Manny Ikomi

Photo: @queerjay

I love that Manny Ikomi has adopted a philosophy of “lift as you climb” as it relates to his career. Manny works as a UX design consultant for IBM iX, but he’s also a design educator and even streams some of his personal web development and UX projects on Twitch. It was great chatting it up and learning about how he balances his work with community outreach.

We started off diving into Manny’s journey from discovering interactive design and UX, to hitting a career ceiling and pursuing further education. Manny also spoke about teaching at his alma mater, his aspirations on working for public sector institutions, and his podcast Gay, Geeky + Tired. Hopefully Manny’s story will inspire you to make a positive impact in the world!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Manny Ikomi:

So my name is Manny Ikomi. I’m a UX designer at IBM currently, and also recently, I am adjunct faculty teaching an interactive design course at Bunker Hill Community College.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. How’s your year been going so far?

Manny Ikomi:

So far, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. I think there’s definitely been some really good ups and some really low downs. But at the end of the day, I think the net ending of that is still growing and succeeding in the things that I want to do so far. And there’s still more to come, I guess. So, still with a lot of optimism, it’s been going well.

Maurice Cherry:

How would you say you’ve grown and improved over the past year? Have you noticed anything in particular?

Manny Ikomi:

So I started at IBM in June of last year of 2022. That first year was like a little trial by fire because of the project that I was working on. But I also had access to a lot of really great mentors; people in my network, both inside and outside of the company. And so professionally, I think there was just such an immense growth in that stretch zone, that I like to call it, within my first year. And so now that I’m a little bit over a year in, as of June of this year, I’ve kind of, like, leveled out. The honeymoon phase is a bit over, and I’m kind of just like doing the thing now. Things that I thought maybe I wasn’t capable of, like a year ago. I guess I’m capable of now — teaching being one of them.

I think probably most recent, a little bit of recency bias. But teaching has been something that has been on my mind to do for a little while, ever since a professor of mine kind of planted the seeds, like when I graduated from the college that I’m teaching at now, which is another story. But it’s been a really great experience so far, like, teaching IBM only like four weeks into my class. It’s my first time teaching ever, and for the most part, it’s also been going really well on top of just working at IBM and doing other things. And interestingly enough, there’s also a lot of overlap between some of the work that I’m doing now and some of the things I’m doing for my course this year has been definitely a year of growth and stretching and learning and teaching. So sometimes teaching also is a really great way to learn. So it’s been really great.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Let’s talk about your work at IBM, specifically IBM iX, where you work, like you said, as a UX designer. Tell me more about that.

Manny Ikomi:

So yeah. IBM iX. So IBM, for those of you who maybe don’t know, because they’re not as recognized, I guess, of a brand anymore, especially for younger folks, it stands for International Business Machines. It’s a very old company. There’s lots of history. They hold a lot of patents for things interestingly that I learned about. Most notably, I think, like the magnetic stripe on credit cards is something that I never realized that they had essentially invented. And so they’ve been a very large technology company for a very long time.

And over the years, I think they evolved from more like hardware and stuff. And then now they do mostly software and consulting, so they have their own cloud offerings. And then I’m in the Consulting part of the business. And then iX, which stands for Interactive Experience, is a smaller bubble within IBM Consulting. And what I do there as a UX designer, I guess, like all of us will say, it depends. It depends on the project, it depends on the client. Because ultimately I’m considered a consultant as opposed to an in house designer. So I don’t necessarily work on IBM’s cloud services and software and products.

I actually work on clients of IBM who come to the company and say, “hey, we need UX designers for this”, or “we need design services for some sort of initiative”. And through that, I’ve really gotten to do a whole bunch of stuff, particularly within my first year, I could be doing anything from contextual inquiry and design research, traveling to clients on site doing observational research, typical, like user interface prototyping, working in Figma, doing demos and things like that. Usability testing, enterprise design thinking, which is kind of like their methodology around design thinking and how we deliver design services. Yeah, I’ve pretty much done, I think, the whole gamut of user experience, design and really just design in general. I’ve really expanded my view, I think, kind of going back to the other question about how I’ve grown. My view of what design is and how it works and what I do has definitely been a lot more expansive beyond just the tangible artifacts and things that we make.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, it sounds like your day to day work is pretty varied then. Like you said, you’re either researching, you’re doing site visits, et cetera. It sounds like there’s a lot of variety in the work that you’re able to do.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, there definitely is. And some of that is for better or for worse, I guess, because it turns you into a little bit of a generalist, which some people have opinions about. But I think at least at this point in my career, because it’s a little bit more earlier on, it’s good for me to have that kind of exposure and growth opportunities to try and do different things, especially when the risk is low for me personally. Right? Yeah, I mean, I get to work on a whole bunch of stuff. Most recently, the project that I’ve been working on is a little bit more on the strategic end and getting a local state government to actually adopt some of IBM’s design thinking methodology, which really kind of lines up to what I was talking about earlier, about teaching people about design now as like an adjunct faculty instructor. So there’s also been some really interesting overlap and ways in which I’m now delivering design that I never really considered possible up until recently. So that’s been interesting. But yeah, it’s been a really great growth and learning experience so far.

Maurice Cherry:

I kind of want to talk a little bit about that generalist part that you just mentioned there. I know there’s this book by David Epstein called “Range”. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it.

Manny Ikomi:

You know what, it sounds familiar now that you say that. I think I might have saved a sample to my Kindle at one point and never ended up buying it.

Maurice Cherry:

But it’s called “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”. And it does sort of make the case for why generalists are…they’re really sort of sought after in a way. I’m curious though, because you do so much, are you finding there’s a particular part of UX that you prefer over others?

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, that’s something I’ve been kind of thinking about a little bit lately ,and I guess due to the fact of my generalist nature, it kind of goes beyond just design and also into web development too. And so this area that I’ve been kind of occupying, at least not necessarily within IBM, but just in general as I upskill and just learn different things. I’m also like a self taught front-end web developer and so I’ve been thinking a lot about the intersections of experience, design and web development and the opportunities there for people who have that kind of hybrid skill set and can really, I guess, specialize in there. Despite considering myself a generalist in some ways, I specialize in others. So the areas that I think I’m really liking the most is research.

There are things that I’ve learned about design research and psychology and humans and their behaviors just from watching them interact with designs that I’ve made or others that I just find so fascinating that just kind of lends itself to my own just like innate sense of curiosity and wanting to learn. But then there’s also, interestingly enough, the complete flip side of that, which is like the more logistical, I guess, x and y’s ones and zeros codes and things like actually developing and building the things that I design in some tool and actually making it a real thing, because that’s kind of where I started. And that’s how I really transitioned into the work that I do now, is I started as a graphic designer and then I became interested in web design and then I would create these web designs, but I couldn’t actually put it on the Internet and have it be a website.

And all kind of roads, basically, no matter how hard I tried to avoid coding, were just like, basically “if you want to do it, you got to do it yourself.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Manny Ikomi:

So I learned coding through that and then now it’s just kind of been a skill that’s really stuck with me, I guess, along the way. It’s not a skill that I get to use or a muscle that I get to flex all the time, but it does surface in some other interesting ways, especially when it comes to collaborating with other developers and just thinking a little bit more logically about the designs that I’m creating and their ability to be feasibly implemented. So I would say between the design engineering part…so that kind of hybrid of making a design and actually being able to build it, but also some of the user research aspects of it and strategy, which I guess is kind of everything, but also specifically at the same time.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, I think it’s good to have that sort of generalist, I think, sort of mindset as well as skill set. I mean, back in the day when the Web was really just first starting to become something, everyone sort of had to become a generalist in some way. Like you designed it, you had to code it, you had to slice it up, et cetera, and put it on the Web. Of course, now it’s so interesting with companies because it seems like companies want specialists and yet when you look at their job descriptions, what they really want is a generalist that has a specialization. So they kind of want that…what do they call it?

Manny Ikomi:

T-shaped.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, like the T-shaped designer or whatever where you’ve got this broad set of skills. Like, I saw something for this company; they wanted like a social media manager, but then they also needed them to be a graphic designer and they also needed to know motion design. And I was like, those are entirely different things. What you want is a designer. It sounds like you want a designer that has social media experience, but they were like, no, we want a social media manager, but then you want this person doing motion design. I don’t know if that’s also just a byproduct of how messed up the job market is right now, but I’ve seen a lot of that.

Manny Ikomi:

Definitely, I’ve seen a lot of it.

Maurice Cherry:

What are some of the projects that you’ve worked on that you can talk about?

Manny Ikomi:

For a lot of reasons, obviously, I can’t talk about a lot of details. Probably the level to what I can say is the first project that I worked on while I was at IBM was basically in the realm of safety. And so the idea was that people who were working in a manufacturing facility could record and take pictures of safety violations or safety issues that they might find and then be able to report that through a system that we developed. So the application of actually reporting and observing safety issues, and then like a whole process and chain of people involved essentially like a service design around people on the front end actually recording issues, and then all the way in the back end, actually analyzing issues and doing some predictive analytics and things like that. And then the most recent project that I’m on right now with a local state government is basically helping them adopt human-centered design thinking processes and methods and frameworks. And the way that IBM does that is through their enterprise design thinking framework, which I’ve come to really like and appreciate. It was one of those things that I wish I had known about as a student and definitely kind of opened my world to the possibilities of what design can be and how it can manifest itself, I think. And then ever since then, it’s kind of just become this thing where I’m like, “wow, it’s more than just the artifacts that we make.”

It’s also the way that we think and how we convey our ideas to others, how people interpret our ideas. And it’s really just kind of expanded my view, I guess, of what it is. But yeah, those are probably the highest level I can get with those two specific projects. The first one I was on for just under a year, and that was pretty much the majority of my entry level experience, getting hired into IBM as an entry level professional hire. And that first project was really great. I had a great team that I worked with. I got to travel a little bit as part of it, and it was a really great experience. There were parts of it that were challenging, definitely, as with any project or design engagement. But ultimately I’m really thankful for that first project and the people that I got to work with and I’m hoping to reach out to them again the end of this year to just kind of check in and see where the work has gone since I’ve left the project.

And then this more recent project that I was talking about in terms of design adoption, that one just recently kicked off like a few weeks ago. So we’re still in the early stages, but the team is also looking really great to work with and so far it’s been great. So the work has just been very varied and interesting and every time I just feel like I’m learning something new or learning something different about design than I thought was ever possible, like maybe like two or three years ago. So it’s just fascinating.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you talked just a little bit there about one of the projects having predictive analytics, which of course makes me think about sort of this current era that we’re in of artificial intelligence and machine learning. And there’s a number of different sort of cutting edge technologies now that have clearly bled into the mainstream that I think have been going on for a while, like AR, VR, et cetera, but now they’re becoming mainstream sort of things.

How do you see UX evolving with these new technologies?

Manny Ikomi:

I haven’t put too much thought into this. I think, obviously you know, obviously the glaring kind of observation here is with generative AI, right? And like ChatGPT and OpenAI and all this stuff that’s come out recently. I think ultimately, at least in the specific realm of generative AI, it kind of offers an opportunity to actually augment the work that we do as designers. And in some places, I guess, yeah, it will replace some jobs, but I think ultimately it will also kind of augment the way that we do work. And there are products now that are out that kind of help user researchers find patterns in their interviews and the transcripts using AI and things like that that are just really interesting. So there are areas where AI is kind of like enhancing the work that we do and allows us to kind of augment the work and be more productive. Things like AR and VR. I actually haven’t had too many experiences with, not really even in college. However, the Apple Vision Pro device that was announced by Apple earlier this year, I thought that was really interesting and had a bit of a rabbit hole of thoughts around that in terms of experience, design, and how.

For the longest time, a lot of our designs for user interfaces have kind of been at least for digital user interfaces have been kind of confined to these rectangles that you’re probably looking at right now in these screens. And so with AR and VR experiences and mixed reality with products like the Apple Vision Pro, it’s kind of like it allows us to step outside of those bounds, really, of that rectangle screen that we’re so used to designer for. And it really opens up a lot more possibilities for a lot more intuitive and natural interfaces for us that maybe we just have not developed even usability patterns for yet, or rules of thumb for. And so I find that like a very interesting area that’s kind of opening up. I imagine there are much more qualified people than me to talk about that, but it is something that I’ve been thinking about, especially since technology, it’s kind of hard to stop progress in that sense. And so as experience designers, I guess we’re also kind of well positioned in the sense that almost everything is an experience and almost everything is designed in one shape or another. I think we’ll end up having a hand in it and potentially not only just consuming the technology, but also producing ways for people to interact with it too.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I think, as you mentioned, the way that the technology is rapidly advancing, I mean, I feel like this time last year, companies were just starting to kind of test the waters a little bit to see what they could do. And now I think within that past year, every major tech company has made some sort of announcement about how they’re using AI or they’re using like a ChatGPT or some sort of generative type of new technology in the work that they’re doing, almost kind of shoehorning it in in some mean. Let’s just talk about the obvious — Google Search. Google Search now will bring up AI stuff right along with these SEO-optimized results that will come up in your regular search engine results page, and it’s a little difficult, I think sometimes to be able to discern what is good with that and what’s bad with that. Like, I think everyone’s trying to sort of race to find how they can use technology, how they can make it work without really stopping to think, is it necessary? Do we have to do this?

Is it just a competition thing? Like business competition? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I mean, I feel like after a while we’ll start seeing appliances that have AI. We already have stuff like smart fridges and smart toasters and stuff, but I don’t need my toaster to have ChatGPT or whatever, just toast the bread. I mean, that’s an extreme case, but you know what I mean.

Manny Ikomi:

I totally get what you mean. I think that’s where I have the negative sort of perspective on AI particularly, is really with any sort of emerging technology, especially for these really larger tech companies, like IBM included. it’s kind of like the rat race to figure out who’s going to be able to monetize it and make the most revenue with the technology and kind of have their moat. So to speak. In that case, that’s where we end up with like, oh, let’s just slap AI on everything and see what happens. Without really, to your point, stopping to think about the impact, whether it’s positive or negative, to the people that AI is being deployed on, in the same way that it can be a really immense help and benefit to society in some case, it can also be very dangerous. And I don’t think companies are really incentivized right now to really think about it in that more ethical or social impact lens because that’s just not going to make the money. And that’s the way the world turns, essentially, right?

Maurice Cherry:

So there’s this startup, I’ll say it now, I was thinking about if I should even mention this, but I’ll go ahead and say it. There’s a startup based out of Seattle that does like AI text to speech. Essentially they cloned one of the host voices of Planet Money for NPR and did like a whole episode with this person’s voice and it sounds pretty mean. You know, I think there are still going to be certain eccentricities in the human voice that humans will be able to discern, but of course the models are getting better for it and things like that. But they’re one of the few companies, the company is called WellSaid Labs. They’re one of the few companies I’ve seen that actually has like a code of ethics behind the work that they do because it could be so easy for someone to use their service that they offer use that technology for extremely nefarious purposes.

Manny Ikomi:

Right?

Maurice Cherry:

But they actually have a code of ethics behind about what customers do with that technology and how they even plan on implementing and using it, which I would like to see more companies if they’re going to be implementing. These features I would like to also have them talk about, like we said before, those ramifications of what it means to include all of this. And who is it really serving? And this is something that we saw with, like, Bitcoin and with Web three and all this sort of stuff, where the use of all this generative AI also uses a lot of natural resources, which is something that I don’t think we regularly would think about because computers have been such an ever present just an ever present sort of thing. But I remember I was reading something I want to say, I don’t know, a couple of days ago about how Microsoft’s water usage or something has increased by 30% because of the fact that they’re like using AI within oh wait, I’m looking at it now. AI usage fuel spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, it spiked 34% because they’re using it in all these other types of programs and stuff, which you would think water, why water? But it takes more servers, space and power to do all this AI stuff, which means it has to be cooled in some way with air conditioning. It’s all tied in, so it’s not really happening in a vacuum. I would just like to see more companies talk about the ethics behind why they’re doing what they’re doing instead of just rolling out innovation after innovation that I guess we’re supposed to OOH and awe over in some fancy presentation.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. My perspective is obviously kind of biased because I work for IBM. But recently, with the whole Watson X announcement thing that you may or may not have heard of, I think part of it, and IBM does, I think. Have pretty decent programming and ethics and training around the use of AI, because that’s kind of like, one of our strategic areas that we’re trying to be leaders in. And so the whole rollout for Watson X was kind of centered around three different areas. There was Watson X AI data and then governance. And governance, I think, is really that part of it that kind of talks about making sure that it’s responsible and transparent and explainable. And then we also have even like an enterprise design thinking course where the methodology for design thinking is tailored around.

Like if you want to implement AI and you’re using a design thinking framework or initiative to do that, there’s also training that’s kind of specific to that as well. That kind of goes into some of the what is the ideal outcome or impact that we want to have, and is AI really even necessary for that in the first place? Right, so it wants you to think about those things. Now, in my personal experience, have know deployed AI in some way with IBM? Not really. So I haven’t actually gotten the chance to user these learning materials, but I think at the very least, they’re there as a resource for us employees to use. And it is in IBM’s interest for us to be very smart about the user of AI because in some ways we are kind of seen as leaders or innovators in that space. There is definitely an aspect of companies need to have more ethics and intent around how they’re using AI, where it gets deployed, what the impact is, who’s using it, who’s being affected by it. I think I would like to see more from that from every company, IBM included. But from what I’ve seen so far, I think at least at a programming and learning level, IBM seems to be very aware of that.

