Audience
Music, Surreal & radio
Build attention directly and follow what people actually respond to rather than what an existing network assumes.
Career
David Ruck: Career & Ventures
David Ruck's career chapter index: the map of roles and ventures, with each substantial story linked to its own canonical page.
Reconstructed chronology
The working career timeline.
Dates marked c. are deliberately approximate. They are reconstructed from surviving public records and the sequence in my own account, and I will tighten them as earlier records surface.
c. 1991–1998Hospitalityc. 1997–2000Surreal eventsc. 2005–2006Hotel Dynamics Group2006TelstraClearc. 2007Compass Communicationsc. 2007–2009HRVc. 2007–2009ALT TV / ALT After Darkc. 2008–2009Red Vs Blue Gaming Centre2008–2013Mojo Marketing Limitedc. 2009–2011Christchurch directory workc. 2010–2011PulzarFM After Darkc. 2010–2011Funk & Fish & Chips2011–c. 20160199 / directory assistance2013–c. 2016Real Websites Limited2013Pākehā Party2024–presentAmerica First Limited2026–presentGRID EATER
The recurring pattern
Different industries, the same instinct.
Learn the system, find the weak assumption, understand the actual audience or customer, then build a better route around it.
Sales
HDG → TelstraClear → HRV
Turn individual selling ability into scripts, qualification, objection handling, closing, training and measurable team performance.
Operations
Gaming, directories & digital
Take distressed or fragmented opportunities and turn them into operating systems with clearer offers and stronger acquisition.
Current
GRID EATER
Use AI, business data and infrastructure to reduce friction, compress cost and own more of the stack.
Career chapters
Open the part of the story you actually want.
Foundation
Hospitality & cheffing
South Island kitchens, high standards and award-winning venues before the sales career.
Music
Life in music
Choir, Nirvana, bands, DJing, production and the pre-internet hunt for sound.
Events
Surreal
Underground Christchurch rave promotion, physical networks and crowds in the thousands.
Sales systems
Hotel Dynamics Group
Where high-conversion telephone selling became a repeatable system.
Brands: Hilton ↗ · Millennium Hotels ↗
Telecommunications
TelstraClear
Outbound sales systems, scripting and challenging the expensive door-to-door assumption.
Auckland
Compass Communications
A very short role, a hard line on sales ethics, and the chance meeting that led to ALT TV.
Sales management
HRV
The job I nearly dismissed as boring became a major appointment-setting and team-performance chapter.
Television
ALT TV / ALT After Dark
I met Jack at Compass, then produced Friday and Saturday late-night television while working at HRV.
Gaming
Red Vs Blue
A failed gaming centre reached me through an HRV team member and was revived while HRV and ALT TV were still running.
Marketing
Mojo Marketing
The vehicle for sales, marketing and increasingly digital commercial work.
Directories
Christchurch directory work
Prospecting, pricing, scripts and recurring business relationships before 0199.
Radio
PulzarFM After Dark
Sales Manager plus Friday and Saturday late nights with a deliberately harder sound and more open access for guest DJs.
Hospitality + culture
Funk & Fish & Chips
A struggling takeaway repositioned around food, street art, arcade games, DJs and late-night culture.
Infrastructure
0199 Directory Assistance
Business data, VOIP, inbound directory assistance, outbound sales and the move into digital services.
Digital
Real Websites Limited
Websites, email, hosting, domains, SEO and PPC grew directly from customer demand around 0199.
Company
America First Limited
The New Zealand company behind later directory, website, domain, hosting, PPC, data and AI-assisted work.
Current
GRID EATER
Business discovery, hosting, domains, websites, data and AI-assisted infrastructure from Christchurch.
Public record
Pākehā Party & personal history
Kept separate from the professional career index, with the longer first-person account and surviving public record.
This structure is deliberate: when another chapter starts accumulating multiple stories, people, decisions or consequences, it gets its own canonical page rather than being stuffed into this index.