The night I remembered why I started
For seventeen years, I've had a front-row seat to some of the most exciting storytelling in tech.
I’ve had the honor of working both agency-side and in-house, partnering with some of the greatest minds while building campaigns for IBM, Dell, HP, NVIDIA, Oracle, AT&T and more. I've sat with brilliant founders as they searched for the language that would carry their ideas into the world. I came up in advertising during the digital transformation, watching an entire industry reinvent itself in real time and getting to be part of that reinvention.
It was an incredible education. The kind you can't get from books. I learned how global brands think. How startups move. How to build narratives that cut through noise and land with force.
I loved it. The craft. The challenge. The creative problem-solving at the intersection of strategy and execution. But somewhere along the way, slowly, quietly, something started to shift.
The meeting that felt different
I remember sitting in a messaging workshop a few years ago. Three hours deep. Too much coffee, not enough windows. The clients product team had built something genuinely remarkable: a new chip architecture that could change how data centers handle AI workloads. Real innovation. The kind that actually mattered.
And we were debating whether to call it "transformative" or "revolutionary."
I watched the founder, this brilliant engineer who'd spent five years solving an impossible problem, nod along as we wordsmithed his life's work into a bullet point. He trusted us. He thought this was how you win.
I left that room and sat in my car for twenty minutes. Just sitting there, annoyed. Not because the work was bad. It wasn't. It was polished. Strategic. Exactly what the playbook called for. But it was also safe. Boring. Trite. Like we'd taken something real and recycled it for another company.
Another PowerPoint. Another interactive infographic. And I started to wonder: Is this what all that hustle was for?
The video that unlocked something
A few weeks later, I was home on a random Tuesday night, scrolling through YouTube, trying to unwind. I clicked on a video I'd seen recommended to me for forever but one I always scrolled past titled: The Spring - Charity: Water Origin Film.
I expected a nonprofit highlight reel. Inspirational montage. Maybe some tears if I was lucky, but it was more than that.
The opening was simple. Almost too simple. Scott Harrison sitting in frame, talking about the gap between the life he was living, nightclub promoter, chasing status, and the life he knew he could lead.
Then something stopped me cold.
It wasn't just his story or the sacrifices he made to expose the harsh realities of the world's most overlooked places. It was the way he used his craft, his lens, his words, his ability to make people feel, to pull the truth into the light.
He wasn't creating for applause. He wasn't performing. He was using his skills in service of something that mattered. He was telling a story that moved people to stand up, to care, to get involved.
What I couldn’t unsee
It wasn’t the wells. It wasn’t the statistics. It wasn’t even his personal transformation. It was the craft, used with purpose, conviction, and a kind of fearless honesty that made people want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
It reminded me why I got into this work in the first place.
The way the film didn't overperform. Didn't try to be clever. Didn't manipulate. The whole thing had this bone-deep integrity that reminded me why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place.
And I realized something I hadn't wanted to admit: I had spent 17 years learning how to make things sound important, but I had forgotten why I wanted to be in advertising in the first place.
I didn't get into this industry to polish decks or package talking points. I signed up to be a starving artist. I wanted to make things that moved people.
I wanted to create work that made someone feel something real. That was the whole point. Somewhere along the way, I lost the plot.
The question that kept pushing back
In the days after, one thought kept tapping me on the shoulder:
What if I used everything I've learned: the strategy, the craft, the experience, to make work that actually moves people again?
Everywhere I looked, I saw brilliant people building incredible things, struggling to tell the story in a way that matched the weight of what they were creating. I saw teams pouring their lives into ideas that were being flattened into slogans and best practices.
And I kept thinking: this is not why any of us signed up for this. They deserved work that honored what they were building. And I deserved to make work that meant something.
The shift
So I called a friend who had gone out on his own. "I think I need to do something different," I said. She asked one question: "What part of the work will you never compromise on?" The answer was instant.
The work has to move people. Otherwise it's not worth making.
He smiled. "Then you're not just starting an agency. You're going back to who you were before the industry got to you." And he was right.
Why Invisible Engine
The name came to me during one of those middle-of-the-night moments where your brain won't shut off. I was thinking about that Charity: Water film again. About what made it so powerful. It wasn't loud. It wasn't flashy. It didn't announce itself. But once you felt it, you couldn't unfeel it.
That's what I wanted to build. The quiet but magical force behind powerful brands. A place that celebrates the fearless. The entrepreneurs who go against the grain. The people who question the status quo because they know there's a better way.
Not another agency churning out content. But a place that takes all the craft I'd learned, the strategy, the frameworks and puts it in service of the people bold enough to build something that matters.
A place where we help you build a brand that's just as impactful as what you've created. Where hard tech becomes human. Where bold ideas get the clarity and conviction they deserve. Where the story finally matches the substance.
We're here for the guts, not the glory.
Let’s make something great together.