And it’s also from a risk and compliance perspective because we’re mostly operate as a B2B or enterprise to enterprise business. Privacy, security and compliance are things that really large businesses that IBM really care about because it kind of is what amounts to their risk and being litigated against. Right. And so when we deploy AI for a client that uses IBM’s technology, we do have to have a certain amount of ownership over what the technology does and who it impacts because we’re. Like, the designers and deployers of those things.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, we all have to, I just think, be a bit more cognizant of the usage of these tools and what they mean and what the greater sort of impact of it is. But I think we’ve nerded out enough about that. So let’s kind of shift the focus here and talk more about you. Let’s learn more about Manny. Tell me about where you’re from.

Manny Ikomi:

I’m mostly from the Boston area. I grew up mostly in towns called Saugas and Malden, and a little bit in Revere. And that’s kind of like, known as, like, the North Shore area of Boston, I guess you could say. But I’ve pretty much lived like, within 20 to 15 minutes outside of Boston for my entire life. And I’ve worked around the same area pretty much my entire life. I went to school around the area pretty much throughout my entire life, too.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, growing up, were you always kind of interested in technology? Was it something that your parents kind of tried to get you into?

Manny Ikomi:

I would say I’ve always been interested in it. I think what led me to becoming a designer and my interest in it was that combination of being able to merge my creative interests and creative outputs and curiosity with more technical implementations and things like that. I remember in high school, I went to a vocational high school for context. So we had kind of like vocational programs as part of the regular high school programming.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Manny Ikomi:

And so that’s kind of where I got my first taste of, like, I can be creative and make something and have it be like a physical, tangible thing. And I just thought that was so cool because, one, I was really bad at drawing, even though I was trying to be creative. But I did find that I had an affinity for things like the software and tooling that was available in the computer labs that we have. The shop was called Graphic Communications, by the way. So that’s kind of what led into my whole six years at a printing company and things like that. But that’s really where I started to develop that interest for the combination of creativity and technology. Although at the time the technology was printing, not as we would think about it, I guess today from a UX standpoint.

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s talk more about Bunker Hill. Of course, you mentioned earlier that you are a teacher there, which we’ll get into, but that’s where you started off in college. You went to Bunker Hill Community College, majored in graphic arts and visual communications. Tell me, what was your time like there? Do you feel like it really kind of prepared you?

Manny Ikomi:

Bunker Hill was kind of interesting because I was kind of facing some, I guess, conflicting realities. That was actually a very huge period of growth for me, I think, relatively to where I’m at now. If I really reflect on it so with Bunker Hill, I think the programming that they had there at the time was pretty good. I think from a design perspective, it was definitely skewed more towards those kind of typical graphic design programs where your first year is kind of like your foundation year, you’re required to do a whole bunch of drawing and painting and kind of like more artsy stuff. And then in your, I guess, second year of the Associates program, that’s where you start getting into more specific studio level courses around typography, which is where I think my trajectory in design kind of started to skyrocket when I finally recognized the importance of it and my ability to influence that as a designer. Now that’s always the one thing I tell people if they learn nothing about design is Typography is like 90 or 80% of the stuff that you need to know if you want to become a designer or at least design something well if you’re not formally trained as one from there. I spent quite a few years there because I was a part time student and then I was working full time at the Print Shop, and that was mostly because I couldn’t afford to go to a full four year institution. I didn’t really feel comfortable with the idea of taking out a whole bunch of student loans.

And although I had pretty decent support from my parents, it wasn’t something that I also felt like, I guess I didn’t want them to be fiscally responsible. I don’t really think we were in a position to do that, especially at the time that I was doing community college classes. So it was really just kind of me like, finding my way, figuring it out. When I first started there, I tried to take twelve credits worth of courses and work full time at the print shop, which lasted maybe all of like four to six weeks before I was, this is definitely not going to work because that was just a lot. And then finally I found like a good balance between two classes a semester, which ultimately ended up requiring me to go twice as long to finish my associate’s degree. So it actually took me four years as opposed to two, but for the most part I was able to go through community college without any loans whatsoever, which was extremely helpful to me. Now I’m thanking myself much later in the future for being smart enough to think about that during that time because I had to be so, I guess, independent in that sense and really think about myself and my needs and ultimately my own personal finances. That’s kind of where I started to really think about my personal finance money, what success meant to me, becoming more financially literate in the decisions that I was making and the impact that it might have on me later.

Learning about debt and compound interest and investing and all those things. And luckily I made a lot of really smart choices during that time to the point where now, financially, I’m doing things less so out of fear, which was kind of like the original motivation for me to do that because I didn’t want to be broke. And I had some minorly traumatic experience around involving money and things like that when I was growing up. So it kind of started from that place of fear. And then now that I’m finally in a place where I feel much more well established, much more secure, not only in my professional life, but also my personal life and just who I am, those things are more so. They’re not top of mind for me and I don’t have to obsess about them, but I have enough of a foundation to think about it more as an opportunity rather than a risk, if that makes sense.

Maurice Cherry:

No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, college is a transitory time for a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. And for you, you were going to college and working at the same time. Tell me about how you sort of balance that.

Manny Ikomi:

I was not very good at it. I guess work-life balance, I guess, is something that I’ve always kind of struggled with a little bit. It originally stemmed from like, I always need to have something to do. I always need to be busy, I always need to be productive. And that was kind of a very unhealthy way of thinking about it because I was kind of motivated by that fear of not having money or opportunity. But the way that I balanced it was thankfully the company that I was working with at the time, they were actually pretty supportive of me going to college and doing what I needed to do. So there were some days where I had class during the middle of the day and they had no problem with me leaving the office to I was working in the office five days a week for that job. They had no problem with me leaving work to go to class for like four hours and then do what I needed to do to get my degree at Bunker Hill. And so that was really helpful because it gave me a lot of autonomy and really, as long as I got my work done, it really wasn’t a big deal for them.

So that was like a huge help. And I know a lot of people just don’t have that sort of opportunity or luxury. That being said, they definitely did not subsidize, nor were they in a position to help me subsidize my education, but it definitely gave me, I think, the flexibility I needed. And then it was really up to me to just be very good about time management, make sure I was keeping up with my assignments, making sure my work obligations were taken care of. Sometimes that required really long nights. Other times it required really early mornings. I wasn’t as much of a social butterfly, or I didn’t really get to do all of the social things that are part of a college experience that people might want or be accustomed to. I didn’t really have a dormitory experience.

There were sacrifices in that, but I think ultimately I came out better for it, and I would definitely do it again if I had to. I just might be a little bit more forgiving with myself in terms of working myself too hard, I guess you could say.

Maurice Cherry:

Trust me, you missed nothing about the dorm experience. There’s nothing about that you have missed. I don’t know if you have siblings or not, but you’ve missed nothing. Consider yourself lucky.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. It ended up working out, I think, a little bit, because once I transferred to Lesley and finished my bachelor’s degree there, although I didn’t get the full know experience there either, I did end up, you know, slowly making friends throughout the entire college experience who did have the dorm life. And we did go over each other’s places and play video games and hang out and do homework together. And not all of them were from the same college. But Boston is…there’s a lot of college-level institutions here, so I got to do some of that. But I guess you’re right. I didn’t really miss much, either.

Maurice Cherry:

I feel like Boston is a pretty extremely diverse college mean. Of course, you have the well known colleges like MIT, Harvard, et cetera, but then you’ve got, like you said, Lesley, you got Bunker Hill. There’s other universities in and around the sort of Boston metro area, so it makes sense that there would be a lot of commingling like that. Yeah, I mean, Atlanta, in a way is sort of like that, too. I mean, I went to Morehouse and there were opportunities where you would, of course, hang out with students from Georgia Tech, from Georgia State. Spelman is right across the street, Clark-Atlanta is right across the street. So you’re just all kind of commingling together. I mean, Atlanta really is a big college town. I don’t know if a lot of folks realize that it’s a pretty unique college town because the number of HBCUs we have, but it’s really a big college town, so you have all these opportunities to meet people doing all sorts of things at all sorts of different places.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I never really thought of ATL like that, to be honest. I think one person who I met was from the Savannah College of Art and Design, which I think is in Georgia, if correctly based out of Savannah, Georgia.

Maurice Cherry:

We have a campus here in Atlanta, too, right? Yeah. And you mentioned this kind of before we started recording, but one of your professors at Lesley was actually a recent guest on Revision Path.

Manny Ikomi:

Yes. So, yeah, shout out to Shanae Chapman. Ever since you reached out to me and I discovered the podcast, I’ve definitely gone in and done my due diligence. And I just think what you’re doing is really cool again. And it’s really kind of surreal, actually, I think, to kind of be part of this in the same way that they were, knowing that some of those people I either looked up to or I learned from or had some sort of influence in my life, personally or professionally. And we’ve also had some other IBM designers on the podcast as, like, I listened to a couple episodes way back with Oen Hammonds and Shani Sandy, who are both, like, design executives at IBM still. Yeah, it’s kind of a very small, interesting world, I guess, as we were speaking earlier. But, yeah, it was a really full circle moment.

I haven’t talked to Shanae in a little while, but recently we did kind of have a bit of a go back and forth because she was interested in the talk that I had done earlier this year. But, yeah, I just think it’s really cool and it’s honestly kind of an honor to be doing this right now.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m kind of…I have a question about sort of…I just kind of want to go back to your college experience for a bit because, like we said before, you were working and you were going to college at the same time. What made you want to continue your studies in design? Because it sounds like you already had — if I’m wrong here, please correct me — but it sounds like you had a nice kind of set up because the company was very flexible about you going to class and still working for them. It sounded like they really supported you. What made you want to continue your educational career?

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, so that was a combination of quite a few things. I think, for context, the company that I worked at for six years, it was a small, family-owned business. We weren’t like some large…we weren’t like a Vistaprint or anything like that. And although it was a really great experience, I think I hit my ceiling there in terms of growth and opportunity relatively quickly, probably in hindsight, within the first three years. But the reason I stayed was, like you said, because of that flexibility that I really liked, and also the pay was decent enough to get me through college, do the things that I needed to do, have a little fun on the side. It was good for what it was.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

Manny Ikomi:

And then I think as I started to become more interested in things like interactive design and user experience and things like that, that I really didn’t even know existed as career paths, really, I kind of stumbled upon them by virtue of learning how to code and kind of self teaching myself that stuff on the side. Hill I was working there. I just basically hit a ceiling there. And then when COVID happened. I graduated Bunker Hill in the fall of 2019, and I had applied to Lesley. I had got my transfer papers, and thankfully they had a matriculation agreement, which made it really easy for me that they just take your associate’s degree, no questions asked, that the credits all get applied where they should, and you start as a junior in their bachelor’s program. And at the time, I was reluctant about doing it because it was going to require that I took out student loans, but I did get a really great scholarship. And the fact that they took all of my credits was really huge, because when I did the math, financially speaking, it actually made it lower cost for me to go there and do the program that I wanted than, say, to transfer and go to a state school like Salem State or Mass Art were probably the other alternatives that I looked into.

So even though the sticker price of Lesley was a lot higher, it was actually going to be net cheaper because of the scholarship that I got. And they took all of my credits, which some of the other colleges may not have been willing to do.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s great.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. And so from there, that kind of made the decision really easy for me. And then when COVID happened, the world blew up in the spring of 2020. I actually decided to take a gap for like a semester and then start in the fall of 2020. Of course, when I had planned to do that, I didn’t know COVID was going to blow up the entire world, but thus it did. And so in some ways, I actually kind of avoided that initial shock to my education experience, because, like everywhere else in the world, everyone was trying to figure out how to do virtual class instruction if they’ve never done that before. There was a whole bunch of new challenges that happened as a result of that. And so I kind of skid by those for the most part.

And then when I started in fall of 2020, I was still working at the print shop. But because I was working at the print shop remotely now, because it just wasn’t safe for us to be in the office, still, I was able to do Lesley full time and work remotely for the print shop.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Manny Ikomi:

And then in 2021, in January, because my hours and income from the print shop was drastically reduced just because business was slow and it was really tough time for everyone. And so, thankfully, I had prepared for some of this. Because going back to financial literacy stuff, I had prepared an emergency fund and kind of knew, worst case scenario, I would be able to make it through college for the most part, even if I wasn’t working a full time gig. And I could just find maybe some freelance work and stuff on the side. So in 2021, I decided to leave. I put in my notice. I left on really great terms with them overall. Actually, recently, I ended up asking them to do some print work for me for a side thing with IBM.

But, yeah, from there it was just like full steam ahead with Lesley. I was like, I just want to get my education done. Out of the way. I know interactive design is the area that IBM interested in. I know it will somehow bring me to some interesting path with coding in some way. And at the time, I didn’t really know what user experience was until a particular studio course that I had, which just so happened to be with two IBM distinguished designers who were my faculty and they were the ones who ended up asking me to apply, like, a year later when I was a senior into the role that I’m in now, essentially.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, nice. I was going to ask how you sort of came across IBM with the work that you were doing, but it sounds like you already had this kind of support system in.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I think it really started kind of like, way back in vocational school because I had a pretty good technical understanding of the tooling and the software and some of the processes for design in terms of the tactical aspects and visual design, working in hind design, all that stuff. And so for me, the real value that I got out of college was the networking, the mentorship, the one on one time. And a lot of the theory and history behind design was most valuable to me, so I could really focus on that rather than trying to struggle with some of the tooling and learning new methods that I was already familiar with. And so when it came time to really work on projects, the technical aspects of doing the design work and making the artifacts and deliverables was actually relatively easy for me. What I was most challenged by was, like, the strategic parts of it and kind of training myself to think like a designer, not just make pretty designs.

Maurice Cherry:

I hear you. Okay. And now, let’s talk about what you sort of mentioned before about teaching at Bunker Hill. I feel like that might be an interesting experience to go back to your alma mater years later and now teach. What made you decide to go that route?

Manny Ikomi:

It’s definitely been a full circle moment that I’m still kind of, I guess, pinching myself for a long time ago. So when I had graduated from Bunker Hill in 2019, a professor of mine who I developed, like, a really great relationship with while I was there for four years, she asked me when I graduated. She said, when you finish your bachelor’s degree, I would love for you to come back and teach the college. And when she said that to me, I was kind of like, what? Because I was like, I just never really considered that as a possibility before. And then ever since she said that, I have kind of noticed getting really positive signals from people that I might be good at doing that. And so over, like, I guess it was kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way, where if I found it interesting and I thought it was nice, maybe it would happen. I maintained a relationship with that professor for quite a while, and even while I was going through Lesley and doing things, I would always go back to the college and even before I got the role there, do design crits with some of their students and provide networking and opportunities and portfolio reviews, things like that, to kind of give back.

And earlier this year, I had went to a design conference. It was like the first in-person design conference I got to go to since COVID kind of unleashed everything she had just so happened to be there. The professor ended up asking me to teach, and we were just kind of, like, catching up a little bit because we hadn’t talked in a little while, but we email back and forth every once in a while, and she had told me, like, hey, we have adjunct positions opening. We’re looking for people to teach certain courses. I want you to apply, basically. And even still, I was kind of like, well, I’m still just barely my first year into this role at IBM. Am I really even qualified or ready to do this? I was hoping, I think, realistically, to get another maybe four years or five years or so in the industry and doing more practice as a practitioner. But I kind of just kind of said to myself, self, take your own advice.

Like, if the opportunity presents itself, just apply and see what happens, just like I did with IBM. And so, long story short, it was like the worst that they can say is no. Right?

Maurice Cherry:

Right.

Manny Ikomi:

So I applied. I did the interview, I did the teaching demo, and then, yeah, now here I am. So I’m only teaching one class. It’s Wednesday evenings, which works really well with my schedule, considering I also tend to go into the office on Wednesdays, and it’s right down the street from my office pretty much too. And the topic that I’m teaching is interactive design, which is kind of right up my alley since that’s what I studied in college, and now that’s what I’m doing for my job, pretty much. So the stars aligned, I guess you could say.

Maurice Cherry:

How’s the teaching experience been so far?

Manny Ikomi:

So far it’s been, I think, a net positive. I think the teaching aspects of it, working with students, kind of like digging back in some of my own archives and coming up with my own content and assignments. I also spent a lot of time reaching out to some of my own professors and also students that I went to Bunker Hill with and at Lesley as well and kind of doing my own design research. I kind of just approached it as like, well, if I was to design a student experience, I just kind of treated it like any other experience design project, except my users are now students. So approaching it with that mindset kind of really helped me. And from there, I think the parts of it that I like are really going well as far as in class instruction, working with the students, providing feedback on their work. I think it’s probably one of the most valuable things I got out of my design education is like, getting critiques and feedback from other people and getting that other perspective on your work that you might not otherwise get if you’re trying to learn by yourself. And then the parts of it that I don’t like so much really are kind of like the more logistics and administrative stuff around it.

I really struggled with grading in the first two weeks to kind of figure out, like, I probably need a rubric. And then also the learning management system that we use isn’t the most user friendly thing either, which is kind of meta hilarious in a sense because I’m trying to teach my students how to design interactive systems like that. There are parts of it that are bad that come with the good, but I’d say overall it’s been going well. And despite currently maybe potentially having to fail one student if they don’t show up next week, it’s been going overwhelmingly good, I think. But ideally I would like to make it to the end of semester without failing anyone. I definitely did not set out to do that when I started teaching, so it’s kind of unfortunate that they’re just not participating or engaging. And I certainly don’t want to make any assumptions as to why they’re not doing it or assuming that they’re a delinquent of some kind because they may have things going on as a student that I just don’t know about and probably never will. But I did try to make an effort to reach out to that person and be as supportive as possible, as opposed to being punitive and penalizing, despite having to uphold the rules of my syllabus in the classroom and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I was an adjunct for two years. I think I taught for two years. It’s 2012 through 2014, I think. I taught a web development course to business majors, and it was a BIS course, like business information systems. And I get that struggle that you’re talking about, like, you go into it. Well, for me, I think the Virgo in me wanted to be like, “hey, this is all wrong.” Like, the way that you’re teaching. I remember going to the dean, like, the first week saying, “we are setting these students up to fail if this is what we’re teaching them, because this is not what we use out in the real world.” Like, if this is what you’re teaching business students, they’re going to go to a company and get laughed at, or they’re going to try to apply for a job and no one’s going to hire them.

