About Will Waters

My entry point into technology was audio. I started working in live sound at a young age—mixing, tuning systems, and recording in environments where things either worked or they didn't, often under time pressure and with little room for ambiguity. That early exposure still shapes how I think about reliability, timing, and operational clarity.

I was fortunate to come up during a period of major transition in media technology. Early on, I encountered the Amiga and the Video Toaster, and before finishing high school I was already tuning Windows NT systems to behave well under real-time audio workloads. To pay my way through college, I worked extensively in AV—serving as a road manager for rock and jazz acts, tuning PA systems weekly, and supporting live productions where there was no margin for abstraction.

After college, I was hired to formalize and build an AV program inside an IT organization. That role coincided with the construction of a new performing arts center, where I was responsible for the technical design and operation of a $5M venue alongside modern classroom systems built on Crestron. It was my first sustained exposure to the intersection of production, infrastructure, and institutional scale.

While audio has always been my first interest, I found myself increasingly drawn to software-defined production and IP-based workflows. That path eventually led me out of education and into AV integration, broadcast, and sports production—working across everything from mobile units to fixed facilities and complex multi-room systems.

My work with a NewTek dealer aligned closely with the launch of TriCaster, and I was part of a small team that helped grow the business into a top-ten NewTek partner globally. That experience ultimately led to joining NewTek as its first Sales Engineer, supporting resellers, distributors, and end users as they adopted software-driven production across education, houses of worship, corporate environments, and international broadcasters.

As NewTek grew, I moved through roles spanning sales, marketing, customer support, operations, and product development. Along the way, I gained a firsthand view into the realities of running a business that blends software development with hardware design, global manufacturing, logistics, and regulatory complexity.

Throughout all of this, the common thread has been translating ideas on paper into systems that actually work on real networks, with real people, under real constraints. Much of my current writing focuses on demystification—helping teams reason clearly about transport, timing, and behavior so production environments scale more predictably and with less stress.