I didn't arrive at this moment
through a linear career path.
I arrived through eras.

Born in 1964, before the digital world existed, which means my relationship with technology has never been abstract. It has always been lived.

I earned a BS in Environmental Design at UC Davis with a plan to design hotels. That plan got put on permanent hold the moment I stepped into eight years at an agency that worked with Apple, 2000 to 2008, across Marketing, Education, Retail, User Groups and Events — the Steve Jobs era, when a company that had nearly disappeared was relearning how to focus by cutting almost everything else away. I watched teams argue not about what could be done, but about what should be, and what needed protecting at all costs. Apple taught me that long-term thinking looks invisible at first — you build for what comes next, not for what ships now. The iPod and iTunes taught me that technology only becomes meaningful when it removes friction from an actual human life. Apple Retail taught me the last mile is never tactical — it's where trust is earned or lost, because the staff was trained to teach, not to persuade. The iPhone wasn't an iteration. It was a category collapsing into a single object, on a bet the market hadn't asked for yet.

That apprenticeship set an internal bar I've never lowered: quality is a discipline, not a preference. Simplicity is earned through hard choices, not designed from a blank page. Speed without judgment is dangerous, and the most important work happens before anything visible gets produced.

Everything since has traced back to that, not as imitation but as principle — which is why, when generative AI stopped being a curiosity and started being infrastructure, it didn't feel like a surprise. It felt like the same pattern arriving faster, louder, with higher stakes. I'd already learned the difference between a tool that expands what a person can actually do and one that just increases velocity. Most of the industry hasn't made that distinction yet, which is most of what I get paid to point out.

I run RockPaperScissors now as a studio of one — not a shrinking agency pretending to be lean, but a bet that a single operator, amplified by the right machines, can do the structural work that used to need a floor of people. Somewhere along the way that bet stopped being instinct and became method. StoryEngine1™ is that method aimed specifically at narrative, which remains the hardest part of the job and probably always will.

The Epilogue Economy™ came out of a related irritation: watching brand strategy get built around a twenty-six-year-old who barely exists and a fifty-five-year-old who, on paper, might as well not — despite having the money, the time, and the lived authority the twenty-six-year-old hasn't earned yet. Campaign Asia named me to their 50 Over 50 last year, a list I have genuinely complicated feelings about holding, given that the whole framework argues against reducing anyone in that bracket to a list placement. I hold it anyway, because the alternative is pretending the complication isn't there.

I serve on the IAA Singapore board, and as Co-Chair of the IAA Executive Advisory Board on AI. Not as titles to list, but as commitments to the craft. To leadership that extends beyond individual projects. And to the responsibility of helping an industry navigate change with more thoughtfulness than fear. Because experience isn’t something you keep to yourself. It’s something you share. Fifteen years in Singapore now, long enough to have opinions about the place, short enough to still notice what a local wouldn't.

I don't lead with titles or company names. They flatten the story. What matters is that I've lived through the transitions organizations are facing now — Apple's, then the web's, then social's, now this one — just at different scales and speeds. That's not hindsight. It's knowing where you're standing while everything else is still moving.

Skeptical of hype. Allergic to shortcuts. Committed to work that holds up over time.