And I offered to redo the whole rubric. I’m talking about the grading, the tests, the lessons. I was like, “I’ll redo it and make this into my course that I think they should have.” And they were like, “okay, it’s fine. We don’t care.” And also in that same vein, yeah, you go into it not wanting to fail anyone, and it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. It’s one of those sad eventualities, and it’s because, oh, how could I put this and I don’t mean this in a derisive way, but students will always try to get one over on their professor. They always will. It doesn’t matter how old they are or anything. They will always try to get one over on their professor. They will give you all kinds of excuses just out of everywhere as to why something did get done, why something didn’t get done. In this case, the syllabus is your friend. The syllabus is the contract between the professor and the student to say, if you’re in this class, these are the things that you have to do in order to succeed in the class. And we had office hours. Students would come to office hours and would wonder why. And it’s not that office hours were included in their grade, but then they would come at the last minute, like, “oh, well, can we meet on this day?” I’m like, “well, that’s not my office hours. “My office hours are on the syllabus because I’m also a working designer, so I can’t go out of my way.” You want to help the students because you’re their teacher, so I get that.

But it’s going to be an inevitability that you’re going to have to fail someone. Students are going to go cry bloody murder to the dean or to whatever, because you’re not fair. You’re a bad teacher. They’re going to leave bad reviews. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.

The best thing that you can do is to follow your syllabus, teach the students that are receptive, because there’s just going to be some people you’re just not going to reach. Because I’m assuming you’re doing this in person. Yes, there’s just going to be people that you’re just not going to reach. I think ours was a mix of in person and online, and the online students were the worst. I mean, copying straight from Wikipedia. I’d run it through TurnItIn and get 99% plagiarized. I’m just like, oh my God. And they would swear to you up and down that they wrote it. And it’s like, “I can look at the quality of your written posts in the forum and tell that you didn’t write this. Don’t lie to me.” But it’s one of those things, unfortunately, that’s just going to happen.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that because one of the things that I had done that I had conversations with some people about when I was developing all the content, because the college basically kind of they didn’t really direct me on. Basically, it was like, here’s the course description. Here’s a sample of a syllabus that’s been used previously. Make it your own. So I had a lot of academic freedom, I guess, in that sense of being able to develop the materials the way I wanted to do it. Because, like you were kind of saying when I took this very same course when I was a student, it was not very good. One of the courses I actually took ended up being so bad that I actually went to the dean as a student, complained about the course, got a refund and then still got the credits for the course.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Manny Ikomi:

But I was also a fairly advanced student because I had already had prior experience. I had already kind of known some of the things that were out there that were happening. I also spent a lot of time investing in my learning and education outside of the classroom. So I was very aware of where the college was doing well and not doing so well at the time. And so now coming back into it, I kind of had the same mindset of like, there is no way I’m doing it this way, I’m going to do it my way. Which ultimately creates a lot of work for me in terms of having to come up with all the content and things like that. But it’s also just been kind of like an interesting way to think about my design skills in a different light in terms of designing for instruction and learning as opposed to making profit off of people, I guess. Yeah, so that’s been kind of interesting.

And then on the topic of plagiarism, one of the areas that I talked to people about is, like, using generative AI. I kind of went into it with a mindset of, like, I would rather students use it and use it liberally and experiment with it and not be afraid of it. But come to me with questions because I think ultimately, if I was to put in my syllabus, there’s no use of generative AI allowed one. It’s really hard to detect whether someone’s using it or not, unless, to your point, you’ve kind of gotten to know them a few weeks in. You can kind of see where people are at and kind of what they’re capable of to a certain extent. Right. But for me, it was kind of just like, I know. And I told them on the first day, I was like, when we were going over key parts of the syllabus, I was like, I know that you are going to use generative AI probably whether I allow you to or not.

So just use it, but be conscious of how you’re using it. Cite your usage of it when you do, and provide documentation to me so that I can see how you’re using it. Because there may be parts like kind of we were talking about where it could be harmful or misleading or maybe it’s not giving them the right information that they need and things like that. So that’s been kind of an interesting thing to also navigate. There are a few students who I suspect of using generative AI without disclosing it according to the rules of our syllabus. But for now, I’m kind of letting it slide, mostly because I just haven’t gotten that sense of familiarity with where they’re at and being able to tell one way or another. And I also have seen the negative effects of accusing students of plagiarizing their work or doing something that they are capable of that you just don’t believe. And that can leave a really lasting and poor impression on students because I remember experiencing that once a little bit where because I was working at the printing company, I had access to all kinds of printing equipment, tools, materials, and quality paper, quality design.

I also did a lot of prepress. And so I knew what it took to design something and actually have it be printed in a way that is high quality. And for one of my first projects I did that, I tried to pull out all the stops, like my work let me use what was available. And when I brought in my project, I remember they didn’t believe the work that I did was really mine and that I actually bound the book, printed the book, designed it, and did all of that. And although it wasn’t as relevant to the conversation on generative AI, I still remember that to this day and feeling like, well, if I’m in a student in this scenario who’s really excelling at their projects and doing to the point where you don’t even believe the work is mine, then why am I here, right? You know what I mean? So I try to be very careful about who I accuse or not of using it. And I think ultimately at the end, if they are going to use generative AI to essentially cheat their way through my course, they’re not going to get the return on the educator investment that they’re putting in. So I think ultimately it all ends up in my favor anyway, but the initial impact of that may work in their favor in the short term.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m glad I didn’t teach in the age of AI. I’m so glad because I can only imagine now that it’s and I mean, that was sort of a thing that came up a lot as sort of a stopping point for educators. Like, I think maybe about a year or so ago when Chad GPT really started to become used more commonly was in educational spaces. Professors really being like, prohibiting it, of course, but then also curious about it because the work is sometimes actually kind of good.

And yeah, it’s like if a student is going to mortgage their future away by using generative AI, why are you in school? Why are you even doing it? I mean, I taught business students, so these weren’t even design students. So maybe I came into it with a little bit of a bias because they really were just like, “look, this is an elective. I just need to take this so I can get my business degree and go get my MBA or whatever.” They didn’t really care about design. And not to say that I wanted to make them care about design, but I also didn’t want them to think this was going to just be a cakewalk for them.

Manny Ikomi:

Right.

Maurice Cherry:

Not to say I made it hard on well, I might have made it a little hard on purpose. I would kind of change the course as things went along because like I said, I came in and I really wanted to change things up. I would edit it from like, semester to semester. I would change some things up. And I remember this one student who I failed three times. Not on purpose. I didn’t fail them on purpose. What I’m trying to say but they failed the course three times, and it was because I would change the course slightly, like change certain things, and they would keep using the same homework and materials from the first time that they failed the course.

I would change the nature of the assignment, and they would just turn in the same thing. I’m like, did you not read what the assignment was? Why would you turn in something that’s completely different? Just…students.

Manny Ikomi:

Oh, my God, that’s so funny. I hope a year or two from now, when I’ve hopefully taught this class again, more in the future, that I don’t have students like that because I am a very patient and lenient person, and I often see the big picture of these things, I think, more than my students do. But I really hope I don’t get to that point because that’s when it’ll really start. Like, the shade will start coming out and…are you for real for real? You’re just gonna submit the whole same thing? I really hope I don’t get to that.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t think you’ll get to that point. Again, you’re teaching design students, so they want to be there for that for the most part. I think you’ll be fine.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, it is a requirement. And one of the things that I did on our first day was do, like, a little intro survey to kind of understand where they’re at in terms of their interest in the topic of the course, but also how many hours they’re working outside of the college versus how many credits they’re taking. Mostly to make sure I’m saving students from the mistakes that I made when I started college, because I had no idea what I was doing. But it’s also just good contextually for me to know a little bit about each individual student because that may be one reason or another why they aren’t participating as much or miss a few deadlines here and there and things like that. So it’s good for me to have that kind of in mind here and there.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Now along with teaching, along with your work at IBM, you not only stream on Twitch, which I really want to get into, but you have a podcast also. What made you decide to kind of branch out into these other forms of media?

Manny Ikomi:

The way that I describe it to people is…I just like making shit and putting it on the internet. Oh, sorry, I don’t know if I’m allowed to swear, but…

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, you’re fine, you can curse. It’s fine.

Manny Ikomi:

So that’s really kind of the mindset that I guess I kind of approached it with is just, I just want to make stuff and put it out there. Well, I guess I’ll start with, I don’t know, should I start with streaming or the podcast? Which one do you want?

Maurice Cherry:

Let’s talk about streaming first.

Manny Ikomi:

Okay, so for streaming, the way that it kind of happened is during the pandemic, like at the height of lockdown and quarantines and things like that, we were all stuck inside for the most part. And originally I had started as a viewer on Twitch like most people do, and I would primarily watch people play video games and they were mostly within the queer community. I am a gay man for context. I don’t know if I talked about that yet, but yeah, I’m queer as fuck. And I just started watching queer streamers on Twitch who play games and I started playing with them and then I forget what it was that really kind of crossed me over in terms of the boundary of going from Twitch to entertainment, but now as a way to learn more about web development and design, because there are a few of us that stream about design on Twitch, myself included. And then there’s also quite a few and quite a bit more people who stream web development and software engineering within the software and game development category, which is typically where I stream as well. And probably like a year into being a viewer, that’s when I started to think about, well, I’m stuck at home, I’m doing some freelance and consulting work here and there, I’m doing my own thing. Let me just start like a co-working stream and see what happens and just share my work.

And then, because I had been so embedded in the Twitch community and the streamers that I had watched some of which who were still very much my good Judys, as I like to say to this day, even outside of streaming. One of them actually, coincidentally ended up living down the street from me during parts of the COVID quarantine, which is also hilariously coincidental. But those people from the queer gaming community really gave me the viewership that I needed and that initial push of support to become a Twitch affiliate. So that’s basically at the point where you can monetize your stream a little bit, you can have subscribers make emotes and do things like that. That happened within the first two weeks of me streaming and everyone was just so extremely supportive despite having little to no idea what my content was or what I was actually streaming because I was streaming my design work and some of my process. And then one thing led to another and probably now I’m a little bit more removed from that kind of like queer gaming part, but I still do participate in some of the communities and lurk in some streams here that I like to support here and there.

But then I started to really find more of the software and game development community and all of the streamers, and now some of them are also like my friends. I met some of them at TwitchCon last year for the first time, which was really great, and actually this year, later this month or in October, I’m going to TwitchCon again and we’re actually going to do a panel about programming on Twitch. And so I don’t have a significantly huge viewership around my stream or anything like that, but the people who do come and who hang out and who stay, whether it’s other streamer or viewers that I’ve had for years now, some of them have been subscribed to me for over, like, three years. And I’m like, oh, wow, this is crazy. Thank you so much for your support. And some of those people still to this day have no idea what I do, but they just support me and who I am and what I like to share and put out there. And so it’s been a really interesting and net positive way of putting myself out there. Kind of like how you’re talking about in terms of building my personal brand, I guess you could say.

It’s kind of taken on, I guess its own thing, I guess. I definitely don’t do it as much as I used to just because now that I work full time and IBM doing my own course, it’s really hard for me to stream on a regular basis as much as I used to. And so as a result, my viewership and other metrics have kind of gone down since the kind of height of my streaming career, if you want to call it that. But I still do it for funsies and I always did it for fun and I never really cared about the metrics anyway because all I really just wanted to do was just make stuff and put it on the Internet. And so streaming just happened to be the lowest barrier to entry, coincidentally enough for me to do that because when you’re live, you’re live. It’s not like a recording like this where maybe we could potentially edit out some things or something like that. For me, it’s like what you see is what you get. And also, at the same token, I don’t have to worry about editing, I don’t have to worry about scripting or being like a perfectionist on it, which kind of can take away the fun because sometimes I do have that nature about my work.

And so for me, it’s a fun way to put myself out there to share what I know. And also it’s part of the reason why I think I’ve become a bit of a better public speaker, why IBM more willing to engage with public speaking opportunities, do things like this. And also people have learned things from my stream, which kind of goes back to the whole you might be a good teacher someday. And so people on my stream have literally told me like, oh, I’ve learned so much from you, or thank you so much for your feedback on my work, or something like that. And it’s just become a really positive outlet, I think, for me whenever I get to do it, just not as frequently as I used to.

Maurice Cherry:

Is there like a big web development community on Twitch? I mean, like you said before, there’s obviously gamers and such, but it sounds like there might be a pretty big community there for web development.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I would say so. We’re relatively unknown, I would say, in terms of the grand scheme of Twitch, but there are some people who have an upwards of an average of 200 viewers and there are some people who have upwards of 1500 viewers when they’re live.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow.

Manny Ikomi:

And they could be doing anything from coding in Rust or building a silly website with animations and things like that. One of my really good friends, mewtru, I think she’s like the perfect example of how you can be a streamer and a content creator and have fun and just like, she’s just really awesome. And I met her through streaming and we’ve kind of become good friends since then. And we’ve always been supportive of one another despite not really even knowing or meeting each other up until Twitch last year. And so, yeah, it’s just interactions like that with people, whether they’re fellow streamers or viewers, it creates a community around what we’re doing. And even though I’m a designer mostly by trade, I still kind of, I guess, hold my own in terms of programming and web development. And my stream is kind of unique in the sense where I add a design lens to things from that. Again, how are you talking about the design, engineering and hybrid perspective that I think a lot of people in the category may not have except for a very small handful of us.

Maurice Cherry:

Twitch sounds like one of the rare places online now, like in 2023, one of the rare places where you can really carve out a niche for yourself. Because with things like Instagram and Twitter and things like that, a lot of stuff is very algorithmically driven. And it feels like, at least from what you’re telling me, Twitch is really more community based in that way.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah, I mean, that’s actually perfect because that was going to be like my next soapbox to get on. When it comes to creating content on Twitch is…the way that I frame it to people is Twitch is kind of unique as its own brand of social media, like you were kind of thinking about earlier, because it has kind of its own unique culture, to be quite honest around it with emotes and chat and how people interact with the streamer while they’re live. There’s also the kind of aspects like you were talking about around community where people who are creating content on TikTok and YouTube and podcasts and even blog articles, any form of media that you put out there. A lot of it is a one way interaction and a lot of people do it with the goal of building an audience that then they can later monetize. But with streaming on Twitch specifically, what I found is that what you’re really doing is building a community because discovery and algorithms and search on Twitch kind of suck, to be quite honest. That’s why a lot of people don’t really know there’s a whole community of us out there. But for the ones that do know and for the ones that discover us, they tend to stick around and they tend to support what we do, even if they may not like all of the content that we stream.

When I first started streaming one day out of the week, on Sundays, I would just stream League of Legends, which is a game that I like to play for fun with some of my friends. It had nothing to do with the content that I streamed two days a week during the day when I was coworking and things like that. But for the people who wanted that, they came and they stuck around and then when I was streaming other stuff, sometimes they would still come and hang out anyway. And so it really builds on that two-way interaction that I think a lot of people don’t get from other social media platforms that Twitch is really good at enabling. And in hindsight, it also kind of really aligns with, I guess, desire, you could say, to have a two way interaction with people and not feel like it’s just a transaction of like this post or subscribe to my newsletter and things like that. It really is a two-way interaction and I’ve created some really great friends out of it, some of which have helped me with the course that I’m doing right now, some of which I’ve helped with their content and vice versa. And it’s really created a nice little community around what I do, even if my particular streamer and viewership isn’t as strong as it used to be, I guess.

Maurice Cherry:

Interesting. There was a time when I was thinking of doing a live show via Twitch for Revision Path. Like I was thinking of doing Revision Path Live like one day a week. This was before the pandemic. If we manage to get the resources to be able to do it, I would love to try to branch into doing something like that because like you mentioned, it’s a totally different sort of dimension in terms of reaching people and then also in terms of communicating.

Like this conversation that you and I are having will be edited. If it was live, it could be a totally different thing in terms of where the conversation goes and what we talk about or anything like that. So I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve really been putting a little bit of thought into it, if we are able to do it. I’m kind of working on some things behind the scenes just in terms of securing funding for the show and stuff. So I would love to do a live thing maybe like once a week or something as sort of a supplement to the podcast because the podcast has been such a constant thing over the past ten years and we’ve had blog articles here and there. We did a literary anthology for a couple of years and I would love to sort of add a different sort of component to Revision Path. But yeah, Twitch sounds like it could be it.

Manny Ikomi:

That’s great. And honestly, it may not even have to be Twitch. It could be another live platform. I mean, obviously if you want help with that, definitely feel free to reach out to me. I could probably help you in some way or another. One of the things that just in hindsight that I caution people about is there are some people who maybe come from other platforms and they’re trying to diversify their viewership, their audience and things like that. And one of the mistakes that I’ve seen and that people make, what they tend to do, especially if they come from YouTube, is they still treat Twitch like an audience and not a two-way interaction.

And so what you get is people streaming their content and talking into the void, but they’re not interacting with chat, they’re not engaging with the people that are there. And that’s where I think a lot of people tend to maybe fail, I guess you could say, or not get the results or outcomes that they want out of streaming. And mostly it stems from, I feel from my very limited anecdotal evidence and observations that the reason is because a lot of them just aren’t used to that mindset shift, whereas for me it just kind of happened naturally because I started my content creator journey on Twitch. And so now when people come from other platforms, it may not, I mean people in general tend not to convert between one platform for another. So if you have a really strong audience in one type of media or platform, like the podcast for example, it’s going to be really hard to get people to move over to something else and that’s universally regardless of which type of social media or interaction you have with your audience. But it is challenging and it’s especially challenging for people to go into live streaming on Twitch for that reason I believe too.

