đ Hello
Iâm Ian, and Iâm an entrepreneur. In previous lives I was an architect, product designer, product manager, and software engineer. Iâm motivated by creating great urbanism at scale via fast-moving startups.
Most recently, I was exercising those beliefs by building Homestead â a startup focusing on financing & facilitating new housing in California.
Contact
Career
- New Things 2023 â Working on small SaaS products on the side:
- AirSupply: The power of Zillow inside your Airtable. Letâs talk.
- Webjet 2023 â We build great websites for great businesses. Copywriting, design, and implementation included. Interested? Book a call.
- Homestead 2022 â 2023 Joined homestead as a late Co-Founder in 2022 when the company pivoted to SB 9. Our mission is to power a grassroots movement to reshape housing in America. After difficulty scaling the model, Homestead transitioned to a traditional real estate fund, which my co-founder now runs independently.
- Outfit 2020 â 2021 Founded Outfit to make DIY accessible by delivering materials, tools, and instructions to homeownerâs front door. Clever idea, terrible market (low willingness-to-pay), and questionable-execution (first-time-founder). YC-backed. Raised ~$1M.
- False Starts 2018 â 2020
- Seated â Figma, but for office layouts
- PermitDesk â Permits, but automated
- Subcast â Convert your favorite articles into a text-to-speech personal podcast
- Figma (Contract) 2018 Got to spend several months working with great people PMâing a small team focusing on Figmaâs nascent Business & Enterprise tiers. A (poorly-timed! Congrats on the acquisition) come-to-jesus moment for me that I am not a terribly-good employee and hated being a PM.
- Katerra 2017 â 2018 LOL. Made it 4 months. Not sure why it took me that long to quit.
- Xamarin / Microsoft 2014 â 2017 My big break. Got to work with incredible people across design, engineering, sales, and more. Started as a Product Designer, and within a year was PMâing a new SaaS product doing $1M run rate. Acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for +$400M.
Personal
I currently reside in Brooklyn after 8 great years living & working in San Francisco & 2 not-so-great years of Los Angeles (boo cars). I was raised in picturesque Evanston, Illinois and was fortunate enough to earn a Bachelors of Architecture from Cornell University.
Beliefs & Ideas
- Iâm a staunch urbanist & believe dense housing solves many problems at once:
- Reduces our collective footprint on the planet
- Togetherness makes us more tolerant of out-groups â helps fulfill dream of America as a multi-ethnic democracy
- Gets people walking and out of their cars
- Cars Suck
- I do own one out of necessity of living in Los Angeles â I wish I could trade it in for a electric bike
- Too many people spend way too much of their lives on highways & it makes us sad, angry, and anti-social
- You donât get 20th Century American Hegemony without the automobile â saying we should have never built interstate highway system, etc. is foolish â but we do have a lot of self-correction in front of us
- The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis (many to most issues stem from it)
- We have a veto-crisis in America
- Too many people & entities can say ânoâ to all types of new things â housing, power plants, interstate power-lines, bridges, etc.
- We need to blow up many veto-checkpoints at the city, county, and state levels in radical ways
- This will never get done at the local-level due to self-interested parties and will require state & federal policies that massively deregulate the rules that stop us from building
- The only way out of the Climate Crisis is to Build Like Hell
- De-Growthers & their ilk are a death cult wanting to make lives miserable for billions (conveniently when theyâre on top of the pyramid)
- We need to build an insane amount of infrastructure, from housing, to subways, to small-nuclear-reactors, etc. to escape the worst parts of climate catastrophe
- Imagine what your idea of âinsaneâ is, then multiply it by 10 and thatâs where Iâm at â I want your skyline covered by cranes, your neighborhood unrecognizable in 10 years
- Get the money (h/t Chamath)
- Money drives the world, for better or worse â and if you have a viewpoint that you think matters, you need to go and get it because that is how you truly can put those beliefs into actions
Privileged, ambitious, and capable upper-middle-class millennials have a moral obligation to take real risks and build a prosperous future for their country and not over-index on being personally-comfortableIâm talking to you FAANG employees, consultants, financiers, lawyers, vcâs, etc.We need to Build Like Hell and youâre are sitting on the sidelines and itâs quite frankly, embarrassingWe need 10x more entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and future-makers â and this group is privileged & capable enough to do it â they just choose not to- Iâm pulling in the reins of this take because while VCs were supporting my income and âshooting for the moonâ â once that capital dries up youâre left without tons of savings, reality hits.
- Iâm now working on cashflow-first businesses
- I hope to build enough of a security blanket in the next few years to take larger shots in the future. Hitting 35 though does change a man.
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