What happened.

Twenty years of this, under six different banners. The names changed. The machine and the mission didn't.

I got a bit better at it. But it's a humbling business, and I'm honored to still be standing and still be useful.

Most of it comes down to the same thing. Somebody inside a company needed help winning an argument, and the argument was usually about whether the right work was worth doing at all. The part I like most is being with good people while it's still messy.

Clients are described rather than named, except where they've said otherwise. Six at a time, out of a lot more. More will show up here as they're done.

A connected bottle, years before anyone asked for one.

Anheuser-Busch InBev ran an innovation outpost in Silicon Valley whose job was matching brand needs to outside technology. They knew what they wanted to try. They didn't know who could build it.

I'd just left frog and signed my first partner, an Austin studio for the digital and the build, and brought in an independent industrial designer alongside them. Even then, one shop was never going to do both.

We prototyped the world's first digital bottle. A Budweiser with a display wrapped around it, glowing, showing messages. Built in record time, aimed at the Brazil World Cup.

The CMO didn't fund it. We made a film instead, played it to the ABI executive team, and more projects followed.

That was the first match I ever made. It took me another decade to build a business around it.

AB InBev · Chaotic Moon · 2012

They needed ideas that could survive their own leadership.

One of Asia's largest mobile operators, planning a move into the US with several new ventures on the table and no way to know which could hold up in a funding conversation at home.

The program came out of a relationship, not a pitch. Months of late calls to Seoul, every detail, before there was any work to win. Their lead there taught me what being useful to a client actually means.

Twenty-odd people ran it out of Palo Alto once it landed, one of the highest revenue-per-month programs frog ever had. Some of it got funded. Eighteen years on, I still can't say which.

SK Telecom · frog · 2007

I went in hoping for elevators.

I'd always wanted to work with a company that made big metal things that move. So I pitched United Technologies an innovation program across their divisions, take on the hard problems and build the engine internally, then waited to see who'd raise a hand.

Onity did. They make the machines that program hotel key cards for most of the world's hotels, and theirs had been on front desks so long that an agent told me it came over on the Mayflower.

Three weeks. Three cities, nineteen front-desk agents, twelve prototypes put in front of the people who'd actually use them. The answer came from a young desk manager rather than from us. Make it work like the credit card reader already sitting next to it.

The contract came through Carrier. I'd wanted air conditioning and elevators and got a hotel front desk instead. It was better work than I expected, and it became the way in to the rest of UTRC.

UTC / Onity · Ziba · 2016

Eight people assembled for one mission.

A funded startup in Salt Lake City, founded by people who'd already run security companies at scale, building something genuinely new: a way for people to control their own digital footprint, before most of us had thought to want one.

It came to me through a friend. Neither I nor the firm would have found them otherwise, and that's when I understood referrals are the whole game. Eight people, product, engineering and design, put together for this specific mission rather than pulled off a bench.

What they built shipped as MySudo. Years ahead of its time.

Anonyome Labs · Cogniance, now Star · 2018

Could health be the reason someone switches phones?

Samsung's US arm had a question their own data couldn't answer, and health and wellness was the suspected lever.

The brief arrived over coffee in Dallas. Spoken, with gaps. Five more calls before it was something a research program could answer, against a budget small enough that where the team spent its time mattered more than usual.

The answer was uncomfortable. Not a technology problem. Features that disrupted an existing habit were worse than nothing at all.

It landed with the US leaders, and it landed in Seoul. Last thing I did before leaving to start my own.

Samsung Electronics America · Fresh · 2023

The hardest part was getting it approved at all.

One of the world's most-used AI writing tools, mid CEO transition and moving upmarket. They asked for a visual identity refresh.

Usually a budget is signed off before I'm involved. Not here. My value was mostly front-loaded: bringing in a team in Oslo they'd never have found, then building the ROI case with their lead until it cleared the CEO and CFO.

After that it was the team's. A thousand details I didn't manage. I'm proud of what they pulled off. Then again, I already knew they would. The new brand is live now, and shaping what they build next.

QuillBot · Eidra's Kurppa Hosk team · 2025