Maurice Cherry:

No, that’s good to know. I mean, like I said, if I did it, it would be a supplement to the show and also honestly for scheduling it would be so much easier. I think it will be so much easier but in the future we’ll see. But since we’re talking about podcasting, you also have a podcast that you said you started kind of during the pandemic.

Manny Ikomi:

Yeah. So that kind of ended up just starting as kind of like an inside joke between me and a really close friend of mine, Kevin, who’s my co-host on our podcast Gay + Geeky and Tired. Hashtag ad. And we started, you know, during the height of the pandemic amongst all the other content creation things I was doing for fun. A lot of times the way I would socialize with my friends during the pandemic was through discord and with my friend Kevin in particular, we would have a group of us, some of us, I met my friend Kevin while I was in college, which was part of Know ancillary college experience. And so a lot of our friends would just joke with me and him about how we should make our own podcast and how we talk about so many things around current events and pop culture and queer culture and society and things like that. And so particularly music and gaming are like two kind of key areas that we tend to talk about a lot. And at one point I think we were kind of just like “should we do it? Should we do this? Is this for real? Should we really make a podcast?” And then long story short, we did. We ended up releasing the first episode, I think on my birthday in June of 2021.

It started as Gay + Graphic and Tired because initially, well, we’re kind of both in the design trade but he more approaches it from like an architecture perspective where I’m more user experience and so we thought that would be a cute title and then we ended up changing it to what it is now. But we talk about all kinds of stuff. I just explain it to people. It’s like we just talk about gay shit. We do it very casually. It’s very unscripted, unfiltered. We come prepared with some topics; we tend to rant a lot. It’s a little all over the place and you probably won’t like it, but for the people that do, and some of them have come from my twitch audience as well, they listen to it whenever we release an episode because it is something we do for fun and something we don’t really monetize.

We have had some spurts and lack of consistently or consistency around posting, especially recently now because of my adjunct role and the kind of demands that both of our jobs now require of us. But we are looking into getting back into it and for the most part we’ve been putting out episodes pretty consistently now since then. So we don’t really have a posting schedule or anything at the scale that you’re doing with Revision Path. But again, it just kind of started as one of those things that we wanted to do for fun and we still do it for fun and probably will until we don’t want to anymore. That’s what it is.

Maurice Cherry:

Now have you found that that sort of helped you out in a similar way that Twitch streaming has in terms of communication?

Manny Ikomi:

I think so. I would say Twitch definitely moreso because there is kind of like you’re talking about that multisensory experience of like you’re visually there talking to people and then they can obviously hear you because it’s a video format. I would say, with a podcast, because we have the luxury of being able to edit it and because they can’t see us. There’s aspects of it that outside of the technical parts of learning what it takes to produce a podcast a little bit and some tips and tricks here to edit audio and understanding what that process looks like. I’m not, like, an audio engineer or anything, and I’m sure your editor could probably do way better than I can at editing our pod, but it’s just one of those little technical skills that I’ve always just been able to pick up really quickly just to do something and get it out there. And nobody really complains about our audio, so I think it’s okay. And outside of that, I would say I’ve definitely gotten more personal growth and value out of streaming. But for the podcaster thing, I think it’s also just half of it is just an excuse for me and my friend to get together on Discord and just talk a bunch of crap.

So it has had value but in less, I guess, tangible monetary ways.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, it’s more like it’s a personal thing. It’s cathartic. I got you. Okay, what does success look like to you at this point in your career?

Manny Ikomi:

When I was listening to some of the episodes with some other people, I figured this one was coming and of course I did not prepare a very well-worded response. I think success is a really tricky word and the way that I tend to think about it and the way that I frame it to people is that success is different for everyone. And for me, it’s not necessarily tied to a monetary amount of money or becoming a millionaire or doing anything like that. I think ultimately my idea of success is being able to have a positive impact on the world and the people around me, whether that’s in small ways or big ways, whether I become some notable designer, Lord, someday or something, I don’t know, I don’t care. But just being able to have a positive impact with people, preferably through my profession and personally, and being able to do that sustainably, I think. So although money is not like a motivating factor for me, it is just a reality of the world that we live in. And there are certain ways, like when it comes to the lifestyle that I want and the flexibility that I want and the security and things like that, to where money does play a role in it. But it’s not necessarily my sole motivator, I guess, like kind of going back to the key takeaway that we were talking about, it’s really lifting as I climb.

I think it’s just been something that especially ever since I got my job at IBM, it’s something that I take maybe a little too seriously. Because I recognize that there is an immense amount for someone like me who is a queer black person who may not have had the most affluent upbringing, but somehow managed to have this beautiful story of overcoming adversity and all that stuff. There are elements that I still recognize are due to elements of privilege in some way because it’s on a spectrum. And so there are privileges that I’ve had, there are opportunities that I’ve had because of that. But there are also ways that I may have been disenfranchised or oppressed, whether internalized myself or externally.

And so lifting as I climb is kind of a way that I like to give back and uplift people in ways that I can, where I have the power and privilege to do so. Like, one of the ways that I try to do that is, right before coming on the podcast, someone who I’d went to college with at Bunker Hill actually reached out to me and said, like, “hey, I saw you posted about consulting opportunities at IBM. I want to learn more about your role and what you do and how to apply and things like that.” And although I’m not in a position to hire them outright, I can at least meet with them, give them feedback on their portfolio, give them some advice, insight into what it’s like, and really just mentoring people. And that brings me joy, that brings me satisfaction. I feel like I’m helping people. I think that’s why I also like teaching so much. It’s a way to just be successful, but also make others successful with me as I go. I guess. Does that make sense?

Maurice Cherry:

If it makes sense to you, it makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense. I’m not messing with you. If you didn’t get into UX, what do you think you’d be doing?

Manny Ikomi:

Oh boy. To be honest, if it had started the other way around, I probably would have been a web developer. It’s probably the closest alternative, I guess. And then maybe my roads would have crossed elsewhere into UX design later on. Probably, like, out of the wild the answer would be maybe working somewhere in a nonprofit or in healthcare or in the public market somewhere like either, again, teaching — maybe not teaching design — but teaching in some form or fashion design. And it’s just something that’s been with me that I known I’ve wanted to do in some fashion or another ever since my vocational training in 9th grade. And that kind of hyper fixation and just knowing what I want to do that early has really propelled me to go really far, at least relatively to people in my age group, I guess you could say.

So I’d never really considered alternatives outside of maybe becoming a web developer and leaving design or potentially becoming a teacher. But all of those things still include design, I guess, in some way, now that I’m doing both of those things.

Maurice Cherry:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Like what kind of work do you want to be doing?

Manny Ikomi:

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about recently, aside from my craft and that intersection of design and engineering is just putting my design skills and knowledge to work in places where I feel like it aligns with my values. And so I’m trying to move towards, at least within the short term in some way, moving towards doing more consulting projects and gigs with public sector institutions, so education institutions, colleges, local and state governments, healthcare providers, things like that. And I want to do that because as close as I can get to, I guess, public service, while still very much maintaining what I do as a designer and being able to bring value there in terms of inclusive design where I can add intersectionality and a lot of those things, like socially, that some people don’t always get the opportunity to bring to their work or maybe just aren’t to because they don’t represent or have the identities that intersect in the way for the people that they’re designing for, I guess. So I guess it would be being a design consultant in some shape or form, working with local and state governments, educational institutions or healthcare.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your work, your streaming, your podcaster? Where can they find that information?

Manny Ikomi:

Online I basically compiled if you want to know where I am on the Internet, basically just go to mannyikomi.com/links. It’s kind of like my own IBM a web developer, so I’m going to make it myself version of Linktree essentially. And that just lists all of my links to places where I show up online, including my blog, my stream, my podcaster, my portfolio is also there on my website if it’s even vaguely up to date. Yeah, I would say mannyikomi.com/links will take you to anywhere I am on the internet that you may also be.

Maurice Cherry:

Sounds good.

Well, Manny Ikomi, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show.

I think one for talking about your story, talking know, just sort of what you’re working on and even what you’re teaching and everything. I feel like you’re kind of at this point in your career where it’s all going to start to come together for you like in the next few years. I feel like it’s all going to gel. I’m listening to what you’re doing now and that it sounds like kind of what I was doing back in the day. Like I was trying to do all these different things and creating stuff and putting it online. I feel like you’re at that point where it’s really going to start to come together and gel in a really positive way and I’ll be really excited to see what you come up with when that happens.

So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Manny Ikomi:

Thank you so much for having me. This was fantastic. I’m just so obsessed with what you’re doing. I think this is great and maybe hopefully one day I’ll have the kind of impact that you’re having right now on the community. I think it’s really cool what you’re doing. So thank you so much for having me. This is really an honor to be here.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit

Brevity & Wit is a strategy and design firm committed to designing a more inclusive and equitable world. They are always looking to expand their roster of freelance design consultants in the U.S., particularly brand strategists, copywriters, graphic designers and Web developers.

If you know how to deliver excellent creative work reliably, and enjoy the autonomy of a virtual-based, freelance life (with no non-competes), check them out at brevityandwit.com.

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David Perrin

How are you using your creative talents to create a more equitable world. For David Perrin, his focus is on the world of nonprofit design. By day, David is the design lead at The Ford Foundation, and he works with an in-house team of editors, copywriters, strategists, designers, and developers. Outside of work, he’s an instructor with Social Movement Technologies, a nonprofit organization that provides strategy, training and campaign support to build people power and win in the digital age.

David gave me a breakdown about The Ford Foundation and what it does, and also provided a sneak peek at the variety of work the Foundation handles. We also talked about what fueled his background and his career transition into social justice, along with the challenges and opportunities it presents. David’s story is one of determination, self-reflection, and the power of using design as a powerful tool for change. Get ready to be inspired!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right. So tell us who you are and what you do.

David Perrin:

So, my name is David Perrin. I’m an art director, graphic designer, and illustrator. I use photo collage as my current graphic style to help kind of portray complex issues pertaining to social justice politics. You know, in my off time…Black joy and Black culture.

Maurice Cherry:

How has your 2023 been going so far?

David Perrin:

It’s been going great! Busy. Done a lot of traveling. Soul searching. Got into grad school, started grad school right now, so currently in that…and yeah, just really gearing up for the fall. Just kind of heads down, I think, for the first half of the year. Took a lot of trips to go see friends and family and everything, and now I’m like kind of just hitting the ground running. So it’s been a busy year so far.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, congratulations on grad school!

David Perrin:

Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:

Where are you going?

David Perrin:

So I’m currently at Baruch [College] studying arts administration. So getting a master’s in that. I’m super excited. It’s really going to help me bolster my leadership skills in the nonprofit space, specifically around art. And kind of on the back end of this, I do want to get into teaching and being a professor. I really love the work that I do, and I think it’s just going to just give me a stronger foundation moving forward.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. So I saw that you recently illustrated a children’s book. Tell me about that.

David Perrin:

Yes. “Amadou Goes To School.” So a friend of mine is Senegalese. He pitched the story to me a couple of years ago. At the time, the only person he knew that he would want to illustrate this book. And so the book primarily is about his experience, really through this character Amadou, and what the first days of school might look like with just dealing with just different cultures and just finding common ground and where people can kind of — or children, right? — can kind of see eye-to-eye on things and really just come together through that unfamiliar process of getting to know one another and stuff. So we’ve gotten a lot of just very just positive energy around the book. We’re working on a second right now. We’re hoping to make it a series.

This has definitely pulled me out of my comfort zone. I think, the last couple of years, I’m kind of undoing a lot of years of slight impostor syndrome and wanting to get into new spaces and things. And so slowly peeling back those layers and stuff. So this is definitely a project of love. Yeah. I really appreciate my boy Jonima Diaby who’s the writer on it. We’re heads down, trying to figure out what the game plan is. We want to do more readings in schools and get this out, you know, as the school year is kind of, I think, jump starting right now, as a matter of fact. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Was this your first children’s book?

David Perrin:

Yes, first children’s book. All original characters, content, all the things. Been drawing since I was in first grade, but to kind of do it in this platform…yeah, it was a little, like, nerve wracking. Finally, I think we released it last year, fall, and so, yeah, we’re gearing up, like I said, for the second book. So, yeah, just super excited to have it out there. And every now and then, I get a ping from a friend who just had a kid and they’re reading the book to their child, that type of thing. So I’m just happy it’s making the rounds. And like I said, I’m being able to touch my community in this way and…yeah, more to come.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice, looking forward to that. So you’re currently the design lead at The Ford Foundation. That’s pretty epic. Talk to me about that.

David Perrin:

Yeah, so I’m currently the design lead at The Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation is a global philanthropic institution centered around the mission of social justice at its core with the goal of expanding equitable experiences for all. The organization is global. We have eleven different offices. We cover a lot of ground and a lot of work. And so it’s really exciting, simply put, just because of all the different bodies of work that we contribute to. As a designer, I feel like I’m kind of a kid in a candy store, if you will. Being able to work on all these different topics, to be able to work on so many different types of bodies of work is really cool. And again, to add a bonus of us being global and working with the different regions as well and seeing how the work touches just different parts of the world is also pretty awesome.

Maurice Cherry:

I want to go a little deeper on what you do, like your day to day. I realized when I just asked that question before, I was like, that was real open ended. “You work for the Ford Foundation. Tell me about it.” I just realized as I said it, but what does a typical day look like? Are you in office? You’re working remotely? Do you have an in house team? What does that structure look like?

David Perrin:

Yeah, so we have an in-house team. So currently our team consists of so we have a creative team and we’re on a broader communications team, right? So the creative team consists of two editors, two writers, copywriters, if you will, and then two designers. And then our broader team consists of strategists and web development folks. So we’ve got a pretty robust team, I think around like 24 folks. So that’s our team as a whole.

The work? Yeah, it’s pretty vast. We have a lot of grantees, so we do grantee profiles where we reach out to our grantees, bolster up some of the work that they’re doing on their end, create these grantee profiles, which then kind of get condensed into maybe a blog format or social media. We’re here in New York, so sometimes our program officers will make regional visits to some of the regional offices and vice versa. So constantly creating content around those visits and kind of like information exchanged. We have a video series. We get into video a lot. Events. The Ford Foundation, as a building, as an entity, houses a lot of events throughout the year. We also have a gallery where we do gallery showings. I think we have one on AI that premiered a couple of weeks ago.

But yeah, we support everybody. Our small team, we have a group of fellows on constant rotation of fellowships that kind of happen throughout the organization. A small bite-sized list of things that we could be working on, you know, on a day to day [basis].

Maurice Cherry:

So it doesn’t sound like there is at any point in time, like a lack of work, because it feels like there’s always going to be something coming in, whether that’s, like you said, new grantee profiles or maybe that’s seasonal type campaigns or things that you’re doing. It sounds like it’s just a constant stream of work.

David Perrin:

Yeah, our grantees are moving and grooving. They’re constantly giving us things to put out into the space, and again, to bolster up. And yeah, the organization is constantly going through these different rotations. Folks coming in and out, fellows coming in and out. I mean, I will say the summers kind of are like a safe period where folks…we try to give ourselves some time off, right? So we’re trying to create some work/life balance there.

Like I was saying earlier, in the fall, yeah, it kind of heads down. Right. So right now we just have a lot of things going in constant rotation. But the summers, we try to keep it a little open ended for folks to take off.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s good to mention that because a couple of weeks ago I had Vasheena Brisbane on the show. She is…I’m going to butcher her title, but she’s like the director of communications for Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York.

David Perrin:

Got it.

Maurice Cherry:

Which is a pretty big church, pretty well-known church. And we sort of talked about kind of like how when you’re doing the type of design that maybe not is, I don’t know, product-based or software-based or things like that, sometimes it gets overlooked and sometimes it has like a stigma to it.

I’ve had designers on the show. I mean, I’m a designer myself, where there can sometimes be a stigma against church work or nonprofit work or things like that because it’s not as, I don’t know, glossy and sexy as like, advertising or software or anything like that. So I think it’s good to note that there’s just a variety of design work that you do with The Ford Foundation and that it’s all kind of pretty encompassing a lot of different types of media.

David Perrin:

Absolutely. For example, we have a 60th anniversary of our East Africa office happening pretty soon, and I’m making a stage design for them. Some of these are firsts for me; wayfinding stuff, banners that kind of take up full columns of buildings and things. Yes, to nonprofit work and some of this stuff feeling, tone wise, really, I guess to your point, maybe not as sexy as advertising or some branding studios and stuff like that, but still get the work done. And we should be held to the same standard as everybody else, I believe.

Maurice Cherry:

Right? I mean, you get the work in and it’s a variety of work. I mean, I think sometimes if you’re working with a company, particularly if you’re just a product designer, you’re kind of doing the same type of thing day in, day out, you don’t really have a chance to kind of stretch yourself creatively. And it sounds like even though you’re the lead and you have a team, there’s always going to be something new and different coming down the pike for you to work on.

David Perrin:

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, we try to keep it interesting too. We’re also trying to push ourselves with our grantee profiles. We want to do more original artwork, original photography…really meet our grantees where they’re at and bolster the work up to, like, a New York Times or The Atlantic. We are really striving for just a higher standard of design and design thinking and reimagining of what this work can look like. We just went through a brand redesign. Yeah, I think it embodies some of these newer ideas and trends in the design community. So I think great design is accessible. Just because it’s nonprofit doesn’t mean “doesn’t have to be stale, doesn’t have to be all these things.” It could really be as energizing and exciting as anything that we see out in the private sector.

