
Founder, engineer,
& world music nerd.
I build things across music, education, and technology.
Most of my time goes into Sonora, an online modern music conservatory that condenses a four-year undergraduate music education into six to twelve months. We've graduated over six thousand guitar players, and six of them have won Grammys.
I also run Playback, a podcast featuring long-form interviews with some of the world's best musicians. Guests have included Billy Strings, Tommy Emmanuel, Victor Wooten, among many others. The show has reached over 17 million people in under a year.
Before all of this, I built and sold PodClear, a podcast software company, and led product engineering on the growth team at Patreon.
I trained as a jazz guitarist, which opened the door to everything else. I've spent years studying folk traditions on the ground in Brazil, Argentina, Ireland, Spain, Nepal, Appalachia, and the Amazon, learning directly from the people who carry those traditions.
A thread through everything I do is bringing people together. I host invite-only intensive recreational learning retreats on subjects ranging from the bureaucratic dark arts to jhana engineering, and I run annual planning retreats for close friends in Mexico City.
I split time between Nashville and San Francisco. Outside of work, I'm usually mountain biking, climbing, or skiing.
Now
SonoraPlayback SessionsPioneer SpeciesIRL RetreatsUn Poco de PlanningWorld Music StudyPreviously
Sonic SpherePatreonBlab / Monkey InfernoPodClearOne Language One PosterWriting
Ten-Year Vision
The future I'm building toward. A creative village, a portfolio of meaningful work, and a life that compounds.
The Company Operating System
How we're centralizing all of Sonora's tools into a single system and building an agentic layer on top of it.
The Business Fundamentals Every Musician Needs to Know
An hour-long conversation with David Guttman about music, entrepreneurship, mastery, and building Sonora.
Un Poco de Planning: A New Year's Retreat for Close Friends
How a New Year's retreat in Mexico City for close friends became the most important week of my year.
Five Years Nomadic: What I Was Actually Doing
I spent five years traveling the world studying folk music traditions. Here's what that actually looked like and what I brought home.
The Case for Generalism
Why breadth compounds, how moving between domains builds the skills that matter most, and what I gave up to get here.
Voices of the World: A Tour of World Music Traditions
A 45-minute spatial audio piece I made for the Sonic Sphere, touring vocal traditions from every continent.