I grew up in Colorado and moved from Denver to San Francisco in 2004. It was in San Francisco that I met my wife, and together we started our family. After living there for over 15 years, the pandemic prompted us to reassess our priorities. In 2021, we established our primary home on the East Coast to be closer to my wife’s family. Most of my free time revolves around activities with my 2 boys and wife.  We make it a point to spend as much time as possible outdoors—whether it’s skiing / snowboarding, camping, fishing, or hiking. I also enjoy "chefing it up" at home,  creating portraits, collecting unique items like spoken-word vinyl, graphic novels, and paper ephemera, as well as attending theater, sailing, and tackling the occasional home improvement project.

I started my career as a 19-year-old web designer in the late ’90s, designing and coding online platforms and marketing programs for national brands and countless now-defunct startups. At a large global agency, I was something of a novelty—not only as the youngest employee but also as the one who couldn’t partake in the office happy hours. During this time, I contributed to what were then considered groundbreaking innovations, including some of the first online loyalty programs — Budget Rent-a-Car’s "Unlimited Budget" and "FastBreak", as well as Virgin’s "Flying Club" — along with early online auction, eCommerce, and marketplace platforms. After the dot-com crash, I shifted to small local product and marketing firms, continuing my work in digital as Rich Internet Applications (RIA) emerged. This first decade of my career was where I truly “earned my chops,” honing my technology and consulting skills in an era of rapid technological change.

Having acquired my chops, I was inspired to move to San Francisco in 2004 for the same reasons many decide to move there today: the pursuit of excellence and opportunity in the technology and design fields. Over the next 5 years, I worked on high profile projects for eBay (Desktop app), Yahoo! (Messenger), Microsoft (Music, Silverlight, Surface), Adobe (Live Color, Kuler, Encoder, Flash, AIR), Salesforce, SAP / SuccessFactors, AOL (Mail), T-Mobile and many others. During this time, I also taught Graduate Studies at the Academy of Art San Francisco School of Digital Media, wrote a technical design manual (published internationally by Apress), was featured in Communication Arts, spoke at industry conferences and helped produce a large conference and other community events.

Over the following 8+ years I built a services organization located in the Mission District of San Francisco called AVANT. At one time I employed 30 in-house project resources (Designers, Engineers, Project Managers) with scale to over one hundred through partnerships with contractors and off-shore firms. My team created award-winning products for national brands (The Village Voice, Safeway, Boeing, GE, AT&T, Comcast, Intuit, Nationwide, Cisco, Humana, Aetna, and many more...) as well as several state and federal agencies. After a great run as a boutique digital agency principal I was seeking a new challenge, with less overhead. I was made an offer to join a client’s business as Head of Product Design: my mission was to create a new team and a new product from scratch for a funded health start-up. I had done this successfully with another similar client. So, I decided to take the in-house role while I reduced the operations of my agency.

My next move was working at Early Warning as Head of Product Design to create and launch Zelle, the largest and most secure P2P platform in the United States. This was a very exciting opportunity that led to major business and industry success, as many people in the U.S. utilize Zelle on a daily basis to send and receive payments. With Zelle launched, I set my sight on other challenges and joined Adobe in 2018 as Head of CX & Innovation for a new team called the Digital Strategy Group.

When I joined Adobe it seemed like I had achieved a long-standing personal ambition: I first opened Photoshop 3.0 when I was 17 yrs old. It blew my mind and I remember thinking “People create stuff like this? What if I could work for a company like Adobe one day and do THAT?”. This was a time before “Like & Subscribe”, when you had to wait a full week to catch the next episode of your favorite TV show (for me, that would have been “Growing Pains” or dare I say it, “The Cosby Show”). I might as well have wished to go to the moon. I lived in southern Colorado and my Apple Performa from Best Buy was a major purchase for my family… my PhotoShop was um… not paid for. But I persisted. I signed up for vocational design courses (which were mostly hand lettering and illustration back then) and worked through my PhotoShop tutorial book. I honestly didn’t even know what to use PhotoShop for at that point, I just found it mesmerizing. This pivotal experience set me off on an adventure I would never look back from. 30 years later I found myself working at Adobe. Maybe not the moon for me professionally given what I had already accomplished, but perhaps my “Adobe” moon.

Today, I'm seeking my next big opportunity which leads me to ask: what's your story?

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.