I started designing as a teenager, making flyers, t-shirts, and logos for my band. I loved the process, but didn't think much about the audience back then. I just created designs that I loved to look at. That was it, until people started saving them, putting them on their walls, and wearing my tee designs in public. Then other bands started hiring me. That was the moment I understood what design could do, not just communicate, but connect.

That instinct turned into a career, from key art for film and television and album covers to agencies like Ogilvy, where the craft met brand strategy for the first time. It crystallized at Rockstar Games, where I led global marketing and creative for Grand Theft Auto V, Max Payne 3, and L.A. Noire, with late contributions to Red Dead Redemption. GTA V grossed $800 million in its first 24 hours and broke seven world records for sales, but what I'm most proud of is how fans took it in. It became part of the culture.

At Amazon I worked at a different kind of scale, directing creative across 500+ global CPG brands and developing brand experience frameworks and systems that contributed to foundational Amazon Advertising products, including the Amazon Brand Store, Sponsored Ads, and Fire TV Shopping. I also built, launched, and led the Trusted Creative Partner Program, training and certifying brands and agencies on how to build connected brand experiences across the full Amazon ecosystem. It was a massive effort to take brands from the basics of e-commerce to everything the ecosystem made possible, and it taught me that great creative without a great system behind it doesn't last. The brands people stay loyal to are the ones that are built well.

Those lessons shaped what I believe about brands today. A brand is everything a company does, down to the order confirmation nobody spent time writing, and the best ideas usually hide in the parts everyone else walks past. That's the kind of work I co-founded KANE to do, sitting with founders and CEOs and digging through their data and what their customers actually say until something surprising turns up. Those are the things you only find when you're paying attention.

For most of my career, building something big meant leading a big team to build it, and I loved that. Then AI handed me back something I hadn't felt since the band: if I could imagine it, I could make it. I rebuilt KANE on systems designed to let us move faster and spend more time on the things that get us excited to show up every day.

Those things aren't always for clients. The best thing I've built lately was for my own team. My wife and I both coach youth sports, and parents were always asking us what their kid should work on at home. Most of the time we didn't have a better answer than "keep practicing." So we co-founded UpLVL, a sports tech company built around youth player development. A coach's voice notes become a development report for every player, with drills to guide them and a record of how much they've improved. Kids know what to work on next, and that's what keeps them excited to show up every day.

I don't measure success by performance alone. I measure it by whether the work was worth making.