The improbable path is the point
I have invested my career tackling the same challenge in different costumes: how do you successfully engage even the most skeptical and cautious audiences to explore and embrace the genuinely new?
You have to learn what they truly value and you have to earn their trust.
Supply and demand brought me to marketing
A storyteller from the start, I trained as a theater director at Carnegie Mellon's world-class drama conservatory. Next I helped found the university's Master of Entertainment Technology program — a pioneering experiment in assembling cross-functional teams to tell transformative stories with bleeding-edge technology, taught by luminaries like Randy Pausch. I worked on conversational AI in the late 1990s, before it was a category anyone believed in. I then spent years in product development and operations, mastering how things actually get built and brought to market with plenty of lessons from the School of Hard Knocks.
That was the story… until destiny drew me into marketing. Through a cascade of opportunities where organizations had needs and I was equipped to serve, I learned that marketing is where all of the knowledge and skills I've acquired elegantly fuse together.
- Analytical rigor meets efficient scaling.
- Tight teamwork meets crisp communication.
- All of it equips businesses to cost-effectively convert aligned prospects into profitable customers.
What I do now is simple to say
and difficult to do well
I build marketing functions (or I rebuild them when things have gone sideways). I focus on technology companies that sell into schools, universities, governments, and the enterprise. I make complicated products legible and credible to buyers who are paid not to take risks. I lead with the number, because that's what earns the right to do everything else. I read the data, craft the business models, and write the code for reporting tools personally.
It all comes down to trust
I tell you the uncomfortable thing plainly. I only put my name to what I can stand behind. I play to win. If that's the kind of help you'd value, let's have a conversation.
