THE PERSON BEHIND THE WORK.

I learned that in restaurants, which is the fastest and least forgiving school there is, because the room grades you every night. Nobody tells you the light is wrong at nine. They just leave at nine. Twenty years later I still work that way: figure out what the thing actually is, then make every decision agree with it, down to the ones no one will ever name. I built Hudson Clearwater in New York, Verlaine in West Hollywood, and The Heyward. Verlaine ended up in Architectural Digest, though what I cared about was that the room worked.

A bottle is the same problem with less room. Two seconds on a back bar to say what you are. I started Tepozán in 2018, additive free, out of NOM 1584, partly to find out whether what I knew about a dining room would survive the translation. It did, and that's when I stopped calling myself a hospitality guy. I ran it as CEO for seven years and now sit as Chief Brand Officer. I'm also a partner at BRUTAL, a creative studio out of Mexico City, and I hold a controlling interest in Craft & Art, a beverage alcohol company representing a national portfolio.

Some of the work I'm proudest of never made money. I built activations for Falling Whistles, the campaign for peace in Congo, to get people to care about a war nobody had explained to them. I've always thought these tools are worth pointing at things that matter.

Right now I'm looking for one brand to give all of this to.