If you're reading this, hopefully you're looking for me and not one of the other Derek Oppermans out there (some of them have great SEO). I am not the ripped personal trainer, sorry.
I live in Ojai, California, where I am the co-founder and head of digital marketing at PureWild Co., a collagen wellness company that makes delicious drinks, healthy wines, and functional supplement powders. Check out PureWild Co.'s website, Instagram page,
andAmazon store for more information about that.
I am also a journalist, editor, copywriter, and digital marketing specialist.
My background is primarily in electronic and experimental music. In a past life, I lived in Berlin, where I was both the editor-in-chief and agency-side project lead of Deutsche Telekom's English-language Electronic Beats online magazine.
This was a great job for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest perks was that it allowed me to contribute to some rather ambitious marketing campaigns featuring cutting-edge technologies and Grammy-winning recording artists. For example, I helped script and was in the control room for the first-ever live interview given by Gorillaz members 2D and Murdoc (they are cartoon characters). I have also recorded a podcast with Billie Eilish.
Electronic Beats has mostly stopped publishing. However, last year I worked with Telekom to curate an archive of notable articles by great writers from my time and other editors' times that you can explore at electronicbeats.net.
I started writing in San Francisco, first at XLR8R and then later for SF Weekly's digital and print editions. I have since consulted, written for, and worked with various clients, including Red Bull, Volkswagen, Goldbelly, and Emirates Airlines.
Update Feb 24, 2023: If you're here because you're looking for information about my SF Weekly column, Lost In The Night, which documented Bay Area nightlife from 2010-2014, I have bad news: the current owners have gutted the site, and the Internet Archive didn't index anything. As a result, you can now only find two paragraphs and a few low-res images per article.