The Adept

— Introducing —

Woody van Horn

Chief of Organizational Alchemy · Southern California

Woody founded WvH Hospitality in 2017 after more than two decades inside the dining rooms, cellars, and back offices of American hospitality — beginning in 1996, and including Thomas Keller's Bouchon Bistro, Bracero Cocina de Raiz (a James Beard semifinalist), and the opening team at The Grand Del Mar — a resort Forbes rated a perfect fifteen stars.

What the hospitality résumé leaves off is that a second career ran alongside the first. Woody's first personal computer — an NEC Pentium 60 with a US Robotics modem — arrived in 1994, and he has been early on every wave of consumer technology since: BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, the open web, mobile, social, cloud, crypto, and now the large-language-model turn. From 2000 to 2003, before the Navy, he worked contract telecom — installing central-office fiber-optic switching at the Transamerica Building in Los Angeles, including the gear that terminates transpacific cables carrying a meaningful share of the traffic between the United States and Asia. The hospitality work sat on top of three decades of tech instinct, not the other way around.

He also served four years in the United States Navy as an Operations Specialist — aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Stethem (DDG-63) and the guided-missile cruisers USS Chancellorsville (CG-62) and USS Shiloh (CG-67). Ballistic Missile Defense and Anti-Submarine Warfare, mostly; and a classified tour under Aegis BMD · Stellar Predator aboard the Shiloh. The Department of the Navy adjudicated him with a SECRET security clearance. Some doors open only once; what happened behind them stays behind them. He does not bring any of this up at dinner.

He holds an AOS in Culinary Arts from The Culinary Institute of America, an accelerated Wine & Beverage certificate from CIA Greystone, and is a Master Certificate Candidate at Cornell's School of Hotel Administration. He is a Certified Sommelier through The Court of Master Sommeliers, a CSW and CSS through the Society of Wine Educators, and keeps active memberships with the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, the James Beard Foundation, and the Guild of Sommeliers.

More recently, Woody has turned that same tech instinct toward AI implementation and the fragmented tech stacks that quietly run small businesses. Built in-house: the WvH Claude Bot — a forty-six-tool Model Context Protocol server connecting Claude to QuickBooks Online, used to run the firm's own books. He is, most accurately, an operator who builds tools — a student of Hermetic wisdom who believes the small business, like any great work, proceeds by solve et coagula: dissolve what does not serve, then quietly recompose what does.

Additional specialists are retained on an as-needed basis, when a project calls for it.

He has also, since 2007, been resetting Apple IDs. Ask him about it.