I've spent twenty years pursuing redemptive work and chasing one question: how do we make people's lives (and the world around us) better?
I came up as a designer: brand, identity, the craft of making things clear and making them matter. I wrote a small book about it (Branding Matters) before I understood that branding was really just the first answer to a much bigger question about people. I never left design, I just kept following the problems into harder rooms.
I helped build two product agencies, Envy Labs and Zaengle, a shop with a mission I still love: Be Nice, Do Good. Out of that work we spun off and exited multiple SaaS platforms. The one that changed everything was Code School: an immersive, game-driven way to learn to code that reached hundreds of thousands of users and was acquired by Pluralsight in 2015. It taught me that brand, design, and product aren't three jobs, they're one craft.
For the last 6 years I led product and design at Virtuous, an AI forward platform serving thousands of nonprofit organizations. I joined when the company was doing roughly $10m ARR and helped carry it past $55m ARR, building the product and design org from the ground up along the way. These days I bring that whole range, design through AI, to a small number of companies and causes I choose. Same diagnosis, design, and delivery that I've honed over the years. See the practice →
The real work is hard, because the best work is more human. As building gets faster, the scarce things are taste, empathy, and the courage to solve the right problem instead of the easy one. That conviction is the whole idea behind Three Pipe Problems, and it's the test I bring to everything I make: not can we build it, but is this the thing worth building, and is it built for the person on the other side of the screen?
I live near the water in St. Augustine, Florida, with my wife and our three kids: the three people who matter most, and who are mercifully unimpressed by any of the above. I'm a former All-American swimmer, a devoted UNC Tar Heel, and the kind of person who re-reads Tolkien and Conan Doyle at an annoying clip. My faith shapes how I live and approach my work: that we were made to make things better, and that the work of seeing and solving is worth doing well.