It’s scary starting your own company, especially when you’re in your 40s, are the sole breadwinner for the family, and your three kids are nearing college age. When I decided to leave an executive role at Capital One 6 months ago to start my own innovation consultancy, I had to process that fear head on. After having lots of leads but few actual gigs in the first few weeks, I started doubting. And then all of a sudden, when my fear had finally dissolved in the chemical bath of rejection and passionate prototyping, the proverbial consulting drizzle turned into a pour.

I was thrown into a dizzying pace of travel and innovation, working with incredible teams on projects that excited me. I was flying to NYC to prototype the future of health advocacy, hopping over to Beijing and Shanghai to redefine collaborative spaces with international architects, working on community and product design with a modular electronics startup, spending time in London as a guest lecturer, exploring how to measure social impact of VC funding, working with high net worth Scandinavians to infuse innovation efforts with co-creation methods, and giving conference keynotes along the way. The Garage Partners dream was finally alive!

So when Dirk Cleveland — a Silicon Valley talent scout I had connected with over the years — called me a few weeks ago to discuss a role he thought I’d be great for, I was prepared to simply refer him to someone in my network. This mentality was compounded by the fact that I was literally in the middle of an epic hackathon with Nexpaq and Maxim in Dallas, and the roles Dirk and I had previously discussed were usually more junior-level positions. This is no fault of his — there just aren’t that many VP/C-level design positions on the planet! But when he described how Walmart had just bought Jet.com, brought in some fresh Valley product leaders, and were now looking for a VP of Design to give this shiny speedjet a sharper rudder, I was intrigued.

I met with the team a few days after returning from the hackathon, and was electrified by the chemistry, big thinking, the need for design to be rooted in modern data analytics, and how the team is thinking holistically about deeply human experiences across digital and physical channels. And having worked at Microsoft and Capital One, I’m learning that there’s a big part of me that thrives on fostering extraordinary design teams and impact from within organizations that are not typically known for being design pioneers. Finally, since I had just sat down with my oldest son as he was selecting his final colleges to apply to — it tangibly hit me that I had 8 months left with him before he started on his own professional journey. Garage Partners was in full stride, but I was seeing my family only a few days a month.

So, goodbye for now Garage Partners. And Hello Walmart! You sustained my family when we were living in Beijing and longing for a little piece of home, you have an amazing team that I’m humbled to now become a part of, and more importantly you’re on the brink of redefining how the world saves money and lives better. I can’t wait to be part of the journey!

#savemoney #livebetter

Instead of sleeping next to my beautiful wife in our cozy bed, I am curled up on a short couch, my long legs awkwardly dangling over the edge.

In the afternoon, after a frenzy of outreach, press, sharing, and thanking, I sneak back to the couch for a much-needed power nap. I’m out of my element and I’m absolutely exhausted.

My startup co-founder, David Khavari, doesn’t hesitate to document the process.

That sleepy photo? That’s me. That’s me in the exact spot I had slept a pitiful 3.5 hours the night prior — which, to me, is almost a formality.

It’s ironic that I ignored sleep, food, and family to launch a product designed to inspire great habits. And I began to feel guilty.

In that doubting moment, I got these messages from my wife and kids…

When I knew my family was with me — that it was OK for me to go overboard for a few days to launch our Kickstarter — my guilt vanished.

I realized in that moment that I didn’t have to choose between my family and my startup — I could choose both in a healthy, if unconventional, way.

I’m a lifelong designer. When I think back to my days at Microsoft, Google or Capital One — I sometimes felt like design’s biggest enemy was marketing.

“In the corporate world, I sometimes felt like design’s biggest enemy was marketing.”

Suffice it to say, when David began orchestrating our marketing campaign, I broke into a cold sweat, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

“I make products. Marketing just isn’t for me,” I thought.

But I had no choice. It was marketing, or inevitable public failure.

24 hours and $15,000 later, finally clean-shaven, showered, and well-slept in a normal-sized bed, I’ve found some wisdom in the madness.

Much in the same way that I realized that my family and my startup could co-exist in a healthy way, I realized that marketing could happily co-exist with great design.

At that moment, I stepped back from my preconceived notions, and I saw that I could approach marketing in my own design-focused way.

After VentureBeat first broke our product story, many other press outlets wouldn’t touch it. They didn’t want to break old news.