Maurice Cherry:

What’s the most challenging part about your work?

David Perrin:

I guess even going back to my days at Dēmos, sometimes visualizing some of this work because it’s so nuanced, right? I’m thinking on when I was working at Dēmos, this racial justice think tank, right? Like coming up with visuals for ending the filibuster, right? Like, what does that look like? It’s not a very tangible thing. You can’t just throw that into Google and a bunch of images are going to pop up. And so, yeah, for some of these more nuanced, more sensitive topics, right? The Supreme Court ruling on abortion, what does that look like? That creates an approachable tone, right? It’s so sensitive. What does that look like? What’s the tone that we want to strike with that? We deal in some pretty heavy topics. And so I think that’s always a difficulty in trying to establish a tone of empowerment, but also making clear what’s at stake and what’s actually happening in the space without being, I guess, disruptive or disrespectful. We do want to respect all the imagery and our grantees and the people involved. These are real issues, and so there’s a lot of sensitivities around that and we want to just be mindful as much as possible creating a message, but also, again, just really thinking on the communities involved in the work. So, yeah, sometimes there’s not always a balance. And so it’s tricky sometimes coming up with how to really set that tone and make sure everybody is fully represented in the right way.

Maurice Cherry:

And I would imagine aside from that, because you’re dealing with different cultures, you’re dealing with different just…topics and mores and things like that. So you’re always having to sort of strike that balance between, of course, something that’s going to be visually and aesthetically pleasing, but then also is going to work for the context that it’s being used. Like, for example, you mentioned doing this conference in East Africa. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t style that, like, you would do maybe an event in Silicon Valley. Like, it would just be a different type of thing, I would imagine.

David Perrin:

Absolutely. And to that point, and I’ll probably touch on this a little bit later, but yeah, bringing folks in, getting the right feedback. We’re very much in touch with the folks in that regional office, and they sent us, like, a mood board, right, to kind of help guide us on some principles and some rules of the road, right? Some things that they wanted to stay away from, as far as stereotypes, and I’m very appreciative of that. I want everybody, people that we are speaking behalf of trying to grantees, who are trying to bolster communities, all that to really come to the table, right? And really help us, guide us as designers and visionaries, so that we’re not misrepresenting the work at any point. It’s a fine line, but always, always here to hear from folks, like, what they want to see in the visuals, and what’s empowering and what makes sense to the work.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, along with the work that you’re doing at the Ford Foundation, you also teach you’re an instructor with Social Movement Technologies. How did you find out about them?

David Perrin:

At my time at Dēmos, I was still trying to get a handle on what organizing work looked like and felt like. And so my director at the time, I guess Smt, had kind of fallen into her inbox. She encouraged me to take the they had a Certificate course right on basically design tools for graphic designers in the organizing space. Right. I took the course. I learned a lot, met up with a lot of great designers, and just kind of got to hear the stories and just kind of be alongside of other organizers and grassroots folks, researchers, people who aren’t designers, that just wanted to learn and to help their organizations out in any capacity, in the design capacity and everything. So, yeah, it was just a really good learning experience overall. And so after the program, the head of the program reached out to me and asked if I wanted to be an instructor, and I jumped at the opportunity. I haven’t turned back. And so, yeah, I feel fortunate to be in a space again, to be on the other side and to kind of help usher in just this next class of folks year after year. It’s been very rewarding, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:

What sort of topics are you teaching?

David Perrin:

We’re starting from the ground up, right? So just teaching like, basic typography, color palette, mood boarding, brand guides, visual tone with photography, sourcing animation, illustration, whatever. We can kind of really pack in during the time that we have. We really try to pack it in. And yeah, we’ve created a pretty decent formula as far as pace goes. But yeah, we really just try to give people the building blocks on what to really think about when thinking about brand and how to start. Right. So really, like I said, from the ground up. And putting this against folks are limited resources too, and giving them a lot of open source material that they could use to kind of just get started. Like Photoshop. Adobe sometimes can be a little inaccessible, can be a little daunting, right? So we really just try to meet people where they’re at and help bolster their skills so that they feel more confident talking about visual identity and what to really think about when it comes to strategy for the organizations.

Maurice Cherry:

How do you sort of balance this teaching work along with your 9-to-5 work? Because it sounds like The Ford Foundation work is already a lot to do.

David Perrin:

It is. Full transparency, right? Like a couple of years ago, I was on the more teaching end of this and now I’m more of supportive…more of like a supportive role, looking at students’ work and being able to kind of guide them on next steps and things. So more of like a small group kind of feedback session type of thing. And I try to do my best to really prepare folks as far as next steps and help them again, just try to meet them where they’re at, whatever the desired needs are at the time.

Maurice Cherry:

Now let’s kind of, you know, change it up here a little bit. We’ve talked a lot about your work, you know, your teaching as well. I do want to ask more about Dēmos, but before we get to that, let’s learn more about you. I know you’re currently in Brooklyn, New York, but you grew up in Miami, is that right?

David Perrin:

Yes. So North Miami Beach, to be specific. But I have a kind of a very roundabout story.

My parents are both from Jamaica. I wasn’t actually even born in Florida, but that’s where I spent most of my time. So born in Texas, moved to North Miami Beach, where I think I did maybe, I don’t know, preschool to maybe the top of first grade. From there, moved to Michigan, spent a couple of years in Michigan, moved to North Carolina for a couple of years after that; each stop, like, averaging about three to four years, landing back in Florida, moving to the panhandle, going to the high school in the panhandle, going to college down in Fort Lauderdale. I spent some time in New York and all that. That mixture. And then finally moving to Brooklyn, where I’m at now. So that’s just a little bit of that journey.

My background as far as a creative kind of started in first grade, drawing dinosaurs and things. I was really involved with Jurassic Park and stuff. Then kind of moved on to Dragon Ball Z, anime, all that stuff. In high school, when I made it back where I made it to the panhandle, I went to a collegiate high school where I was basically taking collegiate classes with college students. There I was able to kind of dig in on artwork in a very specific way, right? So I’m doing live paintings and live drawings with models and sculpting, taking guitar lessons and all these things, kind of almost making up for some of these moves, right? I moved around a lot, so I wasn’t able to really hone in on the artistic side of me until I had a couple of years at this collegiate high school where I was able to kind of lean in, more specifically.

Graphic design really doesn’t start to take, I guess, even a role until I moved to Fort Lauderdale for college, where I’m studying accounting, of all things. And I was kind of doing that in the background. I was a part of a fraternity. I’m making flyers, diving in photoshop a little bit, but not that much. And then eventually after college, I worked in nonprofit worked on the nonprofit side in accounting for a little bit. I told my parents straight up after college because they’re Jamaican. So they’re like, “hey, you got to be a doctor, lawyer, business…something.” Like, you got to make it make sense type of thing. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I told them after a couple of years of doing the accounting thing, I just said “the arts.” I was like, I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I’m going to be in the arts. And so I think around the time of maybe my second year of working in accounting, my sisters were getting ready to go to SCAD. They had made the jump, right? So they went to UCF down in Orlando, and then they wanted to go to SCAD. And they kind of propelled me. I’m like, well, they get to go to art school. I’m the bigger brother. I’m like, I want to go to art school too.

So I start doing some research. SVA is high on that list. I decide kind of then and there, I’m moving out of state. I’m going to New York. I create this portfolio, like, to this day, it amazes me because, like I said, I don’t have the most artistic background. Like, I’m drawing, I’m dabbling, doing little things here and there. But yeah, I cobbled together this portfolio for them of these sketches here and there, and some of these Photoshop files and things that I made along the years, and they accepted me.

And so, yeah, right after the acceptance, a buddy of mine was heading up to New York. His parents were moving up there. I moved up there with him, and I started taking night classes, continuing it at the School of Visual Arts. So by day, I found an accounting job on the nonprofit side. Again, by night I’m at SBA taking classes and things to try to make ends meet. But also with this battery in my back of “I need to make it,” they were very upfront with me when I got to SVA. They were like, “hey, you have a cap. You have a financial cap, and so you have a limit as to how much government support you’re going to get.” I think I had my back up against the wall kind of going in, and so I felt like really, really had to make it. But I also knew that from early on that I wanted to get into social justice work or work that’s community based. The commercial thing really wasn’t clicking for me, even in my early inceptions of learning about graphic design and typography and all the things a lot to think about.

But that was kind of like the early beginnings of design for me and school and everything. Fast forward and I eventually make my way to Dēmos, where I’m working on all these issues pertaining to racial justice, voting rights, I’m blanking on climate change, all these different buckets of work, and then eventually make my way to Ford. That’s the long…that’s the abridged version, but yeah, here we are.

Maurice Cherry:

So I saw, you know, and that you kind of — I guess, I don’t know, maybe skipped over this a little bit — but we can talk about it. I mean, you freelanced a bit in 2015 and 2016. And then after that you were working — this is before Dēmos — you were working at AMC Networks as their lead graphic designer. How was that experience? Because this is before you sort of went into the nonprofit space with Dēmos and now Ford. What was it like at AMC?

David Perrin:

Early beginnings was cool. I get to work for a big brand, right, and I finally get brand recognition. Brand recognition is such a big thing in the design community. It’s really like who you work for. If you don’t work for a big brand or something, it’s like your social capital is really low. You know what I mean? So I felt I got to kind of finally step into that a bit. And so, yeah, early stages of that job was really cool. But things started to kind of turn for me around, I think, like 2016, a little before 2016, just seeing how the politics kind of permeated through the workspace.

Early start’s great, met a lot of great folks, learned a lot. Working with a big organization of that size being able to kind of dabble in between different channels and meet people from different teams and things. It’s a full on learning experience. But like I said, toward the end, I had to make a change for my own moral benefit.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I figured when you said “it was cool”…that sounded a little bit loaded. I was like, okay. I think sometimes you have those experiences where you hope it’s going to be one way and then they’re kind of just throwing everything but the kitchen sink at you, especially if it’s at a place like you said, that has that name recognition.

I can say this now because I don’t work there anymore, but back when I worked at Fog Creek Software, which later became Glitch, Glitch was sort of known, I think in the 2018 to 2020 space, as being like this really progressive software company that’s sort of doing these things. But internally? Whoooo! I mean, I had several different titles. I even had personal slights with management. And then I became management and then they didn’t want to train me as a manager. There was like a lot of stuff that happened. I mean, I don’t want to go too much into it, but I mean, also, I’m not a big fan of really trashing places where I used to work. I mean, it’s in the past, like move past it, but I know what you mean because sometimes that name recognition does mean a lot. I mean, it’s something that I think now people are even finding out, especially if they’ve been laid off in the past year from a company that used to have better reputation. Yes, I’m talking about Twitter. They might be finding it a little difficult, I would say probably in the market to maybe get placed somewhere because that name now has I mean, despite the work that they might have done there, the platform is almost in the dirt at this point. So, I don’t know.

It’s a tricky thing, I think, for designers, especially with career mobility and trying to make sure that you’re doing work that is important, that means something to you, but then also unfortunately means something to other people once you get out in the job market again.

David Perrin:

Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:

It sucks. It absolutely sucks. I just want to put that on the record. It sucks.

So after your AMC experience, you start at Dēmos. How did you find out about them? I mean, I’m sure you probably knew about it just in terms of general consciousness, but that’s a big shift from something like AMC to nonprofit.

David Perrin:

I think at some point, like I said, 2016, it’s like I made a pledge to myself, right? I was just like trying to manifest it was before I even knew what social justice meant. Organizing. My view of that space was still tied to places like the NAACP. I did the NAACP Youth Council growing up. And so I’m thinking, “man, I can’t get a job in this. Like a design job.”

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah.

David Perrin:

My view is just so small, and so I’m applying around. I’m on these job boards. I applied to Dēmos twice, right? They took a while to get back to me. I think just because of internal processes and things like that manifest. I manifested it, it happened, and I ended up there. Everything else in between, I have no idea. So I really thank my lucky stars on that one. Trying to listen to a kid like me in my pitch to get into the space because, yeah, none of my work really reflected that. I’m coming off of entertainment, right? So how does this translate into that type of thing? So happy that they took a shot on me.

Maurice Cherry:

And, I mean, it sounds like it really paid off just for you in terms of solidifying yourself in this particular realm, because now you’re at The Ford Foundation. So clearly your experience at Dēmos must have been pretty transformative.

David Perrin:

Me being the lead, the only designer on the team, I got to experiment. Shout out to my director at the time. She really let me spread my wings on what was possible kind of under the organization. We just got a new president. We just redesigned the website. I kind of used that as, like, a proxy to pull new fonts and new colors into the new body of work. I used that kind of like the template to create what our reports would look like moving forward and what art might look like on the site. I kind of just hit the ground running. Folks just let me know they saw one collage. They were like, “oh, this really resonates. Let’s do this again.” And it was just kind of like rinse, wash, and repeat. And I felt like a lot of the stories that we were telling, the organizations that we were uplifting, the communities that we were talking about, really internally, for me, really embodied the work that I wanted to be doing. So I was really appreciative for just having so much floor to experiment, just really build up this tool of collaging and talking about the work in a way that I feel kind of brings people to the table.

Dēmos can be wonky at times in how they put out their reports, right? They crank out these lengthy 10-page, 15-page reports and things. But, yeah, you want to bring folks into the room and bring it to the table and everything. So I felt I was able to do that with what was them and just rich copy. I mean, we’re talking about really good research that’s done, so things based, in fact, organizations based in reality. And so, yeah, it just kind of gave me a firm leg to stand on. But I did at times miss kind of the allure of an AMC or a bigger brand, right? I feel like I’m working on all these things for an organization that maybe didn’t have the biggest digital footprint out in the space, in the nonprofit space, in the organizing space, think tank space, they are pillars. But outside of that, it’s kind of like (sighs). But love the work, though, nonetheless.

Maurice Cherry:

And a lot of your design work has this basis in social issues, which it sounds like is definitely something that’s really important to you. You mentioned 2016 being sort of this nexus point for you. Why do we need more designers in the social justice space?

David Perrin:

Well, because of the work. The work is we are talking about communities that are on the margins, right? We need folks that represent those communities in this space because I think the work presents itself very differently. You know what I mean? And so, yeah, when you’re not attached to these communities, I think you’re detached in a way. And yeah, I feel like these opportunities should be given to the folks that, again, are from these spaces, that are speaking to these spaces.

Sometimes that’s often not the case. Some of these jobs are low paying. I’m also going to advocate for more pay for nonprofit designers. I’m also going to ask for more of a leadership track or a track to leadership in the design space on the nonprofit side. Yeah, designers are kind of left out these conversations, right? And we’re such a big and pivotal part of the work and how it’s represented outside of the organization and into these spaces. Using Dēmos as an example, we’re making work to put in the hands of policymakers. So like, it’s transformative, right? You’ve got the right policy into the right policymakers hands. I mean, you know, government is slow, but you just don’t know what can happen putting these things in the right hands and stuff. So really important work across the board.

I do want to see more BIPOC designers like instance in the space and also being able to maintain a life in this space. I don’t think it’s temporary, right? Like, we love this work just as much as everybody else. We definitely should have more of a space to live a sustainable life, to create this work over time, you know what I mean? I should be able to retire, working on the nonprofit side, that type of thing. And everybody else should too. Making a huge push for that, for the grant makers, the foundations, policymakers, whatever, for them to really create that budget line item when you’re creating those grants, like, really try to build out more of a creative team. I’m advocating for designers, but more creatives that exist in the space. There’s a lot of people that want to do a lot of great work again, [they] deserve to make a living.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. And to your point, they deserve to retire too.

David Perrin:

Absolutely. 1000%. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

I had Cheryl Miller back on the show for episode 500. And I remember…I think we might have said it in the interview, but we definitely talked about it afterwards about how there’s no retirement plan for designers. And I was like, well, I kind of get what she was saying, but I think in the grand scheme of, like, if you’re a designer today, unless you work for, I don’t know, maybe like a big tech company or something like that, you kind of end up going from job to job. Like, the life and career of a designer is not as structured as, say, a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, or even something more blue collar, like an accountant or something like that, where you could be somewhere for X number of years. I mean, I think just in our lifetime job security, to be somewhere for four or five years is admirable. Whereas my mom was at the same job from like ’74 to 2016. It was an easy thing. And she worked in STEM, she worked in biology. But we were talking about how there’s no retirement plan for designers, which really got me to thinking, what would it look like to retire? Would I just have to keep working and doing gigs until I’m dead? Or what does that look like? Which is morbid, but a reality. Especially like…I’m in my 40s, so it’s a reality.

David Perrin:

Yeah. These are the things that I’m also thinking about, right? Longevity in design, resilience in design. And yeah, I want to figure out what the answer to that is sooner than later. It’s not a magical thing. It’s a process that should also be, again, rewarded with stability at the end of the day, just like everybody else.

Maurice Cherry:

Absolutely. What keeps you motivated and inspired with your work?

David Perrin:

I mentioned the Master’s program earlier. I really want to teach. I really want to teach BIPOC students what this world looks like, the possibilities of a designer. Try to, again, just build a bigger, broader community of future thinkers. And so, yeah, I’m really just, primarily, I want to do this for this next generation coming about. I feel like my design journey? Happenstance, right? I mean, a lot of work, right? A lot of grinding, all these things. But, man, I would have loved to have even this book — “The Black Experience in Design” — I would have loved to have this at 16 or like an earlier age. Who knows what life would have looked like for me if I had just a couple more years? Just being able to get a better grasp of what design is, the possibilities. That’s what keeps me up at night and wanting to really get to that space and just social justice in general.

