The future belongs to the storytellers.

Football, ages five to twenty. Fifteen seasons. Sport was the first system I had to read from the inside - you study the film, you find the gap, you run it again until it works. Nobody hands you a starting spot. You take reps until the reps take you.

It taught me the thing that shows up in every company I've built since: a team isn't the people on the roster. It's the people who show up when the drill is boring.

Fifteen years of having somewhere to pour all of it, and then nowhere. There was a void, and I filled it with a lens. I learned to shoot, to frame, to cut - to express through a camera what I used to express on a field. I filmed and photographed artists across every genre, and found that reading a room works the same way reading a defense does: you look for what everyone else is missing.

I filed for MSM Media & Marketing at nineteen, while I was still playing. Creative direction, brand identity, photography, 2,300+ short-form videos. Attention is earned, never assigned - I learned to make things people stopped for, then the harder part, making things people acted on.

Five years behind a lens before a single line of code. That isn't the backstory to the technical work. It's the method.

Marketing Director at Amplify Culture, 2021 to 2024. We were an events company built around nightlife - music, DJs, rooms across Kansas City - partnering with bars, clubs, and restaurants to build experiences that put the city's different scenes on the same floor. A scene isn't a demographic. It's a room, and somebody has to program it.

In 2024 we brought in Quincy Crutchfield as co-founder and turned that into Culture Club Creative Agency: everything we knew about curating and planning events, plus the marketing and strategy activations I'd been running. Content strategy, social accounts, brand identity. We'd launch a product into the market with Bud Light, host the room, shoot the photo and video, and hand the brand a content engine that kept running after we left.

Across three years of that work: 100+ events, 60M+ impressions, and $8M in revenue generated for clients - in the Kansas City market alone.

Client work teaches you speed, and it teaches you limits. You can make somebody else's thing excellent. You can't make it yours.

UWAZI.AI exists because ballot language is confusing on purpose, and confusion is a policy choice that benefits somebody. Founding it meant trading a brief for a thesis: find a community underserved by an existing system, and build the infrastructure they were never given.

Voters. City governments. Black founders. Parishes. Same pattern, five times over.

I taught myself to code in 2020, during the pandemic, and never stopped. Raia G1.0 is a proprietary civic AI model I built from scratch - it powers UWAZI.AI and Jamii. Not wrappers. Purpose-built civic intelligence. KOVA followed in 2026: an entire company operating system, shipped solo.

The Uwazi App. UWAZI Engage. Jamii. KOVA. The BIN app. KC AI Club. 1Flock. Designed, branded, and coded end to end. Engineering wasn't a credential I was handed. It was a discipline I chose, in the dark, because communities needed what didn't yet exist.

Black Innovation Collective, co-founded in Kansas City in 2026 with eight others. All In Favor and the monthly civic listening sessions at Keystone. Give First. Build Together. Own What You Create.

This is where the line stops being a line. Everything before it was one person getting better at building. This part only works if it leaves my hands.