As I sat down with a cup of joe, I wrote something personal and human rather than just something I thought would drive a lot of traffic. Then I shared it.

My co-founder, David, is a 23-year old Stanford grad and one of the most competent people I’ve ever met. It’s been a wild ride…so I wrote about it.

Together, we collaborated with two high-school engineering whiz-kids as consultants and developed a radical hardware product.

I went totally off-script co-founding with David — and we went off-script working with two kids — but these choices have built a huge source of strength and creativity, even though they seemed incongruous at the time.

Despite being turned down by several major publications, people started to read the article. Before I knew it, people were reaching out to me. Direct messages snowballed into tweets, which eventually culminated, ironically, in features in major online publications.

If I’ve learned one thing from all of this, it’s that you can market in your own way, and—if it’s real and compelling—it’s more likely to work.

That’s why I believe that makers must become marketers…and that marketers must become makers: sincerity is invaluable and unmistakable.

Now that you’ve heard my story, here’s what I’m asking you to do:

Treat your next marketing campaign like you’re designing a product. Think about the value you’re delivering and make it authentic. If you focus on that, the attention will come.

Design on, my marketing friends.

Why my latest project — Peak — has been supercharged by the contributions of high schoolers and recent college grads.

“Become friends with the youngest person you can find at work.”

This was the advice Tom Kelley gave to the audience of a design conference I was attending and speaking over a decade ago. Tom was sort of an idol to me, having been part of the founding team at IDEO: the most admired innovation and design consultancy in the world. But honestly his advice sounded strange to me at the time.

Maybe it was because at the time I was one of the youngest people on my team at Microsoft (still in my 20’s :). Or maybe it was because young people didn’t have as much access to technology as they do today. Whatever the reason, I finally understood the power of this advice a few summers ago when I was leading a 14,002-mile cross-country road trip to the nation’s top universities and maker spaces to learn about how to best create Google’s Project Ara.

It was the first time at work that I felt OLD. But I also felt even more inspired by the vision and skills of a new generation of designers and engineers. What might have normally sparked a mid-life crisis depression spiral turned out to give me insights into Project Ara that I could not have seen in a traditional tech company environment. And some incredible teams have launched incredible products after working with us.

So when I started my own agency three months ago, I decided to let go of any biases or notions of what it meant to be a “seasoned professional”, and focus only on collaborating with like-minded innovators of any age. This led me to a partnership with David Khavari, a recent Stanford Computer Science grad who shared my passion for helping people form better habits.

David and I bumped into the amazing Quin Etnyre at MakerFaire, where he gave us his Qduino mini board to play around with (shown in the photo above). I met him when he was 13 and he came to the first Project Ara Developer Conference. Now that David and I were making our own hardware, we asked Quin (and his equally amazing parents :) if he could help us with our prototyping efforts. They enthusiastically agreed, and both Quin and his friend Cesare have been an extended part of our core team. And if we reach our Kickstarter goal within the next 30 days, we hope to get as much of their time as possible to collaborate on making Peak a reality.

It is kind of amazing that I need to make sure that members of my extended team have enough time for homework and sports — but it also gives me great joy to know that I’m able to work with the best minds and hands in the industry, regardless of age or any other traditional bias.

So here’s my advice to you:

Collaborate with anyone who shares your passion and vision, regardless of your biases.

Dan Makoski, Co-founder of Peak

Why This Ex-Google Design Exec is Building a Startup with Crazy Whiz Kids was originally published in DAYONE — A new perspective. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Space

1: Tech Shop
When you are an extrovert and work for yourself, it’s important to find ways to connect to a social environment. For me, Tech Shop was the perfect place. Not only does it have free WiFi, coffee and popcorn, but also the awesome energy of passionate tinkerers in a beautifully messy garage. Just be sure to bring your noise-cancelling headphones to drown out the lasers and lathes :).
Cost: $150/mo, can work out of any location

2: Breather
I use Breather rooms for those moments when I’ve needed to facilitate a client workshop in a more focused space. Their app makes it easy to find, reserve, extend and even unlock the room’s door. It’s also nice that they come with rights to film and take photos. This came in handy when I was recently shooting a Kickstarter video for an upcoming product launch.
Cost: ~$30–70/hour in the Bay Area
*In a few cases I have referral links for these tools — I am including them here in case anyone wants the discounts: Referral Link (get $45 credit)

