I've won two Grammy Awards. Not for producing beats or writing songs — for singing. I grew up in the Pacific Boychoir Academy, and twice we won. I was a kid in a choir robe holding a golden gramophone, and I had absolutely no idea what it meant.
What it meant, I'd figure out much later, was that I'd been trained in creative discipline before I knew those words existed.
The choir taught me systems
Choral singing is a system. Sixty voices producing one sound. You learn to listen — not just to your own part, but to the whole. You learn that your individual performance only matters in the context of the group. You learn that rehearsal is where the real work happens, and performance is just the output of all that invisible preparation.
I didn't know it at the time, but that's operations. That's how you run a team. That's how you build a product. The individual contribution matters, but only in service of the whole.
Burning Man taught me to ship
In my late twenties, I started building art installations. The first one — the Gratitude Grove — was a 20-foot interactive geometric tree that I designed with Lucas, an architect friend, and built with Evan, who's since taken it to festivals across the country.
Festival installations have a hard deadline: the festival starts on this date, and your piece needs to be standing. There's no "we'll push the launch." There's no MVP. You show up in the desert with a truck full of lumber and lights and you build the thing.
That experience taught me more about shipping than any startup methodology. Scope down. Build what matters. Test in the real world. Fix it live. The Gratitude Grove wasn't perfect — but it was there, it was lit up, and people loved it.
I took that same energy to CrewLAB and Breeasy. Ship something real. Put it in front of people. Learn from what happens.
Music taught me taste
I produce electronic music as Enharmonic. My EP "The Angels" came out in January. Making music is the purest form of creative decision-making I know — every sound, every arrangement, every mix decision is a choice about what belongs and what doesn't.
That's taste. And taste is the most underrated skill in business.
When I'm building a platform for a client, I'm making taste decisions constantly. What goes on the homepage. What the admin panel shows by default. How many steps the onboarding takes. What to leave out. Every one of those decisions is the same muscle I use when I'm deciding whether a synth line serves the track or clutters it.
Rick Rubin says the job of the producer isn't to add — it's to remove everything that isn't essential. That's how I build technology too.
The through-line
Choir → art installations → electronic music → startup operations → custom tech platforms. It looks scattered on paper. But the skill is the same every time: see the whole system, build within constraints, ship something real, and trust your taste about what belongs.
I said something in a recent interview that I keep coming back to: the best things get built when you stop drawing lines between "creative" and "technical." The same instincts that go into making a song go into building a product. The same discipline that goes into installing a 20-foot tree in the desert goes into launching a platform.
It's all building. The medium changes. The work doesn't.
