Glen Liberman – Product Designer

 The Product Designers  No Responses »
Sep 142012
 

This is Glen Liberman.

Sophi’s comment: I met Glen through his hugely popular product, the Gear Ring. We met in a coffee shop in 2010 shortly after I had stopped working fulltime. The Gear Ring took him and a collaborator Ben Hopson over a year to finish. Glen showed me many prototypes of different versions. This long and expensive process would have made many people give up and I was impressed that they had kept pushing to finish the project. 

In my conversation with Glen in 2010 we talked about the importance of “sticking with it” and seeing things through. We also spent about 4 super fun hours doing napkin sketches of potential products. Glen encouraged me to keep working on my product designs and told me if I kept at it long enough, I’d …eventually…be successful. These are the kinds of words everyone who wants to work for themselves needs to hear. So if you aren’t hearing this, go and find someone to tell you that. It’s true, too, by the way. Stick with it, finish your projects, don’t give up, IT WILL WORK OUT.

Check out the video for the Gear Ring below:

What did you do for work in your last full time/part time job?
I was a server at a party / wedding space, a camp counselor, and a retail employee at a local mall.

When did you leave your last full time/part time job?
I stopped working at 25 or maybe it was even a bit earlier than that.

What pushed you to stop working for other people?
I saw people in charge being innovative and creating things true to their own vision. I have so many ideas in my head and I wanted the same opportunity to be innovative and bring my visions to life.

Tell us about what you do to make a living.
Kinekt Design is my full-time gig. I also create music and do a bit of design work on the side. I’ve composed music for a national Toyota commercial as well as working on self-initiated art and design projects in my spare time.

How did you get started in your own business?
I had been a bit down and out for a while figuring out what I wanted to do. The only thing that made sense to me was to manufacture a product and be the sole retailer of it to keep things exclusive and unique.

When you worked for other people describe how you felt.
Often times when I had to work on a certain day, I’d feel anxious and nervous about having to go in.  That feeling has disappeared since I left the job and began on my own.

Do you have health insurance?
Yes, I do have health insurance, but it’s not a company plan. I pay for individual health care out of my own pocket.

Looking at your work, it is really clear that you love what you do. I love what you do, too. 🙂
I absolutely love what I do. I’m passionate about the conceptualization and ideation of new things whether it be for an artwork, product, or service. It’s sort of the central theme of my existence.

Link to the Kinekt Design website (designed by Tina Roth Eisenberg)
Link to his personal website 

Debra Feiner Coddington – Custom Metal

 Just Plain Odd  1 Response »
Sep 072012
 

This is Debra Coddington. I’m 63.  Arrowsmith Forge, is an artisan-iron business my husband and I began when we met 35 years ago. We design, build and install architectural iron, furniture and lighting. Currently we’re a “custom metal” shop but for over 20 years Arrowsmith created lines of furniture and chandeliers for international corporations. Our extensive facilities enable us to make most anything of metal that our clients can dream up. And we do!

What did you do for work in your last full time/part time job?
Hard to remember that far back. I began building trade skills at 17, when I apprenticed w/a dental technicial to study lost wax casting in NYC. Since art paid little, to support myself I began peddling jewelry I was making; eventually selling to stores like: Cartier, Rosenthal Studiohaus, Bloomingdale’s, George Jensen, Bendels, etc.

 When money got tight, I worked part time in the garment center, apprenticed to platers and casting houses in the jewelry district, addressed envelopes for Singer Sewing Machine from pages in the telephone book, developed a line of brown rice maki-sushi for a health food store, cleaned houses, studied physical anthropology at Hunter College, assisted instructors at The New School (for Social Research), and bartered bracelets to an organic co-op for food.  I did whatever was necessary to make enough $ to survive. Back then it was far easier than it is today. NY was a city that encouraged its young artisans to create and develop their skills, their craft, their “art”.

You can afford to make mistakes when you can eat dinner for $1.95 at Comidas China y Criolla and rent is $135.00 per month (including electric).

