About Me

My longer bio is that I grew up in Seattle, the only job I could ever imagine having was as a writer, and that in 7th grade my girlfriend broke up with me via email. Except there was a school dance that night, so I didn’t think to check my email — I was too busy trying on different pairs of oversize basketball shorts and covering myself in AXE body spray. So I get to the dance thinking we’re still together, but she’s clearly mortified. “Did you check your email” she asked me when I was doing my two-step next to her. “No, of course not” I laughed, ignorant of the abyss hovering below me.

My friend Johnny Conley had to take me aside and tell me the bad news. Life lesson number one: always be checking your email (I wish this were more of a joke).

Anyway: I care about stories, emotion, people, and creativity. I think the biggest risk our clients can take is in playing it safe, and I see my role as a writer and strategist to be someone who’s constantly trying to create the type of interactions, be that between a business and its customers or internally between employees, that people remember, either because they were so seamless (see: Content and UX Design), or because they told a story with real emotional weight.

Whenever I begin a project I print out as much literary material as I can about the subject. One of my proudest moments was when we made a huge step forward in a project that was revving its tires in the mud because of an insight from King Lear.

If that makes me sound like my head is too far in the clouds, you can take solace in the fact that I have also led IDEO’s business development efforts, most recently in charge of our East Coast’s Hub’s $15m/yr portfolio. I pitched to clients. I built relationships. I managed our CRM, our revenue tracking, and our marketing and growth efforts. I negotiated. I went to conferences. I ran the three-man weave with our legal and our operations teams to get deals signed and sealed. I always exceeded my target, and Cambridge always exceeded its target. I had a lot of help from a team of really smart people. The way I like to frame this job is that I talked to clients about every single way an organization might struggle (IDEO has a huge variety of clients across industries and organization sizes), and came back to them with creative, business viable solutions.

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Before arriving at IDEO, I worked at POV on PBS, the longest-running independent documentary showcase on television. On POV's small-but-mighty team, I was its lead editorial voice, supported its external outreach initiatives, streaming programs, digital presence and worked on awards campaigns that won Emmys, Peabodys and an Oscar nomination for the first Chilean film to ever receive a nod for Best Documentary.

And before THAT, I worked on a documentary about the Velvet Underground, was a customer service guy at a department store, and dropped out Stanford’s English Lit PhD program before I even started. I’ve always cared about stories, always cared about people, and only kind of cared about academia.

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My work philosophy is oriented towards kindness, empathy and pragmatic action. I believe the workplace should feel pluralistic, and that creativity and experimentation should be allowed to thrive. I also believe that Liverpool FC will win every trophy that can be won, that Purple Rain is better understood as a music video, and that Mr. Casaubon would have finished The Key To All Mythologies if he just had a little more time.

Hope springs eternal.

I cut my own hair on picture day. First time doing it. I think you can tell.