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.

Personal

I currently reside in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn after 10 great years living & working in California. I was raised in picturesque Evanston, Illinois and was fortunate enough to earn a Bachelors of Architecture from Cornell University.

Career

Zinc 2024 ->
CEO of Zinc. We help software developers search & buy any online eCommerce product.
The Wilderness 2023 -> 2025
A period of transition and exploration. Moved cities, worked with various startups, and went through significant life changes. Sometimes you need to get lost to find your way.
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 -> 2025
- 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.