In the late 70s I met my current husband at a blacksmithing conference and we began working together immediately. Because I knew NYC well, I sold our designs there. At the peak of Arrowsmith’s production business, we sold to: Pierre Deux, WaterWorks, Brunschwig & Fils, Portico and many boutique stores. We had 25 employees, which can be quite the human resource headache if you try to do it all yourself!

Are you making a living doing your passion?
O boy. Isn’t THAT a question…

When you begin to “make your living” doing what you love the most, when your “passion” becomes your meal-ticket, that passion can morph into something that is, shall we say, less exhilarating than its original incarnation.

For years I was devoted to metal work. In my mid 30s my life changed as the result of 2 simultaneous occurrences: kids and my business becoming successful; which meant someone had to run it.

Since the male member of our team is a raging (and brilliant) dyslexic who cannot dial phone numbers correctly on a bad day (but does 3-D rotations of objects by closing his eyes), by default running the biz was allocated to me.

And here’s the sound of me pulling up a soap box with advice for anyone interested in listening…  Unless you’re harder-assed and a better biz person that I am,

HIRE SOMEONE ELSE to run whatever aspects of your business you find truly draining.

Not demanding. Draining. Understand and correct business deficiencies, but as much as possible, stick to what feeds you and your creativity. Try to not turn yourself into an emotional pretzel attempting to do things you legitimately dislike (and those may be broad and self-defined) or you may become someone you neither recognize nor like when you look into your internal mirror. Making deals, selling, compromising design and negotiating don’t have to be – but can become soul-exhausting. Can you fire people without it trashing you (and your creativity)? I couldn’t. I wish I’d recognized how destructive it was to me all those years ago. And I wish I’d hired someone better suited to that role because I was not. And I’m still not. 35 years later it still fucks w/me when I have to fire someone – which means quite simply that I don’t always make smart or right decisions for the business.

How much time do you spend in your dream work life?
These days I spend too little time in “dream” life. When the economy is so difficult it’s challenging to get enough of the “right” business through our doors. That said, attacking anything creatively, including marketing, makes unexciting tasks feel less mundane. (See Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit” for a great dissertation on creativity.)

Remembering that my work used to be my “passion” – after putting kids thru college on the back of this business I’ve developed “hobbies” that are removed from work: the gym and training my Rottweiler being 2 of my favorites. I am however, still involved in design work and finishing product and – after all these years –  am actually still inspired by the work.

Have you had to fire clients?
Definitely. There have been clients I’ve been unable to work with. I refuse to work w/abusive individuals.

Even a long life is simply too short to deal with assholes.

We used to have a sign above my office manager’s desk, “Price is directly relative to attitude.” I don’t like to close doors so I attempt to be diplomatic, occasionally, even resorting to slight falsehoods when needed.

What pushed you to stop working for other people?
I never fit in anyone else’s box. So I built my own, with my own reality and rules. It wasn’t a conscious decision; never thought about it, meant to do it, or even realized I was doing it till one day- in my 40’s – I sort of emerged long enough to recognize what I’d developed as a result of the fact that I just never fit in anyone else’s reality.

Tell us about selling items that fell under NAFTA?
O dear. Well,  on this one Ross Perot was dead-nuts! Pre-NAFTA we had 25 employees. Post NAFTA we had 7. NAFTA was the beginning of the end of our lucrative production business.

And then tell us about selling items that compete with offshoring…
We can’t and do not compete w/items made in a global market since there’s no level playing field. I understand the reasons for global trading and sympathize with third world labor. We just cannot compete. So we don’t. It almost put our business under when we continued to try.

Understanding that everyone wants cheaper stuff (hey, isn’t Walmart the largest corp in the world?) once we recognized the new “normal” we moved into a niche where we could be competitive. We changed what we did, who we sold to, the structure of the biz and downsized. It’s not perfect but we’re still alive.

And the recession? How did things go then?
That was practically the nail in the coffin of bigger = better for our biz.

NAFTA, 9/11, then the recession. Bad combination.

