About

A portfolio life built on first principles

This is what I do, in two minutes or less. Work with me here.

I'm a dad and a husband in San Francisco. Professionally, I'm a content strategist and writer. I build the strategy, the systems, and the content that bring inbound business to B2B tech teams, and I keep the final output human.

Every week I publish the Content Market Report, a Substack that assesses which content strategies are worth investing in right now. If you want to work with me, take a look here.

Why content strategy has to move faster now

AI has turned content markets into mini growth stocks. A channel or format can rise and fall within months, and best practices go stale quickly. I spent the early part of my career analyzing and writing about investment markets, so I read content the same way: what's rising, what's overheated, what to rethink. That's the lens behind the Report, and behind every strategy I build.

How I work

Content work has three layers. You can buy any one on its own.

• Strategy. Who needs to receive your message, which pain points and desires your service resolves, and where to publish. A strategy-only engagement ends with a 90-day plan of ordered, specific steps.
• Systems. Research systems that track what your market is talking about, so your content starts from real signals instead of guesses. I build the drafting and repurposing workflows around them.
• Execution. Newsletters, articles, white papers, and ebooks. Sometimes I produce them with you in the loop. Sometimes you take the system and write your own.

Pixel Engine is the studio behind this work: the systems and process underneath Eric Angella.

Principles

• I work directly with the person the content is for.
• I put craft in the critical places to keep it human. Drop the slop.
• I use AI aggressively where it helps and scales, but AI assists the thinking and doesn't do it. It's a rocket pack, not a robot.
• I put real effort into finding a unique voice. The deepest source material I've found is long, unscripted conversation. One client's three-hour recorded interview gave me ten times the raw material, and his published work is sharper and more human for it.
• I think on paper. Analog-first thinking is deliberate friction against handing your brain to AI.

The Adventure Portfolio

In 1990, right after college, I took a six-week trip through Europe with a few friends. We toured the Berlin Wall as it came down and chiseled off chunks, barbed wire included, and packed them in our backpacks. Iraq invaded Kuwait just before our flight home, and Heathrow was in chaos. We explained the barbed wire at two checkpoints, and the officials, who had bigger problems, let us keep our cold war artifacts.

The lesson: sit still and you go nowhere. Move toward what interests you, and fate throws some great stuff your way. Eventually.

I took that into my career, which spans four areas over three-plus decades:

• Finance: Market analysis and writing, which became the Report's lens
• Technology: What to build, and how
• Entertainment: Storytelling, and how it relates to Entrepreneurship
• Entrepreneurship: Iteration

I call this my Adventure Portfolio, a term I borrowed from Justin Welsh's portfolio life experiment. His essay builds on Charles Handy's 1989 portfolio career idea and Christina Wallace's book Portfolio Life. My angle is that accumulated adventures are an auditable asset, something you can inventory and put to work, not just a sequence of jobs.

Elsewhere

• Victories and Setbacks: a pen-and-paper practice I'm building for keeping your own thinking in an age of AI.
• Good/Evil: neo-noir crime short stories that double as a learning cohort for aspiring writers. First edition planned for spring.

Get the Content Market Report → Weekly analysis of one content strategy: invest, draw down, or rethink.

Need a content strategy, content, or a content system? Work with me →