Joby Aviation.

The problem

Joby Aviation is building the electric aircraft that will one day carry passengers between cities and airports — quiet, sustainable, at prices closer to a taxi than a helicopter. Beautiful engineering. But engineering doesn’t commercialize itself.

Frontier products get built by scientists and engineers who — appropriately — don’t know how the world will meet them. Somebody has to close the gap between the breakthrough and the audience. That was the events program: making an unfamiliar future technology tangible now, in the specific cultural, sporting, and industry moments where relevant audiences were already gathered and primed to engage.

What I did

Led the global events program — a forty-plus event portfolio spanning flight demonstrations, international air shows, consumer activations at cultural moments (FIFA, US Open, America 250), trade shows and industry forums, and partnership deployments with Uber, Blade, Virgin Atlantic, Toyota, and others. Program strategy and the Events OS on one end. On-site production of the events I ran myself on the other. A distributed team of planners in between.

Both ends of the candle — strategy and ground game. When the aircraft lands somewhere new, my job is making sure the presence lands with it.

The summer tour

Four events I produced and managed end-to-end on-site, back to back, across three weeks of the peak 2026 summer window:

• US Open · Shinnecock Hills — Blade hospitality lounge, aircraft next to the helicopter landing zone, high-net-worth audience conversations about when they could actually book a flight.
• FIFA Fan Zone · USTA Queens — 125,000+ international visitors planned; fewer days than planned delivered due to weather and multi-party operational headwinds. The community response in the hours we were live landed exactly the way the program was built for.
• National Mall · America 250 — Uber-hosted footprint during the July 4th window. The aircraft as presence, not spectacle. Millions of people could see it.
• Potters Field · London — Virgin Atlantic livery, Tower Bridge in the background, UK public debut. 77 pieces of tracked press coverage across UK national dailies, business titles, and international pickup.

The Events OS underneath

I arrived with a working scaffolding for an events operating platform and enhanced it every day. As Joby’s CEO has publicly framed it, AI is transforming “everything from aerodynamics research to back-office tasks” across the company. That companywide priority aligned with what I was already building — so the events function wasn’t scrambling to shop for tools when leadership pointed at AI. The scaffolding was already there. The AI wasn’t in the interface. It was in the plumbing.

(Deeper story: Events OS case study →)