ABOUT
ABOUT
ABOUT
3x Founder, Designer & Product Leader - P00LS, Fohr & Weardrobe (acq. by Google). Employee #15 at Tumblr.
3x Founder, Designer & Product Leader - P00LS, Fohr & Weardrobe (acq. by Google). Employee #15 at Tumblr.
3x Founder, Designer & Product Leader - P00LS, Fohr & Weardrobe (acq. by Google). Employee #15 at Tumblr.
November 2007. I'd just moved to New York for my first architecture job, at Coach, where my days revolved around making sure everyone had the most current version of a store-opening spreadsheet.
On the first Tuesday of the month, my friend Suzanne brought me to the NY Tech Meetup at the IAC Building in Chelsea, where five founders presented five startups, for five minutes each. Jeff Han demoed an eight-foot multitouch screen called Perceptive Pixel, two years before the iPhone made multitouch ordinary (he would get acquired by Microsoft in 2012). Jakob Lodwick demoed Vimeo, Sam Lessin demoed drop.io, and David Karp demoed Tumblr. David was 21. I was 23.
They were building things that fundamentally changed what was possible. I was updating a spreadsheet. We were living in completely different worlds, and I knew I had to change that.
Suzanne and I quit our jobs the next week, moved to Palo Alto and started Weardrobe. We didn't know how anything about fashion, raising money, writing code, designing interfaces, or building community. We just knew we wanted to learn and so we kept going — winning the SXSW accelerator, being selected to be part of the first ever fbFund, and in 2009, getting acquired by Like.com, which was acquired by Google a few months later.
That was the first time I'd made something of real, tangible value, for a group of people nobody was building for yet.
A few years later I was at Tumblr, and the question I got more than any other was who should we work with. Nobody had a good answer. The creators making the work were scattered across every platform, invisible to anyone trying to hire them. So I built Fohr.
By 2021 those same creators had audiences worth millions and owned nothing of what they'd built. Every deal priced a post, but none priced the years of trust underneath it. So I co-founded P00LS.
Not every gap is in a new market. Some open inside companies that already exist. Skims had turned shapewear into a five-billion-dollar brand and skims.com hadn't caught up — the brief from Jens Grede was two words: make it sexy. X-energy had spent sixteen years becoming nuclear's most credible new player with a brand that still looked like the industry it was replacing. Both had outgrown the way they showed up in the world.
Almost twenty years on from that NY Tech meetup, the work has changed. Fashion bloggers, creator advertising infrastructure, a nuclear IPO. What holds is what I learned creating Weardrobe with no idea what I was doing: find the thing people actually need and build it yourself, until you understand the problem better than anyone.
What comes next? Currently searching for problems.
November 2007. I'd just moved to New York for my first architecture job, at Coach, where my days revolved around making sure everyone had the most current version of a store-opening spreadsheet.
On the first Tuesday of the month, my friend Suzanne brought me to the NY Tech Meetup at the IAC Building in Chelsea, where five founders presented five startups, for five minutes each. Jeff Han demoed an eight-foot multitouch screen called Perceptive Pixel, two years before the iPhone made multitouch ordinary (he would get acquired by Microsoft in 2012). Jakob Lodwick demoed Vimeo, Sam Lessin demoed drop.io, and David Karp demoed Tumblr. David was 21. I was 23.
They were building things that fundamentally changed what was possible. I was updating a spreadsheet. We were living in completely different worlds, and I knew I had to change that.
Suzanne and I quit our jobs the next week, moved to Palo Alto and started Weardrobe. We didn't know how anything about fashion, raising money, writing code, designing interfaces, or building community. We just knew we wanted to learn and so we kept going — winning the SXSW accelerator, being selected to be part of the first ever fbFund, and in 2009, getting acquired by Like.com, which was acquired by Google a few months later.
That was the first time I'd made something of real, tangible value, for a group of people nobody was building for yet.
A few years later I was at Tumblr, and the question I got more than any other was who should we work with. Nobody had a good answer. The creators making the work were scattered across every platform, invisible to anyone trying to hire them. So I built Fohr.
By 2021 those same creators had audiences worth millions and owned nothing of what they'd built. Every deal priced a post, but none priced the years of trust underneath it. So I co-founded P00LS.
Not every gap is in a new market. Some open inside companies that already exist. Skims had turned shapewear into a five-billion-dollar brand and skims.com hadn't caught up — the brief from Jens Grede was two words: make it sexy. X-energy had spent sixteen years becoming nuclear's most credible new player with a brand that still looked like the industry it was replacing. Both had outgrown the way they showed up in the world.
Almost twenty years on from that NY Tech meetup, the work has changed. Fashion bloggers, creator advertising infrastructure, a nuclear IPO. What holds is what I learned creating Weardrobe with no idea what I was doing: find the thing people actually need and build it yourself, until you understand the problem better than anyone.
What comes next? Currently searching for problems.
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