Communications

3: Clara
My calendar is managed by an amazing assistant. She saves me many hours each week with the exhausting back-and-forth of scheduling, re-scheduling, calling, conferencing, etc. She’s so good that she regularly gets asked out on dates. The thing is, she’s an algorithm. I’ve used both X.ai and ClaraLabs.com for the past few months, and chose to use ClaraLabs so I can use my own domain and have human intervention for more complex communications.
Cost: $199/mo for Clara or free (initally) with x.ai
Referral Link

4: Speek
There are few things I despise more than the mental juggling required to join a typical conference call while on the go. Speek makes this a joy by giving attendees a url (www.speek.com/danmak for example) that takes them straight to the conference line, no matter what device they’re on. #bliss
Cost: free for basic services, $19–24/mo for all the goodies

Biz Ops

5: Bench
I aced the verbal part of my SAT, but pretty much bombed math . I’ve just never enjoyed that part of my brain, so it gives me particular joy to have a team of accountants at Bench deal with my financials. I get neat and tidy profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and other spreadsheetish stuff from them each month. Plus, they are really friendly, accessible and just plain awesome.
Cost: $125/mo and up
Referral Link (free month)

6: PocketSuite
Running your own business requires a lot of juggling of logistics, leads, contracts, paperwork, receipts, time-tracking, scheduling, re-scheduling, invoicing, and hopefully actually getting paid. The team at PocketSuite.io have done an amazing job of helping solopreneurs manage all of this from their seamless app, and relying primarily on messaging for pretty much everything. Plus, you get your own virtual phone number, which I use as a special client hotline.
Cost: $9.99/mo and up
Referral Link

Storytelling

7: Strikingly
Back in the day I took a lot of pride in hand-coding my own HTML. Then I started using Dreamweaver and tweaking the CSS or HTML as needed. Eventually I got to a point where I was content with tools like WordPress and Squarespace and spent more time focusing on content rather than presentation. I’ve taken that one step further a few years ago with a lovely little tool called Strikingly. It started out with the great mission of creating single, scrolling pages that were simple, elegant and functional, and has since grown into my favorite way of getting an awesome site up. It has modern, liquid, adaptive layout, video backgrounds, the ability now to have multiple pages, and a sweet WYSIWYG UI.
Cost: Free, $8/mo, or $16/mo
Referral Link

8: Moo
For starters, how can you not like a business card business that is called Moo :)? Second, Moo has awesome formats (mini luxe cards are my favorite), and plenty of well-designed templates to choose from. I love handing out a card with a “printfinity” back (each card has a different photo) that I can feel proud of.
Cost: about $35 for a set of 100 luxe mini cards
Referral Link ($7.50 credit)

Focus

9: SaneBox
Email kind of sucks because it’s so hard to tease out the good stuff from the bad stuff. Information ninja’s during my Microsoft days had convoluted Outlook rules to tame the beast, but I could never take that much time to figure it all out. I’ve used Unroll.me for a few years to make it better and take control of spam, but it was a simple system that wasn’t very smart. In walks SaneBox and takes instant control of my inbox (for Gmail users only right now). Chaos turned into order so fast it was almost comical how much quieter my inbox became. Few things have made me more productive.
Cost: $7 / $12 / $36/mo
Referral Link ($5 credit)

10: Momentum
Most of my innovation team at Capital One used this tasty little Chrome plugin, and I was instantly hooked. It sets an awesome tone with inspirational quotes and beautiful nature scenes from around the world every time I start my day or open a new browser window. It encourages me to articulate my focus for the day, and I’ve paid the very affordable annual premium to integrate my task list from Wunderlist.

Momentum, in part, inspired me to explore a product that will help people form better habits. But that will be another story…
Cost: Free, or $19.99/year

Top 10 Tools for the Solopreneur was originally published in DAYONE — A new perspective. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This time last year, I was speaking at OSCON, helping Capital One launch its first open source software into the world. When a regulated bank begins to embrace the value of open source software, it’s clear that the movement has come to a point of respect and recognition. As OSCON 2016 opens today, I wanted to share a few thoughts on a place where the power of being open has not deeply penetrated yet: the profession of Design. But first, a quick activity to set the stage:

Open up Google, and do an image search for “famous designers”. You will get a general feeling for the stereotypical designer — a lot of black and white, eyes-to-the-camera, elite and fairly narcissistic portraits. And lest you think I’m judging, check out my Instagram feed and you’ll see an unhealthy number of selfies with a twinge of duckface.

