About me

I've been working in marketing and writing code for 20 years. For a long time, this was a difficult combination to reconcile. But lately I have been finding that both areas complement each other in ways they never have before.

I started in 2006 running marketing for my own websites. That led to helping local businesses around the San Francisco Bay Area get found online. Eventually that experience turned into agency work, in-house roles, and into running paid media programs for some large technology companies.

Over those years I worked across paid media, SEO, analytics, email, and marketing technology, in some of the most competitive verticals: B2B and B2C technology, SaaS, legal, real estate, education, and ecommerce. Clients ranged from multinationals and VC-backed startups to bootstrapped founders and local service businesses. Through my agency jobs, I've been fortunate to have managed digital marketing programs for Alibaba, Shopify, Squarespace, and Hewlett-Packard, among others.

From 2012 to 2019 I ran Pathways Digital, my own consultancy, managing millions in annual ad spend.

Most recently, I was Sr. Digital Program & Compliance Manager at VMware, on the Digital Marketing Technology team. In this role, I handled cookies, pixels, consent management, and site-wide tagging across the company's web properties. As part of that job, I spent time working with privacy attorneys explaining how tracking technology functions, which turned out to be unusually good preparation for an era where measurement is the hard part of advertising. Data privacy laws continue to evolve and shape the digital marketing landscape and will continue to do so for many years to come.

The code half goes back further. I wrote my first program in the early 1980s in BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80, took a few courses in college in the 1990s, and started taking it seriously again in the mid-2000s by teaching myself PHP, SQL, HTML and CSS. I'm mostly self-taught as a developer and designer. These days that means Python for AI development and automation, and Ruby on Rails for web applications with some occasional JavaScript and other languages. My most recent project is Pydak, a CRM I built to solve a measurement problem I kept running into for clients.

The combination of marketing and programming is what I mean by marketing engineering: running the campaigns and building the systems that measure them, rather than buying the systems from someone else and hoping the numbers line up. It means understanding the timeless principles of marketing but also having deep knowledge of the underlying technology that powers so much of marketing today.

In a previous life I worked in equity research, starting on the sell side at a technology investment bank in San Francisco during the dot-com boom and its subsequent bust. Later I worked on the buy side for a mutual fund and an investment and tax advisory firm in Marin County, CA. It was a useful education in business that later helped with managing paid search campaigns.

Away from the keyboard, I play guitar and piano, cook, travel and hike California's central coast where I live.