We got a chance to interview Clint when he was out here prepping for the upcoming New York weekend. Want to try your hand at it? The NYC Startup Weekend will be November 20-22, and tickets are on sale now.

You’ve watched tons of teams go through this, at this point. What are the secrets to making a startup work?

It’s all about the team. The idea is definitely secondary. Definitely. That’s my main take-away. A group of five really smart people that are the best at their individual skill set, can make the worst idea wildly successful.

Are there any common stumbling blocks that teams run into?

I think some teams try to undertake more than they can in the weekend, so I think keeping it simple is really important. And to just stay focused. A lot of people find themselves panicking and wasting time over stuff that doesn’t really matter. It’s really just smart people, time management, and prioritizing.

Lately we’ve been throwing in, or getting sponsors to throw in, incentives. 3 weeks ago we did an event at Microsoft, and Microsoft put up $5,000 to the best team. That’s proved to be a good motivator! Definitely keeps people on task. It creates a frenzy, which is pretty fun.

Startup Weekend Nashville

Can you walk us through the weekend? People come in – they’re 200 strangers.

Right. So Friday night, 200 strangers show up. We introduce a couple kegs of beer to those 200 strangers. And, if this is a recipe, they mix for about an hour. That’s the hardest part, is getting people comfortable. By the end of the first night, you want people to be drinking-out-of-the-other-person’s-cup kind of comfortable, like they’ve known each other all their life.

Who are the people that come out to Startup Weekend?

We market to the local tech entrepreneurs in each city. We basically fill the room with entrepreneurs, lawyers, marketing people, graphic designers, coders… All of the elements that you would need for like a Web 2.0 startup. Hopefully they’re kind of the best at what they do, which has historically been the case. That’s our secret sauce, is the caliber of people that the event pulls from the community.

So everyone’s showed up, had some beer – then what?

Then we open up the mic. “Alright, thank you everybody for coming. Now, if you’ve got an idea, get up on stage and pitch it.” And that’s just kind of how it happens. Someone gets up there, three beers deep, and they’re like, “I want to be able to pay someone with Twitter!” And then they sit down. 50 or 60 people do that, and I keep a running tally of all these ideas. At the end, we vote on them, narrowing it down to the top 15 or so ideas.

Then you tell people, “If you want to be in Group 1, go over there.” You would think that 100 people would all want to work on the best idea, but it’s never been a problem. It’s always just worked out, and people break off into 15 or so teams.

Startup Weekend Houston

And each team starts a company by Sunday? The problem you create at the beginning of the weekend, it’s solved and ready to launch?

That’s the idea. Or it’s really far along. At the Microsoft event, we had people pitching ideas on Friday, and then by Sunday we had literally changed the search functionality on Microsoft Bing – added a new search feature that didn’t exist before.

Have you found that people keep doing the company they started?

Yeah. There’s something like 230 startups out there, historically, that we’ve started. 30% of them are still going. And we’ve raised close to $800,000 that has directly been invested in startups.

Do people keep in touch with you?

Yeah. They’ll say, “Hey, we need an IP attorney, can you help us out?” Which is great. It’s pretty fun.

That has to be so cool, to be the enabler of all these startups.

It makes you really aware of what you can do, even as an individual. It was really cool for me to come into this organization, because it’s really showed me what’s possible as one grain of sand on this huge earth. It makes me want to make everything I do into a global initiative.

And it’s possible.

Yes, it’s possible. We’re in 52 cities and 12 countries, right now, and growing. Just out of our last event, I was reading articles in like Chinese, Japanese, German, articles coming out of Pakistan… It was just insane. I get Google Alerts and so I’m like, “Oh, want’s this?” And it’s all Chinese characters, and then it’ll say Startup Weekend, then a million more Chinese characters. I’m thinking, “Oh my god, this is awesome!” Put it on my Facebook – everyone look at this! I have no idea what it says.

Startup Weekend Germany

So how did Startup Weekend start?

Startup Weekend’s been around for a little over 2 years. Andrew Hyde started it, a friend of mine. And now he works for TechStars, in Boulder. He’s the definition of the super-passionate entrepreneur. He loves starting things – as soon as he kind of loses that spark, he moves on to something else

I approached him at just the right time. I was really passionate about Startup Weekend and wanted to take it to the next level. I just had some ideas – I was asking him if he would work with me on implementing those ideas, and he basically came at me with, “How about you take it over?” And I was like, “Rock on.” So I did. That was six months ago, and we’ve been doing it full time since.

Who’s your partner that you’re running it with?

His name’s Marc Nager. I actually met him on Craigslist! My girlfriend at the time was looking for a roommate, and Marc was the guy that answered the Craigslist ad.

What makes you so passionate about Startup Weekend?

I love having a mechanism to introduce people to other really smart people. Maybe the company that they pitched that weekend continues in perpetuity, or maybe they meet other people who stay in the rolodex, and are the first people they call when they have that next, “Oh my god, I have this great idea, I really want to do this.”

Without that network, you’re left feeling kind of helpless as an individual. You think, “Well I don’t have all the skill sets to move that idea forwards,” and then your brilliant idea dies. So I want to build that network for other people and communities, and make this a nexus for all things startup. We’re building a social community in every city.

For the people who haven’t heard of it yet, can you briefly describe what Foursquare is?

Naveen: The background for Foursquare comes from a service that Dennis started a long time ago, called Dodgeball. It was a service which allowed you to ping your friends to let them know where you are, via text messaging.

Dennis: You get this ambient awareness of where your friends go and what they’re doing and where they are right now and where they’re going to be in an hour from now. It helps you make better decisions about what to do after work, or on a random Saturday.