Now, do an image search for “nobel peace prize winners” and you get a very different feeling. A lot more color (photographic and otherwise!), people who are not looking directly at the camera, but are engaged in talking and working with people to make the world a better place. And a whole lot more smiles :). As a designer, my ultimate goal is to use my craft to make the world a better and more connected place. And I believe this can only happen if we, as a profession, fully embrace the power of being “open”. Doing this requires that we recognize and act on two essential truths:

1. Humans are creative

Designers love to perpetuate the myth of the lone genius: that only a few of us are gifted with the talent of being creative. It makes us feel special and wanted. But the truth is that everyone is creative. If you need convincing, watch the first few minutes of Tim Brown’s TED talk on Creativity and Play, where the entire audience goes through Stanford University professor Bob McKim’s drawing experiment.

We also love the myth that “people don’t know what they want”. Again, it puts us into a mystical black box of control. But the truth is that people can absolutely envision a better future and express their hopes and their dreams — they just need the right tools (jump to minute 5:00) and a little encouragement.

2. Openness supercharges Design

Designers are traditionally trained to work through the design process in a studio, and unveil their masterpiece only when it’s ready. For any designer who has worked in tech, you know how dysfunctional this approach is. Sure, a young design team can naturally feel crushed by the sobering and conflicting opinions from across the organization. A great design leader will help the team mature to not only be able to “take” external critique, but to actually seek out conflicting perspectives in the passionate pursuit of excellence.

Far from creating a situation where Design becomes diluted or created by “committee”, all of this extra input supercharges the design process and gives designers a lot more sources of inspiration. And the most important input you can get is from the people who you are designing for. Here’s a story about how this worked for Google’s Project Ara, brought to you by kari.

What’s next?

I’m excited to see where the efforts of an entire generation of designers will take the field based on these two truths. I’m encouraged by the efforts of Garth to create a space for this conversation in the open source community, the way that Etsy is empowering artists across the world, how Threadless uses the power of the crowd to create its designer line of clothing, how the incredible Jessica and Jesse at Nervous System provide tools for anyone to create gorgeous jewelry, all of the chaos and creativity seen in the maker movement, and many experiments in-between. Do you have an awesome example of this emerging space of Open Design? I’d love to check it out!

Originally published at www.garagepartners.com.

Design, meet Open was originally published in DAYONE — A new perspective. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So I took my mentor’s advice. I felt I wasn’t impacting the world as much as I wanted to. I switched things up. For two years I explored how design can impact emerging markets and families who make $5/day, I headed Interaction Design for the Surface project for the next two, and for the next moved to China to lead an entire Design Studio. It didn’t stop with Microsoft. I led Design Research for Motorola to learn more about hardware design, then after two years joined Regina Dugan’s ATAP team at Google for a fixed 24-month term. Some seemed to have a hard time with the time limit, but it felt just fine for me :). During my two years I founded and led the design for Project Ara.

And when my time was up, I chose Capital One. I chose the opportunity to work with several design teams to take a fresh look at finances, and left behind the security of working at another Silicon Valley heavyweight. And I would absolutely do it again. It was the most exhilarating stretch of my career. I have never worked at a company with such alignment of deep purpose, genuine leadership and inspiring talent. And I will be forever proud of what my teams accomplished in the past two years.

But when I took stock after 18 months at Capital One, there was one persistent desire that I’ve never given space to. It’s the thing that I’m both most afraid of and most excited to do: start my own design agency. Literally hang a shingle. My Dad owned his own design firm for the past 30 years, and I’ve loved seeing him connect to projects that fuel his passions. But I also remember the hard times when clients were scarce, and I never wanted to put my kids through that. But after consulting with the family, I have their universal support to give it a go. I have 6 months of operating costs set aside, which gives me the financial confidence I needed to go for it. And whether I’m still doing this after another 18 months or not, I can’t wait to fail, learn, adjust, and hopefully have some profound impact along the way.

I will be forever proud of my time at Capital One, and want to encourage my teams to be bolder, move faster and have deeper empathy for the peoples’ lives whom we have the privilege to make better. I can’t wait to see what they will all do next!

Originally published at www.garagepartners.com.