Master of none.

A festival sponsorship, a Friday night on the floor, a brand campaign, a school’s enrollment system. Same job, different clothes. Somebody has to hold the whole picture, sweat the details nobody will ever notice, and have it all look effortless by the time anyone shows up.

I’ve done that for other people’s brands and events for ten years, and I still do — sponsorships and live events are half my week. The newer half is that I build the websites and the software too, which used to mean hiring a whole team of programmers and doesn’t anymore. It’s the same job either way. So you’re not paying someone to learn your business first: I’ve worked the floor and chased the invoices myself, and I move quickly — most projects take weeks, not most of a year.

I started in kitchens and dining rooms — Pok Pok in Portland, The Wine Cask in Santa Barbara, Basil Flats in Longmont, and Tavolo here in Gothenburg. Cooking, serving, running front-of-house. Hospitality teaches you the whole job: nobody cares whose station the problem is on, the guest just needs it fixed, quietly, now.

Then a decade of live events and media. At DoStuff Media and 503 Media & Events I managed brands and produced campaigns for Jack Daniel’s, Red Bull, Campari, and McMenamins; at MusicPortland I ran marketing and operations for the city’s music industry association; at TEDxPortland I volunteered on production year after year. Since 2022 I’ve produced sponsorships and operations at WagsWorks — festivals and concert series across the US, from the pitch deck to the guestlist.

Somewhere in there, the tools became the interesting problem. Every small operation I worked in ran on spreadsheets held together with hope. So I started building the software myself: first WagsWorks’ internal platform, then a school’s entire web presence and admissions system, then a wine school’s site. Shipped, in production, run by their owners — built with the same standard a good dining room runs on.

These days I live in Gothenburg, where the wine chapter got formal: an ASI Level 1 sommelier certification on top of years of fine-dining service — including a stretch at The Wine Cask in Santa Barbara, which is the kind of list that teaches you fast. The lanes look unrelated on paper. They’re not. It’s all the same job — take care of people, sweat the details they never see, make it feel effortless.

Cooking for far longer than the recipe says, live music whenever there is any, and an ongoing and rigorous survey of Gothenburg wine bars — strictly for professional development.