How did Dodgeball work?

Dennis: It was before we had GPS on phones and big touch screens. It was all based on SMS, so people would just send us a text message that said, “I’m at The Magician,” or “I’m at Cooper Square,” at wherever. And we would have to do all this tricky stuff on our end to try to match what the user said to where we thought they were.

And Foursquare is more sophisticated than that?

Dennis: Yeah, it gets a little bit easier on today’s phones. We have an iPhone app with a menu that will tell you, “Here are the 10 places that are nearby, choose the one you’re at.” It’s more precise and easier for people to use. But the way people are using it, the value that people get out of it, is still the same. There’s just a lot more people that are playing with it now. People have more mature phones to play on, and they’re used to things like Twitter, so the Foursquare concept is easier to grasp.

Screenshots of the Foursquare iPhone app via TechCrunch.

What are your backgrounds? What led you to start this thing?

Naveen: A long long time ago, I was working at Sony Music, doing a lot of their mobile product stuff – basically building a music store for your phone. And then I worked at this company called Socialight, which is where Dennis and I met. They also do a lot of local platform, local blogging kind of stuff. So I’ve been doing mobile-related stuff for almost 10 years now.

Dennis: Before doing this, I was at a company called Area/Code. It’s a digital agency, and they specifically do work that overlaps the digital world with the physical world. They started a business around co-opting public spaces or public data feeds. A lot of the Dodgeball and Foursquare stuff comes out of time that I was there. Dodgeball was bought by Google in 2005. When we went to Google it was just too big; we couldn’t get a lot of stuff done. So I left Google and went back to Area/Code. Naveen was at another company that shared office space with them. We were at different companies, but our desks were next to each other.

Naveen: Dennis and I started talking about how we could augment the Dodgeball experience with other things. There’s a lot of data to be mined from where everybody hangs out, where everybody goes every day. Your friends know a lot of things about the city that you may not know. We thought, why not bring all that stuff together in a single experience? We just threw ideas out there.

When did you decide to go full-force with Foursquare?

Dennis: Naveen and I had been running little experiments on the side, just talking about stuff and prototyping things. Then, in January, Google announced that they were going to shut down Dodgeball. Naveen and I started seriously thinking, “We should build something and try to replace it.” We set SXSW, in March, as a deadline to launch.

Naveen and Dennis at SXSW [photo via flickr]

Wow – that’s not a whole lot of time.

Dennis: Yeah. And so we saw a huge spike in growth at SXSW, but then there was a big comedown after that, because a lot of the stuff wasn’t working properly yet. But we got the concept out there. Around June, we got everything working. We came out with stronger versions of the iPhone app, and since then we’ve seen hockey-stick growth. It’s been awesome.

What was the launch like?

Dennis: We went down to Austin for SXSW thinking, “People either going to be really interested or they’re going to laugh at it and think it’s stupid.” Luckily it worked and people liked it, and they told more people about it. SXSW is great for that. People go home to Seattle, and San Francisco, and Portland, and Washington, wherever, and spread it to their friends. So it was really important that we hit that launch date.

What kind of feedback have you gotten?

Dennis: It’s a lot like the feedback Twitter got early on. I don’t know if that’s encouraging or just to be expected. People say, “I hate it, I would never use this.”

Naveen: Well, more like, “What’s this for? Why would I use this?”

Dennis: And then people come back to it. “OK I tried it, now I’m kind of hooked.” There’s definitely that same hater-to-hardcore-user cycle. So we want to encourage people to sign up and play around with it! And let us know what you think – a lot of the decisions that we make about what we’re going to build next come directly from the users. The more feedback that we get from people, the better.

Video of Naveen and Dennis at SXSW, talking about the Foursquare launch

How many cities do you support now?

Naveen: It’s 20 cities in the US, plus Amsterdam and Vancouver.

Dennis: The number one feature that people request is, “Bring it to my city.” It’s one thing to try to go get data for Phoenix, but it’s another thing to try to get a data set for Berlin, or Tokyo – somewhere where you don’t understand the language, or the character set doesn’t even match up. It’s difficult. But we’ve got this laundry list of users that are asking, “Please add this city.” A bunch of users started a petition to launch Vancouver. Weren’t you getting like Twitter-bombed?

Naveen: Yep. They would retweet, over and over again. It was easily 300 or 400 messages.

So what are your hopes for growing this? More cities, more users – anything else?

Naveen: More devices. Right now we’re on SMS and mobile web, as well as iPhone. We just launched Android. That’s an app that was actually developed by 8 to 10 passionate developers and designers who just got together and used our API.

Dennis: There’s a huge list of all the stuff that we want to do. We’ve started to reach out to bars and offer specials, like, “If you’re the mayor you get a free cocktail.” We want to allow local businesses and local merchants to communicate back and forth with the users. There’s all these little things that we just started experimenting with. We went and raised some investment money, so now we can hire a couple other people to flesh a lot of this stuff out.

Very cool! One last question – what advice do you have for other people who want to take their ideas and launch them?

Dennis: Don’t be afraid to work in teams, and don’t be afraid to share your ideas with people. I’ve been teaching at the ITP program at NYU for a couple years, and lots of students say, “I’m really afraid to get people on board, because I don’t want them to steal my ideas.” You have to realize that ideas are kind of a dime a dozen. It’s much, much harder to go out and build something. You have to be a little bit vocal and try to get a lot of people involved, and get them excited about what you’re doing.

