The founder
Rob Cowell
Who is behind Modern Wizardry, what they are claiming, and — rather more importantly — what they are not.
Modern Wizardry is a project rather than an institution, and at the time of writing it is largely one person. It seems only fair to say which one.
I have spent sixteen years in the Salesforce ecosystem and currently work at Salesforce itself as a principal solution engineer. In 2024 I wrote Salesforce DevOps for Architects for Packt, which is a sentence that has never once made a party more interesting.
I live in Folkestone, where I am this year’s president of the Rotary club. That is the part of my week with the least connection to the other part, and it is probably the clearest evidence I can offer that the argument on this site is one I already believed before I wrote it down.
None of that qualifies me to define anything, and it is not offered as a credential. It is here so that a reader can check that I am a real person with a traceable history rather than an account with a domain name, which seemed a reasonable thing to make checkable.
What I do here
I started this in 2026, wrote the framework, the principles and the ten domains, and I write the journal. I read the answers people leave on the interest form — actually read them, one at a time — and what they say determines what gets attempted first. If something on this site is wrong, it is my fault, and the address at the bottom of this page reaches me rather than a queue.
What I am not claiming
This matters more than the biography, so it is worth being precise about it.
I am not a teacher of anything, and there is nothing here to be taught. Modern Wizardry is secular. It makes no supernatural, spiritual or occult claims, it asks for no belief, and it is not an order, a school or a system of training. Nobody is initiated into it and nobody is graded, including me.
I hold no rank in this, because there are none — which is a design decision I have written about at length. I did not discover the idea; the observation that broadly capable people exist in large numbers without a decent word for themselves is hardly original, and half of what is on this site came out of arguing about it with other people. What I did was give it a name and a domain, which is a much smaller contribution than founding anything usually implies.
Where I am wrong, I would rather be told. The founding hypothesis is written as a hypothesis precisely so that it can be argued with, and it includes the conditions under which I would abandon it.
Elsewhere
Other places the same person can be found, mostly predating this project by a considerable margin.
Getting hold of me
hello@modernwizardry.org. Corrections, disagreements and better arguments are all welcome, and the fourth principle obliges me to take them seriously.