Today we’d like to introduce you to Scott Jones.
Hi Scott, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m the son of two college professors — one came up through engineering, the other through marketing. So before I could vote I was basically a live experiment in what happens when you braid those two things together. The braid never came apart. Engineering and marketing — how a thing works and how a thing lands — have been the two hands I do everything with ever since.
I was one of those kids who was into everything from the jump: acting, improv comedy, dance, piano, tennis, art — all of it starting around age four. By eight I’d decided, with total confidence, that I was going to be a movie mogul 🙂 I spent the next decade chasing exactly that — film camps, weird homegrown video experiments, any program that would let me hold a camera.
Drums found me at fifteen, and I had almost nothing to do with it. My desk partner in biology class looked over at me tapping my pen and said, more or less, “that’s actually good — you should be a drummer.” So I became one. Self-taught, all passion, basically no technique or repertoire — but hooked for life.
I went to Northwestern and double-majored in film and economics. Somewhere in there I realized I didn’t quite relate to the film majors, and the economics side kept pulling harder. After graduation I went the analyst route — economic consulting in higher ed and social policy, then management consulting doing strategy and operations, then an internal consulting role at a billion-dollar nonprofit health system in New York. The whole time I was gigging in bands, still teaching myself, still figuring it out.
Then New York handed me the plot twist. My band caught the ear of a producer in LA — nobody in New York quite got what we were going for, but this guy heard it immediately and wanted in. We flew out for a week, cut an album, and it came out great. There was just more oxygen for it out west, so we decided to move.
Here’s the part I love. I took a job at an internet yellow pages company and made the jump. The other two guys in the trio were in finance — and the Great Recession hit basically the week I landed. They couldn’t find work and stayed in NYC, the band quietly died, and I was suddenly the only one still standing. Sounds like a tragedy. It actually unlocked the rest of my life.
Because in both cities I tended to play in five or six bands at once — and once I got to New York I’d finally gotten serious about studying. That’s about 22 years of real study now, with some absurdly good players: Jason Gianni, Mike Clark, Dave Weckl, Chad Wackerman, Thomas Pridgen, Chris Coleman. Losing the band just cleared the runway for all of it.
Meanwhile, at that yellow pages company, I’d talked my way onto the search engine marketing team, and the autodidact instincts kicked in hard. I went deep into SQL — writing code that was steering three to four million dollars a month in spend across the major search engines. After a year, leadership pulled me aside and said, “you should be a product manager.” Sounded fun. I had no idea it was about to become one of the hottest jobs on earth. They handed me a $150M performance ad product with 50,000 customers, and I cut my teeth on the whole machine — the optimization engine alongside data science, the APIs alongside engineering, the business rules for building and controlling ad campaigns programmatically at scale.
That set the trajectory: adtech, martech, IoT, then Lenovo and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, working right at the seam where AI, hardware, and the cloud meet. Today I run product and go-to-market at Realeyes.ai, where we use computer vision to anonymously verify that someone is a real, unique human — which, in a world filling up with AI and deepfakes, turns out to matter a little more every day.
The North Carolina chapter started at work in LA, too. I met my wife in LA — she’s a North Carolina native, and she made the case plainly: great music scene, great tech scene, and a cost of living that actually lets you raise a family. Hard to argue with that architecture. We moved in 2012, and it’s been exactly as advertised.
The last few years have been a quiet renaissance. I started studying voice about three years ago and reconnected with the piano. Now I sing backup and play drums with the Raleigh rock band The Bleeding Hearts, I lead my own improvisational group The Upward Dogs, and I’m building out a solo act — R&B-style singing while I play guitar and piano.
And if there’s a single thread running under all of it — the drumming, the Kriya yoga and meditation, even the way I make product calls — it’s this: I try to operate from intuition and feeling rather than from grinding, conscious thought. The best musical statements I’ve ever played and the best decisions I’ve ever made came from the same place — you stop thinking, you listen, and you let the answer arrive. Improvising live with The Upward Dogs, the whole goal is to get out of my own way entirely and let something move through me — the closest word I’ve got for it is channeling. Engineering and marketing are what got me in the room. Learning to trust the feeling is what actually made the work worth doing.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Not remotely smooth — and honestly, mostly on purpose. Somewhere along the way “that sounds scary” quietly became my compass. If something scares me a little (or a lot!), that’s usually the sign it’s the next thing I’m supposed to do.
That’s how I ended up joining a European computer vision company to stand up a brand-new platform business as, essentially, a solo founder — product, sales, marketing, business development, an army of one. It’s also how I walked into the rock band The Bleeding Hearts. I only started studying singing in September of 2023, and by January of 2025 I’d networked my way into a group that needed a singing drummer — a thing I had never once done in my life. It sounded terrifying. So, obviously, I said yes.
