Ian Janicki

👋 Hello

I'm Ian, and I'm an technologist & entrepreneur. In previous lives I was an architect, product designer, product manager, and software engineer. I'm motivated by making useful things — whether that's software, or perhaps housing

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.

Contact

• Email
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Career

• New Things 2025 ->
  • Consulting: Helping fast-moving startups with product, design, and engineering
  • MicroSaaS: Bootstrapped, sub-venture SaaS in profitable niches
• Webjet 2023 -> 2024

  We build great websites for great businesses. Copywriting, design, and implementation included.

• 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
  • AirSupply: The power of Zillow inside your Airtable
  • 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

  Woof. 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.

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 an 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 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
  • I'm pulling in the reins of this take because while VCs were supporting my income and 'shooting for the moon' — once that capital dries up you're left without tons of savings, reality hits.
  • I'm 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.