WORKING NOTE / 01
Systems should make room for people.
A journey is more than a sequence. It is a set of conditions that can respond to what someone is trying to do.
CREATIVE VIDEO + EXPERIENCE DESIGN / SOLO PRACTICE
We can do more now.
For most of my career, I thought I had to choose a lane.
Engineer or artist. Founder or creative. Technologist or storyteller. Strategy or execution.
I don't believe that anymore.
AI is collapsing the distance between an idea and our ability to make it real. It doesn't eliminate the value of human creativity. It gives creative people a much larger canvas.
Pink Stack Studio is what happens when all of my disciplines stop competing and begin working as one. It is a creative solo practice for making films and experiences—not a SaaS-building agency.
A working thesis / still in motion
A moving stack of painted, charcoal, pink, and material studies for the roles that shape Pink Stack Studio. This silent study loops continuously.
01
A convergence of passions.
I started as a software engineer on the Journey Builder product at ExactTarget. I went on to become Director of Engineering at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, working on systems at massive scale and learning the rigor that regulated industries demand.
I later became a founder and CEO. At EIG, my last company, my team and I helped dozens of B2B SaaS companies build and launch products. Today, I still lead ZIVIS, a cybersecurity company built around a question I care deeply about: how can people trust the increasingly intelligent systems operating around them?
But creativity has always been present—through design, painting, music, storytelling, products, and the obsessive urge to turn an idea into something another person can experience.
Pink Stack is not me abandoning one identity for another. It is a different kind of practice: a creative solo practice focused on creative video and experience design, where the full range of what I can do belongs in the same room.
These are working notes, references, and fragments from the practice—not a résumé.
PINK STACK / 001
The line carries the idea.
In the prototype, one hot-pink thread connects water, sport, couture, racing, machinery, and a city.
ZIVIS / ASSURANCE
Trust is part of the experience.
Building intelligent systems also means designing the conditions in which people can understand and trust them.
02 / THE AI THESIS
The biggest change isn't that AI can make more content. It's that we can create entirely different kinds of experiences.
For years, marketing automation promised the right message, delivered to the right person, at the right time. That mattered. I spent years helping build that world.
But it was still fundamentally a world of sequences. A person entered a segment, reached a decision point, received a message, and moved to the next step.
Even hyper-personalization usually meant changing the message: a different subject line, recommendation, video, or path through a predetermined journey.
That is no longer the edge. The next generation of experiences will not simply show people personalized content. They will listen, respond, reason, remember, collaborate, and change direction with the person experiencing them.
Marketing automation is becoming experience orchestration.
03
The journey has changed.
THE OLD JOURNEY
A journey designed in advance
TRIGGERSEGMENTSEQUENCEMESSAGECONVERSION
The system decided which prepared experience to deliver.
THE NEW JOURNEY
A journey created with the person
CONVERSATIONCONTEXTDECISIONSCREATIONCOLLABORATION
The system can participate in shaping an experience that did not fully exist before the person arrived.
04 / THE ROOM
The next interface may be a room.
Not necessarily a physical room. A living space made from conversation, ideas, decisions, tools, collaborators, and intelligent systems—all assembled around what one person is trying to accomplish.
Imagine entering an experience that does more than recommend a video. It can help you examine a decision. Challenge an assumption. Develop an idea. Create something with you. Introduce the perspective you are missing. Remember where you have been. Help you become more capable over time.
It can feel less like navigating a campaign and more like being placed in a room with the people, knowledge, and creative forces that help you become the best version of yourself.
This is where I believe marketing, software, media, education, and companionship begin to overlap. This is the territory I want Pink Stack to explore.
AN UNFINISHED IDEA
CONVERSATIONKNOWLEDGECREATIVE DIRECTIONSOFTWAREDECISION-MAKINGMEMORYCOLLABORATIONMEDIAHUMAN JUDGMENT05
This may be the best possible time to be everything I am.
I have spent years moving between worlds that were usually kept separate.
Engineering taught me how systems work. Marketing automation taught me how experiences move. Building companies taught me how ideas survive contact with reality. Cybersecurity taught me that trust must be designed. Art taught me to notice what cannot be measured. Creative direction taught me how separate elements become a feeling.
AI does not make those experiences obsolete. It allows me to bring all of them to the same piece of work.
For the first time, I do not have to reduce myself to one role before I begin. And neither does anyone else.
A LIFE AROUND THE WORK
The practice has a life around it.
Family, friends, dogs, and the ordinary scenes that keep attention human are part of the material too. They are the reason the work needs to stay curious, specific, and alive.
06
Paintings, drawings, and motion.
Relatively High and Low.
An AI-assisted composite study combining an oil painting on canvas titled Relatively High and Low with a charcoal study of the same name. This source clip has no audio.
The studio is not the only place I make things. Painting and drawing have always been part of how I think: slower, physical, and attentive to what a system cannot flatten into a result.
Relatively High and Low is an oil painting on canvas and a charcoal study with the same name. The short video is an AI-assisted composite of those two physical pieces, letting them meet, separate, and become something that could only exist in motion.
I am interested in that exchange between the made object and the generated image. The technology is useful when it helps the work reveal another possibility—not when it asks the work to disappear.
Original paintings & drawings.
A selection of my original artworks, made by hand.
07 / PINK STACK'S BELIEF
Creativity is no longer confined by the size of your team, the boundaries of your title, or the medium in which you were trained.
The opportunity is not to manufacture infinite content.
It is to attempt work that previously required us to become someone else, wait for permission, assemble an enormous team, or abandon the idea entirely.
We can build the film. Build the interface. Build the system behind it. Build the conversation around it. Then connect the entire experience to a real human and business outcome.
We can do more now.
08 / AN OPEN INVITATION
Bring the idea that doesn't fit neatly anywhere.
Pink Stack Studio is a creative solo practice for companies, founders, marketers, and creative teams pursuing ideas that cannot be solved by a campaign, a SaaS build, or a piece of content alone. If the idea requires creative video, experience design, technology, storytelling, experimentation, and an unreasonable amount of curiosity, it probably belongs here.