Belts, sporting goods, consumer electronics, IoT devices. Then software — products, agents, automations, and the systems my own business runs on.
The through-line was never the medium. It’s being able to take something half-formed and make it real, quickly, without a committee.
Most people pick a lane. I never managed it — and it turned out to be the useful part, because the judgment transfers even when the material doesn’t.
Physical products
Concept, tooling, campaign, freight, retail — most of them funded on Kickstarter. Also a hardware router built for a blockchain network, and an NFT project launched with a team that made it work.
Software, since
Almost everything above started as an irritation rather than a plan. I don’t write a proposal about it — I build the working version, usually in days, and find out whether the idea holds up by living with it.
Something costs real time, attention or money. Not a hypothetical — an actual irritation.
I ask whether it has to work that way, or whether the tool could be shaped around the person using it.
The working version, not a mockup. Days, not months, while the problem is still fresh.
I publish it and what I learned. The next question usually comes out of that.
Clients get the same process, pointed at their business instead of mine. See how that works →
Fifteen years of physical products, and nearly three of them running an innovation consulting company in Shenzhen, working directly with the factories that build most of the world’s physical goods.
The first campaign was a men’s belt. Working samples, a story, and $130,000 in thirty days.
Father to Sophia, who is three and a half and comfortably the most demanding client I have.
I make music with AI and listen to far more of it than is reasonable. I train seriously — amateur bodybuilding — and coach a handful of guys online. I’d rather be in a room full of people than not.
Before any of this I played professional basketball in China, ended up on a Chinese soap opera, and did a run of game shows.
None of that belongs on a résumé. But it’s the same instinct that produced everything above — say yes to the unfamiliar thing, then work out how it’s done.
People who only ever do one thing tend to build one kind of thing. I’ve never been much good at that.