About

I have and always will be a maker and tinkerer. Growing up an only child in the suburbs of Saint Paul, Minnesota I spent my summers outside, in the woods and building things with wood and whatever else we could gather. Even then, “systems” made sense to me. For example, when I was ~10 we created a downhill racer out of scrap wood (which was pretty sweet btw), but one time while I was eating dinner a friend wanted to take it out for a spin. In my head I was like “is this guy a qualified driver?” After dinner, I enlisted my friend to help me develop our driver’s license and training program - which utilized at the time something called a “typewriter” printing on 5x3 notecards and various D.A.R.E. photos cut out and glued onto them. Creating to solve problems for people (and myself) is what drives me. It always has and always will.

Fast forward to the dawn of the internet and I found myself designing and developing websites at 16 to save up and buy a car. I had taught myself HTML and photoshop, and was well on my way to learning visual basic which would eventually be my doorway to Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) development. At 18, with tangible skills and too young to be scared I set out and landed my first gig at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center as a full-time web developer & designer. Not too long after that I was scouted by a local advertising agency, Ackerman McQueen and landed my first job in New Media. From that point on it was all over - digital was my future and I was going to revel in it.

Today, after spending 25 years filling out detail to the prior two paragraphs I find myself armed to teeth with knowledge and experience that still to this day simply drives my desire to create. The only difference is that instead of creating for my neighborhood friends I’m doing it for fortune 100 and global enterprises. My desire to create things that people can use. Just creating things for the sake of creating them has long since passed, and I’m now obsessed with identifying new opportunities that create tangible, exponential results that reinforce my personal drive for creating useful, meaningful products and experiences.