Musician, strategist, mystic and author
Every chapter of Will’s life has been training to learn what moves people
About Will Cady
Maker + Marketer + Mystic = Mythographer
Most people spend their careers trying to choose between the person they were trained to be and the person they actually are. Will decided not to choose.
For years his identities were embarrassments to each other. Now they form a single compass, and the sum has a name. In his own words: “I work with curiosity. This puts me in the business of big questions and in the service of stories.”
Will Cady is an interventional storyteller and cultural strategist: a keynote speaker, the author of Which Way Is North (Matt Holt Books, 2023), a columnist for SPIN and the co-founder of HEAL MVMNT. At Reddit he built KarmaLab, the company’s in-house creative strategy agency, and helped take the company to IPO.
The Maker
Will grew up near Walden Pond, raised by parents who read him William Blake at bedtime and brought home Zen riddles from meditation retreats. He studied at Berklee College of Music, toured in bands, and played for audiences in the thousands. His music has passed 3.5 million streams and won a New England Regional Emmy for musical composition and arrangement. He later wrote Which Way Is North, a handbook for human creativity.
When Will was about twelve, he watched his father, then known as Wild Bill, wrap leather around a bear spear in the basement workshop. The spear, his father explained, is carried like a walking stick by someone willing to be the bait. You plant it, let the bear charge, and raise it at the last moment, so the monster is undone by its own weight. Will took it as his first lesson in making: every honest creative act asks you to walk toward what frightens you and hold steady while it comes. Will carries the spear today as a tattoo on his forearm, and the lesson became the spine of Which Way Is North, which treats anxiety as creativity ready to be transmuted.
See the book
The Marketer
Sometimes a photograph tells a story better than words can.
On the day Reddit went public, Will stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in a top hat, three-piece suit and cane. Photographers caught the moment, and he became a literal stock image used to represent the company’s success. Whenever Reddit reaches a remarkable milestone, the shadow of his outline tends to appear beside the headline (as in MarketWatch, Reuters, Semafor and LinkedIn News, among others), a fitting signature on everything he contributed there.
“I’m just trying to blend in,” he said on the livestream from the trading floor. On the surface, it was a comic gesture to represent the culture of Reddit in all its irreverence. Underneath, it was the fulfillment of a job he’d been given with the playful moniker of “Shaman of Reddit.” Will was knowingly channeling the Dagda, the Celtic father god of abundance, to awaken the animal spirits of Wall Street, silently casting enchantments across the floor as the bell rang, reflecting on this moment of wealth creation as a moment not just for him, but for his ancestors.
The road there started on tour, when a Reddit community saved a show Will thought was lost. That encounter carried him from music into marketing. He joined Reddit in 2016, drawn in part by one of its company values: remember the human. There he launched the Los Angeles office, built KarmaLab, the company's award-winning creative strategy agency, from the ground up, and helped shape the platform into a billion-dollar business and take it to IPO. Adweek named him to its Top 50 in Tech, Media & Marketing in 2020.
The IPO was also his final act at the company; a punctuation mark on a great story too large to be told at once.
People are taught how to begin the chapters of their lives far more often than how to complete them, and Will carries this completion of a meaningful time in his career with pride and accomplishment. Most of all, gratitude for the grace of playing his part in building a great company culture.
See the talks
The Mystic
Anyone who steps into the spotlight as a mystic owes a debt to the elders who kept the wisdom alive, and Will’s practice begins by pointing toward them.
His father gave him his first tarot deck at seven, after a comic-shop owner called the cards “real” magic. Since then Will has given well over a thousand readings, from Mystic Journey, once one of Los Angeles’ most celebrated metaphysical shops, to his role as resident mystic for Reddit Inc. and Soho House. He treats each reading as structured questioning, and sees fortune-telling and trend forecasting as one practice in two costumes.
He led the guided meditation “From Anxiety to Creativity” to open Project Healthy Minds’ World Mental Health Day Festival in 2023, featuring Prince Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Foundation.
