SneakerheadVC
My name is Phin Barnes. Grew up on hip-hop and hoops. I love products and services that move people. Partner at First Round Capital in NYC. We are seed stage.
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These are the students, and they are all Cooper Union. They are there to address the Board of Trustees, which “votes” today to determine if they end...
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✎ If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it
Clear, Rise and Solar are three examples of a trend of “gesture driven” apps with a flat UI....
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The Flat Design Era
When LayerVault 2 launched earlier this spring, we believed that we were taking a risk by pursuing an entirely flat...
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New Adventures...
The last two years building and leading the TechStars NYC program have been an incredible time in my life. However, as with most...
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Happy Fabiversary - 1 Year of Fab
Today marks the 1 year anniversary of Fab.
What an incredibly rewarding and humbling year it has been.
We...
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“The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal...”
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Paul Newman's Letter to his Wife on their Wedding Day
“ Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens. A good marriage must be...
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#releasedate #nike air #yeezy 2 release June 9th. Are you Ready? (Taken with instagram)
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My dude @cnotez305 hurtin the game with the #24kts #asics #wdywt (Taken with instagram)
NEW POST: How a simple shelf made my mornings better (aka How the craft of digital UX can learn from physical spaces)
“Culture is critical. Automattic has many policies designed to empower employees and remote work is just one of them. They believe individual workers know best how to be productive and that management’s job is to provide choices and get out of the way. If employees are self-motivated and empowered, remote work can accelerate productivity. However in autocratic or bureaucratic organizations the freedom of remote work runs against the culture. Of course remote workers will be less productive if they’re in environments that depend on centralized, rule-oriented, or committee heavy processes. But even then it can work if managers care more about results than pretense.”
The keys to @automattic making a 100% distributed work force work - Rule #1 Do not treat your employees like children
How WordPress Thrives with a 100% Remote Workforce - Scott Berkun - Harvard Business Review
These are the students, and they are all Cooper Union. They are there to address the Board of Trustees, which “votes” today to determine if they end the 100+ years of tuition-free undergraduate education at the school.
The only problem with the fact that the students showed up is that the Board didn’t show up. After telling these same students that the Trustees are dedicated to communication and transparency on Friday, the Board has moved the meeting to a secret location, where no one has to meet anyone’s eyes. That’s character.
It may seem to be a tangent, but it’s also of note that All the Cooper Union fits in that huge staircase, which has no function except (with three elevators) moving this many students into the tiny classrooms at the edges of the building.
The reason there’s so much empty space has to do with zoning laws that were designed — in spirit — to prevent a building this large from going up. By keeping a small number of usable square feet, but embedding it in a monstrously large unusable shell, the Trustees and the architects were able to meet the letter of the law (encouraging modest construction) and still find a way to spend $175MM on the building.
Coincidentally: it’s a building that had part of its construction contract awarded to a family member of the Board of Trustees.
So here is All of the Cooper Union in a staircase atrium: a space deliberately designed to avoid function. But that space found a function today. Or it would have, if only the Trustees had walked the walk and showed up to the building.
After all, they built it.
The newest venture fund in NYC is run by students for students. @firstround brings the Dorm Room Fund to New York!
The home cooked story of the @firstround investment in @blueapronmeals #frc
A 3d printer that can print from recycled 3d printed objects from recycled plastic
Turn your water bottles into 3d printed objects with this all in one recycling 3d printer - http://filabot.com/reclaimer.php
The Flat Design Era
When LayerVault 2 launched earlier this spring, we believed that we were taking a risk by pursuing an entirely flat interface.
Well-loved products on the web share a similar design aesthetic, with roughly the same kinds of bevels, inset shadows, and drop shadows. For designers, achieving this level of “lickable” interface is a point of pride. For us, and for a minority of UI designers out there, it feels wrong.
We certainly didn’t invent the flat style but arriving at it was a violent process. We tore through hundreds of revisions (we have the LayerVault timelines to prove it) to potential interfaces before arriving at the answer that now makes us say “of course.” The desk at LayerVault’s original headquarters (my Manhattan apartment) still has the battle scars from objects being slammed down in anger. At one point, while working on a mockup, a MacBook was slammed shut so hard it was nearly unhinged.
