My favorite emotion is winning

I'm going to tell you something that you're not supposed to say out loud in the creative industry: I love winning. Not in the abstract. Not as a metaphor for personal growth. I mean the actual, specific, full-body high of pulling off something that everyone said couldn't be done and then standing in the middle of it while thousands of people lose their minds.

That feeling is the entire reason I do this.

I've built experiences for Absolut, Sour Patch Kids, Bud Light, Dell, Alienware, Shure, Red Bull, Oreo, Airbnb, Tito's, Audible, and a list of other brands that would take up the rest of this paragraph. I co-founded The Participation Agency and turned it into a pioneer of long-form experiential — not weekend pop-ups, but living, breathing installations that moved into neighborhoods and stayed for years. I did that for a decade. Then I exited the company during peak pandemic. The pandemic made everything experiential lose. Until I found the thing that won.

That thing was Sharks: a fully autonomous, staff-free pool club. No employees on-site. Everyone told me it was impossible. I opened seven locations in 24 months with tens of thousands of customers. Then I sold the company, because for me the lose was raising money — which I've never had to do — and in scaling brick and mortar, you need outside money past a certain size. So I went on to a new, bigger, badder, better winner: CAPE.

CAPE is an experiential entertainment company, designed to do things this industry hasn't figured out how to do yet. My partners, team and I intend to figure them out first.

Here's what I've noticed about the creative production world: the people writing about it have mostly never done it. They're analysts. Observers. They write smart things about campaigns they watched from the outside.

Nobody is coming from inside the room where the thing is actually getting built — and sharing the secrets of the build. The room where the budget just got cut by 40% and you have to figure out how to still make it spectacular. The room where the client just called at midnight to say they want it twice as big. The room where the fire marshal is asking questions you don't have answers to and the doors open in six hours.

I've been in that room for twenty years. I've never lost in that room.

I don't mean nothing has ever gone wrong. Things go wrong every single time — that's the nature of production. I mean I've never walked away from a project that didn't end up being exactly what I said it would be, or better. The difference between the people who win in this business and the people who don't isn't talent or taste or connections. It's the refusal to let the thing be anything less than extraordinary, no matter what it costs you personally to get there.

That's what I'm addicted to. The moment when the impossible thing becomes real and you're the team who made it happen.