First Press: A Scoreboard for Culture
2025–2026
What if culture had a score, and a scoreboard? Would trusted scores help us make better choices about what we consume? Would tradeable scores let true fans profit from their knowledge? What if creators – musicians, authors, filmmakers – shared in the rake? These are the questions we set out to answer with First Press: part game show, part fantasy bracket, fully rooted in the belief that the passive, distracted way we engage with streaming media and the business model that supports it needed reinvention.
Pandora: Keeping Music Human
2020–2023
Hired to answer the question of what Pandora should be when it grows up, in its second half of life, post-acquisition by Sirius XM. Assembled the first team to reverse a years-long decline in engagement through improvements to the radio algorithm. Rebuilt the Music Genome's human tagging methodology and modernized the machine learning models that run on it. Still the best, and most human, music recommender in existence.
WNYC Studios: The Art of Listening
2018–2019
Before podcasts about music were a thing, produced two podcasts about music that became a thing. We decoded and explored arias with Rhiannon Giddens and the Metropolitan Opera. We invited interesting people (Esther Perel, Alec Baldwin) to tell us about one piece of music that changed their life, their mood, their day with the Open Ears Project.
WQXR: Rebranding Classical Music
2017–2020
Hired to write a strategy and raise philanthropic support to rebrand classical music on behalf of WQXR, the oldest, best, and largest all-classical station in America. Why should something so magnificent and universal be mislabeled as white, Western, and only for old people? We built a plan and team, raised $12M against a $10M goal, and made sure the airplane flew (grew the FM ratings, saved New Sounds) while we built the new one (mobile, social, digital).
The Yams: Curation-as-a-Service
2014–2017
Solved my own problem, which was disappointment in the anonymity and mediocrity of algorithmic music recommendations. Built a music recommendation service that invented Curation-as-a-Service (paying for curation) and delivered interesting, expert, human-curated recommendations through SMS, chatbot, and even a 1-800 phone number. Turns out the magic was in the conversation about the playlist, not the playlist itself; imagine a music recommender you could and wanted to talk to. Raised a pre-seed round, built the team, and scaled to thousands of paying members with 100% organic growth.
SXSW: Thinking Small
2011–2013
At a time when SXSW was getting bigger and more corporate, created a series of intimate performances on the outskirts of Austin with our good friends with great taste, Yours Truly. Fans came by van to the MTV Hive House, had a beverage, a taco, and watched "up and coming" artists like Kendrick Lamar, Charli XCX, Kurt Vile and Alabama Shakes perform in cinematic settings.
Artists.MTV: Direct to Fan
2012
Why shouldn't musicians have direct access to their fans? What if artists could find their 1,000 true fans and sell them music, tickets, and merch directly? We built it long before musicians were demanding these rights for themselves, predicated on the idea that artists should not only get heard, and get promoted, but get paid. Celebrated the launch with Indie-Pendence Day, a 24-hour July 4th TV marathon that invited viewers to tip the artists they loved, proving TV to digital conversion never works (unless you're Idol/reality TV).
O Music Awards: Another Awards Show?
2011–2012
With the declining relevance of the VMAs looming in the background, we invented (yes) another awards show, one that honored the artists, fans and weirdos who were defining internet culture with creative daring and technology. Gave awards to the most zealous fan armies, broke Guinness World Records, and staged pop-up performances in unexpected places.
MTV Classics: Old Shows, New Screens
2009–2011
What could beloved shows like 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, and even Unplugged mean to a new audience, in a new format? Built teams that breathed new life into these iconic brands, balancing each one's original ethos with shorter attention spans and the unconstrained time and space of the internet. Won Webbys and Emmys along the way.
Jackassworld: Bringing Jackass to the Internet
2008
The Head of MTV Films and the wrangler of the cult show Jackass brought me, the local "digital person" an idea: what if the next Jackass movie was released online, rather than in theaters? And what if Jackass had its own social network? For this adventure, I moved back home to Los Angeles, lived in corporate housing by night and at Dickhouse Productions by day, built an online community for Jackass fans, and released a studio-length, feature film online (a first!) with the most creative and deranged crew in television. "When all is said and done, “2.5” could end up a milestone in Hollywood’s transition to digital media or an overly ambitious misstep." It was a really fun misstep.