I was an only child in Florida, and my first best friend was a computer.
The other kids were out there somewhere. I was in front of a screen — and behind the screen was everyone. The internet was the one place I wasn't alone. So when a ninth-grade web design class showed me that the words I typed could become a place other people could stand in, that was it. I've been pulling on that thread for twenty years.
College handed me a second obsession: music. I threw shows and chased the exact moment a room full of strangers loses it to the same song. Then I graduated, took a corporate job at Bank of America, and found out what my life looked like with both loves removed. (It looked like fluorescent lighting.)
The way back in was a music zine nobody read. To change "nobody," I had to learn how being found actually works — and that's how SEO got me. Not as a career. As a lifeline that turned out to be a puzzle I couldn't put down. The zine grew into press passes and a staff of writers. That led to running social for a music channel three million people followed. When it ended, I was 26, shooting NGHTMRE, SLANDER, and TOKiMONSTA from the wings while the bass came up through the floor.
Photography didn't pay rent. SEO did — and it took me a decade to see what that actually meant: I never gave anything up. People treat search like the coldest corner of marketing, where the soul goes to die. Look closer. It's the puzzle from ninth grade. It's the stage from the shows. It's an image you build so people can find their way to it. The traffic number is just applause you can graph.
I've spent ten years being the person who owns that number — as a department of one, as the builder of 20-person teams, and now leading SEO and AI search globally, where organic grew from 22% to 47% of company revenue on my watch and the board gets briefed on how machines talk about us.
Here's why the timing matters. I've watched the internet reorganize who-gets-found three times: portals to search, search to social, and now search to answers. Most of the industry is still grieving the old game. I'm on the record — in board decks, published frameworks, and one extremely handsome Google AI Overview — playing the new one. Because I recognize this moment: it's the machine that kept a lonely kid company, learning to talk back.
I really do love my computer.
