As a child of the 1980s growing up in Milford, Pete Sena had a clear vision of his future.
“I wanted to make cool stuff on the internet,” he said.
Mission accomplished.
Digital Surgeons LLC, the digital creative and marketing firm he started while still a student at UConn, has worked with accounts as diverse as Lady Gaga and U.S. Open Tennis, ESPN and MTV, Google and the former United Technologies Corp.
Now at the age of 40, he’s taken a step back from being the firm’s CEO, handing leadership reins to Mike Raleigh, who had been senior vice president and head of success.
Sena remains involved as Digital Surgeons’ chief creative officer, but he’s dividing his time shepherding a host of programs housed in the firm’s most visible project — the District in New Haven.
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Re-imagining a 9-acre site that previously housed a CT Transit bus depot, the District is now home to dozens of startup businesses in a 108,000-square-foot coworking space with amenities that conjure images of Silicon Valley — or trendy parts of Brooklyn.
At the District, Sena leads the weekly “Forward Obsessed” podcast that spreads his creative vision and approach. There’s also “District Studio,” a production facility where Digital Surgeons makes its magic; “Find your Venn,” an employment operation for creative artists; “Creative Wild,” an internship program with an emphasis on helping diversify the creative arts field; and “Think FWD,” a training program spreading creative approaches to businesses.
Beyond the District, he’s “entrepreneur in residence” at UConn, and serves as a fractional chief marketing officer, mostly for firms that have been clients, or in which he is an investor.
Previously, he also served as a venture mentor at Yale.
It’s a heavy workload that requires a lot of juggling. Sena has had a lot of practice.
An early start
In describing his experiences growing up, Sena doesn’t sugarcoat it: “I was a nerd.”
His father was a butcher and union leader; his mother worked in the school guidance office. His brother was headed for a career in finance. But Sena was moving to the beat of a different drummer.
Like others of his generation, there were video games. Lots of video games. But he veered off the popular path.
While his peers were consumed with the antics of rock stars, athletes and ingenues, Sena was focused on the projects of filmmaker William Lucas and tech icons Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
While his peers went to parties, he studied coding. Little did they know that he’d soon be teaching them coding.
Like so many business success stories, the winds of change were at his back. It was the late 1990s, and the internet was everywhere. Money was cheap; investors were plentiful.
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The dot-com bubble was inflating on Wall Street. Everyone wanted a website, but the expertise to build one was limited.
Sena seized the opportunity. Working from his dorm room in Storrs, he shifted from designing club posters and ads for local bands to designing websites. It was both fun and profitable, but a call from a friend took Sena’s operation to a new level.
The friend had a corporate client that urgently needed a website. Could Sena handle the job? Soon, DirectTV had a website.
Friends told friends, clients told clients, and Sena quickly had more work than he could handle. He hired a coder to help, then a designer and an administrative assistant. Digital Surgeons was off and running, in a fashion.
For Sena, the future had opened up before him. He’d discovered what he describes as “the powerful black art of marketing.”
Working on a project for Thule Roof Racks, he realized he was designing more than web pages. He was designing demand. The analytics showed sales were rising based on his work.
Working with MTV allowed him to refine his thinking further — from “change peoples’ lives with a click of a mouse” to “own the mind, own the wallet” — he recalls.
It was like he’d found “the cheat code for life,” he said.
But it also had become clear he needed help to harness this new world.
Sena confesses he’d always been disdainful of sales and business development types. But now he saw their value, and he needed one.
Enter David Salinas.
Yin and yang
Salinas had been working on the edges of the music industry and in digital marketing. An engineer who knew both Salinas and Sena thought they had similar interests and should meet.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The two saw quickly that their strengths were complementary. Salinas recalls the new team’s first prospective client was a fledgling clothing line.
“How much are you going to charge them,” Salinas remembers asking Sena. When Salinas stopped laughing at Sena’s answer, he suggested a number 10 times higher.
Salinas closed the deal.
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Over the ensuing years, what Salinas calls their “superpowers” developed. Sena became an expert at seeing possibilities and anticipating trends. Salinas sharpened his sales techniques.
“He could smell it, I could sell it,” Salinas said.
For Sena, a personal high point was helping launch and drive record sales for the video game BioShock Infinite.
“I was so grateful when they featured us in the end video game credits,” Sena said. “Being able to see our brand name scrolling through the end-game credits created a sense of relief for all that hard work.”
Predictably, Salinas takes a different approach in identifying a highlight. He points to work Digital Surgeons did with Lady Gaga as a turning point in the firm’s climb.
The singer was trying to crowdsource locations at the same time Sena and Salinas were exploring a “shoot-local” concept that would eventually feed into the District Studio plan.
The ideas were different enough that a partnership wouldn’t work, but Lady Gaga liked what she saw and hired Digital Surgeons to work on a project — Gaga’s Workshop — she was launching with Barneys New York.
That project won a Webby, the top honor for digital arts, and boosted the firm’s New York City street cred.
Today, Digital Surgeons employs around 50 people. The privately held company doesn’t disclose revenues.
Brooklyn east
Salinas, who’d grown up in Queens near the Brooklyn border, knew and liked the feel of the big city. Sena, however, was determined to stay rooted in Connecticut.
Sena won that round, but Salinas brought a Brooklyn vibe to the District in New Haven. He even named his daughter Brooklyn.
While Salinas became the frontman for the District project, it was always and remains a joint undertaking with Sena and other partners.
Sena explains the origin of the District with the industry term “dogfooding.” That’s the process of solving your problem, then selling the solution to others who face similar challenges.
Digital Surgeons was outgrowing its space near the vacant CT Transit bus depot. If it could buy the building, remake it into a trendy coworking space that included a studio for Digital Surgeons, perhaps it could tap into the energy that was growing in New Haven’s nearby biotech corridor.
Matthew Nemerson, whose fingerprints have been on a number of New Haven development projects over the years, was serving as the city’s economic development administrator at the time. The competing bids for the CT Transit property came down to a retail concept, or the District, he remembers.
It wasn’t a close call from the city’s perspective. It wanted tech energy in that space. But it wasn’t until the state agreed to pay about $6 million to mitigate environmental problems at the site, that the District became a reality.
The District’s founders paid $1 for the property and invested millions more to renovate it.
More to come
Nemerson describes Sena and Salinas as “go-to people” who are “evangelists for New Haven.”
“They are aggressively looking for ways to pay it forward,” he said, pointing to their unsuccessful plan to develop a new entertainment complex — including a floating restaurant — at Long Wharf, a New Haven waterfront district.
Sena and Salinas said while they are disappointed the Long Wharf idea didn’t work out, they are actively looking at projects around the state — in Hartford, Norwalk and Stamford, as well as in New Haven.
Salinas frames it as a desire to help the state fulfill its “real need to connect people.”
Sena also points to the duo’s investments in both client and tenant companies that are driving important innovation.
Sena is also focused on creating opportunities for the area’s diverse creative arts community through various programs at the District, including Creative Wild and Find your Venn, which are involved in talent development and recruitment.
“Right now, I’m focused on unlocking creativity in a million people,” Sena said. “When that number reaches 1 million, I’ll move the goal post to 10 million and hopefully can keep achieving that as long as I can.”
Salinas looks at Sena and says his partner is still climbing toward the peak of his “superpower” of seeing the next big thing.
And when that next opportunity presents itself, Salinas will be ready to apply his “superpower” to make it happen.