2020, 2016, like the pandemic, like these inflection points, it really shook up democracy in a way to where you could, you know, scratching your head. Like, what does democracy even mean? What does liberation even mean in this country, specifically and abroad? Yeah. And what does that look like from a design standpoint? What are we going to do to kind of help maintain the steady rhythm of just organizing and getting people together. These are the things that I think about is what does the future look like for this space? How do we contribute to it? How do we keep it fresh? How do we keep feeding it and keeping it energizing and inclusive and bringing more people to the table and bringing them in? That’s why I’m calling for more nonprofit designers to come into this space and share their expertise from all different points of life, because we need it. There’s a lot of noise out there, politically and everything. And yeah, we definitely need the support.

Maurice Cherry:

Do you have, like, a dream project that you’d love to do one day? It could either be through The Ford Foundation, it could be a personal project…anything like that.

David Perrin:

Yeah. So through this medium of collage, I want to do murals. I see a lot of vector art murals, painted graffiti, all these things. I think of…I think his name is, like, JR. Artist. When I first came to New York, he had a lot of just big murals, right. With his collage work and everything. And so, yeah, we have a piece at The Ford Foundation. So that’s been a dream of mine, is like yeah, to be able to do a big collage piece on, you know, one of these walls in the area. So I’m constantly driving around and being like, “man, like, a mural would look really good here.” That type of thing. Also just more editorial work in general. I’d love to see my work in [The New York] Times or The Atlantic, that type of thing. So I’m kind of moving and grooving about. Yeah, I want to be able to kind of be on everybody’s radar and be able to tell those stories for those publications and murals and things like that.

Maurice Cherry:

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? Do you think it’ll be doing that kind of work?

David Perrin:

Absolutely. Yeah. I want to have a couple more of these Amadou books under my belt. We do want to make this a series. Yeah. Some murals and eventually, like, teaching. Like I said, I want to be at a school, ushering in that new generation of thinkers, communicators, and mentorship. I really want to give this stuff back to my community in a way that feels impactful and meaningful, and I want folks to come back around and ask me questions. I want to be the design elder. I’m putting that on myself, that type of thing. Anything I can do to just build my community up in the ways that I think are going to be positive moving forward in the realms of design, artwork, that sort of thing.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to sort of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work and everything? Where can they find that online?

David Perrin:

So I am on Instagram under my artist’s name, @dpicting, right? So my name is David Perrin. So DP, right? So D-P-I-C-T-I-N-G. So using my first initials. And then I-C-T-I-N-G. So that’s @dpicting on Instagram. I’m online at dpictingstudio.com. Also dpicting.com on the website. Yeah, I’m working on want to get an exhibition out there of my artwork. I’m working on After Effects as well, trying to create more moving collages and things like that. So that’s a slow and steady process. So that’s going to be coming. So show coming soon. Yeah, you can find all the updates and things on Instagram, on LinkedIn as well. I’m on LinkedIn. David Perrin. That’s where I’m at. Right.

Maurice Cherry:

Sounds good. David Perrin, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. First of all, I just love the work that you’re doing at The Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation already does so much great in the world, so much philanthropic work. And when I was doing my research and I was like, “wait a minute there’s a brother that’s leading all this.” That’s when I was like, I had to get you on the show to sort of talk about that. I mean, I think it was one thing, of course, it was great for you to talk about your history with working and doing design with social justice issues, but also kind of, I think, giving folks the opportunity to see that you can switch career paths and stay true to yourself. Certainly you sort of started out, like you said, doing this accounting work, and then you kind of wanted to work at a design place that had a big name. And then 2016 happened, which I think was a nexus point for a lot of people, not just designers, but a point to have them think, “well, how can my work make more of an impact?” And now you’ve done this work for Dēmos, you’re doing this work for The Ford Foundation. I hope that others will hear your story and realize that this is something that they can do. Nonprofit is a space that they can go into and that they can often find success. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

David Perrin:

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, super overjoyed. Thank you.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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Ethan Baldwin

It’s no surprise that designers like working on projects that allow them to fully display their creativity and talent. For Ethan Baldwin, those projects just happen to revolve around what might not be considered that exciting by others — banking and finance. That outlook is one of the foundations behind Slash and Structure, his new brand strategy and visual identity design firm.

Ethan spoke about his passion for “making boring stuff less boring”, and how it’s been important for him to balance his artistic skills with other aspects of a career in design. We also talked about working in-house vs. being an external vendor, and Ethan shared how his education at Oberlin and his work in the agency and financial world in NYC helped shape his perspective as a designer and an entrepreneur. For Ethan, being involved in the creative process is about more than just making something look good — it’s about providing value, trusting the process, and staying connected to your craft!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Ethan Baldwin:

I’m Ethan Baldwin. I am a creative director based in Brooklyn, New York. And this year, I have started a new brand strategy and visual identity design firm called Slash and Structure. So, say hi to me. I am a founder, entrepreneur, creative director, lover of all things beautiful and design forward and eye catching. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

How has the year been going for you so far since starting the business?

Ethan Baldwin:

It’s been pretty good. I always tell people that the only downside has been kind of like the demons inside of my own head and trying not to get into my way. But within all the situations where I’m able to push forward and really focus on what I’m trying to accomplish, it’s all been pretty successful. It’s been such a joy to work on crafting something that I’m building from the ground up. And I’ve been working with some amazing clients so far. I’ve got to work on some very cool projects and it’s nice just being able to, what I say, raise this baby from birth. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

Is there anything that you want to try to accomplish before the year ends? I mean, this could be business-wise or not.

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say from a very business specific standpoint, I want to basically up my monthly run rate. We don’t need to necessarily talk about specifics of numbers, but I do think having that kind of like, business financial goal in mind is incredibly important. And really I want to have an established four to six clients by the end of the year that I can see that longevity with. Like really kind of like…I will say the partnership feels like a family. It’s all still very new. We’ve got some great relationships. So it’s all about building those connections outside of the work itself.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you know, since you talked about your studio Slash and Structure, let’s dive more into that. What was behind the idea of you starting the studio?

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. So I worked as a visual designer for many years now. I got my start in advertising and then after freelancing for quite some time, I mainly started working on the client side of things, working either for design teams or designing for marketing teams. Also a little bit of product work, but after my last job, that job fell through. Got let go. Kind of like that post-pandemic…I’ll say, like, that post-pandemic bubble kind of burst. I realized I didn’t want to be in an office anymore unless it was the group of people that I really felt that I could build a team or family with. There was a product that I was super passionate about, but really I just wanted to create something that really tapped into my design methodology, like the way I run projects and the way I see the world.

And given all the places that I’ve worked in the past, I knew there was something that I can tap into based on the way I do think that could be of service to people, and I could be of better service doing it from my own firm versus trying to do it and change things from inside another corporation. So that really was the impetus to start the company. And the name Slash and Structure. Slash has always been in kind of like my artistic forward usernames for many years now. And it always kind of stemmed from…I do this, I do design programming, I do print, digital. And there is always that push that I got from people, like, “you really need to niche down. You really need to focus on serving one particular audience.”

And it was a lot of figuring out how I can do that. Again, you want a good business to serve a specific audience. But just being me and having this brain that wants to pick up on so many things, my experience got me to where I am by being able to pick up a whole bunch of different skill sets and talents and interests. So having that slash in there, being able to see a whole bunch of different either types of mediums or types of industries to really get people to focus on what their goals are and what their content is and how I can then put visuals on top of it, I guess that kind of became the throughline for all of my work. It’s really about helping people figure out what it is that they want to do or build or sell, and I can apply a number of different mediums or modalities to help them achieve that.

Maurice Cherry:

So you’re bringing basically to their project…slash structure?

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. (laughs) In my business, the slashing is going through whatever they have so far. So usually when I’m working with the client, it usually starts like, “I want a website,” or “I want a motion graphics piece,” or “I want this set of collateral.” I’m like, “okay, that’s all well and good, but we need to figure out who you are, what you’re about, what you’re trying to say.” And so that’s another play on the slash part. We take all of the stuff that you’ve kind of set up for yourself. We slash it all apart. We look at what all the individual pieces are and we figure out how to put them back together in a way that makes sense for you and for your audience or for your desired customers.

And then the structure comes after. The structure is building those systems in place, giving you the platform that you need and then giving you a way forward that’s scalable. Because at the end of the day, while I want to keep all of these partnerships, my biggest thing is I want to build solutions — design based solutions — that clients will use on their own if they need to update their content on the website. I make sure that the sites that I build have a robust CMS so that they can update their own content, they can change their own pictures. Because it’s always those little things that clients tend to get so wrapped up about. And I’m like, that’s the least important part of all of this process. That’s the least important part of your growth.

I want to make those things as easy as possible. Clients can focus on building their business and talking about themselves and really figuring out who they are and getting that out there.

Maurice Cherry:

How’s business been going so far?

Ethan Baldwin:

Pretty good. A bit of a, I would say…there’s like that standard slowdown in the summer. And to be perfectly honest, a lot of that was mainly coming from me. I needed to take a break physically and emotionally. As I was talking about, I had a nice little vacation this summer, went away for three weeks, and now I’m kind of getting back into the swing of things. And it’s weird because as much as I needed that break, I have missed that energy of bringing in new clients and working on multiple design projects simultaneously. It’s an ebb and flow with the business. So this fall is going to be picking back up pretty…I would say pretty steadily pretty soon.

Maurice Cherry:

Are there specific types of clients that you prefer to work with in a particular area, like healthcare or business or something like that?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say I like to focus on, in terms of client size, I like to focus on solo entrepreneurs or like very small teams that are just building, or larger companies that have a bunch of systems in place that they’re looking to improve upon. And I mainly focus on SaaS platforms, technology, anything that usually tends to have a whole bunch of data points, whether that be tons of customers or tons of product segments. But anything that tends to have a lot of data points that need to get organized and that usually falls inside of the tech and digital product space.

Maurice Cherry:

And I’d imagine that probably draws on your background too. I mean, prior to you starting Slash and Sructure, you were at Clear, which you mentioned earlier. So it’s kind of feeding into that in a way.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. The majority of my experience really has been kind of working with a product or a platform that at face value can seem like very boring or everyday and figuring out ways to make it appear more luxury or make it more accessible to a wider audience, or just provide some clarity for people to understand it better. And in all of those places that I’ve worked with my clients now, it really goes to what I always call “what is your flag in the sand.” What is the one thing that you’re trying to say? What is the one person that you’re trying to reach? And finding that flag in the sand is hard because we naturally want to get as many audience — people in our audience as possible — reach as many people as possible, make everybody happy. These [are] things that I struggle with as well. The more that we find the specific person that we’re trying to reach and improve and serve, the better reach we end up getting, because the connections that we create in our business end up making more sense. We find the people that fit what we do.

Maurice Cherry:

What are some dream projects that you’d love to do through the studio?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would love to do a platform rebrand for some boring banking product or something in, like, I’m thinking of…these aren’t boring breaking products, but these new products that are coming out in the financial space like Chime or Rocket Money — these things that are finding, I would say, contemporary ways to do very boring tasks like bookkeeping. What is a way that those products can be packaged and presented in a way that gets people more excited about doing their monthly bookkeeping keeping or doing their taxes and not having this weird aversion to having to do all the boring stuff? I’m always trying to find ways to make boring stuff less boring because that’s how I have to function as a designer. If there’s a tedium, it is always hard for me to get started. So always looking for those types of projects — there’s that end. It sounds real weird, but I love doing annual reports; again, anything where I get to play with large amounts of data, making charts and making graphs and making those things move and ways that we can provide more understanding through visuals. Those are things that I really get behind.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you know, I’d also say the other thing about even if you’re in the market for doing not necessarily annual reports, but things like that, you can really find a way to become a part of a company’s design budget or marketing budget. Back when I had my studio and I was really doing a lot of design work with clients, my main goal was I wanted to be a line item on the budget, because then that way every year, you know, you’re getting some kind of work as a retainer or something like that. But annual reports, email newsletters, like any sort of thing that you can do continually and build that relationship with them, it ends up being really lucrative for the business. But also it provides you as a creative a lot of stability in what can be a very unstable…I mean, striking out on your own is never easy. You got to find clients, you got to do all the admin work and stuff like that. But having that level of steadiness allows you to then explore other things either through your studio or outside your studio. But you always have that rock to come back to.

Ethan Baldwin:

Exactly. And it’s interesting that you mentioned the retainer model because that’s something newer that I picked up for my business and I’ve discovered in the past year that it really works for me. Part of it is exactly what you mentioned. Kind of like having that stable repeatable income coming in makes it easier to focus on growing the business or growing different projects in or out of the business. But from a client perspective, I like the retainer model because it allows me to grow with a client and really help them see and understand the creative process and specifically the identity creative process. Like getting into brand style guides, going like “this is why this purple shows up in all of these places”…having that ongoing design relationship with someone, you get those aha moments where they are starting to realize that “oh, that’s why you did that” as a creative. And so that’s how I kind of divide up my business.

I have kind of like the brand strategy, brand building side of things which is project-based and those are usually focused with smaller business or solo entrepreneurs that are looking to grow something from scratch. And then I have the retainer model, and those usually go with larger companies that are kind of like “we need someone to do X number of banners” or “do this video.” And what I’ve seen is that through that retainer process, it usually helps clients see we don’t need a lot of the dumb stuff that we ask for. It teaches them how to use more templates. Yes, you have me on a retainer and I will do whatever that you want me to do, but you probably don’t need me to do PowerPoint graphs all of the time. Once they see everything that’s capable and how things can be templatized and automated, they then start to focus on more of the big ticket projects that are going to give them more ROI. And that works for me because then I get to work on more interesting things.

Maurice Cherry:

I don’t want to say it’s a magic trick, but it’s kind of a magic trick in a way because sometimes companies don’t really know what they need creatively until they have a creative on staff. And then, as you’re able — that’s even in a freelance capacity — but then once you’re doing that work for them, they’re like “oh wait a minute, you can do this” and “we could do this” and “maybe we don’t need to do this.” They’re going to trust you also because you’ve built that relationship over time and it’s less of kind of this one off sort of thing that you have to try to win them over about.

Ethan Baldwin:

Exactly. And piggybacking off of that. One thing that I’ve noticed on going off on my own and working as a vendor for clients versus working in house. There’s this weird, I don’t know, mindset that when you’re working as an outside expert, there’s a heightened level of understanding or at the very least, respect for what it is that you do. Because for a lot of the things that I’m doing now, they’re the exact same things that I did at places working in house. But because to a certain extent, people are now coming to me to solve very specific problems versus just me being there to just, quote, unquote, “do things,” I’m able to get people to shift their briefs a bit better so they’re improved, or they’re like, “maybe you don’t need to do this. Let’s do this.” There’s more opportunity for rapport, and it’s weirdly because I’m not on their payroll, or I’m a line item, but I’m not on their payroll. It’s weird.

It’s like a mental shift where they feel like they can get more out of having this vendor relationship, like, more value from it. I haven’t been able to figure out what that is, but it’s one of the biggest things I’ve noticed after making this shift.

Maurice Cherry:

Value is good. I mean, never discount that at all.

Now there’s more about your career I want to get into. Of course, you’ve had a very prolific career, and we’ll get into that a bit later. But before we do that, let’s kind of learn more about Ethan. Let’s learn more about you as a person.

You’re based out of Brooklyn currently. Is that where you’re from originally?

Ethan Baldwin:

No, So I’m originally from Washington, DC.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Ethan Baldwin:

And my whole family is from deep “dirty south” Aiken, South Carolina. But I’ve been in New York since I left college in 2006. So I feel like I can officially say that I am a New Yorker now.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay. Now, did you sort of always have this interest in design and everything growing up? Like, was it something that your family cultivated or anything like that?

Ethan Baldwin:

So, strangely enough, my mom is also a visual artist, so she was a photographer for the Smithsonian basically her entire career. She just retired about a year ago, and she’s also a fine art painter, ceramicist, and she does a lot of tapestry work, so she kind of like the idea of having all of these artistic hobbies, I would say, came from her being a multihyphenate, so to speak.

But in terms of a line of study, I actually started as a theater kid. Ever since I was little, I did theater. I did dance. I went to school. I joined the theater program and did that up until halfway through my junior year. And there was just a shift of, like, I’ve always wanted to create things, but I’ve realized I wanted to be more behind the scenes, and I wanted to create either physical things or things that just had a bit more, I would say, staying power that weren’t as ephemeral as a stage performance.

And I always had an interest growing up dance. I always had an interest in dancing, choreography, and my main goal I always wanted to do music videos.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay!

Ethan Baldwin:

That was kind of like the biggest thing that got me into the visual arts and why I jumped into advertising. I’m going to be that person who makes the next Gap commercial. And so that’s when I made that shift in college. And we didn’t have a marketing program at Oberlin, but I wanted to focus on making beautiful images. So my studio art focus was photography, and my senior thesis was a coffee table book called Ego Boost, and it was really just editorial photography for my friends. And the point was, I truly feel that everyone should deserve to feel like a celebrity for at least an hour. So I made this coffee table book, and then we made all these posters with all of my friends who modeled, and we put the posters around the school, and then we made these little collector cards that people could pick up. And then instead of having the thesis show in the museum, which was kind of standard, I had it in the student union and ended up making this huge white party, like Puff Daddy style white party.

And then I built these translucent, lit up walls to house all of my photography. And my friend from the dance group I was in, he had the DJ, and we had a bar. And it was the art world, but in a way that was fun and fit, like the community that I’m from. It had that performance piece to it, but it still focused on photography. It was very hip-hop focused, very focused around dance, but at its core, it was fun. The whole point is that all of this stuff is supposed to be fun.