Naveen: I’d say find a co-founder. There have been many times when I started different projects, but nothing ever went anywhere. I did a lot of small hacks and small experiments, but if it worked for me, I would leave it at that scale. For instance, I had a bookmarking thing on my phone that helped me bookmark all the places that I wanted to go to or wanted to remember. It was very hacked together, very low level, but it worked for me. So I never took it to the next step. It helps to have someone to bounce ideas off of.

Dennis: Another thing is, there’s always people that say, “What you’re doing is stupid. No one wants that.” There’s just a ton of haters. People hated on Dodgeball before we built it. We even hated on Foursquare a little in the beginning – “This is kind of stupid, right? Is this going to work?” But if you have a gut feeling about something, you should just do it and see how it goes.

MakerBot is a pretty new venture, right? How have you gotten so much traction so quickly?

We really just didn’t sleep properly for a few months, dreaming this thing up. When we started, we thought it would just be something that we’d do on the side. But no, it’s been like 80-hour weeks the entire way through! I’d go to bed and I’d literally be dreaming of the machine. My girlfriend would tell me I’d been talking about it in my sleep. Not exactly the most romantic thing!

We started our business in January. And then I took a prototype to SXSW in the middle of March. I would just go to a bar and set it down and start printing out shot glasses and 20-sided dies and giving them away. It was fun. People would come up and ask, “What is that thing?” And I’d say, “It’s the future. It’s a machine that can pretty much make anything you want. Right now it’s making shot glasses.”

3D printing has the potential to be pretty revolutionary. What’s your vision for the future?

Right now we have a way of distributing and manufacturing products that is completely alien, compared to what people were doing 100 years back. We shop for things, often online, and we find the thing that most suits us. We order it. It was probably built very far away, and it ends up getting shipped to some other place and some other place and some other place before it comes to you. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. You could just shop for something online, download a file, and print it out at home on your 3D printer.

The MakerBot

What led you to developing this inexpensive 3D printer?

Zach Hoeken Smith and Adam Mayer and I knew each other from NYC Resistor, an electronics hacking collective here in Brooklyn. Zach had been involved in the RepRap project for a couple years, which is a research project to develop self-replicating rapid prototyper. Adam and I had both helped out on that.

A lot of energy had been put into being able to make a machine that could reproduce itself, but you have this chicken and egg problem. In order to make a machine that can reproduce itself, you have to HAVE a machine that’s reproduced itself. And so, we just wanted to make a 3D printer.

We figured out all the things we wanted it to do and mocked something up. I did the design of the body, Adam did the XY, and Zach did the plastic extruder and the electronics, and it all just came together. Most of the parts that go into a MakerBot are stock parts, so that if you need a replacement part, it’s very likely you could just go to the hardware store and get it. That was our focus.

How does it work?

There’s a plastic filament which feeds into the plastic extruder. It gets heated up and it becomes molten, and it comes out the bottom as like a very tiny stream of spaghetti. The machine builds up layers of that molten plastic to form an object.

MakerBot building a model of Walt Disney’s head.

Do you see the technology becoming more refined, so that the prints have a higher clarity to them?

Yep – we’re on the edge of that right now. Right now we get a layer height of about .375 of a millimeter, which is great. But we’d like to get down to .25 of a millimeter. We’ll get there. There’s another version of the plastruder that’s in development.

The challenge is, if you make that little tiny stream of plastic thinner, you have to apply more force. We have to build a slightly more robust, more powerful drive mechanism to get that much force. We’ve done it, but everything has to be completely perfect for it to work. With the layer height of .375, there’s more tolerance.

If someone already has a MakerBot and an upgraded plastruder comes out, can they just switch out that part on their machine?

Yeah, it’s totally modular. It would take you 5 seconds to undo the old plastruder and put the new one in. The cool thing is, because MakerBot is open source, it’s YOURS. You put it together, you know how it works, and you can modify it however you want. If you want to put it on wheels or something crazy, you can do it. We never know what people are going to do with these things.

Who are the people that are buying them?

It’s interesting – our kind of core audience is tinkerers, designers, architects, and just people who want to live in the future. You know what I mean? Where you can imagine something, and then walk over to your MakerBot and print it out, and suddenly it’s real. We’ve had someone at Microsoft buy one, people at Google and Disney, and we just shipped one to NASA.

What are the limits to what a MakerBot can make?

Right now you can do anything 100mm x 100mm x 130mm, which is about 4in x 4in x 6in. People always ask, “Can you make it bigger?” But most people aren’t even using that much space. Most of the things that will take under 3 hours to print will fit in that space.

The other constraint is that right now we don’t have support material. So when you make things that have an overhang, you have to keep the overhang to about 40 degrees. It’s turned out to be a really interesting design constraint. If there’s a box that you have to fit into, it makes your mind think that way. And we’re working on support material. We’ll get it eventually.

Plastic filament, which feeds into the plastruder to print 3D objects.

What colors can you print in?

We have three colors of filament that we sell – white, black, and clear. It’s ABS plastic, which is the same thing that Legos are made out of, so it’s strong and really durable. You can use it for making functional parts.

We can actually get any color we want, it’s just that it costs a bunch of money to have the filament made. We’ll ask our community what they want, but I think at some point we should do red, and blue, and I would love to see glow in the dark! One step at a time.

What has been the hardest part about turning this into a business?

The hardest part? Luckily all the problems we have are usually one-issue problems. We had a problem with missing parts in kits. So we just found a new way to make sure we had no missing parts in kits, and now we have a lot less missing parts in kits. I mean, we’re human, we make errors. Machines don’t do the whole thing. Yet!

What advice do you have for people who want to work on their own projects and turn it into a business?

