Sweat The Product

Allan Yu

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 12:00:00 EST

After being friends on the Internet for several years, Allan and I finally met over cocktails and popcorn at my East Village apartment. With his outside-the-box design thinking, fashion sense, and my love for his colorful conversations, we became quick friends.

Allan is best known for his design work at NYC darling Svpply, before moving to Project Florida, then Google-X, where he presides currently. In our one-on-one, Allan walked me through what happened to Svpply, what’s different about being a designer at a big company like Google, and what advice he’d give to young product designers: none at all.

Deepa Subramaniam

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 12:00:00 EST

I first met Deepa through my friend Saha (January 2015’s STP interview). We sat together at her downtown office in TriBeCa to talk about her time at Adobe, where she worked her way up from a QA Engineer to help lead product on Adobe’s original Creative Cloud team. After ten years at Adobe, she decided to move across country to New York City to join the charity: water team in late 2013. Today, she finds herself with completely different challenges leading product at a much smaller, non-profit company.

Jesse Lamb

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 12:00:00 EST

I first met Jesse Lamb and the Dispatch team during Techstars Summer NYC 2011 when I was a Mentor. Jesse immediately struck me as a “do whatever you can to get things done” kind-of-guy. We stayed in-touch for 3 years through Dispatch’s $965k financing round in 2011, which was led by Thrive Capital, through their eventual sale to Meetup in late 2014. Jesse has recently left Meetup to work on his new project Loose Leaves, an instant markdown publishing tool for Mac and iOS. We sat down to discuss the past fives years at my office in Flatiron, NYC.

Sahadeva Hammari

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 16:00:00 EST

I first met Saha in 2008, when we were both subletters in Harvest’s old SoHo office. Saha had just launched his first startup, Rumplo, a t-shirt company, and I was still with Carbonnade. We became quick friends as Saha had a quiet, “no bullshit” demeanor that drew me to him. Only fitting, five years after we met, Saha is again subletting from Harvest (now in Flatiron), where I conducted this interview over Aeropress coffee.

Noah Kagan

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 11:15:00 EST

Noah Kagan is best known for his companies AppSumo and SumoMe, having been fired from Facebook as employee #30 and losing out on $185 million there, and having also been employee number #4 at Mint. After I met Noah for tacos at Calexico in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, what interested me was how open and honest he is. You don't meet many entrepreneurs who are as straightforward as Noah. After meeting him, I knew I had to hang out with him again and interview him for STP before he went home to Austin. The very next day we met for coffee and headed back to my apartment for our interview, which we finished just in time for him to rush off and participate in a webinar at GrowthHackers.

Jack Groetzinger

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 9:55:00 EST

Jack Groetzinger is one of those guys who is genuinely helpful. From the time we first met in early 2012, Jack has given me great business advice and constantly offered his help. Although our relationship started as business, we now regularly play squash together. After today's match I asked if I could interview him. He graciously agreed after defeating me 0-3 — his revenge for my having beaten him and his new racket the previous week. We sat down in the library at the Yale Club of New York and Jack told me his story, from selling his first company halfway through his time at the tech incubator Dreamit Ventures in 2009 to recently raising $35 million for his current company, SeatGeek.

Brian Wang

Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:15:00 EST

Brian Wang and I met in 2010, when he started Fitocracy. As the founder of a company that’s been around for over four years, Brian has a lot of stories to share, from running out of a New York Tech Meetup when his phone blew up with email notifications from signups on Reddit’s Fittit community to losing that community’s support several years later. Brian and I sat down on plush couches in his office’s conference room to discuss the many ups and many downs of running a startup that’s doing everything it can to scratch and claw its way to success.

Adii Pienaar

Wed, 24 Sep 2014 12:49:00 EST

Adii Pienaar is a serial entrepreneur best known for founding the successful and multi-million dollar company WooThemes in 2008. That's a huge achievement in itself, but he also built WooThemes from South Africa — about as far away from Silicon Valley as you can get. Not only is Adii a successful entrepreneur, he's a great speaker, writer, and person. It's been four years, but I still fondly remember meeting Adii for German food and beers in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since WooThemes, Adii has started a few new businesses, most recently Receiptful, a SaaS business for better email receipts.

Jake Przespo

Wed, 03 Sep 2014 10:00:00 EST

Jake Przespo is a twenty-six year old Product Designer living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He now works at a small product studio after having worked at Skillshare for two years as their first employee. This is Jake’s first ever interview, so we sipped on Negronis at my East Village apartment to lighten the mood. Jake talks about his days at Skillshare, their product design process, and the differences that emerge as a team grows in size, explaining how product design is different when you're working at a small studio.

Jon Wheatley

Mon, 26 Aug 2014 09:00:00 EST

You won’t find many people who are more of a serial entrepreneur than Jon. Since starting his first online website at age thirteen, he’s gone on to build over sixty, most notably DailyBooth, which raised over $7 million. In the last few years, Jon’s focus has shifted to building physical products. Read about his process of discovery, getting samples made, and eventually selling his products through Kickstarter.

Mikael Cho

Mon, 26 Aug 2014 09:00:00 EST

Mikael Cho is a US citizen living in Montreal, where he founded Crew. At the time of this interview, Crew was known as Ooomf. They went on to raise $2.1 million in April 2014. Six months before that, I sat down with Mikael at the Harvest office. Mikael explained how Crew built their first product with no more than a Mailchimp newsletter and a Wufoo form, how they build features, and how they acquire new customers.