Get in the middle.
Be early.

I started working the X Games and music venues while I was still in high school. Action sports, live music, and gaming were three scenes that shared an audience but hadn't figured that out yet. I was in all three rooms at once.

That overlap became the job. I parlayed the live music and action sports work into music supervision for video games. While the music industry was suing Napster, we did the soundtrack for Tony Hawk's Underground and won the first MTV Moon Man for Best Video Game Soundtrack. The award category didn't exist before that night.

I joined Red Bull as the first hire on their digital marketing team, somehow convincing them that the first hire should be someone to build a global gaming strategy, not a web developer or a social media expert. That's a testament to Red Bull as much as me.

I brought Red Bull into Major League Gaming, their first official support of any professional sport league. I introduced NBA star Gilbert Arenas to MLG, and he went on to buy Walshy's team, Final Boss, the first time an NBA player bought an esports team. Twenty years later, the MLG founders I worked with then would hire me to run strategy at their next company.

I joined NCompass and built the Lifestyle and Esports divisions. I also built new live broadcast, consulting, and strategy capabilities across the agency. The work ran flagship for Red Bull, Activision, Disney, YouTube, and Neiman Marcus, inside a category that didn't yet have agencies, university programs, or a Cannes Lions jury. I also led brand positioning strategy for Herman Miller and WeWork, the same operating system applied to categories that had nothing to do with gaming.

The big one was Call of Duty XP. An integrated online and offline celebration of the world of Call of Duty. Activision's flagship gathering for the franchise, and the moment that proved a video game could host a cultural event at the scale of a music festival. It won a Cannes Silver Lion, the Grand EX Award, and a Gold Effie.

The night before the inaugural Call of Duty Championship aired, I was on my hands and knees at 4 a.m. taping the edges of the stage with the set designer. The show went on. The audience never knew. I built out the broadcast capability across the agency around what happened that night.

I co-founded Adamas Esports, an elite performance brand for competitive gaming, modeled on world-class sports performance science. I launched the company as CEO, then brought in a co-founder to take over as full-time CEO so the business had dedicated leadership as it scaled. I moved into the Chief Strategy Officer seat and drove the initial product and service offerings in collaboration with our performance experts. The bet was that the next generation of competitive players would need the same performance infrastructure as elite athletes in any sport. They do.

Around the same time, I joined the board of Gamers Outreach, a nonprofit that brings video game setups to children in hospitals. I've served as President of the Board for years. Two bets on the same belief: gaming has real impact on real people.

I joined Vindex as SVP Strategy during its fastest growth phase. Some familiar faces from the Red Bull years were already there. I was part of the executive team through the acquisition by EFG, stayed through the integration, and then built the thing that didn't exist yet: a global innovation group inside a 1,200-person company. First pipeline. First creator rewards platform. Net-new capability at enterprise scale.

HCA is a conscious choice. The right partners, spaces that inspire me, and new ways to apply what I've learned while gaining entirely new experience along the way.