2016 in Review
On the one hand, it’s crazy that I haven’t blogged in almost a year, but on the other hand it’s not.
Last Fall began a process of re-evaluating everything and putting in place a plan forward, which included a longer time cycle of operating.
I’m starting to complete that now, and it’s been a very productive 6 months since my last public appearance in January, with a semester at SVA and multiple new programs at Orbital. The good news is that there’s a path forward, which is nice to know given that I had committed to a 3-year lease extension at the beginning of the year on faith.
Thankfully, the hackNY folks invited me to meet the fellows again and that ended up being a good forcing function for reframing the work I do at Orbital and putting together some sort of coherent mid-year progress report. When you don’t have a boss, it’s great to have milestones, and talks like these are valuable catalysts for reflection.
I’ll eventually get around to cleaning up the talk and posting it, but for now I thought I’d share the list of references I put together for the fellows, so that they can dive deeper as desired.
It was an absolute pleasure to meet the hackNY fellows–they continue to be an incredibly thoughtful and engaging group, and I look forward to following their next steps.
About
- Entrepreneurial Design at SVA IxD (Recaps 2014 and 2015)
- Moving to NYC
- Talk at Design Driven, January 2016 (and the accompanying Notes
Orbital
- The Orbital Membership
- This Entrepreneur Has Built an Incubator for Networks
- Don’t Need No VC (True for Lots of Companies) by Albert Wenger
- Arguing from First Principles by Brad Burnham
- On Constraints, Exploration and Chance by Gary Chou
On Learning
- Fail in Public by Tony Chu
- 10 Product Designers Share Their Best Habits by Celia McQueen (Designers)
On Producing
- Developing a Philosophy of Producing by Karin Chien
- Karin Chien: Women, Arts, and Activism (March 30, 2011)
On Power
- Alec Ross Quote on networks
- Platform Monopolies by Fred Wilson (and a follow up)
- Why we spend so much time on policy stuff by Fred Wilson
Letters for Black Lives
- Christina Xu’s Tweet
- The Project: Letters for Black Lives
- Letters for Black Lives is taking racial justice advocacy past language and culture barriers (via Daily Dot)
- Meeting People Where They Are: The Seed Crystal of the Letters for Black Lives Project (via Reappropriate)
- “Let’s do this together”: an interview with Letters for Black Lives (via Creative Commons)
Designing Networks
- Make Your Service Underdetermined to Reach Network Scale by Albert Wenger
- Mid-Term Thoughts on Designing Networks by Gary Chou
- Quick Thoughts on Designing Networks by Gary Chou
- Signal, Space, Structure: Designing for Communities of Interest by Christina Xu
- Bonnie Bassler on Quorum Sensing in Vibrio Harveyi
- Startup Quotes: Jeff Atwood, Brad Burnham, Fred Wilson
Broader Context
- Technological Revolutions by Carlota Perez (the short version)
- The Deployment Age by Jerry Neumann
- Venture Capitalist Brad Burnham on Skinny Platforms by John Geraci
- Land, Capital, Attention: This Time it is the Same by Albert Wenger
Closing
- The Thesis After Your Thesis by Gary Chou
- Proving Rancid Filmed ‘Time Bomb’ at Kickstarter’s Old HQ by Fred Benenson
- Where my watch come from (no longer available from Poketo)
Bonus Stuff that I didn’t talk about but is worth looking at: