Experience matters when it turns into judgment.

I started out as a creative. But from the beginning I asked too many questions before executing anything. What is this for? What should someone feel when they use it? What problem does it actually solve? That led me to rethink entire projects before designing a thing. Working for Disney, Univision and DIRECTV I won two Emmy Awards — one for best art direction for a television network and one for best campaign. Not because the work was pretty. Because every piece was built on a clear strategic idea. That's where I understood that the kind of creativity I cared about was creativity in service of a strategy. When there wasn't one, I built it. Doing that full-time was the natural next step.

The move to Silicon Valley was no accident. I was always an early adopter — technology interested me as much as design. But what drew me in was seeing a problem no one was solving: an entire industry talking to its engineers instead of talking to its customers. Marketing centered on technical specs, with no narrative, no story, no emotional connection. I saw I could bring something that was missing: the ability to translate complex technology into something people could understand, remember and choose. That took me to DivX, Rovi, DTS and TiVo.

I've seen brands preparing to be sold that needed a story to justify their value. Brands starting to fade into obscurity that needed reasons to be relevant again. Companies with impressive technology portfolios being ignored because no one knew how to tell their story. Each of those situations required the same thing: building clarity where there was none. What I learned in the process is that a brand isn't a pretty wrapper around a product. It's the meaning that product holds in the consumer's mind — the idea that makes someone think something specific when they hear the name. Building that idea with judgment is what determines whether a product competes or simply exists.