Startups

The first startup. In 2010, while teaching 7th grade grammar, I turned the parts of speech into characters and raised $900,000+ to build the apps, videos, and platform to bring them to life. Over two million app downloads and ten million YouTube views later, it's still running.

The full story lives on the Education page. As a startup, it was where I learned that building something people actually use is harder and more interesting than almost anything else. Grammaropolis is now pivoting toward AI-powered writing and grammar experiences built around the same cast of characters.

Six Foot, a Houston video game studio, hired me to start a publishing subsidiary in 2018. I was President of Six Foot Press, with full operational control over acquisitions, contracts, production, and distribution. Running an independent book publisher inside a gaming company made more sense than it sounds: they had IP worth extending into print; I had the background to do it.

In four years we published across a wide range: comics (Dreadnought Legends) building out the world of the Six Foot video game Dreadnought, a novel (It Doesn't Take a Genius) acting as the sequel to the Six Foot Pictures feature film Boy Genius, picture books illustrated by Coretta Scott King Award winner Charly Palmer and Pura Belpré Award winner Susan Guevara; a Bill Sienkiewicz art monograph in Trade and Limited Editions with an introduction by Neil Gaiman; and institutional co-publications with the Peabody Essex Museum, Rice University, History Nebraska, and Baylor University. Six Foot Press titles are distributed through Ingram worldwide.

Six Foot spun out a new entity to build technology for the gaming industry. I co-founded it and eventually became CEO. The original bet was on digital asset infrastructure for games: items players actually owned, could trade, could carry from one title to another. We built the full stack. Then spent three years asking ourselves the same question: why this technology, specifically?

That question became a discipline. We never shipped an answer we didn't believe. We pivoted, renamed to Arden Labs, raised a Series Seed, joined the Creative Destruction Lab accelerator in Montreal, and rebuilt as Quest Commerce: a gamified loyalty platform where merchants got a white-labeled app and customers earned points and completed challenges tied to their purchase history. By late 2024 we had live customers and signed letters of intent.

In November 2024, a call with Eric Allen, CEO of LISNR, answered the question we'd been asking for three years. Two companies describing each other's missing pieces. LISNR acquired Arden Labs on January 3, 2025.

The job is partnership architecture more than sales: figuring out which industries the technology creates real leverage in, then building the commercial relationships to deploy it. The pipeline runs across transit systems in India, Colombia, Spain, and Singapore; forecourt fueling and fleet operations in the US; enterprise authentication; retail media networks; and loyalty programs for stadiums and regional retail chains.

The two products I lead:

The platform I built at Arden Labs. Quest gives merchants a white-labeled consumer app and a no-code management portal where customers earn points and complete challenges tied to purchases, visits, and any custom event tracked via webhook. At LISNR, it functions as the loyalty layer in deployments where Radius handles the physical connection.

Ultrasonic data-over-audio technology with 131+ patents. Radius transmits data via inaudible tones between any devices with a speaker and microphone: no specialized hardware, no camera, no internet required at the moment of transaction. After a decade of development, the commercial question is no longer whether it works. It's where the combination of capabilities creates a hard argument.