Innovation isn't a department. Creativity isn't a field. The interesting work starts the moment you stop treating them as separate.

Talks for teams and audiences who've been told to pick a lane, and suspect that's the wrong advice. Sixteen years building across marketplaces, AI, a magazine, and the stage — and what all of it turns out to have in common.

Built at Amazon, eBay, Expedia, and Belden. A $300M P&L, marketplaces launched from zero, production AI shipped. Wharton MBA.

THE TALKS

The Shape Underneath

Why your best ideas come from the field you were told to drop — and how to go get them on purpose.

Original ideas rarely come from digging deeper into your own field. They come from noticing that your stuck problem has the same shape as a solved problem somewhere that looks nothing like it — and stealing the answer across. Specializing is what blinds you to this; it teaches you your problem's vocabulary so well you stop seeing its structure. This talk hands you the move: strip a problem to its bare shape, find who else lives there, and borrow their solution. It's the part of the work AI is worst at, which makes the range you were told to apologize for the thing worth leading with.

New Things, Old Buildings

How to get a new idea funded and shipped inside a company you don't own.

Most innovation advice is written for founders — quit, raise, disrupt — which is no use to the person with a mortgage, a boss, and a good idea. This is the other playbook: how to find the boundary you're being told not to cross, make the case for crossing it, and get the thing built and shipped without a lab, a mandate, or permission you can't earn. Drawn from the marketplaces and the payment product I got off the ground inside companies that had every reason to say no.

The Blank Page

What it takes to make the thing that doesn't exist yet — a first product, a first issue, an opening night.

A marketplace with no sellers, a magazine with no first issue, a stage before anyone walks on: the blank page looks different every time and behaves exactly the same. This talk is about the earliest, ugliest part of making something — how to move before you have proof, what to build first, and how to tell a thing that isn't working yet from a thing that won't. Built from launches that shipped and openings that made it to the stage, across software, print, and dance.

WHO THESE TALKS ARE FOR

LEADERS & OPERATORS

Teams trying to innovate without a dedicated innovation function.

BUILDERS & PRODUCT TEAMS

People working from ambiguity — zero-to-one products, new categories, or problems without a playbook.

CREATIVE & CROSS-DISCIPLINARY TEAMS

Organizations trying to bring more range, originality, and lateral thinking into how they work.

Talks can be tailored for leadership offsites, product and innovation teams, conferences, founder communities, and creative organizations.

If your audience is tired of being told to stay in their lane, let’s talk.

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