I build, write, and back useful things from a small place on Vancouver Island. Most of what is on this site, the ventures, the frameworks, the writing, the Lab, makes more sense if you know how I got here. So here is the honest version.
What I do now
The day job is demand generation. I lead it at Embroker as their Director of Demand Generation, which means I am accountable to a number, not just to an opinion. I want to be plain about that, because it shapes everything here: the writing comes from inside a working growth function, not from a safe distance. I have always had more respect for people who have to live with their decisions than for people who only narrate everyone else's.
VonClaro is the longer arc. I am its president, and it is the performance media agency where more than two decades of growth and operating work, since 2002, gets put to use for other companies. The Exposure Intelligence Lab is where I think out loud: an active research initiative into commercial awareness, intent detection, opportunity signals, and how trust and decision-making are changing as AI works its way into everything.
None of these are separate identities. Embroker keeps me honest, VonClaro gives me range, and the Lab is where the patterns get named. I also build ventures with people I trust, including CSRI, Canada With Purpose, and Quirky Perks. The writing is just the residue of paying attention. The rest of this page is how I got here.
Leaving home
I left home at twelve because I was certain I knew everything. I did not. What followed was a few years of finding out: sleeping rough, couch surfing when someone was kind enough to offer, and busking with a guitar for whatever people would drop in the case.
I am not going to dress that period up. It was not a heroic chapter and it was not a tragic one. It was an education. You learn things on the street about people, trust, and risk that no classroom teaches, mostly because the stakes are real and the feedback is immediate. You learn who actually helps and who performs helping. You learn how fast a situation can turn. Those lessons never left me, and I think they sit quietly underneath a lot of what I work on now.
A pastor eventually took an interest, helped me access student assistance, and got me back into school. I have thought about that a great deal. One person deciding you are worth a little effort can redirect an entire life. I try to remember that when I am the one in a position to take the chance on someone.
A band, and a discoverability engine I mistook for music
Music was my first real obsession. In 1996 I started a band called Everything Falls Apart. For a while EFA was the whole world. Later I started EFA Underground, which on paper was about helping independent artists find venues, audiences, and a way to get heard.
In practice it was about something I did not yet have a word for: helping overlooked people get discovered. Distribution, networks, exposure, opportunity. I was building a discoverability engine for musicians and calling it a music project. Looking back, nearly everything I have been interested in since was already showing up in that work. I just thought I was booking shows.
The accidental operator
At twenty-three, success looked like becoming a rock star. It did not work out that way, which turned out to be its own kind of luck.
What happened instead is that I kept becoming the person who built the system. I ran the Art of Christmas festival. I helped build and scale a security company. I managed operations, built websites, set up accounting systems, wrote processes, and ran large teams, usually in that order and usually slightly out of my depth.
My method was not sophisticated. I said yes first and learned how to do the work afterward. "Say yes, then learn it quickly" is not advice I would give a cautious person, but it is honestly how most of my capability got built. I became an operator years before I had the word for it.
Falling for the system
I came into digital marketing during the early paid search era, when a lot of the rules were still being written. What pulled me in was not advertising. Advertising I could take or leave. It was the system. I became genuinely fascinated by how attention, demand, opportunity, and information move through digital networks: who sees what, why, and what it is worth.
At Geosign I got very good at paid search, very fast, during a period of real momentum. It was the kind of company that raised around $160 million back then, which tells you how much energy was pouring into early search. That experience taught me the lesson I actually carried out the door: platform-driven businesses are powerful and fragile at the same time. When your livelihood rides on someone else's platform and someone else's algorithm, you are renting, not owning. I filed that away. It mattered later.
Over the years the work took me into a lot of markets: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and others. I am wary of making that sound grander than it was. It mostly meant solving the same few problems for different people in different places, and learning that the problems rhyme more than they differ.
Google, which is evidence and not the story
For a stretch around 2013 and 2014, I worked as a contractor for Google, with the title Google AdWords Performance Expert. The work was less glamorous than the title sounds. I audited agency accounts, developed recommendations for organizations including Apple, Dell, and Canadian Tire, worked across Google's Retail and Technology teams, and trained account administrators, agency teams, and executives on advertising strategy. In 2014 I was also one of four judges for the Google Search Excellence Award in Canada.
I will be honest about why I mention this. I am a high school dropout who left home at twelve, and Google decided I should be one of the people teaching its partners how this works. That still makes me laugh. I include it not because Google is the point, but because it is evidence. The street kid and the Google contractor are the same person, running on the same instincts. Google is proof the instincts were real. It is not the story.