The recessions hit us very hard. We couldn’t access capital to alter our business (or heat the shop for that matter). The jury is still out as to how long we’ll be able to continue to be honest.

When you stopped working for other people describe how you felt.
The very first check I wrote to an employee made me so anxious I could barely breathe. I surely couldn’t sleep. 10 years later, I had over 20 employees and the things that made me anxious had exponentially increased. You learn as you grow…

Actually, meditating and the serenity prayer get me thru more sleepless nights than I like to admit.

How do you support yourself financially?
The business supports the family. My husband and I run it… Well, to be accurate it feels like it runs us. Both sons have worked w/us at various times in their lives and are creative and bright enough to not want our business. They’ve seen first-hand too many years of us taking no time off. Smart kids!

Do you consider yourself financially stable or not?
I always feel I’m one step away from losing everything. That’s not exactly accurate but I can never relax. Life is not uber secure but we are managing. It is always difficult. By its very nature custom work has a built in learning curve. We’re a custom shop now – rather than a production shop. Creating anything initially means uncertainty in the learning curve. Just think, you can actually lose your shirt every single time you do something truly new! Yes, you learn a ton, but you may not make a lot of $. Whereas, when we were involved w/production work (high end and upscale though it was) problems got resolved during prototyping. By the time lines were running the learning curve was finished. We could predict price based on output. That’s quite different than custom.

Do you have health insurance and if so, who pays for it? If not, why not?
We have health insurance and we pay for it. When our biz was super successful we paid 100% of our employees benefits and had 401K plans for them. It was a very hard decision to take that from employees, but we had to in order to continue. My husband is turning 65 so he’s eligible for Medicare now and Social Security which should help.

Glad you chose this path or do you wish you could go back in time?
I read The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin by P.D. Ouspensky in my teens and it profoundly influenced my forming persona. I think it’s kind of a waste of energy to wonder overmuch about that stuff. I think you do what you have to do. If you don’t have to go into business for yourself, if you envision other possibilities you’re gonna take them. People always told me how “brave” I was to be in business for myself. That felt inaccurate. Actually, it felt like BS. It wasn’t ever about bravery. I never had another choice cause I just never fit in anyone else’s box. I did get really lucky though,when I met a partner 35 years ago and we wanted to build our box together. It’s been an interesting run so far and I don’t know where it’ll wind up. Apparently we’re not done yet.

You can read more about Debra Coddington and Arrowsmith Forge at her website.

Dave Vandenbout – Engineer

 The Engineers  1 Response »
Aug 222012
 

My name is Dave Vandenbout, but at least one person calls me Egbert. I’m 56 years old. I’m one of the original founders of X Engineering Software Systems Corp. (XESS) and now the sole remaining employee. My focus with XESS is on building low-cost, powerful and open FPGA systems for engineers, students and hobbyists. I’ve been pulling this plow full-time since 1994 (except for a nine-month contracting stint with ABB back in ’97).

What did you do for work in your last full time/part time job?
My first and last corporate job was with AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1978 until 1983. I did several things while I was there: designed telephones, wrote 6801 firmware for video terminals, tested crystal oscillators for temperature drift, wrote test vectors for ASICs, etc.

(I also used to hide in the company library and write games for the Commodore 64, but don’t tell anybody.)

Over the five years I worked there, no project I was involved with ever survived the internecine corporate power struggles and made it out to an actual customer. So I left.

After that, I got my PhD and then became an assistant professor at NCSU from 1987 through 1993. My academic research foci were using neural networks for combinatorial problems, computer architectures for tomography, and rapid prototyping using FPGAs. After publishing 45 papers over that span, I decided the job required too much talking about what I wanted to do and very little doing of what I wanted to do. So I left.

What are your passions?
I don’t really believe in that whole passion thing. If you look back at the romantic relationships you’ve had, most of those people you wouldn’t want to see ever again (especially if they’re coming out of a pawnshop with their new handgun). Passion seems to lead to short-term happiness that comes to a sudden and noisy end.

