My career has spanned restaurants, consumer products, technology, education, and hospitality, but the underlying challenge has always been the same: creating something people don’t simply use, but something they actually care about.
I believe the strongest companies don’t compete on products alone. They create meaning. They build trust. They foster belonging. And they leave people with experiences worth remembering.
Today I work with founders, CEOs, investors, and leadership teams to shape strategy, brand, customer experience, and long-term growth.
I’ve spent more than three decades helping build consumer businesses by bringing together brand, customer experience, operations, design, technology, and strategy.
For nearly ten years, I served as an executive at Chipotle Mexican Grill, where I was Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Development Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer. During that time, Chipotle grew from an emerging restaurant chain into one of the world’s most influential consumer brands. In addition to marketing, I led real estate, architecture, construction, facilities, customer experience, and strategy, helping oversee the opening of more than 1,000 restaurants.
Earlier in my career I co-founded an agency called Studio Archetype in San Francisco. Apple was our primary client, but we did work for brands across Silicon Valley and beyond. Studio Archetype was acquired by Sapient in 1997. I then founded an agency called Sequence whose clients included Google, Sonos, Chevron, Best Buy, and Chipotle. Sequence was subsequently acquired by Salesforce, but the work I did for Chipotle led them to ask me to become their first CMO in 2008.
Since leaving Chipotle, I’ve worked with founders, boards, and investors as an executive, advisor, and board member, including leadership roles with Impossible Foods, MasterClass, I Squared Capital, and other emerging companies.
Today I’m a Partner at Paladar Inc., where I invest in and help build hospitality and consumer businesses, and I serve on the Board of Directors of DIG INN.
The essays on this site are observations drawn from successes, failures, and the sometimes counterintuitive lessons that emerge when building brands over the long term. While the stories often come from restaurants, I believe the underlying principles apply to almost any business.
Brands are experiences.
A brand is not a logo or an advertising campaign. It’s the accumulation of thousands of decisions, interactions, and moments that shape how people feel. Every customer touchpoint is branding.
People seek belonging, not transactions.
The organizations that endure create communities, not customers. The most successful restaurants become rituals. The most admired companies become movements. The most memorable destinations become shared experiences.
Great design is invisible.
The best experiences rarely call attention to themselves. Instead, they create clarity, reduce friction, and make people feel something they may not even recognize in the moment—but remember long afterward.
Wonder is an undervalued business strategy.
The businesses that surprise, delight, and inspire people earn something more valuable than attention. They earn advocacy. Wonder creates stories. Stories create loyalty.
Simplicity requires courage.
The hardest strategic decisions are rarely about what to add. They’re about what to remove. The clearest brands, products, and experiences are often the result of relentless simplification.
The Chipotle of X
The most successful business models are rarely defined by the feature everyone notices first—and why Chipotle’s system is so hard to replicate.
Read the essayMission Is Not Positioning
Lessons from Impossible Foods
A mission inspires the people building a company. Positioning persuades the people buying from it. Those audiences often need very different messages.
Read the essayMarketing Nobody Wants to Do
Lessons from Emerging Brands
There is no magic digital strategy waiting to be discovered. Sales are built one conversation at a time, within a few miles of every front door.
Read the essayThe Menu Is Not the Strategy
Lessons from Sweetgreen
A menu can tell you what people are willing to buy. It cannot, by itself, tell you what a brand should stand for.
Read the essayLight Forms
In addition to my work building brands, I create original art and sculpture. While the medium is different, the intention is much the same: to create something distinctive that makes people feel something special.
The Light Forms are constructed entirely from acrylic, including fluorescent materials that absorb ambient light and re‑emit it with unusual intensity. This makes the sculptures appear to glow, even though they contain no electricity, lighting or internal power source.
Their simple geometric forms allow light and color to become the subject. As light passes through overlapping translucent surfaces, edges intensify, interior elements appear to float, and color radiates onto the surrounding wall. The work changes with the room, the time of day and the viewer’s position.
I am interested in the contradiction they create. The sculptures are physically passive, yet they appear energized—almost electrically alive. They do not simply occupy a space; they change the way the space feels and, in turn, the way people feel within it.
