I started in Berlin, DJing in clubs and directing immersive theater in abandoned warehouses — the kind where the audience wears earpieces and becomes the characters rather than watching them. That early obsession with what happens when you move someone from spectator to participant has never left. It's in every company I've built since. The question is always the same: what does it take for something to actually land in a human being?
From Berlin I moved into technology. Viorama — a neural video company — got acquired by Giphy. Our code now powers Giphy Stickers across Meta's platform, which means it's touched hundreds of millions of people who never knew my name, which is exactly how it should go. Then Splash: one million 360° videos, a SXSW Jury Award. ShaderVerse. Social Play Club, which started as a structured serendipity experiment and became the core connection methodology for Kinnernet and DLD — two of the most selective founder gatherings in the world. Sparklverse, designed for Burning Man's Virtual Burn during the pandemic. Each thing taught me something the next thing needed.
Wonderland came out of a conviction that brands are the next generation of media companies — and that AI changes what's actually possible for a brand willing to act like one. The studio became the place where the Play Economy thesis turned into a working system: real customer truth in, synthetic audiences testing every hook before a dollar of production is spent, an AI writer room turning signal into scripts, and serial vertical episodes that compound into owned distribution. And it produced the book: The Play Economy, the argument that the Industrial Revolution didn't just reorganize labor, it taught us to be ashamed of play. Huizinga was writing Homo Ludens in 1938 — play predates civilization and defines it. What's happening with AI isn't disruption. It's correction.
The current portfolio is the thesis in motion. Action Signal — AI audience intelligence, built with Domenick Crimmins, for sales and growth teams who need to know what lands before they commit the budget. Clankers — an AI entertainment studio and character universe for the AI-native era, where the relationship between audience and character is fundamentally different from anything that came before. Side A — the vinyl listening community that's a counterargument to algorithmic music consumption and an argument for shared attention. Wonderland — the brand content studio, turning real customer truth into AI-produced serial vertical episodes that compound into owned distribution. Alongside the portfolio, an active practice as a Creative Producer in the Machine Cinema community — generative cinema for brands, live audiences, and cultural moments. The thread across all of it: AI as creative collaborator, not tool.