For Aniwa’s Sacred Ceremony for a Sacred Earth (Fair Winds Press, 2025), Will sat with recorded ceremonies from more than a dozen Indigenous lineages and gave them written form. The wisdom belongs to Aniwa’s Council of Elders, and his name is absent from the cover by design, which is the point.
He continues that work as one of the founders of Aniwa’s Changemakers, a growing circle in fulfillment of an ancient prophecy: that the people of the North, of mind and technology, would meet the people of the South, of heart and land, around the same fire to bring about a better, more peaceful world. Will lent the compass and structure of Which Way Is North to its creative direction, and its first summit gathered Indigenous elders alongside leaders in technology and finance in Sonoma County in October 2026.
Visit the Aniwa Changemakers Summit
Interventional storytelling
The Mythographer
The Maker makes, the Marketer shares and the Mystic sees. The Mythographer reads the story all three are telling, and Will's practice is to step into it while it is still being decided. He calls it interventional storytelling.
He reads how storytelling in culture is changing, in his SPIN column since 2023 and in the archetypes he calls “the color wheel of culture.” He steps in at the moment of choice, the way he did in a Las Vegas suite in January 2020, when a buyer asked what he saw and Will set the forecast aside and told him the truth.
“The world’s need for stories never fades, but who it wants to write them can and will change.”
Read “Human in the Loop”Every identity points toward one mission.
HEAL MVMNT
STEM for growth. HEAL for repair.
HealingEnvironmentsArtLanguage
“The Sciences teach us methodologies for perceiving truth. The Arts teach us methodologies for confronting them.” HEAL MVMNT, which Will founded with Rachelle Cady to spark a renaissance of respect between the arts and sciences, works with leaders to accelerate responsibility, discernment and care at the pace of their tools, and to bring heart back into the architecture of progress.
Visit HEAL MVMNTThe work
What these identities produce
Moral ambition to match technological ambition
Alignment is a culture problem before it is a technology problem.
Ancestral intelligence
The ceremonies, archetypes and symbolic systems earlier cultures built, brought into the conversation about artificial intelligence.
Belonging
Culture is humanity at scale. Communities decide what matters long before brands arrive, and the work is finding the story they would welcome.
Better questions
The quality of a decision depends on the question that came before it. Most rooms are avoiding one.
Better stories
Finding the adjacent story, the one already nearby, that leads to a better decision.
Human creativity
Which Way Is North, the handbook, and Tarot for Storytelling, its practice.
Press
Will in the press
- LA MagWill Cady on building a more human future for AI and business2026
- Grit DailyWill Cady is building a framework for leadership in an age where technology outpaces morality2026
- Fast CompanyHow breathwork can help relieve stress2023
- Forbes5 tips to start your workweek with zen and fuel your career2023
- Training IndustryOp-ed: How teams can leverage AI for improved creativity and innovation2023
- NewsweekInside Prince Harry and Meghan's mental health festival2023
- Next Big Idea ClubOctober 2023 must-read books2023
- Inc.6 new leadership books you need to read this fall2023
- B&TReddit made me buy it! Why recommendations on Reddit are built differently2023
- AdweekOp-ed: Practicing media hygiene in the face of the anxiety pandemic2021
- Marketing DiveReddit sets up in-house creative agency KarmaLab to scale ad business2021
- Adweek“A lot more consultative”: Reddit rebrands its creative strategy team as KarmaLab2021
- DigidayWhy Reddit is building an in-house agency to work with brands2021
- Modern RetailBrands are increasingly seeing Reddit as a marketing goldmine2021
- Digiday“A new narrative”: Reddit's ad-focused New York office now has 60 people2019
- AdweekThis musician found a community of fans on Reddit. Now, he leads brand strategy for the platform2019
Writing
Words by Will
Book Will to speakBuild yourself, and pass it on.