If you look at my career one frame at a time, it makes no sense.
YouTube kid. Film School Dropout. VaynerMedia Producer-Editor. Freelancer. Shoe-Ad guy. Head of Motion. Creative Director. Social Media Director. And now... a software engineer at an AI company?
Try to draw a straight line. You can't. It looks like someone who couldn't decide what he wanted to be.
But run the whole tape, start to finish, and there's only ever been one thing I wanted to do: I build things that people actually want, and I refuse to wait in line to do it.
The Original Plan
I was supposed to be an engineer. The plan was MIT — computer science, maybe mechanical too. I loved the idea of building both software and hardware. That was the whole dream.
Then in my junior and senior year of high school, I got chronic migraines. I missed a lot of school, fell behind, and my math grades tanked. MIT was off the table, and I had no idea what I was going to do.
So I did the thing I was actually excited about: I made videos. I was obsessed with the daily vloggers on YouTube, so I started shooting my own on my iPhone 5s. Three weeks before I graduated, I booked my first client — Cy Wakeman, from Reality-Based Leadership. She flew me to Denver to film at a conference, three days before I walked at Graduation.
My engineering dream didn't die that year. I just needed a decade to earn, learn, and build my way back.
I Don't Wait In Line
Six months into film school in LA, they brought in a successful Producer to talk to us. She'd gone through my exact program. The first thing she told the room was that even after film school, we'd have to climb the ladder like everyone else: PA, then camera assistant, second AC, first AC, and then — finally — we might get to do the job we actually wanted.
I was already shooting for real, paying clients. I was learning faster on the job than any lecture could keep up with. So I left after 8.5 months and bet on the work.
That instinct — don't wait in line, go around — is the through-line I couldn't see at the time.
I'd already done it with MIT (fine, I'll teach myself). I did it with film school. I did it again to break into VaynerMedia...
GaryVee was posting daily vlogs, so I cold-emailed his videographer, D-Rock, 14 times. I'd heard they wanted people who could make that kind of content for clients — which was exactly what I was already doing.
The Decade That Looked Like A Detour
Everything after that looks like a bit random, but every stop was the same skill sharpening in a new arena:
- VaynerMedia taught me to make content people actually want to watch — at volume, at speed, without the quality slipping.
- Freelance taught me to run a business, not just do the craft.
- K-Swiss brought me in-house and taught me polish and performance — my best ad hit a 32x ROAS.
- Blue Light Media and Decked Media taught me to lead teams — building the systems and standards other people execute against.
- Impact Theory taught me to lead a department, and to actually grow people. I taught a community manager how to edit; she left and became a successful creator on her own. That one still means the most.
None of it was a detour.
It was all the same instinct — understand a person, remove the friction, ship something that lands — just pointed at video instead of software.
Full Circle
John Hu brought me into Stan to audit and redesign his content systems, then rebuild them with AI and software.
In my first month we shipped the MVP of an AI Agent that knows your whole social presence, learns how you write, and acts as your AI head of content.
A decade of content production, turned into a system anyone can run for less than $100/mo.
And then something happened I'd been waiting ten years for... they told me I was more valuable building.
So I became Stan's first Forward-Deployed Engineer.
Now I talk with customers, dig into their real workflows, and build the features they actually care about — automating the grind while protecting their taste.
The kid who wanted to build software at MIT is building software. He just took the scenic route — and that route was the entire advantage.
I don't build for creators from the outside. I am the customer. I spent ten years living inside the exact problems I now get to code my way out of.
What I'm Building Now
That's what this site is: the scenic route, taken public.
Stan is the day job.
But outside of it, I'm shipping small tools of my own — in public, one at a time — for people exactly like me.
Some are free, some are paid, all of them solve a real problem fast.
If you want to see what a decade of content instinct looks like when it finally gets to write code...