Noah Watson

I started at Valvoline at 19 as a lube tech. Oil changes, the POS system, working a counter. The next year I moved to Gabrielli Truck Sales as a diesel tech, running preventative maintenance on trucks and heavy equipment, including NYC sanitation trucks for DSNY. That work pulled me into diagnostics and troubleshooting under real safety protocols, and it pushed me to enroll at Universal Technical Institute for the heavy-duty diesel associate’s program in parallel. From Gabrielli I went to Lil Pete’s Automotive as a fleet technician on a 55-truck fleet. The bulk of the job was PM services, electrical diagnostics, hydraulic systems, and brake work. We did some towing and recovery when a truck went down, but the main story was keeping the fleet on the road. UTI gave me the textbook. Valvoline, Gabrielli, and Lil Pete’s gave me the hands. By the time I finished the associate’s I had three years of shop work behind it.

In late 2023 I took the advanced Cummins module at UTI and went to work at Interstate Fleet Services in Pennsylvania to keep wrenching while I was in the program. ISX15 specialization. Fuel systems, after-treatment, smart device modules, engine teardown and rebuild. From there I went to Xcalliber as a transmission specialist on Allison units. Component inspection, full rebuilds, torque specs, fluid systems. Then Cummins, first as an apprentice and then as a Workshop Technician Level 1, eventually Cummins NOW Overhaul certified. I specialized in FDNY fire trucks and MTA buses — full engine rebuilds, preventative maintenance, warranty work on essential city equipment. When CDTA in Albany needed help on their bus fleet, I was sent up to handle it. The standard at Cummins is exact. You document everything, you torque to spec, you don’t sign off on what you didn’t verify. That’s where I learned how a shop actually runs when the customer is the city.

In September 2025 I started a mobile diesel diagnostics partnership called NoGoodDiesel with A&NMotors, owner-operator with the full operational lifecycle on me. In October I started at M&T Bank as a teller. Same week I was rebuilding engines, I was counting cash and learning the system from the customer-facing side. I’d already been writing daily on LinkedIn about markets, earnings, and macro for over a year by then, and the bank work made the finance writing sharper, not the other way around. That writing is what eventually became Watson’s Equity.

The part of the job I write home about is Money Mentor. Through M&T’s program I’ve run sessions at Brewster High School with a class of special needs students on the fundamentals, recognizing coins, wants versus needs, what a bank does, and how saving works. At Gayhead and Sheafe Elementary the kids are designing, building, and funding their own rocket launch. I got to teach them how to write a check for parts and fill out a check register. Watching third graders treat it like real engineers running a real project is something I won’t forget. Financial literacy isn’t one-size-fits-all, and meeting students where they are is what makes the work matter.

Watson’s Media is an AI-native solo studio. Content creation, AI automation, websites, dashboards. The stack is Claude, GPT, Supabase, Vercel, Cloudflare, Pinecone, Stripe, Clerk, n8n, Sentry, PostHog, Resend, Upstash, and GitHub. I install AI into businesses that are already profitable but haven’t tapped social or automation yet. The Google AI Professional Certificate and the six supporting certificates were finished in April 2026.

The sister product is Watson’s Equity at watsonsequity.com. It’s an equity research terminal that blends DCF cash flow, peer multiples, and bull/base/bear scenarios into a single fair-value estimate for any U.S. ticker. Three view modes, Simple, Standard, and Expert. The first two are open access. Expert is in founders access for now. I built it because the gap between retail price feeds and institutional fair-value analysis shouldn’t still exist in 2026.

Every chapter ran on the same operating principle. Do the work, sweat the details, make complicated things make sense. That principle is what carried me from a 55-truck fleet to an FDNY shop floor to a teller window to a research terminal and a studio. The uniform changes, the standard doesn’t.