I grew up between cultures and languages. I started playing music at nine, as the rhythm guitarist in a high school blues band. I wasn't in high school. I studied music, turned professional at sixteen, and by twenty-five I was a resident at Pacha in Ibiza. Then I started companies.
None of that was only a career. It's where I learned to read a room, hold attention, manage energy, and know when to leave. A dancefloor gives you feedback in real time and it doesn't care how good your plan was. Every one of those skills came with me into business.
Knowing that it works stopped being enough. I wanted to know why. That question became twenty years studying musicology and the science of what sound does to the human body and brain.
Not from the outside, either. I've worked alongside researchers at the University of Chicago, Berklee College of Music and the University of California, and with professors at Melbourne, Sydney and NYU, contributing to studies on music, emotion and cognition. All of it points one way. Music isn't just entertainment. It's a physiological event.
That's where the TEDx talk came from, on how music can literally save your life. And the keynotes and panels in Belgium, Spain, Australia and the US.
In my early thirties I started building technology companies to act on it. That's where the two halves finally became one job. I invented two systems, the AI Music Brain and VibeDNA, that let a machine analyse music the way a human brain does rather than the way a database does. Not tempo, key and genre tags. What a piece of music actually does to the person hearing it.
They power music personalisation, classification and recommendation, and they became the foundation for a venture-backed company using music to improve brain health. Over $5M raised, awards won.
I also made every mistake a founder can make. Hired the wrong people. Scaled before the thing was working. Kept projects alive for months after I knew. The reason I can find those patterns in someone else's business now is that I ran all of them in my own first.
Last year I closed that chapter and started this one. No investors, no employees. I build my products myself and turn my own ideas into revenue. The difference this time is that I'm doing all of it in public. Curtain up, including the parts that don't work.
I spend part of my time working directly with clients, one on one, helping them get unstuck. That's what the FOG® Diagnosticis for. It works out which phase of the business lifecycle you're actually in, then puts the right systems in place to reach the next one. Most companies aren't stuck on the wrong thing. They're working the right thing in the wrong phase.
I also founded Optimize Labs, an agency that helps small businesses build their own AI harness and application layer rather than renting someone else's. It's LLM agnostic, it learns as it runs, and it stays the company's IP. Most businesses buying AI right now are quietly building someone else's asset.
We've built a few tools they can use on their own too. My Website Sucks, BigMoneyIdeas and The First 100.
I write about all of it every week in The Drop, which lands on WhatsApp rather than in an inbox.
Music taught me to hear patterns. Business taught me to see them where others see noise. The goal hasn't changed. Help people see what they're capable of, myself included.
The thread hasn't changed. The format has.