From MTV Tours to Product Systems

The first environments I built came with load-in times and noise complaints.

Before the design engineering — before the ventures, the repos, the terminal open at midnight — I built rooms. As an event manager at MTV I ran pan-European tours: same show, different city, different country, every week. The brief was easy to say and hard to do. Make a space people actually want to be in. Then do it again on Tuesday, somewhere you've never been.

Then I did it for myself. For the better part of a decade I co-ran E.T.A., a West London events company. We partnered with Glastonbury and Lovebox. We ran Notting Hill Carnival afterparties — the kind where the room finds its feet around 1am and doesn't sit back down. House music, mostly. A door list, a sound system, a very specific feeling you chase all night and can't fake.

For years I thought the job was throwing parties.

It wasn't. What I was actually building — at MTV, at E.T.A., at three in the morning in a West London warehouse — was an environment where two things were true at once. People found each other. And the people in the room stayed in control of it.

Those two things are the whole craft.

The first is the obvious one: you're making a place where strangers turn into a crowd, and a crowd turns into something with a mind of its own. The second is the part most people get wrong. A bad event processes you. It controls the flow, moves you through, extracts what it can and treats the night as something done to you. A good one hands you the room and trusts you with it. For one night, the place belongs to the people in it.

That distinction is the thing I never stopped caring about. It just stopped being a room.

The medium changed. The warehouse became a screen. But the job — build a space people want to be in, then get out of their way — turned out to be portable.

It has an opposite, too. The software version of processing people is the platform that extracts: it owns your audience, your work and your upside, then rents them back to you. Most of the internet is built this way. The systems I build now are the afterparty version instead — your room, your work, your terms.

AART.SPACE is an art publishing platform where the artist and the work stay the hero, and the people who made something keep control of it. ProtoForge is royalty infrastructure for independent artists: production music royalties currently run on spreadsheets and trust, and the entire point is to replace both with something the artist actually owns and can verify — so control sits with the person who made the work, not the person who happens to hold the spreadsheet. How Might We, stripped back, is the same Carnival instinct in a different format: a place where people find each other and do real work, on their own terms.

Same two things. People find each other. People stay in control.

I didn't plan the throughline. You rarely do. For a long time the events and the software felt like two careers stapled together by a CV — one with flight cases, one with a terminal. They're not. They're the same instinct, twenty-five years apart, in whatever medium I happened to be standing in.

Build the room. Make it one people want to be in. Then trust them with it, and get out of the way.

The load-in is just a deploy now.