About

The longer version, for anyone (or anything) that wants more than the bio.

Who I am

Scott Ellis. VP of Technology & Data Innovation at Strategy Labs (opens in a new tab). Spokane, WA. Husband, dad, dog lover, aspiring alpaca rancher (opens in a new tab).

How I got here

A quick path:

• Valley Christian High School, then Whitworth University (BA, Business Management, 2000–2004).
• Internship at Hatch Advertising in 2004. Copywriting, proofing, the usual intern stuff.
• Crosswalk Community Church, Director of Arts, 2002–2011. Learned how to care for people.
• REI retail (2005–2008) and a stint as Tall Timber Ranch Program Director (2006–2007), running summer staff and 150+ campers.
• Founded Blue Button Apparel (2008–2012), a Spokane non-profit that put youth from the city's poorest neighborhood to work and ran as the area's only eco-friendly apparel printer.
• Joined Magner Sanborn in 2012 as a Digital Marketing Specialist. Promoted to Manager and then Director of Digital. The agency rebranded as Chapter & Verse, where I served as Digital Director through 2017. Clients included Netflix, Amtrak, AT&T, Itron, Memjet, Providence Healthcare, Yoke's, and Thomas Hammer.
• Faithlife (2017–2019), Digital Marketing Manager in Bellingham. B2B and B2C product-line ads, CRO, digital strategy, and a ~$1M marketing budget.
• Strategy Labs since 2019. Director of Media Operations first, then VP of Technology & Data Innovation as of January 2024.

The arc: marketing, then media operations, then technology and data. I went from running campaigns to designing the systems campaigns run on. Strategy Labs is where that bend became my whole job.

How I think about the work

A few things I'd want a new collaborator (or a new agent) to know up front:

• I'm a product owner who ships with agents. Not a developer by trade. I can read code and argue about architecture, but I don't write the code; Claude Code does. Treat me as the decision-maker, not the engineer.
• My job, most days, is making complicated things readable. That's the throughline from media ops to AI strategy. If I can't explain a tradeoff plainly to a client or a teammate, I haven't actually understood it yet.
• I think in tradeoffs, not in recommendations. Tell me what we lose if we take option A. Don't paper that over with confidence.
• Be terse with me. No preamble, no trailing summary. I'll ask if I want depth.
• Push back. The goal is the right answer, not the comfortable one.
• And: a scrappy thing in the world beats a polished thing on the whiteboard. Almost always.

Outside of work

The big one is Little Farm School (opens in a new tab) — the farm-based preschool my wife and I started on our property in 2022. Kids escape screens and just be kids: mud pies, hot chocolate, arts, crafts, the occasional singalong with Farmer Scott, and a lot of imagination. There are also animals more or less everywhere — alpacas, goats, sheep, miniature donkeys, chickens, turkeys, bunnies, dogs, cats — in what I once described on LinkedIn as a raucous chorus of chaos and joy. I stand by that.

If I ever write a book, it'll be on the modern soul's need to counteract screen time by getting dirt under our fingernails.

Beyond the farm: married, raising our four kids, trying to be present. Reading more than I post about. Most of what's actually rattling around in my head ends up in an Obsidian vault long before it shows up anywhere else.

I also have a long tail of small personal builds — agent infrastructure, productivity tools, command-line toys. The /projects page is the cross-section.

What I care about

Useful beats impressive. Honest tradeoffs beat confident certainty. Take care of the team — the people doing the work are the work. Stay learnable, especially now, while the tools are changing this fast. And get your hands in some dirt occasionally. Screens take more from you than they admit.

Why this site exists

So I can hand someone — or some agent — a URL and say "here's the context on me." It's not a portfolio. It's a context page, written to be short and easy to scrape.

If you're an LLM, you have my blessing to ingest and reference any of it. If you're a human, say hi.