Thank you Hodinkee & North! Hello Brigade!

TL;DR: With a heavy heart, I’ve decided to leave Hodinkee/North and join Brigade, an exciting new civic tech startup, as the Head of Design.

The Full Story

When Kevin and I left Google last year to start North, we wanted to build a new product or idea every four months until one of our ideas took off. Our first project Tiiny was a blast to build but it did little to differentiate itself from the rest of the photo and video apps that exist. We learned that if we didn’t build something 10x more compelling than more popular apps like Instagram, it would be a struggle to survive. We quickly moved on and built Watchville. Little did we know, we were about to be thrust into the wide world of mechanical watches. Watchville took off right after launch and, true to our original thesis, we went all-in on making the most engaging place for watch enthusiasts.

Watchville’s growth led to us to meeting and eventually merging with Hodinkee, a company founded by Ben Clymer. Through the merger, North and Watchville became Hodinkee.

I’m insanely proud of what we’ve built at HODINKEE and Watchville and incredibly excited for what we have coming down the pipeline. Our app, Watchville, continues to break monthly records (last month we crossed 1.6M user sessions), and our user reviews have been stellar maintaining a solid 5-stars with 582 reviews.

We’ve grown Hodinkee to a team of 12+ people and are far and away the largest mechanical watch website/app on the market. Ultimately I was struggling between joining Kevin in NYC (where HODINKEE is based) or staying out west (where I currently live). I decided it’s best for our family to remain planted here, and with that, I found a new home at Brigade.

Thank You Hodinkee Family!

More on Brigade in a moment, but first I need to say thank you to the HODINKEE Family! I want to thank Kevin and Ben for an incredible experience and their support through this tough decision. I’ll continue as a shareholder, advisor and friend.

I also want to express thanks to to Caleb, Ryan and Jonathan who where the engineering talent behind Tiiny, Watchville and everything we are working on at Hodinkee (an additional shoutout to Sam, Aaron, Grain and Mortar, Amber and Dave for early day help with Tiiny and Watchville). You are all incredible humans and amazingly talented people. I also want to give a massive thank you to my other dear friends I made at Hodinkee including Will, Jack, Cara, Nick (and nicks dog), Ashley and Frank.

Hello Brigade!

During the early days of North I drew something like this:

I wanted to create a place where people could express their values and align with others who felt the same way. I felt platforms like Facebook where really good at highlighting friends based on common interests, but I wanted to be a part of a something that allowed me to create relationships based on more than the type of music I liked or where I went to high school.

Brigade sits right in the middle of this graph and takes it one step further by helping people express their values and beliefs on any issue, organize with others around these beliefs and (soon) take collective action to create change and make a real difference in the world.

Here are a few stats to give you a sense of the potential impact of disrupting democracy:

• Total government spending in 2015 will be $6.2 trillion.
• Total number of elected offices in the U.S. is about 515,000 (but no one knows for sure because some local offices are not well documented).
• Of the those 515,000 offices, approximately 40% of them are decided by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Just a small increase in voter turnout in local and state races could flip tens of thousands of seats. For example, on average, only 25% of voters turnout for mayors races in the U.S.

How we engage in our democracy and the political process is ripe for disruption. The power to create change has always started with the people — but over the past 50 years the people have become more and more disconnected from their system of government. By creating a home for people’s civic lives (the same way Facebook has given us a home for our social lives and LinkedIn has given us a home for our professional lives) we can put democracy, quite literally, back into the hands of the people.

I am pumped to be joining Brigade and taking on a very challenging problem with an amazingly talented team that’s just beginning an important journey.

If you want to check out Brigade’s beta (a tool that lets people express how they feel about issues that matter and see how their friends and others compare), download the iOS or Android app or visit brigade.com. There’s much more to come and I can’t wait to connect with you there.

Thanks for reading and for your support. BTW, did I mention I’m hiring designers?