Marketing since fifteen, with 4,600 miles on foot

I started working in marketing and SEO in 2006, when I was fifteen. In 2026, that puts twenty years between my starting point and the work I do now. Marketing is still part of my life, alongside AI development, education, and membership in a worker-owned manufacturing cooperative.

There has also been a long stretch on foot. From Florida to Washington State, and later through years of full-time travel, the geography of my life has changed as much as the work. These days, I’m writing from Curitiba, Brazil.

Marketing and expert content

I founded my first marketing agency in 2008. In 2009, I began working with experts to develop and market their content. The work brought together the material itself and the question of how it would reach an audience.

Those are related tasks, but they ask different things. Reaching someone gets an idea in front of them; explaining it gives them something they can understand and use. Education runs through my work in expert content, podcasting, speaking, and enterprise AI. Earlier work also included political digital campaigns and Artapreneurs Summit.

Florida to Washington, on foot

From 2013 to 2014, I walked approximately 4,600 miles solo across America for the Ekal Foundation, supporting rural education in India. I traveled from Florida to Washington State with no follow car.

Contemporary reporting gives that distance some everyday detail. In his July 10, 2014 article, Mark C. Anderson of Monterey County Weekly described my arrival from Big Sur with an ice chest and backpack on a sled fashioned from PVC pipe and a dolly. His food discussion included peanut butter, rice, and tortillas.

The same report covers a night of high winds in the Guadalupe Mountains. Food, carrying weight, and shelter sit alongside the more dramatic parts of the account. A route across the country is also a succession of practical questions about getting from one place to the next.

The Times-Standard’s August 30, 2014 coverage describes my progress through Northern California and people offering accommodation along the way. I walked without a partner or support vehicle, with hospitality along the route.

The Indian Panorama also mentioned the walk in its coverage of Ekal events. The $225,000 in that headline was raised by separate fundraising concerts in New Jersey, not by my walk.

Travel continued

From 2014 to 2019, I traveled full time through more than twenty countries while podcasting, speaking, and consulting with startups. I was a cohost of the Backpack Entrepreneurs podcast. The Story Jam Theatre episode page, where I later shared a story, records that post-walk travel and podcasting context.

The walk occupied 2013 and 2014; full-time travel continued through 2019. By the latter part of that period, AI had entered my work as well.

From chatbots to coding agents

I began building with AI in 2018 through chatbots for marketing funnels. In 2020, I had early GPT-3 access. Around 2022, I was Chief Strategy Officer at Horizon AI, an enterprise AI education and development consultancy working in sectors including civil engineering, law, and aerospace.

My current flagship project is Constellation, a system I authored to coordinate coding agents across Claude Code, OpenCode, and Codex. It uses file queues, model dispatch, and verification gates to turn objectives into tested programs, running locally and on a VPS.

That work brings a different question into view: once a system has produced something, how do you check it? My preference is for workflows that leave something to inspect. A generated answer and a tested program represent different stages of the work.

Life and work now

I’m an American expat in Curitiba and am learning Portuguese. As Marketing Director, ShoeRepairGlue.com, I work on marketing across Amazon and Shopify, including Amazon advertising bulk-file optimization.

My cooperative role is Worker-member, Carth & Co, where I handle administration remotely. I am also Owner, Infinite Game, LLC, my AI and business development consultancy and education company. It is currently quiet, and I rarely take consulting roles.

Marketing, education, and AI remain part of the present, alongside writing and Portuguese. The Now page keeps track of those current focuses. The longer history includes the agency, the road, the podcast, and the places in between.