Carl Robert Winans

Carl Winans has spent more than 25 years helping companies figure out what to build next, and then actually building it. His entrepreneurial career began in his Michigan State dorm room, where he designed and sold t-shirts by day and performed amateur stand-up by night. The university told him he couldn’t run a business out of his dorm. The comedy club told him not to quit his day job. He listened to one of them.

Since then he has founded or co-founded companies across web, mobile, virtual reality, AI, and consumer products. He sold his studio Deep Canvas in 2018, invented the anti-gravity phone case, built a conversational AI startup before ChatGPT made it cool, and designed Beershorts, the only shorts with magnetic can coolers.

Today he runs Sunrise Innovation Studio, which helps brands start up, start fresh, and start over. He is the author of Rethink, the first book in the Survival Guides for the Modern Mind series and the newly published "How To Be Your Worst Self: A Devil's Guide to Wasting Your Potential". He works and writes as he travels between his home state of Michigan and his new home in Izmir, Turkey.