I did not start in AI systems. I started in a garage in Niagara Falls, assembling a computer with my brother, learning what happened when you took a machine apart. That curiosity never left. The path from hardware to film to systems infrastructure is not a pivot, it is a straight line. Looking back on twenty years of work, Andre Cobham's constant was never a job title. It was the question: how does this system work, and how can I make it better?
Before the Algorithms
In my opinion, my father brought home two Windows 95 machines and asked my brother and me to learn how they worked and put them together. First taste of taking a system apart to understand it. That garage moment stuck. By high school at Niagara Falls High School, I was spending time in the OSC21 media and news studio, managing the machines, troubleshooting Final Cut issues, repairing the technical board, and learning stage lighting design. The studio was where hardware, software, and live production met. It was where I learned that good systems fail quietly, and bad ones fail loudly. It was where the work behind the curtain mattered as much as what the audience saw.
The Raphy Report and the Incubator
From my perspective, at SUNY Fredonia, I studied film. My focus was on production and storytelling, but my real education came from seeing a gap. In 2012, Michael Carbone and I created "The Raphy Report," a student-run multi-segment news and variety show produced by TRR Productions. It started small. It grew into the first organization in the SUNY Fredonia Technology Incubator operated solely by students, pulling in more than 50 interns across graphic design, business, public relations, journalism, accounting, theater, art, and computer science. We also co-founded V3 Studios, the Incubator's first student-founded tenant, a video production company with three employees and eleven clients. The lessons from building that team and that studio were about resource constraints and creative problem solving. How do you scale when you have almost no budget? How do you coordinate across disciplines? How do you build infrastructure that doesn't break when it's under load?
Where Film and Infrastructure Met
What I have found is that the Dunkirk Access 12 station was where film and technology clicked into place. I worked on a complete rebuild: ran fiber, set up device automation, and moved the broadcast off a single laptop onto a proper system. That project taught me that infrastructure is not a cost center. It is the backbone of reliability. Every day the broadcast went to air, every camera worked, every feed connected, was a day the infrastructure did its job. That is the moment I understood that I was not interested in film for film's sake. I was interested in the systems that made stories possible.
A Decade in Data
From 2013 onwards, Andre Cobham moved into marketing and SEO. As an SEO Specialist, I managed over 30 accounts and drove more than 80 percent of them to the first page of search results. That was the foundation. From 2014 to 2017, I worked as a SEM Strategist and Senior Search Marketing Specialist, learning to build campaigns that converted. The work was always about the system: which keywords, which messaging, which channels, which timing. How does the funnel flow? Where do prospects get stuck? How do you optimize at every stage?
In my experience, from 2018 to 2021, I was an Enterprise Account Manager at InVue Digital, managing SEM and PPC campaigns across Buffalo and the Niagara Falls region. Late in 2021, I moved into a Senior SEM Enterprise role and achieved a 13 percent improvement in lead conversion rate. During this period, I deployed a reporting pipeline using Google Cloud Storage buckets and Google Data Studio to automate client reporting. The system captured data from multiple platforms and routed it to a single dashboard. Every client could see their performance in real time. That is the work that shaped how I think about infrastructure now: not impressive technology for its own sake, but invisible systems that eliminate friction and surface the right information to the right person at the right time.
Basil Marketing and Transcat
At Basil Marketing Group, I built systems for restaurants and automotive brands. I linked digital signage to inventory and campaigns. I set up UTM tracking and co-op budget management. I automated reporting. The goal was always the same: create the infrastructure so that the marketing team could spend their time on strategy, not spreadsheets. Every system I built was designed to make the next person's job easier.
That ethos carried into Transcat, where I was Digital Marketing Manager from 2021 to 2023. I standardized KPI reporting across the organization, secured investment in marketing technology, and analyzed digital channels for multiple acquisitions. The work was less about campaigns and more about infrastructure, measurement, and decision support. When the organization acquired a new company, I was the person who mapped the marketing landscape, identified redundancy, and proposed integration approaches. That is systems thinking applied to business growth.
What Arising Media Is
What I have found is that all of this leads here. I am building fully agentic experiences for business growth. Infrastructure that thinks. I work with companies that are tired of static websites and manual processes, and I build systems that automate decisions, surface insights, and scale with the business.
The constant across every role was never a job title. It was curiosity, problem solving, and the system behind the result. Film taught me how to tell a story and manage complexity. Technology taught me how systems fail and how to design them to be resilient. Data taught me how to measure and optimize. Andre Cobham's career is one arc from assembling a computer on a garage floor to architecting agentic infrastructure for the businesses I work with. The garage moment never left. It is how I work now.