Ian Janicki

👋 Hello

Contact

• ianjanicki@gmail.com
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Career

• New Things 2023 → Working on small SaaS products on the side:
• AirSupply: The power of Zillow inside your Airtable. Let’s talk.
• Webjet 2023 → We build great websites for great businesses. Copywriting, design, and implementation included. Interested? Book a call.
• Homestead 2022 → 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 → 2021 Founded Outfit to make DIY accessible by delivering materials, tools, and instructions to homeowner’s front door. Clever idea, terrible market (low willingness-to-pay), and questionable-execution (first-time-founder). YC-backed. Raised ~$1M.
• False Starts 2018 → 2020
• Seated → Figma, but for office layouts
• PermitDesk → Permits, but automated
• Subcast → Convert your favorite articles into a text-to-speech personal podcast
• Figma (Contract) 2018 Got to spend several months working with great people PM’ing a small team focusing on Figma’s 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 → 2018 LOL. Made it 4 months. Not sure why it took me that long to quit.
• Xamarin / Microsoft 2014 → 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 PM’ing a new SaaS product doing $1M run rate. Acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for +$400M.

Personal

Beliefs & Ideas

• I’m 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 — 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 — 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 don’t get 20th Century American Hegemony without the automobile — saying we should have never built interstate highway system, etc. is foolish — 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 ‘no’ to all types of new things — 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 they’re 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 “insane” is, then multiply it by 10 and that’s where I’m at — 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 — 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-comfortable
• I’m talking to you FAANG employees, consultants, financiers, lawyers, vc’s, etc.
• We need to Build Like Hell and you’re are sitting on the sidelines and it’s quite frankly, embarrassing
• We need 10x more entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and future-makers — and this group is privileged & capable enough to do it — they just choose not to