TL;DR:
- I started in art, design, and branding.
- My work transitioned into software, crypto, data, and finance.
- Eventually I started seeing the company itself as the creative medium.
I’ve spent most of my life somewhere between art and business.
I’ve always been driven to create. I like starting with almost nothing and slowly discovering what something wants to become. For a long time I assumed that meant I would end up a designer, musician, or something like that.
But I was equally drawn to systems and logic. I liked taking something messy and making it coherent. Turning chaos into order. Making all the pieces fit.
In middle school I bounced between drawing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and programming BASIC on a 286. After high school I worked at a screen-printing shop, where I was introduced to graphic design.
On weekends I made avant-garde electronic music, which is a generous way of saying unlistenable garbage.
Later I moved from the quiet suburb where I grew up to the artist district of Los Angeles. That was where I got my first real taste of international business.
I made websites, videos, clothing, music, magazines, and DVDs. Looking back, I was already doing the same thing I do now: embracing the chaos of creation, then forcing it to survive in the real world.
Eventually that turned into a small branding studio. Over time I was moving away from the business of art and toward the art of business.
For the first few years I ran the studio while traveling around America in a motorhome with my wife. I managed production from a laptop and a cell phone before remote work was really a thing.
When that chapter ended, we moved to Tokyo.
I stumbled into a Bitcoin meetup in Shibuya, and that accident shaped the next decade of my life. I walked the whole path from the libertarian dreams of anarchy to the institutional adoption of smart contracts.
Somewhere along the way, branding gave way to software, data, finance, and company-building.
When I look back at all of it, though, I don’t mostly see the projects. I see the people.
I have never really done the lone-founder thing. Almost every important chapter began with somebody calling, asking me to build something with them, or bringing me a problem worth getting obsessed with.
Someone pushed me, challenged me, trusted me, taught me something, or gave me room to make something better.
That is still how I like to work. Business, at its best, is collaborative. You build something together that neither person would have made alone.
At this point, the tension between art and business is gone. I used to think I had to choose between being creative and being commercial. Now I think I was just looking at the medium too narrowly.
The thing I like to create is the company itself.
The product, the market, the story, the economics, the systems, the people. All of it has to come together into something that works.
That is the art of business.