LocalTour is
one of seventeen.
SH@W Labs is a Bell Labs-inspired R&D holding company. We build config-driven software — products that ship in days, not months, because the hard work lives in the platform, not the instance.
LocalTour is one expression of that thesis. Seventeen more are in various stages of build, launch, and exit.
The thesis.
The old playbook was one product per company. Raise a seed, hire an army, build a thing, hope the thing finds a market. Most don't.
The new playbook is one platform, many products. A config-driven core — pipelines, intelligence layers, content generators — that stamps out complete products on demand. Each product gets its own domain, its own voice, its own economics. The platform stays shared.
SH@W Labs is built on that bet. A single founder, a mobile workspace, AI as a force multiplier, and a portfolio where one product's learning compounds into the next.
Bell Labs gave the world the transistor, UNIX, the laser, information theory — from a research model that treated portfolios as living ecosystems, not product roadmaps. SH@W Labs is a miniature version of that same model, built for the age of models.
The portfolio.
Solo founder. Mobile workspace.
The arc, from hauling trucks to city decision engines.
Aaron started in the trenches. Twelve-plus years running All American Contractors LLC — over 100 completed residential projects — taught him that every system is a scheduling problem dressed as something else.
At Caterpillar, he shipped autonomy on machines that weigh as much as a building — MineStar Command for Hauling, GRADE dozer control, HIL bench development, sensor fusion. He wrote validation pipelines for systems where "bug in production" means something breaks in the desert with a $4M payload on board.
In late 2025 he left Caterpillar, packed a Jeep with Starlink and a golden retriever, and started building SH@W Labs from a four-zone mobile workspace: Deck, Truck, Studio, and a bathroom with a portrait-mode MacBook for deep reading. What he learned in mining autonomy about decomposition, config-driven testing, and rapid iteration is now the scaffolding underneath every product in the portfolio.
Purdue MS in Autonomy is the long-term academic track. SH@W Labs is the near-term operating one.
Seventeen products.
One operator.
LocalTour is the one you're reading. The other sixteen live at shaw-labs.com — some public, some in stealth, all built on the same thesis.