Being a designer, being a creative, we have these jobs that make no sense. Think about it. But we’re able to tap into something that’s really kind of magical, especially in our clients, because we’re able to make those connections with things that people can’t necessarily verbalize or we can see something out in the world or can hear a piece of music or see watch a movie and have that be the foundation to build a whole bunch of new ideas. And we somehow made that into a job. It’s wild, but that’s what’s fun about it.

Maurice Cherry:

So while you were there, you majored in visual arts, and certainly this sounds like it was a visual art production in some capacity. How was your time there overall?

Ethan Baldwin:

It took me a while to appreciate Oberlin for the school that it was. I mean, it’s a great school, very hippie dippy school, but it’s also a school that has such a rich history, especially when it comes to what they’ve done for marginalized communities, what they’ve done for specifically Black people in America. And it’s also a school known for having this amazing conservatory. So even if you’re not a musically inclined person, you’re always surrounded by music and opera, great dance, theater. It was a great place to be specifically for the arts, considering that it’s not an art school. So, yeah, I fully appreciate being at Oberlin until I made that switch from doing theater and going into visual arts, because that’s where I really found that my creativity aligned with who I was.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Ethan Baldwin:

I tell everyone “everybody should go to Oberlin.” It was a great school.

Maurice Cherry:

So Oberlin kind of pushed you in this other direction then, sounds like.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, I would say Oberlin gave me the space to find that other direction because I didn’t know that I wanted to go into advertising. I can’t even really say that I wanted to go into advertising. I knew I wanted to dance, and I wanted to make videos. Like, when I was a kid in middle school, I would make behind the scenes music videos of the musical cast. So almost like Behind The Music before the High School Musical. I just wanted to do some sort of upbeat music media that, I don’t know, got people moving, got people dancing, and Oberlin gave me the space to figure that out. There wasn’t a marketing program. There’s a studio art program, but it wasn’t like a fine art program that you’d get at an art school or a design school. It really taught us how to find what our voices are, find what it is that we want to do, and then do that successfully.

I got a good amount of fine art training for photography while I was at Oberlin. Shout out to Professor Pipo [Nguyen-Duy]. He was the absolute best. But the biggest thing that it taught me was how to prepare a show, how to work on an outline, how to sell an idea, like how to fund all of the stuff that you’re trying to build. It strangely taught me a lot about the business of being a creative.

Maurice Cherry:

I mean, I think that’s a great thing to get in college, especially because from other people that I’ve talked with on the show that have went into design or they discovered design in college, business wasn’t really an aspect of that. I think there might have been one or two folks that I’ve had on where there was some sort of business component along with their design, but they ended up having to sort of pick up those skills later in the real world. Not in a very sort of, I would say safe — I mean, I think college is a safe environment to learn and to grow, in that aspect — but it sounds like Oberlin really provided that for you, though.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, I would say as part of the senior thesis program, I think they pick it’s like 10 or 15 students. And one of the biggest projects is we do a big trip to New York, and you get kind of, like, fully immersed into the art scene, but really, like, the business of the art scene. So we visited all of these galleries throughout Hell’s Kitchen in Chelsea and met with all of these kind of curators and gallery owners. And it was really to teach us how to learn how to pitch. Like, how do you take whatever your artistic, creative idea is and make it so other people will want to fund it, someone will want to put it up, how to get your own ideas out of your head so that someone else can comprehend them. So we each had to — it was basically like a pitch challenge — we each had to learn how to pitch inside of the environment of an actual New York museum. It was scary as hell, but that was more important in the long run than any kind of fine art training, I would say. And I’m eternally grateful to the arts program at Oberlin for that, because anyone can pick up an artistic skill, a fine arts skill; but if it’s something that you want to make into a career, I always tell people 80% of my job now has nothing to do with me designing.

Maurice Cherry:

So once you graduated, you started working for an agency, working for DDB as a junior art director. Knowing that you had this sort of business skill that you had acquired from Oberlin, how was your time there? Like, what do you remember from that time?

Ethan Baldwin:

DDB was one of the best jobs I ever had, mainly because of the network that I built. The people that I met on that job, I’m still friends with a lot of them to this day. One thing I do want to shout out about that job is I got that job through the MAIP program or the Multicultural Advertising Internship Program. And MAIP is part of the 4A’s Foundation, and they just do amazing work with bringing awareness of the marketing advertising industry to students of color throughout the nation. So I owe a lot to that organization for helping me land that job. I got the internship through that program, and DDB hired me after the internship. And at DDB, I learned a lot about who I was as a creative. It was a very kind of standard house.

I worked on some very cool clients. I got do some storyboards for Diet Pepsi. My favorite project from that time was making a bunch of billboards for Subaru and then getting to see them get put up over the PCH. That was, like, one of the coolest things because something that I created was now 50 feet in the air. But I learned that there is a big difference — and it seems to be more apparent now — there’s a big difference between the design side of things and the art direction side of things. And I don’t necessarily think that there should be.

But I knew after that job, I think I was there…I was there for almost two years after that. I knew I wanted to focus more about how to find my design voice, and that’s why I jumped into this long phase of freelancing. After that, I got a job at the Apple Store working late nights and then would just take different freelance jobs throughout the day. I recommend every creative go through a phase of just picking up freelance projects. If I was to say one thing that everyone should do, it is that the best way to figure out what your design voice or what you love doing is to really just try out a whole bunch of different things.

Maurice Cherry:

I want to go back to what you said about sort of the difference between art direction and visual design that you just mentioned. Can you unpack that a little bit?

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah. It’s funny. One of the things I discovered after doing a bunch of freelancing and then kind of wanting to settle into a full time job, that having been out of the advertising game, so to speak, it was harder to get back into it. Because in most advertising firms, your design function, like your design talent, usually ends up being part of a production team. And your art directors and your copywriters, they’re the ones who are coming up with the ideas for campaigns, print campaigns, motion graphics, commercials. A lot of it kind of started with the ideas of making the commercial or the print ad, but the art director would kind of come up with the visual ideas, but they weren’t necessarily illustrating or drawing or building the site for a multimedia campaign. They were kind of like coming up with the ideas with the copywriter partner and then eventually that would go to production. And there was something about that that I missed.

I want to push the pixels and do some of the illustration, and I don’t really do that now. There are people who are much better illustrators than I am, so I’m obviously going to farm that work out. But there was such a divide between the design and the art director. That’s where the slash originally came from. I have a very close friend of mine that I met at DDB and she said to me, “at this point, you need to decide, do you want to be an art director? Go down like, the art director to creative director to chief creative officer path down an advertising journey, or do you want to be a designer going to being a senior designer, working for a design firm, working for a production house?” And I couldn’t agree with either of those options. There has to be something that has both, because I always knew I wanted to work on the big ideas, but I also wanted to have a hand in how it was crafted. That craft is, again, like the fun part.

And I’ve seen with a lot of kind of people at the director level that it’s very easy to get jaded and you lose sight of the thing that made you want to do all of this. Like pulling out crayons, pulling out markers, getting on a whiteboard or a sketchbook and drawing out ideas or figures or little stick people or landscapes. That connection to the craft is still incredibly important to me, and especially like when working with my clients, I would say that’s one of the things that I offer. I am going to help you work through your ideas, your high level ideas, to build your campaign or build your website or build your next video piece or whatever the project is. But I also want you to trust that I’m going to make something for you with you that is also going to be pretty. It’s going to be beautiful. The content is always more important, but creating something that is beautifully designed and constructed and illustrated is just such a great feeling.

And so I wanted to make sure that that divide of being a creative director and being a designer didn’t really exist for me. I don’t really see the need for that divide. If you have a larger company and you can section out those functions, then great, good on you, but that’s not what I want. For me, I wouldn’t want to be either or. I think having both allows me to serve people better.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t want to have that, I guess you could call it…a restriction in a way. You wanted to be able to do it all.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, and that was kind of the moment where I realized I probably wouldn’t work for an ad agency again. And not necessarily because I didn’t want to, but because it’s like talking with hiring managers. They want to see that you’ve worked on X number of commercials or X number of campaigns. And I was like, “well, I’ve worked on plenty of campaigns and I’ve worked on tons of video pieces, but not necessarily in the context of an ad agency.” In all of the places that I’ve worked, I’ve been able to work on long form video and full website builds and beautiful out of home print work and big event installations. I really just started to love working in house because the idea of that divide was less apparent.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you’ve done a lot of, you know, freelance work. You’ve also worked full time at some pretty prestigious places. You were at Dow Jones for a number of years. You were at PulsePoint. You were at qbeats. Earlier you mentioned being at Clear. We don’t have to go into those particular ones individually unless you want to, but I’d love to know, when you look back at those experiences as a collective, what sort of stands out to you the most? And it can be multiple things too.

Ethan Baldwin:

Yeah, I would say for all of those jobs, my biggest thing is I wanted to do something that would somehow leave a mark. And it doesn’t have to necessarily be my mark, but something that’s going to change the way, whatever place that was thought about how they did business, or they did design or they went into a website build or thought about branding. And if anything, I would say I’ve been able to achieve that throughline in all of those places, Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal…that was a particularly weird but fun and exciting experience because it was one of those places — and this goes back to the idea of in house spots being a bit less restrictive on what your experience is and where you’ve worked. I got hired there. My title was multimedia communications manager. Who knows what that means? And it was within the HR department.

And I remember my interview…one thing that stood out to them was the fact that I told one of my interviewers that I tap dance. And I remember there was at some point where someone asked me to do a shuffle step in an interview and I was like, “I will do this once.”

Maurice Cherry:

Oh no! Noooo….

It was pretty far along.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay….

Ethan Baldwin:

I was like, this is…we’re treading.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, there’s tap dancing metaphorically for an interview and then there’s that…

Ethan Baldwin:

…literal tactic. (laughs)

Yeah. But that job taught me so much again, about crafting what it is I want to be doing and what the things I love doing can be of service for who I’m doing it for, because there was no precedent for my job in that function and inside of the learning and development team, but what I got to work on was building a whole bunch of internal campaigns, and it really actually brought out my love for learning and development in particular and building training programs and building curriculums for other employees.

One of the biggest things there was being able to help start the DJ program or Digital Journalism at Dow Jones. And it was all about bridging the gap between kind of print journalism and digital journalism. And so we did multiple versions of this week long training program in New York, Princeton, London and Hong Kong where we talked about the business as a whole. But we also got to do very specific trainings. Like this is how you can use your iPhone to shoot footage on the fly for a smaller piece. Or here are the rules around photo licensing so you don’t get sued. It got into very specific trainings and that was just so fun for me because we immediately got to see the results from our efforts. And I knew from that that part of what I want to do as a designer, as a creative is help teach people how to do things better or how to make a process easier.

This goes to working for Clear, and one of the big things there was revamping the website and eventually moving to the Webflow platform. I will talk about Webflow all day long. I absolutely love that. But one thing that was really important to me was getting everybody, like all of the stakeholders, on some sort of system that they could start focusing on their own content and inserting their own content where it needed to go versus always being dependent on a developer or on me and the design team within marketing to do something like make a new blog entry or insert a new airport location.

You don’t need a team of designers to do something like that. So my goal was to build a system in place and then teach people to kind of do those content updates for themselves. And it makes the working relationship so much easier. And there’s always that aha moment where I’m like, “oh, no, you updated that web page. You updated a web page. You just built a new web page.” Of course, me and my team, we do all the stuff on the back end to make those templates and whatnot. But you now see that it wasn’t about how beautifully is it designed, or “am I going to break something if I enter in this bit of tech?” No.

As designers, one of our biggest goals is to create solutions that help people do things better. If you’re designing a chair, you want that chair to be beautiful, but it also needs to sit someone’s butt. Design without function is just art — which has its place — but function in, again, serving someone and making their life easier is always at the forefront of what I do now.

Maurice Cherry:

Is there anything different about how you do business now as opposed to when you first started freelancing? Because you mentioned you were kind of working at the Apple store, you were also freelancing, so I would imagine even just kind of trying to juggle work and freelance work was a bit hard. But outside of that, what do you do different now that you did when you first started?

Ethan Baldwin:

Well, when I first started freelancing, it was a little bit different because I mainly worked through placement agencies, so it was like people would often find work for me, and I would work on those projects on whatever basis that they have. And now I pretty much do all of finding clients through word of mouth or through my own lead generation. So that’s one kind of logistical difference. And at some point, I may jump back to using a placement agency. I have absolutely nothing against them. It’s just not something that I’m doing right now. But in terms of knowing more about myself and how I operate as a creative, I would say the biggest change is I will not work on a project if I know I just absolutely don’t want to do it. It’s one of the biggest things I tell younger designers.

I had one job — we don’t need to go into who it is — but it was a job that I was incredibly excited about. It was a big name and great for a resume. But working there? No one’s happy and none of the products are particularly interesting. And at its core, it was just a job and the pay wasn’t that great. It really just was a bad stepping stone, I would say. But all of that is to say that when you’re starting out, there’s always this pain in your chest about making sure you have enough money, making sure your rent gets paid, and making sure you have enough coming in so you don’t have to just keep focusing on work. But I’ve learned now that if the work itself is not either fulfilling and enough to make it worthwhile to work on, or they’re just paying, you absolutely extravagantly, finding a job just to find a job as a creative usually is not worth it.

As a creative, you’re not going to perform your best if you don’t want to be there. Your clients are not going to be served in the way they should be served because you don’t want to be there. And it’s just going to be miserable for everyone involved. And at all of this, at the end of it, you probably won’t even get a good portfolio of it because you’re not exactly proud of anything you’ve done. So I would say it’s better for me to sit and work on some back-end stuff than just jumping into a job just because the job has presented itself.

Maurice Cherry:

Outside of that, how would you say you’ve just grown creatively? Like, how have you grown as a creative over the years?

Ethan Baldwin:

I’ve definitely become more efficient. I would say I just developed a lot of processes to help get to an end product faster. And I would say I’ve also learned to give myself a lot more grace and knowledge that not everything is always going to be perfect. I can definitely say that I am a very good designer, but I am not the best. And I’m not going to be the right choice for every single client that comes my way. And being able to say, “oh, I’m not the right fit for you, let me recommend somebody else,” or “I’m just not the right fit for this project” because secretly I just don’t want to do that. It’s not going to give me anything outside of the paycheck. And being okay with that, that took a lot of growth.

It’s okay to say no. And I’ve learned that we as creatives, we can have more stock in ourselves. We think about other service industries, think about mechanics, you think about electricians, and they have this very specific skill set. They’re able to do this thing amazingly well. And for whatever reason, I’ve noticed that as creatives, we tend to not think about ourselves in that same way, because the thing that we do isn’t necessarily as tangible, but the results that we provide to people are. And so we focus on, like, “I built this website, but that website increased conversions by X” or “this social media campaign increased this company’s Instagram followers by Y.” There are tangible results, tangible business results to the beautiful, weird idea connections that we make as creatives. And I think we need to start giving ourselves more stock in ourselves because of that.

That’s another thing that I’ve learned.

Maurice Cherry:

Who are some of the people that have really kind of helped you out in terms of mentorship or anything like that over the years throughout your career?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say one of the biggest people I follow, and this is everyone kind of [inaudible 49:01] follows this person, but Chris Do of The Futur has always been like one of those people that…if there’s a conference, I may or may not go, but if he’s there, I likely will go, because he has a very no nonsense, matter of fact approach to not just being a creative, but really how to be a creative business, how to run a business and how to get through the day of running a business in a way that isn’t confusing. It kind of just is what it is. And he keeps it kind of, like, “follow what I say or don’t.” There’s a level of confidence there that I find so admirable because that is also, again, that’s eventually the level of confidence that I want to be at. That’s the level of confidence that I want to give to all of my clients. Everyone should feel that good about what they do and what they provide to the people that they do services for.

And then I would say a more personal mentor is actually one of my old — technically technically, she’s still a current client — but one of my old bosses at PulsePoint, Maria Simeone, we’ve had such a weird working relationship, and I think it’s just a matter of fact, we work really well together. But she’s very much a marketing brain from the strategy and the business side of things.

And I learned so much about marketing from that standpoint, from her, because that’s not how I approach problem solving at all, but just watching her work while we’re at PulsePoint and then watching her grow within the company and even grow further. Even after I left, she always kind of looked back to see what I was doing, would always give me really good advice. She’s always been open to critique me on our work. And she also has a very similar no nonsense way of, I would say, gathering me together, which I appreciate. I’m very much a tough love type of person because it shows me that you care and that you’re invested, but you’re also not going to let me fall completely on my face.

Maurice Cherry:

So what does success look like for you now? I mean, you’ve got your studio. You’re out on your own. What does success look like at this stage in your career?

Ethan Baldwin:

For me, success is being able to do what I want, when I want. And that’s really to say if there’s a day that I’m not feeling well or I just need a break and I just need to go walk in a forest — I really love camping — but to be able to just go do that and make sure I have rapport built with my clients to say that I’m not going to be working or to have enough of the work done and a system in place that I’m not needed 100% of the time or being able to travel as I see fit and work as I travel…I try to keep a very, I would say, like, lean tech profile so I can really do what I do from anywhere. Like, I have just like one small MacBook Air and then I have one larger Pro for video work, but I mainly just work on laptops because some days I want to go work in the middle of Central Park and so I can do that. That’s what success looks like for me. Because for some people, success might be a number amount, like a number of clients or revenue goal, and I have those goals from a business perspective. But success really looks like being able to take a vacation and not have to sit there and tally up the number of vacation days I have left or not feel guilty about taking a sick day.

