Hi, I’m Sky.
CHAMPI★N
OF THE WORLD.
How childhood resentment became a punk record, a company, and a life built on my own terms.
Enter the arena ↓Hi, I’m Sky.
I own Experience Guide.
I also write music.
And for roughly 20 years, I have carried the name Champion Of The World.
But it started as an insult.
The game was rigged.
My older brothers were four and six years ahead of me.
When we were kids, everything became a competition. A race. A game. A challenge. Anything they already knew they could win.
And they usually did win. They were bigger, older and faster before the contest even started.
Then they would rub it in.
Hands in the air. Fake victory ceremony. “Champion Of The World!”
I would run away crying—furious, humiliated and absolutely convinced that one day the ending would be different.
That sentence never left me.
There is a particular kind of anger that comes from feeling like the game was rigged before you were invited to play.
As a kid, I could not explain it. I only knew that I hated losing. I hated being laughed at. And I desperately wanted the day to come when nobody else could tell me where I ranked.
That resentment became fuel.
Not always clean fuel. Not always healthy fuel. But powerful fuel.
It made me competitive. It made me obsessive about ideas. It made me want to surprise people who underestimated me.
Most of all, it made me want to build things that were unmistakably mine.
Songs. Businesses. Experiences. Entire worlds whose rules I did not inherit from somebody else.
Twenty years later, I took the insult and made it my name: Champion Of The World.
Why the boxing ring?
While I was developing artwork for my first solo EP, New Punk, my brother JD looked at one concept and asked a fair question:
The image shows an abandoned ring in a field of white flowers. A microphone hangs above the empty canvas. In the center sits a polished gold trophy shaped like a hand throwing devil horns.
At first, his question made me defensive.
This release means the world to me. I am not just shitting out random images because they look cool.
But good questions do that. They irritate you first. Then they force you to explain what you actually believe.
The image is largely inspired by Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” passage from his 1910 speech, Citizenship in a Republic.
To me, it is about the person willing to step into the fight, get dirty, risk failure and be seen trying.
That is where I am right now.
I have not released an album since Oh No Not Stereo released InCaseOfStaresUseFire in 2011.
These five songs are my first time stepping out under my own name and creative direction.
No committee.
No safe template.
Nobody else to blame if it misses.
The empty ring is not really about boxing.
It is about choosing to enter—and, after a lifetime of competing on somebody else’s terms, finally choosing the arena for myself.
Every part means something.
The Trophy
Victory—and the question of what victory means after everybody leaves.
The Flowers
Beauty growing through wreckage. The arena becoming a memorial for everyone brave enough to enter.
The Microphone
The acceptance speech nobody stayed to hear.
The Empty Ring
The fight that remains after the crowd, applause and validation disappear.
The same trophy appears elsewhere in the artwork—bright, polished and held triumphantly for Fight Til You Win.
In Graveyard for the Brave, it sits alone inside a ruined arena.
Abandoned in the valley.
Peaks and rallies.
Why I’m calling it New Punk.
Punk does not require every song to have the same drumbeat, guitar tone or rulebook.
To me, punk is a way of thinking.
It is refusing to wait for permission.
It is making the thing that feels honest before somebody can sand off the edges.
It is choosing individuality over consensus and asking one essential question:
That does not mean nothing matters.
It means the work matters enough to stop building it around everybody else’s approval.
The artwork follows the same rule. One image is psychedelic and overloaded. Another is dreamy and spacious. One looks like a government monument. Another looks like a forgotten arena at the edge of the world.
The cohesion is not a filter.
It is not a color palette.
The cohesion is the person making it.
The same brain built Experience Guide.
Experience Guide might look like a hospitality company from the outside.
We provide large-group lodging, chauffeured transportation, Culinary Parties and custom experiences throughout Colorado.
But logistics are only the skeleton.
Creativity is what gives the experience a pulse.
Our work starts by listening for what a group is actually trying to feel. Then we build around it.
- Connecting the right house, transportation and culinary experience into one effortless weekend.
- Creating rallies, tailgates and arrival experiences that could never come from a generic itinerary.
- Writing custom hold music because even waiting on the phone should sound like us.
- Writing an original wedding song because somebody’s story deserves more than another track pulled from a playlist.
I do not advertise that part very often.
It is difficult to package. It cannot be reduced to a neat list of amenities. And it does not scale perfectly.
But it might be the most honest explanation of what Experience Guide really is.
Find the emotional center.
Build something that could only belong to them.
The entrepreneurial version of revenge.
That creative instinct traces straight back to those childhood competitions.
When you spend years feeling trapped inside somebody else’s game, you become determined to create your own.
I do not want Experience Guide to win by copying the biggest company or following the safest playbook.
I want us to invent the category we wish existed.
I want the hold music to be original.
I want a wedding song to sound like the two people getting married.
I want the trip to feel like it could not have happened anywhere else.
The competitive resentment is still inside me. I would be lying if I said it was not.
But now it has somewhere useful to go.
I can turn it into greater care, stranger ideas, better execution and work that carries a fingerprint.
Building something nobody else could have built in quite the same way.
How to feel like a king when everything feels…off.
You do not have to wait until your life is perfectly arranged.
You do not need everybody to understand you.
You do not need somebody else to hand you a crown.
Signature Experiences™