Building versus owning
The harder lesson took me too long to learn. When I was younger, I believed that if I worked hard and helped other people succeed, they would reward me in turn. Sometimes they did. Often they did not. I do not say that with any bitterness. It is just what happened, and it is a more useful thing to understand early than late.
For years I created value for organizations I did not own. I built the systems, drove the growth, and watched other people build real wealth on top of what I had made. At some point the math becomes obvious, and your attention shifts from being the person who builds the engine to being the person who owns it. Most of what I do now comes from that shift.
The move to the edge of the continent
In 2020, in the middle of the COVID era, I moved from Ontario to Vancouver Island. Two people, Rory Capern and Owen Matthews, encouraged the move, and I am grateful they did, because on paper it was difficult and a little irrational. It was also one of the best decisions I have ever made.
I live in Deep Cove now. After more than four decades of Ontario winters, I remain firmly of the view that not shoveling snow is one of the great achievements of a human life. The Island did something to my thinking I did not expect. Building from the edge of the continent, instead of the middle of the noise, turns out to suit me.
Canada
I come from a proud military family, and I think it shows in how I see the country. I look at Canada through a lens of stewardship more than politics. I am less interested in arguments about Canada than in what gets built here. My honest view is that Canada needs more builders, operators, and founders. More people willing to create opportunity for others instead of waiting for permission or applauding from the sidelines. I would rather be one of the people building than one of the people commenting on it.
Why AI, honestly
People assume my interest in AI is about technology. It is really about leverage. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to accomplish more than one person reasonably can. I used to joke that if I could clone myself, I would. AI is the closest thing I have found to that. My interest in it is practical rather than ideological. I do not think it is magic, and I do not think it is the end of the world. I think it is leverage, and leverage in the right hands is how a small group of people builds things that used to require an army.
Sarah, and what it cost the people who loved me
None of this happened alone, and most of it would not have happened at all without my wife, Sarah MacDonald. She has been beside me through nearly every chapter, including the ones that were not much fun to be beside me for. I joke that a good amount of my perseverance is really just knowing that Sarah will not let me quit. It is a joke that is mostly true.
My parents are a bigger part of this story than a younger version of me would have admitted. One of the genuine lessons of adulthood was understanding, finally, how much my early decisions cost the people who loved me. Leaving home at twelve is something that happens to a family, not just to a kid. I see that now in a way I could not then.
What I am building toward
If there is a through-line to all of it, it is probably this. I keep building the thing that connects overlooked people to opportunity they cannot reach on their own. EFA Underground did it for musicians. A lot of my marketing work did it for companies that could not find their customers. The ventures I am building now do it for Canadian businesses looking for domestic suppliers, and yes, even for dogs that need food the industry forgot to make.
I am not done, and I am not trying to be. At any given time I have a handful of ventures, experiments, and half-built ideas running at once, and I expect that to stay true for the rest of my life. The point was never to arrive somewhere in particular. The point is to keep building, testing, and learning. I am still searching, on purpose.
When I am honest about what I am working toward, it is not titles or status or awards, or even money for its own sake. Those are scorekeeping. What I want is enough ownership and leverage to be useful in specific ways. To help family members build their own businesses. To create real opportunity for people I care about. And to support a few things that matter to me: animal rescue, adults with developmental disabilities, and safer environments for women and children escaping abuse.
That last one is not abstract for me. I once saw the aftermath of a man forcing his way into a shelter and killing his wife. I will not say more about it than that, out of respect for the people who lost her. But I have thought, many times since, about how better systems and better security might have changed how that night ended. A lot of my interest in trust, in exposure, and in how people can be reached and protected traces back to a simple conviction: some of these failures are not inevitable. They are unbuilt. Someone has to build the thing that prevents them.
What success looks like now
At twenty-three, success was a rock star fantasy. Today it is much smaller and much harder to fake. I wake up excited to work every day. To me, that is the win. Everything else is detail.
If you want to understand why I keep building things, that is the honest answer. I have been the person who needed someone to take a chance on him, the person who built value for everyone but himself, and the person who finally figured out that the point is to own enough of the engine to be useful to people who cannot build it on their own. I am still figuring it out. It still rarely follows the plan. I have made my peace with that.
For the short, factual version, see Who Is Rob T. Case? To get a sense of how I think week to week, there is the Tuesday Briefing.