Turnarounds, lender repair, covenant and collateral restructuring, counterparty audits, and the low-probability problems others pass on.

Zero 3 Strategies is a 100% veteran-owned firm (U.S. Marine Corps, 2001–2009), Austin, Texas.