Builder first, leader second.

Before any of that, I was a racing kid who taught himself how to design and code so I could create my own website and brand for the racing team.

I started racing go-karts at 12. When I was 15, I won the karting grand nationals and was one of the youngest drivers to be invited to the Red Bull Driver Search. By 17, I was behind the wheel of a 360 sprint car... a 700-horsepower open-wheel machine with no traction control, no power steering, and no room for error.

Racing didn't become a career, but it shaped how I work: You learn to commit before you can see where it goes, and you learn that preparation beats talent almost every time.

When I wasn't racing, I started building things. At 18, I started Emerald Pacific Outfitters: a scrappy brand that made apparel and short videos to help action sports athletes in the Pacific Northwest get noticed by sponsors. Some of those videos even helped out a local BMX team, Ride and Glide, earn a feature on King 5 with Paul Silvi. Once I was done with action sports, Emerald Pacific became Empac: a consultancy that builds custom solutions and guides established businesses with their marketing needs.

To fund it, I worked at the Apple Store in Tacoma. I kept submitting work samples to Apple's corporate teams until one of them invited me to Cupertino for a project. I spent five months designing internal tools, building product guides, and supporting the UX team on usability research. When that wrapped up, T‑Mobile brought me in.

I started at T‑Mobile as a design intern. Four roles and eight years later, I lead creative development for the savings calculator, Super Bowl landing pages, Friday Night 5G Lights, campaign deal hubs, and the T‑Mobile.com redesign. All the work at T‑Mobile ships to tens of millions of people, and moves incredibly fast.

Meanwhile, Empac has been running the whole time in the background. What started as a one-person action sports brand has evolved into a consultancy that helps established businesses figure out the right technology approach for their business. Sometimes that means configuring what they already have, sometimes it means finding them the right platform. Or, we might need to build something custom from scratch. The main challenge is identifying which direction to go and what will be the right call for my clients.

I started as a computer science major at UW. Two years in, I went to Apple in California... and all the program managers I worked with mentioned that having a business degree with a CS background would be more valuable than being a pure CS major. So when I came back to Seattle, I switched to business and marketing. Business strategy and technical execution is the thread that ties everything I do together.