Diego J. Medina

This started early. In 1997, at fifteen, I ran fan sites for Korn and Nine Inch Nails — domains paid to InterNIC, lyrics transcribed by hand, a buy-now link wired to CDNow. The Korn site drew twenty thousand monthly visitors and paid me $150 a week. Build the thing people want, connect it to value, count what happens: I have been running the same play ever since.

I came to New York for music production and technology. A week after two Western Digital Raptors crashed and took all of my material with them, connections from the New York comedy scene — I got jokes — turned into a two-week role at an early content-distribution startup, and the people I met there opened the path into New York media: digital advertising and product operations at Maxim, business product and technology teams at Gawker Media.

At ViacomCBS I founded the sponsorship-focused Innovation Product department and ran it: a ten-person team, big budgets, bigger sells, and a mandate to make television do things it hadn't done. We put AR on live TV — Screens Up!, Clio Sports Silver — shoppable QR on Jersey Shore that took a Shorty Silver Honor, Missy Elliott holograms at the VMAs, VR at Clusterfest, native and value-exchange ad formats across MTV and Comedy Central, and thousands of interactive takeovers on nick.com. In 2020, before GPT was a household word, we sold Burger King chatbot sponsorships with DoorDash delivery built in.

The play never changed, only the scale. We ran beacons at music festivals to align artist preference with sponsor-tent presence — and I wired the Viacom cafeteria as the test case, tracking how many people abandoned the salad line for pizza.

Since 2022 I've been a stay-at-home dad and the founder of an integrated coffee business: production in El Salvador, importing, wholesale, and ecommerce in the United States. As the kids grow, I'm re-entering the product-development and media conversation.

Working Robot is that re-entry: be2ween, moltart gallery, and a small Lab of things to use, make with, and learn from. Beyond the shop: worthy-successor conversations, soccer, and music technology — in the early 2000s I released dance music as part of the Naboombu, and as Levin.