Wildebeest

I'd always worked well as a freelancer. Project comes in, solve the problem, ship it, move to the next one. Efficient, autonomous, effective.

But something was missing.

What I actually wanted was the collaborative back-and-forth energy. The brainstorming sessions that stretch past midnight. The moment when someone on your team solves a problem in a way you hadn't considered. That team feeling where building something together matters more than building something alone.

Then the call came.

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Ran and Kevin had been two of my favorite students at General Assembly. Creative, ambitious, eager to push boundaries. After graduating, they'd started Wildebeest—a design and development agency building digital experiences for cultural brands.

They'd landed a major project. Disney and Spotify were collaborating on something ambitious, and Wildebeest won the contract. But they needed technical depth they didn't yet have.

"Can you help us ship this?" Ran asked.

I could have said yes to a three-month consulting gig and moved on. That's what freelancers do.

Instead, I said yes to building something together.

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Marina Del Rey

The Wildebeest office sat at the end of a pier in Marina Del Rey, twenty feet from where celebrity yachts docked. The kind of location that shouldn't work for an agency—too far from everything, too isolated—but somehow felt perfect for what we were building.

Small team. Direct collaboration. Everyone around the same table.

I remember sitting there teaching Ran and Kevin how to use GitHub properly, how to review code, how to think about architectural decisions. Not lecturing—working through it together on real projects with real stakes.

"Oh, we're really doing this," Kevin said one afternoon after we'd just solved a particularly tricky technical challenge together.

That feeling. That's what I'd been missing.

The transition from teacher to team lead happened naturally. They already saw me as an expert, knew my range across design and development. But this wasn't a hierarchical relationship—it was peers building something together, learning from each other, elevating the work through collaboration.

Three months of consulting turned into four years of transformation.

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Building Products While Building People

The work itself required technical sophistication the founders couldn't yet provide alone. Major brands with ambitious timelines and uncompromising standards. But the challenge wasn't just shipping projects—it was building team capability while delivering at that level.

Every project became an opportunity to teach while building.

Disney + Spotify: Character Matching

The project that brought me in: Disney and Spotify wanted an ML-driven playlist generator that would analyze your Spotify listening history and match you to characters from upcoming Disney releases.

The technical challenge wasn't trivial. We needed to understand music characteristics deeply enough to map them to character personality traits authentically. The product challenge was even harder: creating that "how does it know me so well?" feeling that makes algorithmic understanding feel magical rather than creepy.

I led development of the character matching system while teaching the team how recommendation algorithms actually work. Not just "here's the library we'll use" but the deeper thinking: how collaborative filtering differs from content-based approaches, why certain traits map to musical characteristics, how to balance accuracy with surprise.

We built the system. We met Disney's timeline. And the team walked away understanding ML concepts they'd use on every project after.

Fritos Super Bowl: Cheetle Detection

Super Bowl campaigns operate on a different timeline than normal work. Everything compresses. Stakes multiply.

Fritos had created an ad campaign around "Cheetle"—that orange dust left on your fingers after eating their chips. They wanted an app that would use ML vision detection to scan your hand through your phone's camera. If it detected orange dust on your fingers, you'd unlock special content.

Tight deadline. High visibility. The kind of project where quality couldn't slip despite pressure.

I led the vision detection work while ensuring our implementation would actually work reliably—not just in perfect lighting with perfectly orange fingers, but in the chaotic reality of millions of people trying this during a Super Bowl party.

The team learned ML vision principles while we shipped. They saw how to balance ambitious technical work with pragmatic reliability requirements. They experienced what it means to deliver under pressure without compromising standards.

The app worked. The campaign succeeded. The team grew.

Enterprise Scale

Not every project had the cultural cachet of Disney or the intensity of a Super Bowl campaign. But they all required the same commitment to quality and team development.

We built a thousand-page multi-language documentation site for a major enterprise hardware company. The technical architecture needed to handle global scale and localization complexity. The team learned how to think about performance at scale, how to architect systems that wouldn't collapse under their own weight.

We designed and built a membership community platform for a celebrity-driven brand. Product strategy, member experience, real-time features at scale. The team learned modern development practices while we shipped.

Every project layered new capability on top of what came before.

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Technical Transformation as Leadership

When I started, Wildebeest was a Rails shop. Ruby on Rails worked well enough, but the industry was moving. React was emerging. Modern development practices—CI/CD, automated testing, code review culture—weren't yet standard practice.

The agency needed to evolve its entire technical foundation while continuing to serve clients. You can't stop billing work to rebuild your stack.

So we did both simultaneously.

I introduced CI/CD pipelines while shipping the Fritos project—the team learned deployment automation by deploying under pressure. We established code review practices through daily work—every pull request became a teaching moment. We moved from Rails to React and Next.js incrementally, each new project pushing the technical boundaries further.

The transformation wasn't about adopting new tools because they were trendy. It was about building capability that would let the agency compete for more ambitious work. And it worked—each project we completed opened doors to the next.

More importantly, the junior developers who joined Wildebeest left capable of leading complex projects independently. The culture shifted from individual contributors working in isolation to collaborative team building where learning from each other became standard practice.

That's what leadership actually looks like. Not delegation. Elevation.

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The Jack-o'-Lantern

My favorite memory from Wildebeest wasn't a Disney launch or a Super Bowl campaign.

It was October. We were all working out of that tiny Marina Del Rey office. Halloween approaching. We'd been grinding on client work and needed a creative break—something just for us, just for fun.

Someone suggested building a Halloween project combining hardware and software. The idea evolved: a jack-o'-lantern that would light up, laugh with a spooky recorded laugh, and—the ambitious part—drop a piece of candy when you put your hand in its mouth.

No client. No revenue. No strategic business purpose.

Just the team building something creative together because we could.

We spent evenings and weekends wiring sensors, coding the interaction logic, testing candy-dropping mechanisms, recording increasingly ridiculous spooky laughs. It was collaborative problem-solving at its purest—everyone contributing ideas, trying things that didn't work, iterating until they did.

When it finally worked—when the jack-o'-lantern actually detected a hand, laughed, and dropped candy—the feeling in that room was better than any client approval.

That's when I understood what I'd actually been building at Wildebeest. Not just an agency serving cultural brands. Not just technical capability for ambitious projects.

A team that cared about making things together.

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Three months turned into four years.

The founders who'd been promising students at General Assembly became capable leads on complex projects. Junior developers who joined nervous about code reviews left confident enough to lead their own teams. The scrappy Rails shop became an agency that could compete for Disney releases and Super Bowl campaigns.

The transformation wasn't dramatic. No big speeches. Just daily work: reviewing pull requests together, talking through architectural decisions, shipping ambitious projects while teaching the concepts behind them.

That collaborative energy I'd been missing as a freelancer—the back-and-forth, the learning from each other, the feeling that building together matters more than building alone—I found it at the end of a pier in Marina Del Rey.

Teaching GitHub around a table. Building ML systems while explaining how recommendation algorithms work. Making a candy-dropping jack-o'-lantern on weekends just because we could.

The work proved we could deliver: Disney, Spotify, Super Bowl campaigns, enterprise platforms. But what I learned was different. Working alongside people, seeing them grow while shipping together—that's more fulfilling than building alone, no matter how good the solo work is.

The best work comes from building together.