At Equinix, the publicly traded data center services company, a 10-year-anniversary was coming up. The once-plucky startup had grown up. Having survived the dot-com bust, the company had become a billion-dollar company. But its brand identity hadn’t changed.

At American Express, one of the world’s most trusted and recognized consumer brands, the company’s lesser known corporate payments products struggled for awareness. Amex sought to launch a newly branded corporate payments product suite, its first new B2B product in years.

After surviving a rare blood cancer and a life-saving bone marrow transplant in 2014, I achieved a lifelong dream of becoming an author, authoring three books of fiction and publishing work in NPR, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and elsewhere.