First of all, do it because you love it. Put your heart into it. Spend all your spare time and energy on it. And commit to it – don’t just dream about it. Commit to doing something on it every day, whether that’s calling somebody to find out if you can get something, or doing design work, or making the things.

I would also say that you should get a community together. We had a community before we started, because we were part of a community of 3D printers before we were a 3D printer manufacturer. But connect with the community around your thing. If you’re going to make toasters, I’m sure there’s a toaster community. It might not be very big, but find them! That way you can learn from them about what works and what doesn’t. They’ll give you opinions and have discussions.

Salt and Pepper Hats designed by Design Glut, available on Thingiverse

Speaking of community, you guys started Thingiverse, which is another really important component of all this.

It is, actually. We’d been really frustrated because there was no place to download the files to make 3D objects. We had all these design files that we were generating, and people were putting them on their own servers, and there was no place to search them. So finally we challenged ourselves to make a site. It took a couple weeks for it to get up and running. It limped along for a while. But people needed it.

It sort of propels the whole thing, because that makes you more inclined to get a MakerBot, if there’s a whole library of designs available that you can download and make right away.

Yeah. Some guy had gotten some sort of medical scan of his skull, and then he uploaded his own skull to Thingiverse. Our intern Will designed some glasses. And now, instead of paying $300 for glasses, you can pay $750 for a MakerBot and print out as many glasses as you want! When he finishes the design for the glasses I’m going to get lenses put in them, just to confirm that they work.

What’s next?

Well, through the end of the year, our goal is to scale up the production of these machines. The holidays are coming, and we keep growing faster than we expect, so we have to be ready! We’re gearing up to get a couple hundred or a thousand machines out there.

Glasses designed by Will Langford, available on Thingiverse

Your company is strongly rooted in an ethical philosophy. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

The company was co-founded by myself and my sister, Teresita. Having grown up with the same people, our parents, we naturally brought the ethics we were raised with into our lives and our business. Our father was a Peace Corps volunteer. And prior to that, he studied architecture, so he has a design background which came out in our upbringing. Our mom grew up in India, where you inherently learn how to live close to the earth. In India, versus the United States, you don’t have the luxury of being hidden from how you use things and where those things go.

I think the ethics of how humans make things and do things is drastically changing. Designing that change is where we see SMIT fitting into the big picture.

Do you think that starting a business is a good way to express a moral philosophy? I think that’s a pretty new idea.

At SMIT, we design and make things for humans and their environment. The products that we choose to design at SMIT and bring into the world are because we believe in their ability to lessen our (humans’) impact on the earth’s resources in an accountable way.

Our moral philosophy comes out in how we design and the choices we make in that design process. When it comes to starting a business, it has to make money. That’s the agreed system in which we all do business. Our customers value not only our products’ physical design and functions, but also the fact that the product itself has integrity and a sustainable relationship to the world. And as long as people choose to buy the products, then the business and the moral philosophy can both work.

You’ve shown your work at ICFF and at MoMA. Those must have been two big turning points for you! How did those shows happen?

When I was graduating from Pratt, my sister was also graduating from NYU’s ITP program. She and I were kind of taking similar paths. I was creating a product, GROW, while she was creating a business, SMIT. Her business plan incorporated some ideas that I was really interested in, in terms of starting a business and entrepreneurship, and my product fit well with the business plan.

When I was a senior, I showed my project to the committee who was choosing what was going to be shown at ICFF in the Pratt Booth. It was chosen for the show, and that was a big turning point. ICFF opened the door to a much broader audience. I walked away from ICFF with probably 200 business cards in my pocket, and a number of different architects who said, “When this is real, let me know. I want this for a building.”

It was great timing for my sister and I. Deb was gathering people for the Pratt Design Incubator. She looked at us, and at this product, and said, “Do you have a business plan? Do you want to be in the Incubator?” I didn’t have a business plan! But, my sister was right there and she did. We had a meeting a week later and were accepted into the Incubator. Then began the process of starting SMIT, Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology, LLC.

And MoMA?

The MoMA show was another big turning point and they actually found us. You know, one doesn’t exactly go after, “How do you get into a MoMA show?” and expect anything to come from it. It’s something I had written off as an impossible thing. After ICFF we went about developing GROW. One of the first things we needed to do was raise some development money. We got a grant, and with that, we agreed to create a blog in order to keep everyone up-to-date on our progress.

Someone working at MoMA stumbled onto the blog. They wanted to get in touch with us, but on the blog we didn’t provide a phone number or e-mail to avoid spam and what not. A persistent MoMA intern read through our entire blog and spotted our uncle’s name. She happened to have gone to Cornell and taken one of his courses! She emailed him, saying “I think I’m looking for your nephew and niece” And he says “Yeah, that’s them,” and forwards us the email. We literally freaked out. What, the MoMA is looking for us?!?

As it turned out, they wanted the GROW concept be a part of their catalog for an upcoming exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind. So we said, “Yeah! We’ll send you images, of course, whatever you need!” And ever-so-slyly also said, “We could make a prototype for the show, if you want to show it.” Not being pushy, but just slid that one under the door.

They deliberated on it, and they eventually said yes. We made an up-to-date prototype and installed it in Feb ‘08. It was a very exciting experience! I have always gone to and been inspired by the shows at the MoMA, and to be putting up a piece in one was truly an honor.

After the show we got some more good news. Paola and her team were considering our piece for the permanent collection. Again, we were overjoyed, but trying to be reserved about it. I think we said, “Oh! Really!? ” They eventually got back to us with a yes. So our piece from the show is now in the MoMA’s permanent collection. A little surreal, and very welcomed!

