4th April 2016
This is one of the scariest, most exciting things I’ve ever set out to do.
I run a small design firm in Bangalore, India that I started out of university. I had interned during and had found a focus on the internet lacking so I went at it myself. When I couldn’t do something I contracted and built a network and realised many of us were doing this separately—the dream was to come together instead, have an inter-dependent agency of freelancers.
Thirteen years later, I went back and forth with this and settled on a core team of five. I built websites from content-driven to transactional, shot photographs, made videos, games, …. What I never got right however, was the freelancer network. I realised I was a maker, not a manager.
At the same time, personally, I find my focus wanting to commit deeply to something singular. The freedom that came with freelancing made way for a desire to build a single product over a long term. We broke ourselves down to two people and we now work with a few early stage startups helping define the product and design UI.
And then there was Crew.
From the freelancer network that’s becoming a co-working space, to the love of side projects, a book, a podcast, to Unsplash which inspired us to start Pickle Jar, Crew is the better, more successful version of so much of what I love about the work I do. There’s power in the network and I want to help create the way the economy will work in the future; I just learned I may have to pivot to do it. Within Crew, I could contribute skills to the larger team I couldn’t build and create a space for makers to not have to also be managers. Working with Crew could be the spiritual sequel to my current life and I want in.
Thank you for your six seconds and reading this far. I’m happy to jump on a video call with you, share stories, find common ground and change the world for the better. I live in Washington, DC, so yeay timezone compatability!
I believe I am very well suited to really contribute to things at Crew. (Thanks Andrea)
PS. In the spirit of building in the open, I’m currently building a dynamic CSS stylesheet using a palette generated from Unsplash images. I’ve got colours going, the next step is establishing a type hierarchy and margins and laying the thing out. On to more dishwashing.