About
For forty years, I’ve been asking: How do we design systems that empower people rather than control them?
That question has guided everything I’ve done: from being the editorial leader of Time Warner’s first digital portal in 1994, where I wrote a planning document on “Intelligent Agents”; to building blockchain-based social platforms that decentralize content ownership; to founding Homesy, a real estate startup that challenged industry orthodoxies about who owns—and has the tools to grow—home data.
Intelligent Agents, c. 1994. Click to read the document.
Now, as AI agents begin making decisions and taking actions on behalf of users, that question is more urgent than ever: How do we protect and extend human agency when we delegate decision-making to machines? AI promises greater efficiency and productivity, but modern systems from government to social applications and DAOs often end up doing the opposite: disempowering the very people they claim to serve.
My approach: Access, Responsiveness, and Co-creation (ARC) a framework for putting humans inside the AI loop so users feel they matter, brands build trust, and AI amplifies rather than replaces human capability.
Expertise
Strategic Leadership: Content Strategy | Go-to-Market Strategy | Product Marketing | Business Model Design | Category Design
Content & Editorial: Editorial Direction | Thought Leadership | Copywriting | Content Design | Brand Publishing | SEO/GEO
Research & Analysis: Customer Development | Competitive Analysis | Market Research | Persona Development | JTBD Analysis
Emerging Technology: Agentic AI | Blockchain | Platform Design | Digital Transformation | Innovation Strategy
Industries: Real Estate | Media | Publishing | Financial Services | Consumer Technology | Blockshain | SaaS
How I got here
Education
BA, Honors in Government, Oberlin College
M.Sc., Econ., History of Political Thought, London School of Economics
MBA, Management, NYU Leonard Stern School of Business
1980s: Punk tyro
The moment DIY ethics became the template for startup culture
Art, Music, Critical writing: Documenting the hothouse of early 80s art in NYC for Art in America, ArtNews, Artforum, ZG, Los Angeles Times, and as performance art editor of the East Village Eye
Author of The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren, the first definitive biography of the manager of the Sex Pistols, and his wife, Dame Vivienne Westwood (Harper & Row Perennial Library, US, and Omnibus Press, UK).
Performance art productions at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and PS 122, PS 1/MOMA, and Just Above Midtown/Downtown. (See Art page.)
Music: Five years playing guitar in the orchestral rock ensembles of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca (Symphonies 1-5)
1990s: Writing from digital Ground Zero:
Reporting from the frontiers of digital life.
EchoNYC, User 11Feature journalism for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, New York, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and many others. (See: Writing page)
Writes “In Defense of Hackers” for The New York Times Magazine, profiling the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, meets Walter Isaacson, and is hired to be first editor of Time Inc. Online which becomes Time Warner Pathfinder, the first media portal.
1993-2011: In the trenches of Paid, Owned & Earned
Nearly twenty years leading the conception and launch of media for the world’s biggest media, finance, and tech companies
Time Warner Pathfinder‘s founding editor
Led six Disney magazines (Discover, Family Fun, Family PC, etc.), executive producer of hyperionbooks.com, editor in chief of Booksfirst, a hybrid print/online books magazine with DoubledayDirect ecommerce fulfillment
Editorial director for a six country launch of Bertelsmann’s bol.com
Founder of Bookhits, a community for book lovers
Executive editor of ZiffDavis eShopper, a luxury online shopping mag
Editor-in-chief of Samsung’s award-winning magazines on digital innovation, DigitAll and Mobile Mode. Author and producer of Samsung Electronics 2003 Annual Report
Founder, TheGreen, a blog site and free business newspaper
Editorial Director Citi Real Estate Lending‘s mortgage.com
Editor in chief and programming director, AOL Real Estate
2011-2016: Social transformation
Customer-obsessed startups FTW
Business development and senior marketing roles at Zemanta (native advertising), Dachis Group (social business optimization), and SurveyMonkey (the market leader in cloud-based market research), three companies that made co-creation with consumers core to their competitive strategy.
2014-2018: Teaching what’s next:
Adjunct lecturer at Parsons School of Design at the apogee of Design Thinking, teaching graduate (MS) and undergraduate (BBA) classes in Strategic Design & Management about the design of systems and strategic agency. (See Teaching page.)
Classes include:- Strategic Design & Management in New Economies
- Design of New Firms
- Business Model Innovation & Planning
- Leadership & Innovation
2017-2020: Blockchain rises:
Decentralized financial systems are part of a fundamental shift in how we organize economic value and creative ownership.Blockhouse, my marketing agency, created thought leadership and campaigns for blockchain startups and led to roles as CMO for Steemit, the first social media token, Kowala, a non-collateralized stablecoin, and Gilded, a crypto accounting solution. (See Entrepreneuring page.)
2021-2024: Getting homesy:
At the frontier of consumer-led real estate
At the peak of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, I developed homesy, a peer-to-peer home discovery portal to give consumers greater transparency and access to the home data that really matters. Homesy challenged foundational real estate orthodoxies—constraints on user communication and the content design of listings—to reshape the top of the real estate funnel by putting consumers at its center. (See Homesy page.)
2025: What I’m doing now:
I help companies navigate the shift to agentic AI through a focus on how we can bring agentic technologies to specific customer-focused verticals (e.g., real estate), with human interaction prominent in prompt design and orchestration.
Consulting: Strategic positioning, content strategy, and go-to-market design for products in the age of AI agents. See consulting.
Writing: Thought leadership on the future of consumer real estate and agentic technologies. Read my work: writing.
Teaching: Graduate and undergraduate courses in entrepreneurship, leadership, and the design of agency in complex systems. See my syllabi: teaching.
