Chapter 1

How a Dirt Road led to Times Square

I grew up on a dirt road hollow in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

I put myself through college on a lacrosse scholarship, Dean’s List grades, and every spare hour I could find working at a local television station in Winchester, Virginia.

By senior year, I had completed an internship at The Washington Post and accepted an editorial and news assistant offer with USA Today.

The path seemed set. I was going to be a journalist.

Decision made.

Then in early May, an email arrived in my inbox from MTV.

After being waitlisted for over a year, they offered me an unpaid summer internship.

I had no income, no fallback plan, and no guarantee it would lead anywhere....

I said yes, immediatley.

My only objective was simple: work as hard and as visibly as I could, and hope someone gave me a chance.

Luckily, someone did.

One of the senior producers I worked for took notice and when he left for a new opportunity at the end of August, he asked me to come with him.

That invitation led to On2 Technologies, an early moonshot tech company inside the Tribeca Film Center, working at the edge of web video and compression schemes before streaming was mainstream.

As a junior producer, editor, and motion graphics artist, I worked across emerging digital projects while contributing to larger productions in an environment where experimentation and invention were part of the daily culture.

It was the first time I saw technology, storytelling, and systems beginning to converge... and I was hooked.

1999-2000 chapter title with 6on2 and ESPN logos.

Then the Dot-Com Bubble Burst

Barely seven months in, almost overnight, the company collapsed and what looked like a clear path disappeared.

Instead of waiting for the market to recover, I leveraged every connection I had and pivoted into live sports production with ESPN, starting as a shotgun mic operator and working my way into studio camera roles across Senior PGA, NASCAR, and LPGA broadcasts.

It was a radically different education in precision, pressure, teamwork, and technical discipline, in live environments where there are no retakes.

That chapter proved short-lived as well. By the end of 2000, rights deals had shifted. ABC became the primary PGA Tour rights holder, and new broadcast agreements moved NASCAR coverage to Fox Broadcasting Company and NBC.

On November 5, the IR Senior Tour Championship in South Carolina was the final golf event I worked.

On November 20, the NAPA 500 became the last NASCAR event I worked under ESPN’s banner.

Two industries.

Two abrupt disruptions.

Two forced reinventions.

That sequence shaped a pattern that would repeat throughout my career: adapt quickly, build inside uncertainty, and treat disruption as an operating condition rather than an exception.

That was the foundation.

Everything else built from there.

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