Rich Rudzinski
Technical Strategist | CEO
We're tech geeks who love what we do
Our high-performance, US-based team is stacked with senior talent
A Tragic History
Supporting businesses and founders since 2009
Tragic Media was founded in 2009 by Rich Rudzinski after leaving his job at a large national agency in San Diego. Rich saw a growing gap in the digital service landscape. Existing marketing and design agencies were ill-equiped to scope and manage the growing complexity of emerging technologies.
Over the years the company has evolved and pivoted form a white-label resource for other agencies to a web development agency to an ecommerce focused agency and finally to a custom software and technology agency.
Tragic provides its clients with a team of technical experts, flexible engagement plans, and innovative thinking to help them solve their biggest technology challenges.
Scalable, Reliable, Knowledgeable
- +Design, development, and cloud resources
- +Remote, senior stacked team
- +Diverse platform and framework expertise
Partnerships and Associations
Fun Facts
Tragic's first big ongoing project was building TaylorMade Golf's marketing emails and managing their Yahoo web store.
Epic Accomplishments
Our CEO was nominated for the San Diego 2020 Top Tech Awards
Fun Facts
Initially, Tragic worked solely as a white-label development service for larger agencies, acting as the 911 call when projects needed immediate expert development that couldn't be handled in-house.
Epic Accomplishments
Since 2019 we have partnered with the San Diego chapter of the American Marketing Association to support their org's tech and share insights to the marketing community.
Fun Facts
Our first "office" was 3 rented desks in the corner of a local Drupal agency. We now occupy the historic San Diego Mayor's office just a half-block down 5th avenue from our first location.
Epic Accomplishments
In 2013 Tragic had the opportunity to rebuild Pixar.com after a local agency outsourced the project abroad and it came back... less than Pixar ready.
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Todd Budzinski
Lead Engineer | CTO
Todd is the backbone of Tragic. A back-end wizard, he has more than 15+ years of experience in programming enterprise websites and applications, specializing in languages including PHP, Python, and Node; frameworks like Drupal and Laravel; and has extensive server experience building lean cloud-based infrastructures in GCP and AWS. Todd spends time keeping up with the latest advances in digital technologies and back-end frameworks to ensure Tragic is always leveraging bleeding-edge tech to produce modern, high performance applications and infrastructure.
Todd has been in software development his whole career, but his skills reached new levels working at Digitaria (now the global agency Mirum), where he gained exposure working with large brands like Taylor Guitars, Qualcomm, SAIC, and Petco. After Digi, Todd became one of the most valued engineers at Business.com before leaving to work as a consultant for local agencies in San Diego. He first started working with Tragic as a consultant in 2011, and was extremely impactful in our early growth. After several years, Todd came on-board full-time to grow Tragic's engineering department.
Todd is an avid video gamer and can be found playing games on Steam or Battle.net. He also likes to travel the world and has visited many countries including Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Malaysia.