Did it lead to a lot more architects getting in touch?

Absolutely. GROW and Solar Ivy are products that are able to interact with many different typologies of architecture. So, naturally, architects and developers are interested. Most of the Architects from ICFF were in and around New York, or in the United States, with a good handful of companies from the rest of world. But after the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition opened and its catalog released, our exposure went all over the world.

I also knew from the beginning that architects were going to be the first adopters of GROW. My sister and I brought on Benjamin Howes (Pratt Arch. 2006) as an equity partner in 2007. He’s a great thinker at many levels and can break down the most complex ideas into logical systems. Plus his last name is Howes, pronounced “house” and he’s an architect. What more could we ask for?

I’d like to back up to where you were talking about the grant that you got. I don’t think we’ve talked to anybody who’s taken that route. Was that part of your original plan? How did you make that happen?

GROW came from examining the relationship between humans’ built environment and how nature responds to it. When you build a building, plants will start growing on it. Things start to inhabit it that you don’t want to inhabit it. GROW’s concept was to harness energy in a similar way to what plants do, through a form of biomimicry. Ivy, for example, finds the side of the building where it will get the most sunlight. It creates its own footing. And it has this beautiful kinetic sculpture effect, as wind blows through it across the side of your building. This, in turn, presented a unique opportunity to harness both wind and solar energy.

We applied for the grant to prove out our technology and develop GROW into a product. Since w
e were in the Pratt design Incubator, we were able to utilize Pratt’s grant writers, who found the organization, NCIIA (National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance). NCIIA had an Advanced E-Team grant, which is set up to foster ideas from concepts into actual working prototypes. We used the grant to fund R&D for GROW as well as pay for legal fees involved with filing a utility patent, which we now have.

What’s next?

We recently hired David Rose as our capital campaign adviser. His background is in design innovation (he teaches at MIT’s media lab) and business creation. David has been great in helping us fine tuning our business plan and ushering us into this next round of developing SMIT. We have been pitching to some venture capital firms and angel investors. The process is kind of like finding a dance partner. Some people you find a rhythm with, while some you don’t. It has been a fun process as we have been learning a lot about how this works.

For the past year or so, we’ve been making alliances with emerging solar tech companies, universities, and manufacturing companies to help facilitate our designs. It’s also just really fun to see what others are up to. So, we continue to meet more people and work to move new ideas forward.

We are also going to be part of a few shows coming up. There is a show in Germany which is traveling from Hanover to Berlin in which we will be showing the GROW concept. There is another possible show in Paris later on in 2009. We also have the GROW concept in few book publications due out early ‘09. And, soon, look for a website update that’s happening as we speak: http://s-m-i-t.com

Could you talk about your design philosophy?

Well, first of all, my father was an industrial designer. I never thought of doing anything else as a job. It just seemed like the best thing to do. You could work on anything and everything. But when I went to college, I didn’t think that I needed to study industrial design.

You probably already got some of that education in the first part of your life.

Right, that’s what I thought. But then, when I was going to school in England, I had this idea for a Beatles nightclub. So since I was in England, I went and talked to John and Yoko about making this club. And they were like, “But why would we hire YOU to do it?” And I said, “Because I had the idea!” And they were just like, “No.” I realized that maybe I did need to go to school for design and get some credentials. So I went to Pratt.

I think my basic philosophy is that design is a tool for doing social things. I’m not interested in sculpting the perfect teapot. I’m interested in things that are going to change people’s behaviour. That’s why I like what I do now, working in the LAB at Rockwell Group. Our clients aren’t asking for specific things; they’re asking for an environment or an experience.

[mauboussin kaleidoscope from labatrockwell].

You’ve been involved in starting up many creative companies. What was the first?

My brother and I started a jewelry store in Ohio, called Ohio Silver. When we started it, I read this article that said, “Most businesses fail within their first year.” When we made it over a year we were like, “Woohoo!” And it’s still in business.

We set it up to be a place where we could make whatever we wanted. Jewelry, stained-glass windows, leather goods, anything. It was a place for us to make things, and then to support that habit we would sell the stuff. I learned two important lessons at the store. One, I learned that the price really didn’t have anything to do with the actual value of the thing. Sometimes we would make something and it wouldn’t sell. So we would lower the price. And it still wouldn’t sell. Then we would try raising the price higher and it WOULD sell.

Two, I learned that the industrial part of industrial design was really great. When we sold something, “Wow, we made money,” but then it was like, “Oh no, we have to make another one!” After I did that for a while I realized why mass-production was a good idea, rather than being the machine myself. So that’s when I went back to being a real “industrial designer” again.

What led you to Smart Design?

I met this guy at a party, Davin Stowell. A couple of days later a friend of mine who was working with him called up. Davin had just moved down from Corning, NY, and he and a bunch of his friends from Syracuse had this project of designing the information panels for the Empire State Building. So I went to his apartment and he that was the beginning of Smart Design.

How did Smart Design get its first clients?

Davin started off with Corning Inc. as his client. He went to Syracuse University and he was from Corning, NY, so that was pretty much the place to work. He’s a great designer, and they were very happy with the stuff he designed. He said he was going to quit and move to New York City. And the Corning design director said, “You should work for us as a consultant, and we’ll pay you a certain amount every month.”

So he came down here, and he had this job he was doing on a regular basis for Corning. They they started asking for more work. And then his friend got the job doing the Empire State Building graphics. From there it was just word-of-mouth. With design, if you’re doing a good job for someone, other people want you to do it too. If you’re doing a bad job, then it’s harder to sell. You’ll probably need a marketing guy and advertising and stuff.

