The Long Version

Before any of this, I was a musician who happened to love technology. That combination felt natural to me — it still does — but it wasn't obvious to anyone else at the time. Music and tech were seen as separate worlds. I was interested in the place where they met.

Walking into Verve Music Group, a wholly owned subsidiary under Universal Music Group, in the early days of digital music felt like walking into a room where the rules were still being written. Labels were scrambling to understand what the internet meant for how music reached people. Nobody had the answers, and that was exactly what made it interesting. I've been chasing that feeling ever since.

From Verve I moved to Disney Music Group, where I built and ran digital — initially for Walt Disney Records across franchise properties, and eventually adding Hollywood Records and Lyric Street Records to my purview. I oversaw digital sales, marketing, and technical development across hundreds of releases — from Herbie Hancock's Grammy-winning River: The Joni Letters and Diana Krall at the height of her commercial run at Verve, to the Daft Punk Tron: Legacy soundtrack, the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato at Disney — artists who would go on to define a generation of popular music.

I also had the privilege of producing records during those years, including a series of jazz albums for Disney featuring Roy Hargrove, Esperanza Spalding, Dave Brubeck, Regina Carter, and The Bad Plus. I played bass. I've had the opportunity to co-present at BMI alongside Grammy Award-winning producer Dallas Austin, and to speak and give keynotes at events across the industry — conversations I've always valued as much for what I learn as for what I share.

Those years gave me something that has shaped everything since: the conviction that the best technology serves culture. It doesn't replace it. The tools change. That principle doesn't.

Disney was extraordinary in ways that are hard to fully explain. The scale of it. The way a company that size generates gravity — every project touching something else, synergy not as a buzzword but as a daily operational reality. I understood something about large organizations there that I couldn't have learned anywhere else.

But I was also being pitched constantly — by founders who were building platforms, many of which would become household names — and the contrast was hard to ignore. These startups could make a decision on Tuesday and ship it Friday. The gap between that pace and the pace of a company the size of Disney was stark, and something about it kept pulling at me.

An opportunity came along at the same moment a series of significant personal events made one thing very clear: the window for this kind of leap doesn't stay open forever. I looked honestly at my situation — no mortgage, no family depending on me, no obligations that would make a stumble catastrophic — and I recognized the freedom for what it was. I took a significant pay cut for the promise of building something together. It was the most deliberate risk I'd ever taken. It worked out.

HYFN was a social application agency built around a simple idea: help brands meet people where they actually were. We had the opportunity to work with incredible clients — Google, Microsoft, Levi's, Pepsi, and others — and that work created the platform to invest in our own IP. The result was HYFN8, a social application, content, and advertising platform. We had rocket growth, and in 2013 were acquired by LIN Media.

Between companies I opened a restaurant with some close friends — a passion project that had nothing to do with my existing skills and everything to do with the same instinct: find something interesting and build it.

Then came Genome, a digital innovation company I built for nearly a decade. We had the incredible opportunity to work with clients ranging from Verizon and United Airlines, to iRobot and Maserati, to the NFL and Target. In 2022, AMP Agency — part of Advantage Solutions — acquired us, and I became Chief Innovation Officer with responsibilities including long-term technical vision, data strategy, M&A advisory, and product development for the company and across our clients, which included Google, Meta, and Starbucks.

What I've come to understand about all of it: each move looked riskier from the outside than it felt from the inside. That's not because the risk wasn't real. It's because experience compounds. Every stage built a platform for the next leap. The stage kept getting bigger. So did the footing.

AI right now feels like digital music in 1999. The rules aren't written. Nobody has the answers. The people who get there early and stay curious are going to build things that matter. I've been here before. I know what to do when the map runs out.

Today I'm involved with a number of ventures. I run MCF Consulting — a studio for companies that need strategic clarity before they build. Digital products, AI implementation, data infrastructure, for startups and established companies alike. I advise across both, and angel invest in technology, real estate, and a growing focus on healthcare.

I'm building a brand intelligence platform — tracking what brands stand for, how they're shifting, and how they compare. It lives at the intersection of creative and technical, which is exactly where I've always done my best work. Launching 2026.

I'm also building a platform for families navigating the dynamics of post-divorce co-parenting. That one came from personal experience. After realizing how many families are court-mandated into tools where the user experience has been neglected rather than designed, it became clear a better option needed to exist.

And there's a healthcare platform in development — focused on making it easier to build and deploy the kind of digital infrastructure the industry has needed for a long time.