Hi, I’m Garrett.
I’m a two-time founder and media leader whose career sits at the intersection of content1 and the systems that deliver it to audiences.
I used to tell folks: If you streamed music or movies in the last decade-plus, chances are I had something to do with it. That’s because in 2015 I cofounded Third Bridge Creative — the preeminent content agency of the streaming era. We’re the ghosts in the machine2, building editorial and discovery systems for Netflix, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon Music, among many others — 109 clients and counting. $25M+ in revenue. No outside capital. And a Clio Award along the way.
Recently I’ve been CEO of The Small Bow, a subscription media platform for the 48M Americans in recovery. My cofounder handles editorial, and I single-handedly shipped the platform — iOS and web apps, a two-sided B2B2C layer3 — while executive producing our podcast and helping to launch our forthcoming anthology.
Before any of it: seven years at Rhapsody, the first streaming service, running global content systems. I was early in building CMS tools and user-personalization systems, and even hold a U.S. patent on the subject.
I got my start as a writer, and never really stopped4. My early training as a journalist gave me a nose for what’s true and what’s noise — and clear communication became one of my foundational skills, whether I’m writing a PRD, a creative brief, or a strategy deck.
You’ll find a tour of my work below. Thanks for stopping by.
Third Bridge Creative
Co-Founder · 2015–presentI cofounded the preeminent content agency of the streaming era.
In 2015, streaming was scaling fast and the editorial infrastructure to support it didn't exist. Netflix, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and every other platform needed culturally fluent teams making thousands of curation and discovery decisions daily — but building that capacity in-house was slow, expensive, and nearly impossible to staff at the required depth.
My cofounder and I designed Third Bridge to be the team they couldn't hire, eventually running parallel editorial operations at Netflix, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Sonos simultaneously. Not one client at a time — all of them, concurrently, with distinct editorial voices and standards for each. A 500+ person expert network embedded across the entire streaming landscape.
The Small Bow
CEO & Product Lead · 2024–presentRecently I've been building the editorial home for 48M Americans in recovery.
A.J. Daulerio had cultivated one of the most distinctive editorial voices in recovery media — a 3x-weekly newsletter read by 20,000 people, many of them deeply loyal. What The Small Bow didn't have was the infrastructure to grow that voice into a full editorial ecosystem.
Today TSB runs across multiple surfaces: the newsletter, an original podcast, video content, and a subscriber community — each one feeding the others. The podcast features celebrity guests in recovery and drives clips across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. The Small Book, an anthology of essays, represents our first foray into publishing. Using an AI development process, I relaunched the site, shipped a mobile app, and built the tools to support our first institutional partnerships with rehabs. The editorial voice was already there. I expanded the revenue streams around it.
"It's about addiction, but relevant to anyone who has problems and regrets (so, everyone)."
— The New York Times
Rhapsody / Napster
Sr. Director, Global Content Systems · 2006–13I ran global content systems at the world's first music streaming service.
The OG of music streaming. Before Spotify, before Apple Music — Rhapsody was first. I ran global content systems: architected the CMS, built the metadata infrastructure, and led international expansion across 25 countries. I also co-invented a content delivery system awarded U.S. Patent No. US9529979B2.
Starting from zero, I built Rhapsody TV into a full original-content operation — episodic interview franchises, live session series, and exclusive performances featuring Taylor Swift, Adele, Lady Gaga, and hundreds more. The operation produced 500+ videos and established Rhapsody as a destination for original music programming at a moment when no one else was doing it.
Original video at a music streaming service in 2008, when no one else was making any.
Case Studies: Building Editorial Systems
Most of my working life has been spent making other people's writing better — and building the systems that make that possible at scale.
Building the Voice Standard for a Global Platform
A complete editorial system for 500+ contributors writing in 20+ languages — including a 377-term music-specific index.
View case study →Designing an End-to-End Copy System for the World's Largest Streamer
150 characters to convince a stranger to spend two hours of their life on something.
View case study →Content Architecture for a B2B SaaS Brand
Not a single article. A system for how every article would work.
View case study →Apple Music · Editorial Style Guide · NDA
Quality at scale is a systems problem. I built the editorial infrastructure for Apple Music's global content operation: a style guide covering voice, tone, and format specs across six distinct content types. Attached to it: a 377-term music-specific index resolving every usage question a contributor might encounter — Afrobeat or Afro-beat, Auto-Tune not autotune, when acid jazz and acid house are not interchangeable.
The guide wasn't a rulebook. It was a translation layer — converting editorial judgment into something teachable and reproducible across 500+ contributors in 20+ languages.
The documents are under NDA. The output ran on every Apple device on earth.
- Editorial style guide: voice, tone, format specs across 6 content types
- 377-term music-specific index — every usage question answered in advance
- 500+ contributors, 20+ languages, one enforced voice standard
- Platform: Apple Music
Netflix · Editorial Production System · NDA
Netflix's synopsis is 150 characters. At that constraint, every word is a decision.
Netflix trusted my team to design and staff their entire end-to-end copy production process: writer briefs, editorial standards, QA protocols, and globalization context notes that allowed linguists to accurately transcreate each synopsis into 30+ languages.
Over the engagement, my team produced 10,700+ individual blurbs — every one passing through a voice standard we wrote and enforced.
- Built the full pipeline: briefs, editorial standards, QA, globalization notes
- G11n layer enabled accurate transcreation into 30+ languages
- 10,700+ blurbs across every major content category
- 150-character constraint: every word a decision
Squarespace · Editorial Content Strategy · Making It Blog
Most content projects start with "what should we write." This one started with "what should the architecture be."
Squarespace hired TBC to build the editorial infrastructure for their Making It blog from scratch — not just the copy, but the system underneath it. That meant designing a hub-and-spoke content model where each primary article anchored a cluster of deeper supporting pieces, with interlinking logic, SEO keyword integration, and conversion goals baked into the structure before a single word was written.
I built the project bible. The writers executed against it. The blog ranked.
- Designed hub-and-spoke model: primary articles anchoring supporting piece clusters
- Voice standard: authoritative, jargon-free, SEO-optimized without reading like it
- Audience: "Enterprising Dreamers" — first-time entrepreneurs, practical guidance
- Built the project bible. Writers executed against it.
The Holiday Selling Guide
A hub article produced under this system — still live, still ranking.
As published on Squarespace ↗Selected Writing
Before all of that, and still: essays and features on music, health, literature, and politics.
Appeared on The Ringer's 60 Songs That Explain the '90s: the 2000s to discuss Joanna Newsom, whose music I was the first person ever to write about.
I was a guest on the Aware Recovery podcast to discuss the use of storytelling as a key component of recovery.