And from there you went on to open Frog Design’s New York studio, if my internet research told me the truth.

Well, I was the chair of the IDSA conference and I wanted people to think about the future. So I got a bunch of people to come and make predictions about ten years from then. Bruce Nussbaum, joking around, said, “There will only be five design companies in the future, and one of them will be “Smart Frog.” Everybody got a big laugh out of that.

This friend of mine, Steven Holt was working at Frog. He goes, “That’s actually not such a bad idea. Frog needs an office in New York.” And I thought that the mixture of Smart’s very smart design and Frog’s gung-ho, emotive design was a good combination. We almost merged with them. Smart decided not to do it, but Hartmut Esslinger convinced me to start the office. Dan Harden from Frog came to New York, and we went around with a realtor looking at different spaces.

We didn’t even really know how big of a office we wanted. We visited all these spaces, and then we went into one and said, “This is it!” And so that was the one we rented. And then we said, “So that means we’re going to have how many desks? How may people?” That kind of a process has its ups and downs…

I’m curious how you got into the new-media world.

That was one of the reasons I went to Frog, because they had just merged with a new-media company in Austin, TX. And so they had that kind of capability; they were doing advanced stuff like CD-ROMs.

But when I was still at Smart, I’d met Craig Kanarick, one of the founders of Razorfish. I met him when he had just started up and there were like two of them. I was really interested in what they were doing, and he was interested in us. We got a job to design a remote control for a Toshiba television, a “television of the future.” I said, “This is mostly interface design,” so we hooked up with Razorfish and did the project together.

I thought the partnership was great. The interface, the software, and the hardware all went together. So then when I went to work at Frog, I tried to get Frog and Razorfish to merge. We got very close, but then that fell apart.

Why didn’t it go through?

One of the problems was naming it. Frog thought that they had a lot of equity in their name, and Razorfish thought that they had a lot of equity. It was like, “What, are you going to call it? Frog Razorfish? Razorfrog?” So then, the same thing that happened with Hartmut happened with Razorfish, and I said, “OK, I’m going to Razorfish.”

Then the internet bubble burst. Similar to this time, the economy shrank really fast,
and so I got laid off from Razorfish. But previous to that, I was talking to these Dutch guys about merging with Razorfish. They were an industrial design company from Amsterdam. When the bubble burst, again, I said, “I’ll go work with you guys.” So we started Springtime-USA. Once again, we were looking around for office space…

This is sort of a repeating pattern.

Yeah. The same thing. And then David Rockwell said, “Hey, we have extra space in here, you can have a desk.” So he sort of incubated Springtime-USA. He also had some connection with Coca-Cola. Eventually there was a new CEO at Coke, who wanted innovation. We pitched the idea that we would make an innovations think-tank here. We would think up new kinds of cans, or new displays, new drinks, new graphics, anything. They liked the idea, so we started a special Rockwell studio for Coke called Studio Red.

It was a multi-disciplinary group that wasn’t constrained by what the deliverable would be, except for that we were going to create something cool and innovative. I think that’s the ideal project for designers. Most clients come in and they ask, “We need a chair,” you know? He came in and said, “This place is not exciting. What can we do?” That kind of attitude is much better.

[sheraton toronto from labatrockwell].

How did that transition to the LAB at Rockwell Group, where we’re sitting in right now?

David decided to make the LAB a separate thing which would focus on R&D interactive design, so that’s the thread that runs through from all the way back at Smart Design: the idea that interfaces and physical components should be conceived together.

I’d like to throw your own question from the IDSA conference back at you. What do you see happening in the next 10 years?

This recession is not a regular recession. I think it’s more of a cultural shift. I don’t think the economy is going to work the same way anymore.

With everything falling apart, it presents a very interesting opportunity to rebuild.

Right. And that’s the right attitude. It’s an opportunity to build it back better, not to try to patch it up. Designers are in a great position, because we do make stuff that’s better. It’s too bad for the bankers, what do they do? We actually provide wealth, really, whereas other people just manage it and move it around. We take the raw materials and improve them.

Ryan, you have a webstore, Elsewares, which came before Supermarket. Tell me a little about how that got started.

Ryan: I had a previous life as a documentary filmmaker, and at the tail end of a PBS project I realized that I enjoyed making the film’s web site as much as, maybe more than, the process of making the film. Around the same time, in 2003, a friend of mine came up with an agitprop product called Bush Cards, and I helped him build an online store that was extremely successful. I wanted to repeat that experience, so I turned to other products that I thought the world should know about, and – thats how Elsewares started.

Randy, what is your background?

Randy: In design, as a graphic designer. I started working with Ryan through Elsewares, and it really just evolved. We committed to the idea of Supermarket, and decided to turn it into something.

So what made you want to expand into new online territory and create Supermarket?

Ryan: Supermarket came out of what Elsewares wasn’t. Elsewares is a traditional online retailer: it holds stock, carries inventory and we ship all the products. There’s always been a limit to how large it could get, and how large we wanted it to get, and that in turn has always limited the number of designers and great products we could work with.

How do you curate the designers on Supermarket?

Ryan: What we aim to do, by curating the collection, is not create something that’s exclusive, but rather the inverse – create a site, a platform which attracts as much good work as possible. We find that good work attracts good work, so we just try to follow this vein of good design, and there are things which naturally fit into that.

Randy: It’s very intuitive, kind of a gut reaction – it’s what would you buy yourself? Can I be a fan of this product?

