Updates, notes and more.
👋 TL;DR: I’m seeking philanthropic funders to collaborate on grantmaking experiments in 2025 that are focused on supporting risk-taking and experimentation.  Thanks to a grant from Nick Barr and the fiscal sponsorship of hackNY , I’ve spent the past year exploring a hunch: that
Our second, and main event, the Teach the 1K Workshop at Orbital on February 8, 2019. Photo by Nikki Sylianteng Insights from the Teach the 1K Workshop In February 2019, Christina Xu and I convened Teach the 1K  — a multi-event gathering of over 40 entrepreneurship educators
Update: We’re live! Subscribe to our podcast here ! Thanks to everyone who came out to our launch party ! TL;DR: Last February, I made a viral tweet , which has turned into a real podcast called I Drink Two Beers and Try to Tell You How to Run Your
The hard part about making things with humans is humans. — Gary Chou (@garychou) April 2, 2019 Essentially, this is why Orbital Studios exists. Last week, we wrapped up our 8th cycle of Orbital Studios . 58 people from over 40 technology companies in NYC participated in our Studios for Senior
How to check-in with your friends, colleagues (and yourself) Selected slides (published with consent) from a subset of our members’ collective 2019 State of the Orbital talks. Thanks to our speakers for sharing updates: Archie Archambault, Katie Smillie, Michael Grinich, Bailey Richardson, Ida Benedetto, Kevin Huynh, Nikki Sylianteng,
Join us for Teach the 1K , a free one-day workshop for entrepreneurship educators and activators on February 8th, 2019 in New York City. Over the past 5+ years, Christina Xu and I have taught Entrepreneurial Design at School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design Program . Drawing from our
Last month, I had the pleasure of returning to San Francisco to give a talk at Bond , a conference examining “how creators make a living through the internet”. This was a particularly special talk for me, as I unintentionally ghosted on SF and never gave it a proper
Lessons Learned from the $1K Challenge We’re in the final weeks of Entrepreneurial Design 2018 , and with the $1,000 Challenge now complete, the learning can now begin. From Tony Chu’s Fail in Public , 2012 To kickoff that process, Christina and I have taken the
In 2016, over 150 Designers, Product Managers and Engineering Managers from 50+ NYC companies joined a Community of Practice at Orbital to share stories, challenges and lessons with each other. When your job is fundamentally about navigating uncertainty — whether it’s the search for product market
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
On May 13, I gave the closing keynote at the The Graduate Show: The MFA Interaction Design 2015 Thesis Festival at the School of Visual Arts. The event is a platform for the graduates to present their master’s thesis projects. As one of their first-year instructors, it
When you’re launching an idea, one of the best things you can do for yourself is introduce constraints. Constraints can be anything: a fixed time frame (“launch in a week”), a finite set of tools/resources (“writing code vs. using what already exists”), or
There are a plenty of places to help you develop your startup idea or product, but not a lot of places to help you navigate the initial creative process when you are just getting off the ground. That’s what Orbital Boot Camp is all about. It’s
In the age of the networks, I believe the first step for a creator should be to assess their own self-sufficiency. This could mean a wide range of things, but for most, the focus is financial sustainability. What is the economic model that enables you to focus on your