Payton Kaleiwahea · Tulsa, Oklahoma
I drove warships for the Navy. Then I spent the next seven years producing live shows, building communities from zero, running marketing for game studios, and shipping a product of my own.
Six sectors
Six threads that shaped how I work and why I do what I do. Each one jumps to where it starts on the timeline.
Ran an 80-person engineering division on a warship in my early twenties. Drove the ship at General Quarters through the Strait of Hormuz. Taught officers how to do it after me. Then founded Wolves from zero and managed 100+ creators as talent.
Agent-driven workflows across research, editing, and distribution. The same systems that let me run a media operation and a product roadmap without losing the human quality bar.
A $1.2M launch in 48 hours. Two director seats under founders who built MySpace and Words With Friends. Go-to-market that takes a project from unknown to sold out.
Started with a camera, weddings, and terrible thumbnails. Now: original show formats, live broadcasts, vertical systems, and 50M+ impressions from my own channels.
Prototypes, PRDs, wireframes, decision trees, UI and UX maps, then demos instead of PRDs once the agents were in. Zero to one more than once, then rebuilt on my own foundation with an AI-native team of five. 730K+ community members tracked, 10M+ gaming sessions across communities.
A private network of builders started from zero, then turned into gamified live events people show up for. WolvesDEN turns that community into a live, competitive show. Creator Den runs the content houses and creator workshops underneath it.
2016 to now
Oldest first. Each entry is tagged with the sector it belongs to.
Professional life starts here. Degree in hand, commissioned as a Surface Warfare Officer and sent to the fleet two weeks after graduation, freshly married.
First division. The radars, comms, and combat electronics that let a warship see and talk. Seven months learning how to lead sailors who knew far more than I did, before a DIVO shuffle landed me in main propulsion.
Took over as the Main Propulsion 1 officer on my first tour. When the MP2 officer was injured, I took on both divisions: roughly 80 people and the engines that move the ship. Ran the major INSURV and dry-docking qualifications along the way.
Started with a camera, weddings, and terrible thumbnails. Church events, skits, anything that needed coverage. Shot NASA capsule recovery operations from the ship, and started my own content: learned YouTube from scratch.
Deck department on an amphibious transport dock. Then the Zulu warfare liaison officer for my captain: embarked on the LHD, worked for the Commodore, briefed admirals and other captains, and relayed for the amphibious squadron and the MEU. Then back to the Murtha.
Taught the next officers what the sea had taught me. Put in my one-year notice during COVID and transitioned out with a camera already in hand: went hard on content, built the hard skills and a YouTube channel. That content is what got me hired straight out of the Navy.
Founded from zero. Started as my own content channel and became a private network of builders across gaming, blockchain, and AI. This is where I learned that distribution is a community problem before it is a content problem, and where every system I now sell was tested on my own audience first.
Hired by founder and CEO Mark Otero, who created Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Led the sold-out launch: $1.2M in transactional volume within 48 hours. Owned distribution, messaging, and the hype cycle, and wrote the go-to-market playbook that took the project from unknown to fully subscribed.
Marketing for the Launchpad on the largest NFT marketplace in the space, on the back of the Azra launch. A short stint.
Poached to run community for a web3 game studio, then moved up to marketing director, leading the team and reporting to the executive team. Mentored weekly by Chris DeWolfe, co-founder of MySpace, and Aber Whitcomb, its CTO. Pushed the game onto Steam, Amazon Prime Gaming, and the Epic Games launcher, then hired my own replacement as head of community. The best team I have worked on.
Poached again, this time for operations. They called me the marketing producer: Jira, ticketing, planning, and production across marketing and operations. Inherited a broken pipeline between the two, mapped the failed handoffs, rebuilt the coordination, delivered a working system, and transitioned out.
Streamed the YGG Play Summit in Manila and an esports broadcast on OpenSea’s own platform. Run of show, switching, graphics, talent, and distribution. Both booked me again the following year.
Stepped out of the studio roles to build Wolves properly. A roster of creative talent under the brand: facilitating deals and business development, running live events and content operations for Wolves and for the creators underneath it. Advising and consulting for founders and studios on the side.
2024 was also my GPT moment. Midjourney, Veo 3, and a stack of other tools for content, and a few Wolves courses teaching it. Then OpenClaw came out. Got into it, built Hermes, built research agents, lead enrichment agents, and editing agents. Agents.md files and file structure became the job.
Live events with game mechanics built in, produced as broadcasts. Started in 2024, ran again in 2025, and is on the calendar for 2026. Community, format design, and live production in one room.
Over the course of Wolves I have managed 100+ creators as talent: logistics, getting them into the right rooms, booking and flights, then running the run of show and making sure every one of them is there and briefed on the production.
Took the contract to learn under Paul Bettner, founder of Words With Friends. Ran marketing for six months and ran live production around the world, Singapore and the Philippines included: on-camera talent, plus the tests and launches of the Thousands.tv live production platform. Then left to launch Kizuna, a chance to build my own community application.
Second year with both.
A community and product intelligence platform for game studios: we merged what we knew about community data with AI systems that generate community-based reports, so a studio can act on its playtests more accurately. Went from zero to one more than once, starting over to find product-market fit. Then rebuilt it on a foundation I owned myself, hiring my own talent and running an AI-native team of five across development and operations. Platform goes live.
The product work ran the full stack: prototyping, product requirements docs, wireframes, decision trees, UI and UX maps. Once the agents were in place, the PRDs turned into demos. Instead of writing what we wanted, we showed it.
Discord rejected our application for the permission the app needed. Said goodbye to the team and wound it down.
After Kizuna, went back to marketing and content: working with founders to get their voice out. Seven years of independent media production, formalized into one company, an external media department for founders and expertise-led businesses.
Craft
Not a tool list. In order: what I lead with, what I actually do day to day, and what I’ve built.
Working together
You bring the expertise. One 90-minute session a month becomes at least 20 publish-ready pieces, and I run the operation around you.
See how it works →