The long way here

I grew up in Jupiter, Florida, in a house full of animals, with the TV tuned to Steve Irwin. He taught me that caring about the natural world could be loud, joyful, and brave. That idea never left.

Music was what held. I played saxophone in the Jupiter High School band and graduated in 2007. The band room gave me structure, a team that depended on me, and something I could get better at every single day. When I left for Boston, I wasn't leaving a hard place behind so much as carrying the one thing that had saved me with me.

I studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music. I learned quickly that talent wasn't the scarce thing in that building. Connection was. Brilliant composers were graduating without ever meeting the filmmakers who needed them.

So I started the Film Scoring Network, a group that connected more than 150 filmmakers with Berklee composers. It was my first real production: finding people, matching them to the right project, and getting work made. Looking back, it was ROTU in miniature.

One night after a Film Scoring Network meeting, Emir Cerman asked me to lunch. He had an idea that sounded impossible.

Emir wanted to bring musicians from around the world together to write and sing one song of peace. We called it Anthem for the World. Musicians from 90 countries wrote it together.

The video went viral around the world in 2011. That led to something none of us expected: selling out Symphony Hall in Boston. Then came the Esplanade and Boston Common, where an estimated 10,000 people turned out for a single show. Across four years, our live shows reached 30,000 people.

Music is universal. It has the power to unite the world.

That became the founding principle of ROTU, short for Rhythm of the Universe. What started as a student project became a company, and I've led it as CEO since 2012.

Our music had a message, and the message needed a frontline. We were asked to document what was happening in the Peruvian Amazon. We went in expecting rainforest. We found a wasteland left behind by illegal gold mining.

I produced Mercury Uprising, a documentary and music video that put that destruction, and the children living beside it, in front of the world. Making it put my own life at real risk. It screened at the COP20 and COP21 United Nations climate conferences.

I came home a different person. I wanted to make work that didn't just get seen but made people feel something for places and creatures they would never visit.

In 2015 a friend handed me an HTC Vive and dropped me into the ocean next to a whale. I took the headset off and said the only thing that made sense: this is what I am doing with the rest of my life.

Virtual reality could do what a concert or a film couldn't. It could put you inside the story. We turned Rhythm of the Universe into a VR saga, funded by Meta, built in Unreal Engine with support from an Epic MegaGrant, and shown at GDC, Gamescom, CES, PAX East, and AWE.

Ionia launched in 2021 as the first VR game with a public nonprofit partner: Wildlife Warriors, the conservation charity founded by Steve Irwin. The kid who grew up watching Steve Irwin got to end his game with Robert Irwin asking players to help protect wildlife, and 5% of every copy sold went to the cause. Eolia followed in 2023.

Along the way we built Jam Theory, an educational VR music tool funded by Unity. Meta donated more than 500 headsets to under-resourced music programs, so kids who couldn't afford a piano could still learn how music works.

Building games taught us to build worlds in real time. That turned out to be exactly what the rest of the industry needed. ROTU became a real-time studio for media and entertainment, delivering everything from concept to final pixel, faster and leaner than traditional pipelines.

We became an Epic Games Gold Service Partner, and I joined Epic's Media & Entertainment Technology Advisory Board. The work grew: photorealistic stadium digital twins for Fox Sports' FIFA World Cup 2026 coverage, visuals for Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar, an original project for Sphere in Las Vegas, and work for Disney, Meta, Google, CBS Sports, the PGA Tour, and T-Mobile.

Today that adds up to more than 500 million impressions, over 100 projects, and more than 30 clients. The student project is now an eight-figure company.

I've also kept teaching. I co-taught VR and AR design at MIT in 2017, and since 2023 I've been an Adjunct Professor at Berklee, teaching the business class I wish someone had taught me.

After 17 years around Boston, I moved my family back to Jupiter in 2025. I'm a husband and a father of two, and I'm raising my kids a bike ride from the house I grew up in.

When I'm not working on ROTU, you'll find me training Brazilian jiu-jitsu, fishing, surfing, or kayaking the same waters I grew up on.

The tools keep changing: live stages, VR headsets, real-time engines, AI, screens the size of a building. The reason doesn't. I tell stories that bring people together and make them care about each other and the world we share.