Founding the Houston Immersive Studio.

I joined as one of the founding members of Accenture's Houston Immersive Studio, recruited and trained the first five new hires, and helped set the operational tone that would carry through everything that came after — from Davos to Vision Pro.

Role
Founding member · Recruiter
Org
Accenture · Houston
Hires
5 trained from zero
Community
50+ person research network
HTX Hub — Accenture Houston studio interior with branded kiosks
Team · Build-out
HTX
A studio is a culture before it's a product. Get the first five right.
// 5 hires · 50+ research community
// 01 · Challenge

Building a studio from a blank room.

Houston was a new node in Accenture's immersive footprint. The first hires would set the tone for everything downstream — what kind of work the studio attracted, what kind of standards it held, what kind of place it was to work. Hiring is a design problem, especially first-five hiring.

// 02 · Process

Recruit slow, train fast.

I recruited five new team members and ran their onboarding personally — not as orientation, but as a structured ramp into the actual work, with real projects from week two. In parallel, I founded a 50+ person internal product research community and used it to design and execute a research survey that we delivered to a client as a real artifact.

  1. The first fiveRange over rate. Different shapes of mind so the studio didn't become a monoculture.
  2. Research community50+ Accenture practitioners across geographies, used as a real research instrument, not a Slack channel.
  3. Training shapeOnboarding ramped from observation to ownership over six weeks.
// 03 · Outcome

The studio that ran Davos and shipped Vision Pro.

The Houston Studio became the operational base for almost every project in this portfolio. The discipline established in those first months — runbooks, post-mortems, demo cadence — was exactly what kept Stratus boring and Davos calm.

// 04 · Learnings

Culture is set in the first five hires.

  1. Variance is a featureFive identical hires produce one identical viewpoint. Range protects you from your own blind spots.
  2. Communities are infrastructureThe research community I founded was a research instrument that produced real client deliverables.
Next case →
Múkaro — Founding a startup in Puerto Rico