The Long
Game.
How a kid from Kansas City ended up shaping the way people consume media online. Five chapters. No shortcuts.
Learning to Tell Stories
It started in a newsroom. Not with a byline or a corner office, but hunched over an edit bay at WDAF-TV in Kansas City, cutting video for the 10 o'clock news. I was an unpaid intern when I walked in the door in the summer of 1997. Within a month, I was editing the majority of the broadcast on a paid basis.
That experience — the urgency of live television, the discipline of telling a story in 90 seconds, the weight of getting it right — shaped everything that came after. At the University of Missouri's journalism school, one of the best in the country, I learned not just how to write, but how to think like a communicator.
"Mizzou didn't just teach me to write. It taught me that every story has a structure, a tension, and a reason to exist."
The Art of the Sell
After graduation, I landed at Muller + Company, a Kansas City ad agency with an outsized reputation for creative work. I came in as a copywriter and quickly discovered that advertising, at its best, is just storytelling under constraint.
The discipline was exhilarating. You had a headline, a visual, and maybe 30 seconds to make someone feel something. Over nearly four years, I wrote campaigns for clients in healthcare, sports apparel, theme parks, and restaurants. The work earned more than 50 local, national, and international awards — including two Best of Show Addys. Publications like AdWeek, Creativity, Graphis, and Communication Arts took notice.
Those years taught me that great ideas aren't born from unlimited resources. They're born from creative pressure.
The Startup Chapter
In 2004, a small technology company called kozoru offered me a chance to leave the agency world and build something from scratch. They had developed a search technology that could answer natural language questions directly inside instant messaging clients — essentially, they were doing conversational AI before anyone had a name for it.
As Director of Communications, my job was to build the brand and generate buzz in a crowded, fast-moving tech landscape. It worked. In two years, kozoru was profiled by Fast Company, Wired, CNET, the San Jose Mercury News, and the BBC. That experience — learning to communicate complex technology to mainstream audiences — would prove invaluable in everything that came next.
The Social Media Revolution
In 2006, I joined AMC Theatres as a Senior Copywriter. But the world was changing fast, and by 2009 it was clear that something seismic was happening in media. Social networks weren't just platforms — they were transforming how stories were told and how audiences were built. AMC needed someone to figure that out. I raised my hand.
As Social Media Lead, I built AMC's channels from the ground up, at a time when most major brands were still skeptical about the whole thing. We didn't just post content. We built a community of passionate moviegoers and developed a genuine editorial voice for a brand that had never spoken like a human before.
The crown jewel was an in-house team of film bloggers and commentators I recruited, trained, and produced — a daily talk show format that drew more than 200 million YouTube views and won IAWTV Awards two years running for Best News Show and Best Live Show. That team was eventually acquired by Collider and the strategy lives on today at Valnet Inc.'s ScreenRant.
"We proved that a movie theatre chain could be the most interesting voice in film conversation online. That had never been done before."
Building a Media Company
In 2016, I joined Everhance as Executive Producer and Editor-in-Chief. Everhance operates a network of digital media properties — including Twisted Sifter, Did You Know, Wimp.com, and others — with a combined global audience of 30 million followers. Our original video content has now surpassed 2 billion views.
I've overseen the full editorial operation: hiring and managing writers, developing content strategy, managing our publishing pipeline of more than 1,800 posts per month, and leading video licensing partnerships with Yahoo, George Takei, AOL, Tumblr, Tim McGraw, and ATTN:. In my current role as Chief Content Officer, I'm also running financial modeling, developing proprietary performance algorithms, and using AI tools to find new monetization opportunities.
It's the most complete executive role I've held — equal parts creative, operational, and analytical.
