Leader / Manager
My passions are technology enablement and creative production. While I always enjoy jumping into the trenches and contributing directly to projects, I am fulfilled by activating others to do their best work and providing them the means and opportunity to discover expanded potential.
I am an English-to-English translator when it comes to aligning collaborators of different backgrounds. I am steady when leading a group, and dynamic when prioritizing goals and tactics. I believe choosing to leave someone behind is a choice most commonly made because inclusion would be hard. I believe a life well lived is hard.
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He has single-handedly introduced dozens of colleagues to the world of XR and helped elevate our storytelling in dynamic ways. I had the pleasure of personally working with Henry on election coverage, Black History and Women's month projects and other news items and he always had a fresh and innovative way to tell the news. I appreciated his insight and wisdom, but more importantly his patience with helping introduce XR to folks like myself and even being gracious enough to share his intellect with students I teach with Syracuse University. I can't thank Henry enough for being a great XR storyteller and even better colleague.
Marquise Francis, National Correspondent - NBC News
Director of XR
From 2019 to 2022, I grew Yahoo Immersive from its first published AR story to more than 260 in under three years. Yahoo Immersive was interacted with by more than 20 million users and converted more than 1 in 5 impressioned users over 40 years old to engage with 3D content. It won more than a dozen awards and was the highest ROI XR operation in editorial media before company-wide layoffs eliminated nearly all first-party content FTE in 2022-23.
My strategy focused on scalability and accessibility. I enabled Yahoo’s best creators to adopt 3D as a format and fit it into their existing work. I used my 3D generalist and journalist skills to lead by example. I templatized my work and elevated those cross-trained in my methods. I seeded a culture of celebrating beginners and first publications, such that many in the company would clamor to work on an XR, rather than avoid the scary or unknown. The diversity of our creators and their constant output generated statistically useful data I used to inform our product development, designs, and high-budget investments.
Director
In 2022, I co-founded DemocratizeXR alongside two ex-Yahoo Immersive colleagues to bring our knowledge to under-resourced media companies around the globe. While providing all the usual services (production, engineering, consulting, professional development), DXR specifically scopes client deliverables toward self-reliance. Separate from technical responsibilities, I am the principal for clients and a public-facing advocate for non-developer inclusion in the future of XR.
CEO and Co-Founder
In 2017, I co-founded tech startup ShareVR LLC, later rebranded Pryde. Our mission was to help VR adopters share their experiences with non-adopters. I focused on interviewing customers and users to develop the product, designs, and roadmap. I also managed our marketing, relations, sales, press, and other business needs.
Our first product was an AI camera for Unity that predicted the best camera shots of VR users in-engine and connected those videos to users’ social media. This product was adopted by multiple major VR games for marketing, UGC, live events and more.
Our second product was a custom avatar creation engine. The company closed in 2018 prior to that product’s release.
Operational Data Department Manager
In 2011, I joined LAZ Parking as a day job while moonlighting as a playwright. While there, I taught myself to code to automate my work. In 2013, I was promoted to lead operational automation and start an internal product development department. I transitioned the company from a paper-based lookup workflow to optical character recognition and app-based capture, real-time big data visualizations, and algorithm-driven task assignments. I also led research into multidimensional cartography and machine learning uses.
I retrained, cross-trained, and implemented organizational restructuring based on our technical advancements.
Writing Team Lead
In 2011, I was tapped to lead a team of seven professional playwrights and seven middle-schoolers to write a documentary theatre play about multi-generational parenting on Chicago’s Westside and Southside. As lead, I structured interviewing, writing, and editing tasks and assignments to maximize creative story capture and feedback loops. My work resulted in completely rewriting three full iterations of a docudrama play in four weeks, without overburdening the writers or student contributors.