I was never supposed to be a marketer
I've been a rock and roll kid since I was nine. Drums, bands, loud guitars. That wiring has been underneath everything I've ever done.
Marketing was never supposed to be the job. When I joined Red Bull, the brand still belonged to people like me. Misfits. Loud. Allergic to the corporate script. Then the Procter alumni arrived. Then the Unilever ones. Best practice everywhere. The energy drained out of the room in slow motion. I didn't fit. I never did.
I ran trade marketing across 20+ markets in Latin America on $10M+ budgets. I learned how a brand actually gets built: not by buying attention, but by earning the conversation people have when no one is watching. The F1, the cliff divers, the cartoons, the entire Red Bull machine was built to do one thing. Get people talking. The conversation at the bar was the metric.
Then I blew it up. I left a successful retail marketing career to start a company. Timewarp Delivery, first to market with sub 1-hour delivery in South Africa. It failed, expensively. It taught me everything.
Five years ago I wasn't earning a cent. Startup couldn't pay me. Ex-employers weren't interested. Covid crushed the job search. I was convinced my career was over, and heavily depressed. I had a small kid at home and another on the way.
So I started over from zero. I layered on new skills like snake skin, one topic conquered every week, until I'd turned myself into a tech and digital marketing machine. I stuck my neck out in the one thing I was actually passionate about: crypto. I was willing to be the dumbest guy in the room again. On purpose.
The first time I sat in a room with people building real Bitcoin infrastructure, the wiring switched back on. They weren't trying to fit in. They were rebuilding the system from the outside, loud about the things that mattered. Misfits. My people.
Since then I've run growth at Crypto Banter, one of the world's largest crypto media brands, closing deals with the likes of Jason Derulo. And at Xverse, a Bitcoin neobank, where I repositioned a 2M-user wallet, closed Google, and rebuilt the entire growth function as one person using AI automation after the team was laid off.
I work remotely, family first, currently out of South East Asia. No office, no commute, no asking permission to live my life. I traded the "safety" of the corporate ladder for the only thing that turned out to matter: control.
I still work harder than almost anyone I know. Now the thing I produce looks like me. The actual me. Not the focus-grouped, on-brand, corporate-guidelines version.
We're still just getting started.