I concentrate more on achieving fulfillment. I try to build things that others will find useful enough to pay for. Then I hope they take something I’ve built and do something really great with it. I like that because it’s external and tangible: I did something that somebody else wanted and, as a result, the world got a little bit better. (Unless they take something of mine and build a bomb with it, but I try not to spend time obsessing about that.)

As part of making those things others find useful, I do a lot of FPGA design (primarily VHDL), schematic drawing, PCB layout, simulation, interfacing with manufacturers and assemblers, writing documentation and tutorials, etc. Of all those things, I think I like PCB layout the best with all the placing and fitting of components and wires into a small area while meeting the various requirements. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. But, really, I enjoy all these activities, even the logistics of getting something manufactured and paid for. If you look closely enough, everything has a puzzle inside it waiting to be figured out.

Are you making a living doing your passion?
There’s that passion word again. It’s starting to creep me out a bit.

Sophi: oops

I’ve had big years and small years with XESS. There’s usually enough money flowing or stored up so that I’ve only had to go outside once in eighteen years and do some contracting work. So I guess you could say I’m making a living from it.

I think it helps that I have a pretty austere lifestyle regardless of the income. Someone once came by and asked my next-door neighbor who to contact about renting my house because “Nobody is living there. It’s empty.” She replied: “He has simple needs.”

How much time do you spend in your dream work life?
I guess I spend 100% of my time doing my dream job, maybe because I’ve seen how bad other jobs can be. I don’t have to work in the heat and get my hands all beaten-up like a bricklayer. I don’t have to put in obscene hours on projects that get cancelled right before reaching completion because someone in the chain-of-command fell out of favor in some political infighting. I don’t have to spend all my time writing proposals about what I want to do so I can get funding to hire students to do what I wanted to do so I can write another proposal about what I want to do next.

Instead, I get to figure out what others want, figure out how to get it built, and then deliver it. That seems to be the best job I could dream of.

That’s not to say everything is good about it. I once had a toll-free phone line that was one digit off from the number for 1-800-LAWYERS. I was always getting phone calls on Saturday night from jailed drunks wanting a lawyer to handle their case. I told one of them that “the problem with our country is that it’s easier for some people to hire a lawyer than to spell it.”

And I’ve been ripped-off by some customers over the years, like anyone who sells stuff over the Internet. But they’re relatively few and far outweighed by the number of good customers I have. They’re really what makes the job worthwhile. I’m like a plow horse that spends all day making furrows in the soil. It’s up to my good customers to come along and plant the seeds that will make something grow.

In the end my business is all about them; my products don’t even make any sense without my customers using them to realize their own designs.

Do you have a financial trust fund that supports you?
No. I’m more like a financial trust fund that supports others, like my ex-wife.

I count on the good years and a simple lifestyle to get me through the bad years. If that doesn’t work, then hopefully I’ll be resilient and adaptable enough to get through whatever comes.

How did your business get started?
Some other faculty members at NCSU and I formed XESS in 1990 to develop a spreadsheet program for scientific workstations (Excel wasn’t even in the ballgame back then). We did it on the side while keeping our day jobs, and we signed a contract with a software company to market our stuff.

Well, the software marketers were pretty incompetent in terms of getting our program noticed, much less sold. And then we had the recession in the early ’90s that pretty much ended faculty pay raises. I was pretty much burned out on the whole paper-publishing / student-advising thing any way. So I said “If I’m going to not make money, I might as well not make money while doing something I like.” So I quit and started working consulting gigs through XESS while also trying to market our spreadsheet software. Eventually, the spreadsheet program was sold off, the other guys sold out to me, and I took over the company as the single remaining employee. The consulting work eventually morphed into designing and producing FPGA boards, and that’s the way it remains today.

Describe how you felt when you stopped working for other people.
Quitting a job is great! It’s like parking your piece-of-shit car on the side of the road, taking off the license plates, and walking away. Whatever problems it caused in the past, it sure isn’t going to be causing any problems for you in the future.

But after that, you’re confronted with making decisions about what your goal is, what resources are needed to get there, what obstacles will be in the way, and what happens if there isn’t anything worthwhile there when you reach it?

