Every Time I Walked Toward the Future, the Room Told Me to Go Back

Five waves. Thirty years. And every single time, the people I respected told me to go back to the safe job.

In 1995 I was 25 years old and a senior record executive at Columbia Records spending my days making people famous and my evenings trying to find tech hackers in New York City.

My higher-ups wanted to know what I was doing.
I was supposed to be worried about radio and SoundScan and whether Nas was going to make it to the Tower Records In-Store tomorrow.

When I wasn't at my desk, I was off in the early tech meetups, the downtown circles, spending time on New York Online, soaking up the game from people like Omar Wasow who would go on to create the first community online that mattered and everyone copied called Black Planet. Before Facebook

And when I was in the 550 Madison Avenue office, I was camped out in Mark Ghuneim's office.
He ran new media at Columbia, he had a online zine called Wiredset I read like scripture, and he was the only person in that building who understood why a guy from the music side was talking about the internet like it was about to eat the world.

That question followed me for thirty years.

Every time I moved toward the future, someone I respected asked me what the hell I was doing.

I'm about to ask a hundred people to feel that same question on purpose.
Stay with me.

When I left Columbia Records shiny, powerful and prestigious record label job for a “dot com” called Urban Box Office, people told me to go take the safe job.

Def Jam.
Arista.
J Records.

Any of them would have had me.
I went to the dot com instead, and we raised $75m dollars in eighteen months.
This was 1998 kids. I hadn’t even turned 30 yet.

Years later I was at Ketchum PR in the Omincom family, hired to build websites and intranets.
I talked them into letting me build a social media practice instead.

I had watched Barack Obama win and seen something underneath it.
A campaign could organize a whole country through these platforms, and one day brands would move the same way.

Nobody was asking for that yet. I built it anyway.

I even stood up a small team in Brazil, because Brazil was early on a platform called Orkut and I wanted to be where the future was showing up first.

That Brazil crew is how I met Jesse Stollak and the Nike people.

When I left to start my own agency, I went up against AKQA and R/GA, the giants, by myself.
People thought it was a bad bet.
I knew how the work got priced because I invented it at Ketchum and how it got built, so I competed.

I won Nike.
I won CNN
I won Beats by Dre.
I won Equinox.

I even set the first Guinness World Record for Social Media. Don Lemon from CNN gave me a challenge. I met it in 72 hours and he put me on the air to talk about.

I was “Un-Fade-able”

When I left Atlanta, where I was told I was “the man,” and where I had real community, people could not understand it.

Why would you leave?

I left because I wanted to learn how venture capital really works.
How a deal gets done.
How you read the terms, how you size a founder, why any of it matters.
So I went and learned it as CEO of a venture studio.

Then the pandemic, and I was figuring it out like everybody else.
I put investment into Clubhouse and lived in social audio trying to understand where it was going.

When Ripple gave me a chance to build on their blockchain, I built a thing called Creators Union with DJ Jazzy Jeff, to unlock opportunities for creators.
I had never built anything in blockchain in my life.
The wallet was brutal.
It did not work.

I am leaving that one in.
It did not work.
I went anyway, and it did not work, and I would do it again tomorrow.

When AI arrived, the wave everyone is bracing against, I did not write a take about it.

A couple of years ago, a man named King Willonius came into my life with an AI track and a lot of nerve, and I helped manage the first AI created song called “BBL Drizzy” in history onto the Billboard charts.

Same move I have made my whole life.
Find the person the moment they matter. Get in the room.

Now I have been in Johannesburg, Dubai, Bangkok.
Making films and music with AI.
Writing.
Building AI agents and layers.
And the question has not changed.

People ask why I am not in Malibu at Soho House on a Friday, why I am not at the conferences, where I even am.
I am in the emerging markets, the places that are early, the same way Brazil was early, the same way the internet was early.
I know I am in the right place.
Now I want to bring it to the world.

Through a lot of it, there was Clarence Avant.

The man they called the Black Godfather sat as chairman of our board at Urban Box Office.
He did not always follow the technology.
He understood me.
When everyone else was telling me to go back to music, Clarence told me to stick with this.
Forget music.
Stay in this technology thing.
He said it in his own language, saltier than that.

He did not need the details to know I was in the right lane.
That is the thing about the people who really see you.
They are not betting on your plan.
They are betting on you.

That is the only thing I am trying to do here.
Bet on some people early.
The room is where I do it.

Here is what all of it was teaching me, and I only understand it now.

Being early was never about the technology.
It was about the nerve to begin again before anyone claps for you.
To walk out of the safe room while people are still asking what you are doing.
Five times the wave proved me right, and every time the price was the same.
I had to start over, alone, looking a little foolish, before it made sense to anyone else.

The machine has made this the only skill that matters.
It already took the mechanical work back.
The aiming, the busywork, the parts that were never your gift.
What is left is the only thing that was never mechanical.

Imagination.
Identity.
The nerve to begin again.

The machine is not replacing you.
It is revealing you.

It is about to show the whole world the exact size of what you can imagine, and the tools are the same for everyone now, so the only thing left to separate people is the size of the image they bring and the courage to start.

So I am opening a room.

It is called MAKE: The Gathering.
August 1 through 3.
Three days, live, built in real time, paired with a book I am writing as it happens, Day One: React or Create.

Not a prompt course.
Not another AI lecture.
A room that turns into a community, and the community is where I find the people I am going to build the next ten years with.

Because somewhere right now there is a person about to get asked what the hell they are doing.
About to leave the safe room.
About to begin again.
I was that person for thirty years, and Clarence built a room for me.
This is me building one back.

That is the offer.
Not a seat.
A table.

One hundred seats, and the cap is real, because the room only works if it stays small enough to see everyone in it.

The founding bundle is ninety-seven dollars, grandfathered for life, because the people who show up on Day One always get the best seat in the house.

I have spent thirty years walking toward the thing before anyone else would.
I am doing it again.

Come find out what you would build if you stopped asking permission.

PS. A hundred seats means I will personally see every person who walks in.
If that is you, come early