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 carried me through designing key art for film and television, album covers, and eventually 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 it was received by fans. It didn't just sell. It became part of 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 systematic effort to take brands from the basics of e-commerce to fully embracing what was possible. Most were just finding their footing. The rest is history. That chapter taught me that great creative without a great system behind it doesn't last. The brands that earn loyalty aren't just well designed. They're well built.

That's the work I set out to do when co-founding KANE, partnering directly with CEOs and founders to shape the strategic foundations of their brands. We've since evolved into a Service as Software model, building productized packages that put that same thinking in the hands of brands who have the vision but not always the infrastructure to execute it.

Being deeply engrained within businesses evolved how i see the world. Small problems become impossible to ignore. My wife and I both coach youth sports, and kept running into the same gap between what coaches see in their young athletes and what parents hear about it. So we co-founded UpLVL, a youth player development platform, to fix it. Building a product from the ground up, brand identity, design system, and all, while using AI to do things that simply weren't possible before, has only sharpened how I think about what brands can be when the idea and the execution are finally equal to each other.

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