So you’re in a situation where you have sole responsibility for a lot of decisions, but you also have the authority to make those decisions. As a result of those decisions, you’ll have some days when $70K of new contracts hit all at once, and other days when you have to take $5K of defective boards out to a landfill and run over them with a bulldozer. After a while, you get used to it.

Do others support you emotionally or are they always asking you to get a “real” job?
I’ve been doing this for so long that most people like that have drifted away or died.

Do you continually need to explain why you’re doing what you do?
I think if people know you’re an engineer but you’re not asking them for a loan or anything, they’re usually pretty happy to remain willfully ignorant about what you do and why you do it.

Do people around you tell you that they wish they could do it too?
No, not really. By the time you reach my age, most of them have made their decisions one way or the other and either can’t or won’t change their current situation. Or they’re retired.

How do you support yourself financially?
I design FPGA boards. Then I have them manufactured. Then people buy them. Then I take their money and give it to my suppliers, my government, and my ex-wife. It’s quite simple, really.

Do you consider yourself financially stable or not?
That’s not even a question I ask anymore, because stability is pretty much an illusion. If you think you’re stable, that’s probably because you’re in a temporary null spot where two very large waves just happen to cancel each other out. The world can change on a dime and take you right along with it, no matter how much money you have. The only thing I can do is try to be adaptable and resilient when those changes occur.

Of more importance than money might be a well-connected social network to provide you with opportunities and support. As the old Soviets used to say: “Better a hundred friends than a hundred rubles.”

Do you have health insurance and if so, who pays for it?
I’ve had health insurance since I went full-time with XESS in 1994. I estimate that over $175K has vanished down that rat-hole since then.

Currently, the health insurance for me and my ex-wife has an approximate yearly cost that’s equivalent to buying a new, low-end car. Except it’s a car that you only drive occasionally on small trips to places you don’t want to go, like Broken Bone Beach or Influenza Fjords. If you’re really unlucky, you might also get to take an expensive road trip to someplace like Kidney Stone Park.

Finally, after paying the car off in twelve months, it vanishes from your driveway and is never seen again! So you buy another one. For 10% more. Forever and ever.

That’s what health insurance is like, and every indicator says that it won’t be getting any better. Currently, the only way to get reasonable-cost health care is to be young. So stay young for as long as you can!

How much time do you spend looking for business?
When you’re a one-person company, the answer defaults to 100% because you can see a business reason for everything you do. Why am I designing a new board? To get more customers. Why am I writing documentation? Because customers require it before they’ll purchase. Why am I writing a book? To introduce people to FPGAs so they might become future customers.

Now this isn’t to say I don’t enjoy the things I do or that I wouldn’t do these things unless money was involved. I’m just pointing out that everything done in my company has an impact on finding and keeping customers.

Now if you’re using “looking for business” to mean making cold calls, writing proposals, etc., then I don’t really do much of that at all. I’m mainly trying to provide good products and support to my customers and relying on word-of-mouth and the standard web interfaces (e.g., blogs, Twitter) to get new customers.

Are you glad you chose this path or do you wish you could go back in time?
I’m glad that I can’t go back in time and edit my life to smooth out the rough patches! I think the best parts of me were brought out by the worst times for me. Sometimes the best gifts come wrapped in black.

As for the decision to go into business for myself, I don’t think it’s had a major effect on my life. Good and bad things happen to you regardless of your employment situation. What it does do is amplify your life: you have more opportunities to benefit from the good things, and a higher probability of being rolled-over by the bad things. Overall, you have more responsibility for your life, but also more control over it. And, from what I’ve read, having a sense of control is the most important thing for being happy at work (and maybe in general, too).

Back in the ’80s, I asked my then wife: “In life, you’re the hammer or the nail. Which one are you?” She replied: “Neither. I think life has more possibilities than that.” So when times get bumpy, I always remember life has more possibilities than that.

See more about Dave Vandenbout’s business, XESS here or follow him on Twitter @devbisme