Yesterday was my doom and gloom post, which as you can see from this graph published today, is going to be our new reality for awhile.  Unfortunately, we're just at the beginning: Look at the Wuhan line on this new graph from @jburnmurdoch. The lockdown was introduced there

It's hard to overstate the negative impact the pandemic will have over the next few years. In the short term, death is on the rise and not slowing down.  And, it's plain to see the financial hardship on local businesses along with the people who depend

I've been running a weekly happy hour with the Orbital members for the past few weeks, and it's been a nice ritual to see a bunch of familiar faces while simultaneously creating space to check in with each other. If there's been a downside

I've been thinking about repackaging the Entrepreneurial Design work and the $1,000 Challenge as a set of open, in-public challenges.  The challenges would be designed to teach people what it's like to be a founder (something that can only be done by doing), whether their

There are a lot of challenges in transitioning from being an employee to becoming independent, but the hardest may be the simultaneous process of: 1. uncovering the implicit, almost invisible, support infrastructure that you benefitted from, and 2. the design of the infrastructure you need for the journey you'

The era of "software tools accessed via the web browser" is now close to two decades old, with the past few years being a relative explosion compared to what came before. Generally, I'd characterize this as three distinct eras, the first two of which look like:

It's taken me awhile to finally wrap my head around the notion of working in distributed teams. That is, just saying that a company is "remote" or "distributed" isn't the full picture or the determining factor.  Instead, it's where the

It's never been more important to ask users for consent before forcing functionality upon them. The challenge, is that in a move fast break things culture, or when there's a perceived shrinking window of opportunity to act, there's a tendency to throw out features,

One of the challenges of being in a pandemic whilst undergoing a professional transition is that you have a combination of a wide open canvas and a dwindling bank account. The initial phase of this is entirely reactionary.  You look for silver bullets that solve both problems at the same

I've been spending a fair amount of time researching how effective distributed teams work, and there are a few high-level principles that stand out.  First, a disclaimer: much of the content I've consumed is coming from companies who leverage the fact that they are distributed as

There were two parts to my decision to start Orbital in mid-2014. Of course, there was the intellectual rationale, which was fairly easy to resolve with the act of planning. However, there was also the challenge of having the willingness to take a leap, which was not. In broad strokes,

The more I dive into researching best practices for building and running remote teams, the more I'm starting to realize how valuable the experience of running Orbital and evolving the Entrepreneurial Design course has been. Both presented challenges that were very difficult to hide from.  When you'

Prior to our current pandemic, I was leaning towards designing my next project to be optimized for a distributed rather than colocated team.  If there's a silver lining in everything that's happening, it's been the deluge of people openly sharing their experiences and best

Over the past few days, I've sat in on four different Zoom webinars on the shift to working from home, which includes listening to people from: Truss, Nava, 18F, USDS, Trello, Zapier, Wildbit, Hubspot, MeetEdgar, Gitlab and 37 Signals. Working remote is a new experience for me, and

The Live Cider Retrospective Episode! Thanks to everyone who came out this week for the live recording of our 12th and Final Episode of the I Drink Two Beers and Try to Tell You How To Run Your Company. With that, the recording of Season 1 is officially wrapped! Thanks

My partner Christina Xu and I are coming to the end of another year of teaching Entrepreneurial Design at SVA IxD, and the students just a few days left on their $1K Challenge campaigns. There are some lovely projects here and I encourage you to take a look and become

A few weeks ago, I was selected to serve on a jury for a murder trial. The trial lasted just under a week and we finished deliberations in about two days finding the defendant guilty on all charges. After delivering the verdict, we held a short debrief with the judge,

In 2012, Christina Cacioppo and I were invited by bobulate to teach at SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design Program.  Together, we redesigned the Entrepreneurial Design course weaving together our own individual experiences and perspectives as well as what we had learned during our time at Union Square Ventures. I