Ryan: If there is any criteria it’s, “Would I buy this, and tell my friends about it?”

Randy: It’s a rare occasion when we have to ask each other, “Do you think this fits?”

Do you have any loose figures about how many designers there are on the site, and how many products?

Ryan: The last time we published figures it was several hundred designers, and more then 6000 products. But it’s not quantity, its quality – we want people to have a sense that they can always go to Supermarket, see and find cool stuff, and not be overwhelmed.

It’s interesting when compared to Etsy, which has blown up into this massive thing. How do you feel the two sites relate?

Ryan: Etsy has obviously tapped into a big handmade thing. There’s some overlap between designers that sell at Supermarket and Etsy, but beyond that we’re different web sites offering different experiences, which works for us.

What kind of traffic do you get, and how have you built it?

Randy: We started with what was happening organically, and tried to amplify it. Based on the reputations, and the visibility of many of the designers selling on the site, we were already generating a lot of traffic. Everyone thats selling gets to benefit from the traffic funneling in, so some of the less popular designers, or people who don’t have the name recognition, get to benefit from those who do.

We started to see two things happening simultaneously: one was that some mainstream blogs would have things to say often about specific products or designers, and occasional about the site at large, and at the same time, very personal blogs, where people journal about their personal shopping experience or day, were writing about their experience on Supermarket. We started looking at both those responses, and reaching out to people where the site, or specific products and designers represented on the site, seemed like a good match. Traffic has been pretty organic. Its not as though were sending “please blog us!” emails. We were just forming relationships.

Ryan: Often it starts with a blog mentioning us, and we’ll take a moment to reach out and thank them. Blogs of all kinds are really important, not just the superstar ones. We also have our newsletter which goes out every two weeks, and we try to keep it, like the site, regular and bite sized. Its not trying to stop your other train of thought to digest it, but rather act as an introduction to get to the site and check it out. Its hard to strike that right tone between interruption and offer, and keep someone interested without pestering them.

One thing that you have that’s really useful is the collective blog, could you talk a little more about that?

Ryan: We started blogging about cool products, before Supermarket was ready to go. I couldn’t just sit around and hold it in till we were ready. It was a way to draw attention, and get people to join the site, but also to share information, and have a continual conversation with our customers, without always being in sales mode.

The way it works on Supermarket is that designers can actually add to the blog. Sometimes its a post about their new product, and sometimes they’ll be blogging about other things which are tangentially related – like a new store, or show they’re in, and thats great.

Are there any new projects on the back-burner or new branches? Where do you see the Supermarket heading?

Ryan: Well now that we’re a year in, we see these things within Supermarket where we’ve only touched upon the potential. There’s no small number of things we have to work on. We do have some other things on the burner, that we think might be graceful outgrowths of Supermarket – but they aren’t ready yet.

Randy: I think one of the other things, other then the software development per se, is the idea that we can help designers to figure out how to do the stuff were doing. The blog being there, shows the importance of taking a good photograph, announcing new products in multiple venues, writing a good description – all things that work to the designers benefit. And just on a very human level, allows us to reach out to designers and help them think of things they might not have. We can reach out to designers and say: hey maybe you want to try this, maybe you want to reorganize your store this way, have you considered using these tags, heres some links to other photographs of products like yours. We’re doing this in a very manual way, but we’ve definitely touched on ideas on how to take our business insight if you will, or marketing insight, and hand it over to people as often as possible.

Ryan: Exactly, and some of these are things that designers might not spend their time thinking about, because they think its some business problem, that you can just make good products and surely they’ll sell. We’re excited to share the information we have, and highlight examples of things being done well by other sellers, so that people can learn, and not just do what they’re already doing, but grow their business.

One of the things thats really interesting about Supermarket is that its looking at the bigger picture, its about creating a system rather then
a product or webstore – could you talk about this?

Randy: Supermarket really is a system. Your designing this set of tools for people to use, thats not isolated in a storefront product , but exists in this space where people are already comfortable. Its a bridge between the business world and the personal. No one wants to deal with software, they just want to sell the stuff online. No one wants to deal with a merchant account, they just want to get paid. No one wants to have to install the blog, they just want to express themselves. There are a whole bunch of designers, with a lot of ambition, who have developed their skills in this we can do anything moment, where all the boundaries are blurring, that the assumption is that they can do everything. Supermarket helps facilitate that.

I think it’s a big design challenge, for Supermarket, that it has to be a store which fits all different types of products – in some ways it really has to recede. How did this affect the design of the site?

Randy: We definitely approached that when designing the experience of using the site. Its important that when you go to the site you see your screen filled up with other people’s work, we just create the context.

Ryan: We’ve also been impressed by how much people appreciate not just the product but the person, the designer, and the story behind what’s for sale.

What do you consider your biggest success so far?

Ryan: It’s satisfying to have something that people appreciate, that gets them talking, and which leads to more people seeking us out.

Randy: Interestingly, its funny: if you google Supermarket, we’re the first thing that comes up – above any national food chain. It wasn’t like we sat down and tried to make this happen, it happened organically, the pieces just fell into place.

What advice do you have for creative entrepreneurs?

Randy: It’s important to break things down into really small pieces. The idea of Supermarket is pretty lofty and open, you’ve got all these types of people and product, and we got the most traction and tangible results, when we focused on one or two things for a period of time, accomplished them, and then focused on one or two other things.

Ryan: I also think it’s important to be authentic. Don’t be tempted to “stage manage” your business to look like anyone else’s. Be yourself, speak in your own voice, and just use the tools at your disposal to get your message and your products out there. Forget the press release.

