What you build is shaped by how much of yourself you can bring to it.
I'm Dave. I make room for creative founders to show up as themselves — so their projects can receive the version of them that's actually alive.
The creative founder
You have something alive in you. A project, a company, a vision that knows what it wants to become. Your creativity isn't extra — it's the thing that makes what you're building shine.
You also have a managed version of yourself. It's competent. It meets obligations. And it cannot make what the creative self can make — because making requires showing up, and the managed self performs showing up instead of doing it.
The tell: you light up talking about your project — then immediately apologize for it or change the subject. The shine and the flinch in the same breath.
Two ways to work together
Coaching
Face-to-face. We enter you — your patterns, your edges, what's in the way. The work is making your work feel more like play. When you leave, the project feels different because you do.
Producing
Side-by-side. We enter the project — its soul, its shape, what it wants to become. I follow your vision without capping it, bound it when it floats, translate between the felt sense and the buildable shape. The session ends with an artifact.
Both are the same gift: making room for the creative self to show up.
What's alive
I'm building Play Into Being with my partner Kristen — a studio of practice for creative founders. We're running our first incubator cohort now.
I'm writing about what I'm learning in the room with people at Tending Creativity.
I'm starting a talk show — sitting with creative founders and asking: what's alive in you right now?
Who I am
I co-founded Carbonmade, designed a lot of software, made community things at Relational, created popular art GIFs, and generally tried to live artfully. I built things that worked. I also built things that were dead on arrival — not because the ideas were bad, but because I was building from a managed version of myself.
Now I help creative founders build from presence instead of protection.
I'm in Austin. I believe your project sees who you need to become before you do.