Hello,
I’m Hoss.

I’ve spent 20 years building new technology capabilities inside established companies. I’ve done this across real estate, experiential marketing, digital agencies, and fabrication — each time in a different industry, each time figuring it out fast, each time leaving the company in a fundamentally better position.

I’ve grown a company’s digital revenue from near zero to almost half of total revenue. I’ve created entirely new service divisions during a pandemic that became profit centres when the core business couldn’t operate. I’ve built software products that became the revenue backbone of the companies that owned them. I’ve led distributed teams across offices in Amsterdam, Bilbao, Toronto, New York, Las Vegas, and Bangkok.

Different industries, different technologies, but common objectives and approaches: translating business ambition into new technology capabilities, building the teams to deliver them, and communicating progress in a way that everyone — from the board to the engineers — could understand and get behind.

How I think about technology.

You might be surprised to hear that I don’t find technology intrinsicly interesting.

I believe technology is at its best when it’s transparent to the end user. The best user experience just works, with minimal fuss, and a sprinkling of surprise & delight.

I don’t obsess over technology for its own sake — I obsess over the problems it can solve and the experiences it can create.

This shows up in how I lead teams, how I pitch to clients, and how I make decisions about what to build. The question is never “how can we apply this technology?” — it’s “what value can we provide customers?”

The roles I’ve held.

Companies have hired me as VP of Technology, CTO (both full-time and fractional), Director of Digital Innovation, and Digital Director. The titles have varied but the work has been consistent: building new things inside existing organizations. I’m a polymath by nature — a software engineer with a degree in architecture who’s served time as a graphic designer, animator, and creative technologist. I solve problems by drawing from a wider palette than other technology leaders, and I communicate complexity in a way that people actually enjoy hearing.

I’m sometimes hired as a fractional CTO for companies that need executive-level technology leadership without a full-time hire — something I’ve written about here.

I’m a public speaker with more than 25 years of conference and corporate event presentations.

I was shortlisted by Apple to join their Human Interface Device Prototyping group — a small team of polymaths existing outside their traditional management structure, reporting directly to Steve Jobs and Jony Ive.

While helping run creative organizations our work has received awards from Applied Arts, Cannes Cyber Lions, the Canadian Marketing Association, and the Webby Awards. I personally have received an Epica, was one of Creative Review’s Creative Futures, and Computer Arts featured me as a Design Icon.