I’ve come to believe the unsmooth road is the point. Pressure is what turns coal into a diamond, and I go looking for it.
The hardest stretches, though, weren’t the scary things I chose — they were people. I’ve worked for a recurring cast of what we’d now call “toxic” leaders (I know that word gets a lot of mileage these days). One CEO used to lash out at me, and for a long time I took it personally — personally enough that it eventually showed up in my body as real autoimmune problems. That was the hard, expensive lesson in non-attachment: his behavior was never actually about me.
The gift of learning that once is that you recognize the pattern the next time. A few years later, at the next big company, a business-unit leader spent ten straight minutes dropping f-bombs on a conference call full of people — over something objectively trivial. Old me would have absorbed it and made it mine. New me just thought, “no. Not again. No way,” and was gone shortly after my one-year mark. I still chase pressure — but I’ve gotten realistic about it. Growth-pressure and toxic-pressure are not the same thing, and only one of them makes you sick.
Music has its own struggles, and most of them are internal. I can catch myself sizing up other players like it’s a competition, which it isn’t. And improvising live means taking risks in front of people that don’t always land — but that’s the whole game. That knife-edge of not-knowing is exactly where the energy lives; you can’t fake it, and you can’t get it any other way.
The biggest pressure cooker of all showed up the year after we landed in North Carolina: identical twins. Blessing and gauntlet in the same breath. For a good while there was no time for music — no time for anything — beyond keeping two tiny humans developing and keeping our own sanity intact. But fatherhood to twins turned out to be the single biggest catalyst in my personal development. It forced me to make every day count, and it turned an enormous amount of coal into diamond.
These days I’m full-time at Realeyes, and I still practice voice, drums, piano, and guitar every day — improving fast on all of them — while helping push the leading edge of the AI renaissance. Turns out the scary roads were the only ones that ever really took me anywhere.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
These days my creative center of gravity is music, full stop. On paper I’m a drummer — but what I actually do is improvise.
For the last two years I’ve been studying with Jason Gianni, and he’s taken me places no teacher on any instrument ever has. We work on the deep-structure stuff — advanced four-limb independence, ostinatos, polymeters, polyrhythms, jazz from bebop through the modern and contemporary edges. None of it is about tricks, though. The whole point is expanding the range of emotional buttons I can actually press behind a kit, in whatever room I’m in.
If I’m known for anything, it’s range. I can move from rock to funk to jazz to world music — Latin and beyond — to metal, and make each one feel good and authentic rather than like a guy doing an impression. I think of it as being a chameleon who somehow still sounds like himself. The hard part isn’t playing a lot of styles; it’s meaning all of them.
But the thing I actually specialize in is being in the moment. I’m a bit obsessed with improvisation — reading the emotion and intention of a piece as it’s happening and answering it honestly. Which means I rarely play the same thing twice. What comes out depends on the audience, the band, the room, and, frankly, the universe that particular night.
The thing I’m proudest of is the band that takes that idea all the way: The Upward Dogs. No setlists. No rehearsals. We show up — on a stage or in a studio — and build something out of nothing, in real time, in front of whoever’s there. It’s a high wire with no net, on purpose. Some nights it’s terrifying, every night it’s alive, and that trade is the whole reason I do it.
And if there’s a single thread under all of it, it’s the same one that runs under everything I do: I trust the feeling over the thinking, and I’ve built a whole musical life around getting out of my own way so that something real can come through.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Mostly just this: I’m nowhere near done, and that’s the best part. Almost every day now I wake up to some ability or pathway I didn’t know was in there — it’s like the ceiling keeps turning out to be a floor.
The clearest example is singing. I only started three years ago, and only because my wife kept gently insisting I should. I found a teacher in Carrboro whose work I’d been following for a while — the clincher was watching her band cover Knower, at which point I knew I had to study with her.
I walked in with genuinely no idea who I was, or could be, as an artist. She listened for a few lessons and told me I had a soulful voice and belonged in R&B. I’d shown up making Harry Styles references; she calmly raised the stakes to Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Frank Ocean, Daniel Caesar. Point taken.
It’s been a fast, slightly unbelievable ride since — and the next chapter is stepping out as a solo singing act. After a lifetime behind the kit, standing at the front of the room is the scariest thing on my list right now.
Which, if you’ve read this far, you already know means it’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://scott-jones-drums.vercel.app/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottjeezey/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ScottJonesOnDrums
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjeezey/
- Other: https://upward-dogs.vercel.app/
