01. About
I began my creative career as a documentary filmmaker, where I learned to find and tell the story inside complicated subjects and to make the work happen. Producing meant assembling the right team, solving problems, working within constraints, making decisions under pressure, and getting an idea all the way from concept to completion. Those same instincts kept pulling me into larger challenges.
As StudioNow’s Head of Production, I helped build the company from startup through its acquisition by AOL. As StudioNow evolved, we grew the technology that powered it into a product of its own. That platform became Octerra, an enterprise SaaS platform for marketers and agencies, and eventually a standalone company that I led as CEO. My work has expanded well beyond filmmaking, but I've never strated far from what drew me to it in the first place: finding the story, refining it, and figuring out the best way to tell it.
The experience that likely shaped me the most, however, had very little to do with work.
In 2016, I learned that I had a severely leaking aortic valve. The following year, I underwent open-heart surgery to replace it. There were complications coming out of surgery, and I spent nearly a month in a medically induced coma. At some point during that period, I became critically ill and circulation to my feet was severely compromised. When I woke up, my feet were blue.
For the next several months, my doctors and I tried to save them. I went through extensive treatment, including hyperbaric therapy, but eventually had to decide how I wanted to move forward. In August 2017, I had both feet amputated.
By Thanksgiving, I was standing with a walker. By Christmas, I was walking with the walker. By February, I was using a cane. And in April 2018, less than eight months after the amputations, I was walking the hills of Augusta National Golf Club watching the 2018 Masters without any additional aid.
The experience changed my relationship with work, leadership and time. It also taught me something much simpler and more important: how much love matters. My family and I were surrounded by an extraordinary amount of support from friends, colleagues, doctors, nurses, therapists, prosthetists and people who simply showed up when we needed them. You don’t forget that.
Spending that much time inside hospitals and rehabilitation also gave me a perspective on healthcare I never expected to have. I saw extraordinary expertise, compassion and innovation up close, along with the complexity of the systems patients and families are asked to navigate when they are at their most vulnerable.
I try to live with more perspective and more intention. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful wife and four children, an exceptional medical and prosthetic team, and more reasons than ever to keep moving.
I’m a Nashville native and still live here. Outside of work, most of my time revolves around my family. I play acoustic guitar, listen to a lot of music, fish when I get the chance, and can often be found at a Vanderbilt football, basketball or baseball game. I’m generally happy anywhere there’s a good story, a little competition or something interesting to figure out.