A Biography

Career stuff

Post-college, my first job offer was for a role at Nickelodeon. I’d always been a writer, but the job was essentially scheduling commercials. I interviewed on Wednesday, was offered the job on Thursday, and told I had until the end of Friday to accept. I panicked and accepted. In hindsight, that was not a great move.

The economy was no bueno. Competition for creative jobs was fierce, and I had inadvertently marked myself as a non-creative. I needed a writing outlet, so I started doing standup at night. Got pretty good. Started getting regular club work.

One night, a friend from college came to see me at Gotham Comedy Club. He was now an editor at Men’s Fitness. He asked if I’d be up for freelance writing. I was.

A few months later, it happened again. Another friend from college, this one an editor at Cosmopolitan. So I started writing for them, too.

Eventually, I left Nickelodeon for a digital marketing role at FilmBuff. It was a scrappy startup environment. A year later I was head of marketing.

Then we got acquired by Gunpowder & Sky. Bigger movies, bigger budgets, bigger responsibilities. I was Creative Director for all of our film releases: trailers, posters, copy, art, social media, etc…we did well.

I left G&S in 2018, to help my dad write a book about neuroscience and PTSD.

When we finished, I looked for something new. Branded Content seemed promising. I was hired by Magnet Media to be Creative Director on a series pitch for TIAA. We won the work. We made the thing. I directed my first shoot(s).

I liked branded content. The full-time jobs required agency experience, so I went to get some. Got hired as Associate Director of Branded Entertainment at Hearts & Science. I made content for Amgen. Then I also made content for Grey Goose. Then COVID happened and my team was shut down. I also stopped doing stand-up.

I kept writing, to keep earning. I also started to work with Ruca, a creative co-operative of independent designers, writers, programmers and strategists. Then (Business) Insider offered me a 90-day contract as a Content Producer. Then another. Then another. In mid-2021, Business Insider finally gave my department head approval to bring my aboard full-time, but I decide to focus on Ruca + freelance work. I still often work with the good folks at Insider, as a writer and producer.

I also got involved with Yorba, a startup aiming to help people find and delete their useless online accounts. I became now CMO + Chief Creative Officer. We’re all building it part-time. I’m passionate about digital hygiene and data privacy, and not having my email inboxes filled with garbage. I’m no longer involved in Yorba beyond an advisory role, but I still believe in their mission and wish them the best.

In 2023, I began a contract with IBM, ostensibly to write SEO-oriented articles on for what was then IBM Think’s “Data & AI” beat, as the post-ChatGPT world was still taking shape. I soon became the guy who would/could write about crunchier deep learning topics. I became very sincerely interested in the nuts and bolts of how the things poised to reshape our society work. I found myself voluntarily grinding research papers, expanding the scope of our AI work, helping us move into significantly more technical (and accurate) territory.

That work was noticed. I was asked to help out with some announcements re: new LLMs (from Meta, Mistral, et al) coming to IBM’s platform. IBM Research noticed these articles: when they decided to get serious about the IBM Granite LLM series (starting with Granite 3.0), I was brought aboard to write their announcements. For then on, pretty much any time IBM released a new model, I handled the release messaging.

IBM Think expanded to include journalism, and I was often asked to help clarify concepts to facilitate their reporting. Whenever I have the time (or whenever they ask me to), I work on features of my own. I also still write explainers.

The internet is full of people who pontificate about AI despite being full of shit and not knowing shit and not reading anything but half-baked shit on LinkedIn. For the most part, anyone trying to learn about machine learning can choose between writing from [A] data scientists who understand the science but write poorly and don’t bother providing context or translating jargon into layman’s terms, [B] journalists who write well but, quite understandably, don’t have the expertise and/or (given deadlines) time to get the science right, or [C] overly confident and credulous hobbyists who fall for every bit of hype and lean on LLMs too much.

I’m trying to be the guy to bridge the gap between [A] and [B], and free people from [C]. AI literacy matters. ‘Deep learning everywhere’ is where our world is headed and ordinary people have the right to understand it. Every week, a couple of strangers message me on LinkedIn to thank me for explaining something in a way that finally clicked for them. It means a lot to me. I feel corny writing that online, but fortunately I don’t actually believe that people will actually read this.

I still love working with video and content and not-AI stuff, by the way. But the demand for my AI work does keep me very busy. As does fatherhood.

If you’ve gotten this far, I’m grateful and impressed: mention this sentence in an email and I will venmo you $5. I have not put nearly as much effort into this biography as I probably should…but then again, it has been up for like 3+ years and only a handful of people have ever asked me for $5.