One job.
Every job on my résumé looks like a different job. Copywriter. Product manager. Strategy consultant. Chief strategy officer. CEO. CMO. Agency, event marketing, online media, creator network, esports platform… CX transformation consulting firm. From the outside, a zigzag with no obvious logic.
They were all the same job, even as the industry context shifted.
Each role solved a variant of the same problem: take something fragmented – a first draft, a team, a practice, a company stitched together from acquisitions – and make it cohere into something that works, and that’s worth more whole than it was in pieces. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s probably that. Most of my career has been riffing on this theme.
The variations are in fact the point, because together they provide an unusually comprehensive perspective on all the moving parts that must be coordinated to capture extraordinary value.
Scaled operations and global go-to-market: As CMO of Merkle, a $1B+ customer experience firm, I rebuilt the marketing engine for the global business on a budget that would make you weep, and (previously) assembled an integrated practice out of a dozen acquired pieces scattered across three continents.
Inorganic growth strategy: I’ve led buy-side M&A strategy inside two global holding companies, sitting in diligence rooms and assessing what a services firm was worth – what we’d pay a premium for, and what quietly argued for a discount.
Integrations and organizational development: I’ve managed complex integrations of multiple firms under strategic acquirers with a bias toward efficiency – resulting in the same friction every PE portfolio company runs into after close.
Delivery and financial discipline: As CEO of a venture-backed startup, I built the delivery team, raised seed capital, launched and scaled a product in under four months.
The buy-side eye, the operator’s dirty hands, and the founder’s empathy rarely come bundled as a package deal. That’s it, that’s the pitch.
Neither of these, exactly? Situations rarely read the brochure before showing up. There’s a door for that →
These days the work happens from Steamboat Springs, Colorado – a small mountain town where supply chains are stretched thin, business hours may vary, and nobody cares because every day is another chance to touch grass or fresh pow. I got here by way of New York, Boston, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Austin – a long enough arc to notice that business runs on different assumptions in every one of them, and that none of those assumptions is the entire truth. New York is the one I get back to most frequently.
The household I’m part of is multicultural and trilingual; we run our days in three languages and a fair amount of improvisation. I went to Harvard and Stanford, enjoying both without ever quite feeling of either – inside enough to understand how those rooms work, outside enough to see what the people born to them tend to miss. That tension turns out to be useful. It’s most of what a good outside operator is for.
I came up as a writer before I came up as an operator, which probably explains why I trust plain language over a methodology deck, and a sharp question over a confident answer. I play a few stringed instruments, badly enough to still enjoy them. Introvert, recovering perfectionist, lifelong defender of the Oxford comma. Forever and always a fan of three-item lists.
A word about the name, since it invites the wrong guess.
Tanjent is a tangent – not the conversational kind that wanders off the point, but the geometric kind: the line that touches a circle at exactly one point, and only there. A precise, deliberate contact between an outside line and the thing it meets. That’s how I like to engage with a firm – not a permanent fixture, not a detour, but the right point of contact at the right moment.
The spelling is mine; so are the initials – TP. Strip the vowels out of Tanjent and you’re left with TNJNT, a pithy palindrome of the first initials of my immediate family. A firm of one, with the people it’s for written into the name.
Underneath all of this sits a fundamental question: what is a business actually for? Most firms answer it without wrestling with it – they optimize to get bigger, when the harder and sharper question is whether they’re getting better. The work I do lives in that gap, at the moments where the question stops being abstract: a sale, a stall, a change of hands.
If your firm is in or near one of those moments, that’s exactly when we should talk.
- Most recently Global CMO at Merkle (dentsu), a $1B+ customer experience firm
- Rebuilt the marketing engine for a $1B+ business: sales-ready leads up 840%, marketing-driven opportunities up 95%, spend down ~30% year over year
- Grew an integrated services practice 20%+ YoY, assembled from acquired teams across three continents
- Led buy-side M&A for firms inside two global holding companies; supported a $1B PE exit to AT&T
- CEO of a venture-backed startup: raised seed funding, launched in four months
- 20+ years in and around professional services: operator, buyer, consultant, founder
- MBA, Stanford GSB · A.B. Fine Arts, magna cum laude, Harvard College