Stuck in an unfamiliar part of town with an urgent case of diarrhea? Have no fear. Just whip out your iPhone, go to Diaroogle.com, and type in the cross streets. In addition to locating the nearest toilets, it gives you pictures, ratings, and reviews. Quoted from their site:

“Diaroogle helps you find quality public toilets from your mobile phone. It’s for the discerning, on-the-go defecator who is brave enough to use a public bathroom, but still demands a hygienic and private bathroom experience.”

I really respect people who take seemingly silly ideas and make them a reality. A lot of people have fun ideas, but not many people follow through.

E: Today’s frameworks and technologies have solved most of the “hard parts” of web development, letting people really focus on what makes their website unique / better / cooler. And with today’s Twitter culture, getting your site noticed, if it’s good, is also relatively easy. So at this point if you have a web idea and you don’t try it, that’s just laziness.

K: It’s inspiring to me that we can take an idea and, in a really short amount of time, actually turn it into something usable.

Where is your favorite bathroom in New York?

E: Five-star hotels are the best. Steak houses are also pretty serious. Marble bathrooms, wood floors, gold hardware… Any time there is a bathroom that is semi-public and it’s nicer than the one in your own apartment, that’s a huge win. The Waldorf is pretty sweet.

K: The Bryant Park bathroom is also a favorite. Anybody can walk in, plus it’s shockingly nice.

E: It’s key to find a place where you don’t feel uncomfortable if you’re there solely to use their bathroom. That goes a long way for me.

How did this project start?

E: I had the name before I had the concept fully formed. Some friends and I were goofing around with names at a party. I first wanted it to be called Poogle. We were joking, but we also thought that we could actually make this work. I rolled out a really rough version. Then I happened to bounce the idea and the name off Kevin, who thought it was an awesome idea.

K: At first he just wanted a logo. I took a picture of the toilet in my office and based the illustration on that.

E: Almost instantly we had a really good working relationship. He does the design part of it, the visual presentation, and I do the programming side. He was able to transform it from a hacked-together toilet site to this really legit-looking thing.

How did you jump from having a good idea and a logo to creating a whole interactive site?

E: Websites are what we do for a living, so it was relatively easy. Some of the tools and technologies we use are specifically geared toward rapid development. And Google Maps, which is a huge part of it, obviously existed already. I don’t want to trivialize what we did, because it was a lot of work, but it wasn’t really that hard to get it up and running.

K: It’s like what we do during the day, but with a focus on all the things that are fun about our jobs.

So did you review the first bathrooms yourself, and then it grew into the public putting up reviews?

K: We did about 10 initial reviews before we started getting press. And then we were playing catch-up. Every day I was trying to photograph one. I would be carrying my camera with me, looking into a Kinko’s, peering through the window, wondering if there’s a bathroom in there!

E: But once it caught on, our job was done for us, which was amazing. Now we add 10% of the content, if that, and our users do the rest.

Once you had the site together, how did you introduce it to the world?

K: I think I did the first blog post about it. A couple of people who have a lot of followers re-posted it, and it spread from there. We got linked to on a bunch of sites.

We discovered you from the Thrillist mailing list.

E: It was weird and it was inspiring how quickly it caught on. Kevin’s post was pretty casual. There was no campaign or marketing strategy. The tipping point was getting some big posts, like Lifehacker, Thrillist…

K: Well, our first big coverage was in the Village Voice. And they trashed us. We weren’t really ready yet; we had about ten listings and we were just testing the waters. They said something like, “Diaroogle Disappoints.”

E: On the one hand, it was cool that we got in the Village Voice. But we learned the lesson that we should have had a better launch strategy… We had no idea that it was going to be so popular. The next thing you know, we’re getting reviewed.

Do you have plans for bringing this to other cities?

K: We’ve already expanded to London and San Francisco.

E: It’s hard for us, because you can’t really show someone the site until you have a good foundation of content there, enough to get people excited and make it usable. But we live in New York, and can’t do those first reviews for other cities. We have had a few offers from people willing to represent the cities for us.

Have you found a way to turn a profit from this yet, or is it still a hobby?

K: We use Google AdSense. But that’s pretty tiny.

E: We figure if we want to make anything substantial we’re going to have to create direct relationships with advertisers. And probably not just within the “toilet industry”. While someone like Charmin might want to put some money behind it, we’d probably do best with something geared towards a younger, hipper, Gawker-esque, shows-at-McCarren-pool crowd.

Are you getting enough traffic that you think this could lead to viable advertising opportunities?

E: Yeah, we get pretty solid numbers. Pretty surprising numbers, actually. I’m semi-ashamed to say that this is probably the most heavily trafficked website that I’ve done, outside of…

There are a lot of people out there who need to go to the bathroom!

K: It’s definitely got universal appeal.

E: Girls have been really receptive to it, obviously, because they have much higher standards for what then need from a bathroom experience. Commuters also use the site to map out bathrooms on the route they take to work everyday.

What are your future plans? Do you have any more sites on the back burner? More cities?

K: We’ve talked a bunch of ideas back and forth. We’re formulating our strategy.

E: It’s not 100% official. We still feel like there’s so much to be done in New York alone. However, the New York user base has a ceiling, and at that point we’ll have to branch out. So branching out into other cities is pretty much inevitable. And then from a business standpoint, we have some partnership ideas in the works.

K: Getting to the point we’re at now was crystal clear. We knew exactly what we needed to do, and what that end result was going to be. Now that we’ve achieved it, we have to figure out where to go from here.

That’s a big turning point.

E: We’re now the undisputed kings of the New York toilet scene.