Content → Software. The Whole Arc.

The plan was engineering. MIT, computer science, maybe mechanical too. I wanted to build things, hardware and software. Then, chronic migraines hit junior and senior year, I missed a ton of school, my math grades tanked, and MIT came off the table. I had no idea what I was going to do. Turns out I'd still become a builder, I just took the scenic route.

I was obsessed with YouTube daily vloggers, so I started making them on my iPhone… and fell in love with it. 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 just 3 days before I walked the stage to graduate. That gig turned into a full year of work.

Six months into film school, they brought in a successful producer, a grad of my exact program, who told the room we'd still have to climb the ladder like everyone else: PA, then camera assistant, second AC, first AC, then finally cinematographer. Meanwhile I was already shooting for real clients and learning faster than the lectures could keep up. So I left at 8.5 months and bet on the work.

Gary Vee was running daily vlogs, and mentioned they needed DRock-like producer-editors for clients, so I cold-emailed D-Rock 14 times. They wanted the documentary-style content for clients, which was exactly what I'd been doing for Cy. Inside VM, I worked with Tom Bilyeu, Cy Wakeman again, Nyakio Grieco, Faisal Sublaban and more. This is where I truly learned to make content that people actually want to watch… at volume, with speed, without the quality slipping.

I went freelance and stacked clients… Danica Brisha, Brittany Hoffman, Adorian Deck, and eventually my biggest client ever: K-Swiss. Owning the whole pipeline… pitch, produce, deliver, invoice, this was my first real taste of running the business, not just doing the craft.

After enough great work, K-Swiss brought me in-house full time. Two years, countless shoe ads, and a best-performing ad that hit a 32x ROAS. This is where I learned real polish with After Effects animation, the finish that makes an ad land. And the core lesson? Ads sell by showing people what they want and demonstrating it, not talking about it all day.

COVID hit and K-Swiss laid me off, back to freelance. Around the same time, a car accident left my wife's hand unusable for a year. I took on extra clients on top of everything to keep us afloat, and broke $100k for the first time in the middle of the hardest stretch. Pressure calls me up.

At Blue Light Media I ran the Motion department, leading creative productions for brands like Nutribullet, Nebia, and Fitbake. My first time leading a department: building the systems and standards other people executed against, not just doing it all myself.

At Decked Media I started as Lead Editor, setting the design standards and workflow every other editor worked to. Then I was promoted to Creative Director, running creative direction across all our companies and clients. This is where I learned C.A.R.E. from Adorian Deck: a framework for creative that actually connects, and where directing the work became the job.

I built an audience of 350,000+ explaining mental models simply. A decade of content skill compounded into real distribution and a trust loop most builders never get.

A big salary jump and my largest team yet, in person. I ran social media across Tom Bilyeu's brand, Lisa Bilyeu's brand, and Project Kyzen, hiring and leading a team of community managers and editors. I'm proudest of how I led them: one community manager didn't know how to edit when she started, I taught her, and after she left she became a successful creator on her own. This is where I grew from an individual contributor into a real leader.

John Hu brought me into Stan to audit and redesign his content production systems, then rebuild them with AI and software to automate as much as possible. In month one we shipped the MVP of the Stanley agent: it knows your whole social presence, learns how you write, and acts as your AI head of content. My 10 years of content production turned into a repeatable, mostly-automated system, democratized to anyone with a sub-$100/mo subscription. Once we validated it, I handed it to the product team to ship to users, and kept running John's personal-brand content systems.