A very smart person recently went on another very smart person’s podcast to talk about leading a social app used by over three billion people. He said of his experience, the best product people are “great curators of ideas, curators of people, curators of technologies, curators of strategies.”

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I’m not a traditional product person. I was farming dairy goats in my early 20s. I’ve seen something like 300+ goat births. In 2014, I was working on a well-capitalized farm in the Adirondacks where I eradicated two deadly diseases, streamlined operating costs, increased herd and creamery production, and gave the farm a new brand with a growing Instagram presence. They offered me the farm.

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Instead, I went to work for an organic bread company in the Hudson Valley with wholesale distribution across four states to luxury groceries like Whole Foods, four owned retail cafe locations, and 25+ weekly farmers’ market booth set-ups. I was hired to manage the field markets as a standalone business unit, which included managing 20+ staff with perishable inventory in outdoor weather conditions year round. This was the first time I managed a budget P&L that pushed $1m. I did that job so well that I took on a second remit to implement the first brand refresh since the company’s founding 30+ years prior. I taught myself Illustrator and InDesign so I could bring a deck of brand guidelines to life across the markets, product packaging, wholesale enablement, retail menus and in-store signage. I executed digital implementation across our website, a cold-start newsletter, and Instagram, which I grew from less than 5k to over 30k in 2018. Much of the creative is still in use today.

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In the fall of 2021, I listened to another podcast where two smart people were discussing DAOs and NFTs. Having spent the pandemic years working in political and community organizing, I was curious how cultural movements could leverage emerging, decentralized technology. I made a then-Twitter account called @cryptohun3y, and within four months of joining “crypto Twitter,” I was leading marketing for a consumer crypto startup accelerator where I established the media marketing function and grew our podcast property 30% season-over-season. Likely influenced by the 50+ startups that came through our accelerator, and the network of top early-stage crypto VCs, I spun off to fundraise for a personal project in 2023: a tokenized content product so brands could monetize creative campaigns through blockchain. I was too early, but I learned a ton about taking a product from idea to market, and how to build belief in an emerging market with a lean team.

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The reason why that opening quote resonates with me is because I’m spiky at curating people, ideas, technologies, and strategies, and progressively unblocking movement toward a shared goal. I like working on complex problems in uncertain market dynamics, even better when there are hard regulatory or operational constraints. I like building agile systems to advance a team toward a brand promise. I like to go where there are no roads, let alone roadmaps.

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In practice, I’m an embedded senior IC who builds products and programs from the ground up. I have a particular love for narrative pivots. I leverage artificial intelligence and subcultural insight to close the gap between what’s brilliantly true about the project and what the world knows now.

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We need great products and programs in the hearts and minds of the people who want them most. Work with me if your product needs a belief system.

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