It’s always wild to me. I would always tell my team this back when I worked in an office: “if you’re sick, go be sick and get better.” I don’t need you trying to…you’re not showing that you’re any more of, like, a badass because you’re working while you’re dripping snot all over your face. Get out of the office, go home, go rest. But there’s this weird…we’re in this working society where every one of those things are tallied and counted for and often used against you. And that’s something I just cannot stand for personally. And I’m sure that will get me in a lot of trouble with a lot of places, but I’d much rather see people do what they need to do to take care of themselves so that when they do work, they are working at 100% of their capacity and 100% of their joy. Again, if you don’t want to be here, don’t be here. That’s how I run my business.

If it’s something I don’t want to do, I’m not going to do it. It’s not going to make me happy, it’s not going to make a client happy. No one’s going to be happy in this. So, yeah, success is being able to do what I want, when I want.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. To that end, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What sort of work do you want to be doing?

Ethan Baldwin:

I would say in five years I want to have some big national tech brands under my belt. I want to work on some internal rebrands. I’m thinking of something like…I recently got to meet someone who worked on Chase Sapphire and working on this luxury sub brand inside of this big financial institution. And that would be a dream project for me, taking all of these kind of boring things like credit cards and points and really building this almost lifestylish brand around that very boring thing. So more of those within the next five years. But really it’s just scaling what I do now to just hit maybe a couple more clients each month. But I actually really enjoy how lean things are and being able to work with freelancers as needed. But as of right now, I don’t really see growing employees, too many employees inside of the business. I like the flexibility of building a network, so to speak, versus building another office.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more about you, about your work, about the studio? Where can they find that online?

Ethan Baldwin:

You can find my personal previous work at ethanbaldwin.com. You can find and sign up for an engagement with the business at slashandstructure.com. That’s no spaces, no underscores, just slashandstructure.com. And there you’ll learn a bit more about how the business functions and some of the clients that I’ve been working with. And you can also find me on Instagram at instagram.com/slashandstructure. Really, if that double slash doesn’t work as well when you’re saying it out loud. (laughs) But yeah, instagram.com/slashandstructure.

Maurice Cherry:

All right, sounds good. Ethan Baldwin, I definitely want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I like that you are someone right now that’s sort of striking out on their own, especially at this time when there’s so much happening in tech and design. I think also there’s just kind of this instability with working at companies at the moment. It feels like a really good time for a lot of people to kind of strike out and you certainly not only have the professional experience with the places you’ve worked, but you’ve freelanced before as well. So I’m really interested to see kind of where Slash instructor goes in the future. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Ethan Baldwin:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a blast.

Sponsored by Brevity & Wit

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Anjuan Simmons

If you want to know what it takes to have a long career in this industry, then this conversation with Anjuan Simmons is just what you need to hear. As a staff engineering manager at GitHub, Anjuan has over 25 years of combined experience across consulting, startups, and big tech.

We talked about his work at GitHub, and he gave some insight into their AI tool Copilot, as well as the GitHub Sponsors program. Anjuan also spoke with me about the value of representation, and how it led to him attending UT Austin for electrical engineering, getting his MBA, and eventually becoming an engineer with one of the biggest tech companies in the world. He also dropped a ton of great advice on ways to have more of an impact in shaping your professional journey.

Anjuan’s intentional approach and personal story is extremely inspiring, and I hope it will help you recognize that you have the power to chart your own course in life!

Interview Transcript

Maurice Cherry:

All right, so tell us who you are and what you do.

Anjuan Simmons:

I’m Anjuan Simmons. And I am a staff engineering manager at GitHub.

Maurice Cherry:

So how has this year been going for you? Any highlights?

Anjuan Simmons:

Yes, I think one of the biggest highlights of this year is that my oldest son — and I have three children — and my oldest went to college. So we launched our first baby into university, and we literally, a few days ago, dropped him off at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is an incoming freshman. And we moved him into his dorm and we gave him hugs and we tried to not cry. And we got him installed in Jester West in his dorm, and we drove home without him. And it was a very fulfilling experience. It was a little bittersweet, but we’re super proud of him. And that has been a big highlight because a lot of this year was getting ready for that moment.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. Congratulations.

Anjuan Simmons:

Thank you.

Maurice Cherry:

I love how you say installed, like he was software. (laughs)

Anjuan Simmons:

(laughs) I am a tech person.

Maurice Cherry:

So outside of that, do you have any sort of goals or accomplishments that you want to try to do before the year ends?

Anjuan Simmons:

Yes, I think one of the biggest goals that we had as a family; I mentioned that I have three children. My wife and I, we’ve been married for 21 years, and we do, as you might expect, a lot of family things, right? And so we wanted to have a really reflective and relaxing and connecting summer because, again, my oldest son was going to college. My middle child, a son, is starting his senior year. They just started a few weeks ago. Then my daughter is a sophomore, right? So that kind of gives you an idea of their ages.

And one of the things that we did this summer and we went back and forth on, like, do we want to do something? Do we want something elaborate? Right? Do we want to go to Lagos, Nigeria, or go to Amsterdam or whatever? Then we…no, no. Let’s just kind of tone it back. And so we did just a very simple family vacation where we went to Washington, D.C. for a few days, and then we took this Amtrak Express train from Washington, D.C. to New York City. And we spent time there because none of my kids had been to New York City. And we did all the touristy things. We went to the Statue of Liberty. We went to the Empire State Building. We did all these things. And it was just a nice family time. And so that was a major thing that we did this summer. And that may sound a little bit boring, but it was a delightful little small vacation. My middle son went to a summer program at UT because he’s interested in business like his older brother. And my daughter is on the dance team at high school, so she did a lot of things with her dance troupe. And so this was very much a family summer. So I would say that on a personal level, that was the biggest highlight of this year.

I would say that the other big highlight is that at work I promoted a Black woman and an Indian woman at work. And that was something that is truly gratifying. Not just because of their ethnicity — they were ready to go. They very much, very well deserved the promo. But I’ve promoted a lot of people in my career, Maurice, and just as a person of color, it was really great to be someone who could come alongside them as a manager, help them honestly overcome some of the imposter syndrome that I detected in them and then do the work to make sure that the organization could identify and respect their accomplishments and what they were bringing to the team that, hey, these people are ready for promo. They’re already doing their work in to get that done. And so out of all the many people I promote over my long career, and I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, that was very gratifying.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. I mean, from the family end, I think a nice relaxing family vacation is definitely a great accomplishment, especially after the past two or three years with the pandemic. Like, even just being able to get out and do things tourist wise is great. So that’s good. And also you got to spend some time with your son before he went off to college. That’s a memory that I’m sure he’ll take with him. So that’s great.

Anjuan Simmons:

Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. And since you mentioned work, let’s pivot to talking about what you’re doing at GitHub, where you work as a staff engineering manager. Tell me more about that.

Anjuan Simmons:

Sure. So the team that I’m responsible for supporting is called GitHub Sponsors. And GitHub Sponsors is a program that started, I mean, really a few years ago, that is meant to allow open source maintainers to receive financial support. Right. So open source maintainers can receive financial support through GitHub Sponsors. And the reason that GitHub came up with this program is because GitHub one loves open source. But also we know that so many of the programs and the apps and the websites and the applications that run the world run on open source. There are so many dependencies that people have of these open source projects that make these projects that make these applications work.

And often the people who maintain those projects, they do it for free. They do it because they love the code or they wanted to solve a problem. And often they work an eight or nine hours at their day job and then they labor at night working on open source maintaining these projects that really transform the world and we want it. Or GitHub wanted to make the open source ecosystem sustainable so that these people who are really doing free labor can find reward for their work, but also ideally do it full time. And through GitHub Sponsors, I’ve heard stories of open source maintainers who were able to quit their day job and do their work full time, or perhaps they didn’t quit, but they were able to bring on a partner to help make the project better. And so that’s the team that I’m responsible for, the seven engineers on that team, I work very closely with the product manager, and so that is what I do at GitHub.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Is that a new program, or is that something GitHub has had for a while?

Anjuan Simmons:

We had it for a while. We’ve had it for about three years. It’s been in beta for most of its time, right, the time that it’s been available. But we recently took a GA in April of this year.

Maurice Cherry:

Nice. Very nice. What does your typical day look like? I’m imagining you’re probably working remotely, or are you going into an office? What does your typical day look like?

Anjuan Simmons:

GitHub is fully remote. It’s been fully remote for a long time, way before the pandemic. And so my day starts with me waking up, walking maybe 20 paces into my office, and then I am at work. And so it’s funny, I tell people that I worked at Help Scout before GitHub, and I’ve had remote work as the way that I work for several years now. And I tell people it would take a lot for me to have to work in an office. And I know one of my colleagues said that they basically put, like, $100,000 figure on working from home, right? That if you had an opportunity that you wanted to take, it would have to be, like, 100K over what you’re making now if it required you to go into an office.

And so, yeah, I wake up, I walk into my office. I put some beans into my coffee machine. I make my coffee. I get my water because I got to stay hydrated. And then I log on to my GitHub-issued laptop. And then the first thing that I do, which is I think not very unusual, is that I check Slack and see what happened while I was sleeping. Where are the things that are going on with the GitHub? What’s happening with my team? I also check email, and one of the things that I think people may not know is that GitHub uses GitHub. We use GitHub for our daily work, and so we do what’s called dogfooding, right? We use the tools that we build every single day. And so one of the things that I do with checking Slack and checking my GitHub Gmail account is going to GitHub and looking at all of the notifications about all the issues that my team is working on. Or I’ll check on the pull requests — we call them PRs — or I’ll go into Siscussions. And so I use GitHub every day, because at GitHub, we use what we build for our daily work.

Maurice Cherry:

Back when I worked at Glitch, it was very much the same way. Like any sort of project that we did, it was adamant that we used Glitch for the project. It was never anything like, “oh, let’s think about some third party whatever.” Anything we did had to sort of work within Glitch. So I’m certainly familiar with that concept of dogfooding. I’m curious though, because of that. And you mentioned before, this is one thing through GitHub Sponsors where you’re supporting other open source projects and things like that. Developers worldwide use GitHub for their work. What kind of problems internally is GitHub focused on solving?

Anjuan Simmons:

Yes, dogfooding lets you use the stuff that you build because you’ll see things, right, that customers are running. You know, I’ve gone in and said, “hey, the button on this form seems a little bit off center” and yeah, I can open up an issue and then send it to the team that owns that page and then they can fix. So, you know, a lot of the reason that we use GitHub at GitHub is to really make GitHub better, right? So that’s one thing, that’s one problem that we’re working on, because while GitHub’s been around for a long time, it’s not a perfect product, we know that, but we’re dedicated to making it a little more perfect every single day, right? One of the other big challenges that we’re working on, or a big problem, is what we call developer experience. The developer experience is what developers go through while they’re building code. And so we want to make the development experience one where you feel that the tools that you use don’t get into your way and that you’re able to do the best work of your day, every day based on the tool set, right? So a lot of that is based on how we design GitHub, and GitHub’s always changing. If you use GitHub, you know about GitHub, like I said, pull requests, you know about issues, you know about the other parts of GitHub. And we’re very much invested in their entire teams dedicated to those functions that I just mentioned. But one of the biggest things about the developer experience is Copilot.

And I’m sure we’re going to talk about this quite a bit, but Copilot is our AI tool that is your artificial intelligence peer programmer. It’s like having the best engineer that you ever heard of working with you to help your code become better. So Copilot is a key part of what we’re doing in AI at GitHub. It’s transformational. I think that we’re doing some amazing work. Again, we’ll probably talk about that some more later. One of the other tools that I think is super cool is called Code Spaces, which is basically your developer environment in the cloud where you can log in. And instead of having to do what I did when I started developing 25 years ago and installing all these tools and installed my IDE and my dependencies installed my database, install all these helper applications.

You just log in to basically browse, experience, it’s all there. You can start coding. And so we want to remove obstacles between the idea and the implementation and Copilot and code spaces and just GitHub itself are really some of the things that we’re working on to make that trip.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, yeah, let’s actually go into talking about AI. I know I mentioned to you before we started recording that it’s been sort of a running theme on this show for the past two years now. Like everyone that we’ve had on in some capacity, I ask them about how is this cutting edge tech, AI, machine learning, generative AI, et cetera. How is that sort of affecting the work that you do or what does it mean for the work that you do? So how do you use this sort of cutting edge tech? At GitHub? You mentioned Copilot, but are there other sorts of programs or initiatives that you all are working on?

Anjuan Simmons:

So, to go back to my team, right, GitHub Sponsors. So GitHub is a Ruby on Rails application, right? So at the end of the day, that is what runs GitHub. GitHub, for the most part runs on Ruby on Rails. And so we do a few things, right? We very much contribute to new versions of Ruby on Rails, right? We also upgrade our code, right? So we have entire teams that are kitted to that. So I would say Ruby on Rails as tools are really big at GitHub. We also use other tool sets like React, right, which is a popular front-end framework for building programs. I mean, there’s a whole host of programs and languages that we use at GitHub. We also obviously host a lot of the code for open source frameworks, right? Like React and Vue and Laravel.

And so GitHub not only uses a lot of cutting edge technology, we are also the home for a lot of the cutting edge technology that are used today. And so we take that responsibility very seriously. So we always want to make sure that we’re available, that we’re secure and so working on those functions, right? So it’s not just having a place or having a repository for your code UT. We also want to make sure that we’re highly available, we’re highly secure, that all those things are by default. And I want to spend a little bit of time putting maybe a pin on that. No tool is useful if you can’t get to it, and no tool is useful if it will expose your sensitive information. And so security and availability are like super core concerns at GitHub. And I want to make sure that it’s clear that we spend a massive amount of tools, a massive amount of people, and a massive amount of just thought space, all those subjects.

And so that’s really something that is really important to make sure that we understand. We also spend a lot of time on privacy because, again, a lot of personal information resides on GitHub. And so we do a lot of work around that too. So it’s more than just code. Code is obviously a core concept, but it’s all those things around code that we spend a lot of time thinking about and solving for.

Maurice Cherry:

I’m so glad you mentioned availability, because like you said, GitHub hosts a lot of code for other projects. And I’ve seen on the web, like, when GitHub goes down, that people freak out like other services because you never really know, you know, as a user, what’s connected behind the scenes. So if there’s a GitHub outage for some reason, then all of a sudden that’s affecting other websites and other tools that you use. It sort of is all like chained together in some way. So I’m glad you mentioned that about availability. I’m just remembering from my time being at Glitch how whenever the tool went down, it was always a very frantic time at the company because it’s like, “oh, no, the tool’s down. We’re hearing about it from people. How do we fix it? How do we get things back up?” And that’s I feel like especially now, because so many things are connected under just a handful of services like GitHub, AWS, et cetera.

When things happen there, it’s a ripple effect throughout the web about other things that get affected. So I’m glad you mentioned availability as being a big thing that you work.

Anjuan Simmons:

You know, GitHub, I mean, again, it’s a great platform. It’s been around for a long time, but it is a tool that runs on servers, right? There are data centers, that where GitHub is hosted. There are cloud providers. I mean, it is like any other system made by humans, and that means that you sometimes run into errors. And so while we work at this, like any other service, things happen. There could be a variety of reasons why something goes down. And one of the cool things about GitHub is that if there is an incident, right, where, hey, things are running slow, the system is not available. Again, we want this to be a very rare occurrence, but hey, it happens.

I can hop into a channel on Slack and just follow along what’s happening. We very much value transparency. And one of the super cool things about GitHub is that those incidents, again, we want them to be rare, are observable to anyone who’s a Hubber, right? We call ourselves Hubbers if you work at GitHub. And so that kind of transparency is a powerful feature of the company and really speaks to how we do want to embrace the open source model. And again, there are limits, to be honest, and there are reasonable limits, but for the most part, everything should be transparent, everything should be visible. And that’s really an open source principle that we hold very dearly.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you mentioned Copilot, and Copilot is like this tool that is used to sort of, I guess, help you code. Like it helps with suggestions, with code and things like that. Is that something that’s used internally or is that more of just like a customer facing product?

Anjuan Simmons:

Oh, absolutely. It’s an internal tool to give maybe a couple of examples of Copilot. Copilot integrates with popular IDEs like VS Code. And so once you have Copilot installed, you can say “hey Copilot, create a component” or “hey Copilot, add test.” So you can literally with your voice work with Copilot or you can add a comment to your code and describe what you’re doing. And then Copilot will put in. I mean, often, if not the scaffolding for what you’re trying to do, it’ll actually give you a solution, right? And so what Copilot is meant to do is to, like I said before, remove a lot of those friction points in the experience that developers go through. And instead of having to hop on Stack Overflow or Google a solution, all that’s built into the IDE, the development environment that you’re using.

But it’s smarter than Stack Overflow, right? It’s smarter than just doing random Google searches. It understands context and it’s able to understand, based on what you’re typing, what you want to do. So again, the analogy that I tend to use is imagine that you’re sitting next to the smallest developer that you’ve ever known and then they’re pair programming with you, right? You have your hand on your keyboard, you have your hand on the mouse, but they’re saying, “oh, try this.” Or it’s almost like that super smart pet programmer could immediately just paste code snippets into your IDE to help you along. Now, again, it’s not going to replace the human, right? It is very much meant to be something that instead of replacing human developers, it’s meant to be something that works with human developers.

And that’s the power of Copilot. I know that a lot of people are wondering, will AI replace developers? Will AI make software engineering a non viable career option for people? And I think that’s not happening at all. And I mean, that may happen, but it won’t be while I’m alive. Copilot and I think AI in general is really meant to be what can humans and AI do together and not what can AI replace what humans are doing right now?

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, the tool is called Copilot, not autopilot. So clearly….

Anjuan Simmons:

Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:

It’s meant to be used sort of in conjunction with what humans are doing. I mean, the AI is not necessarily running itself in terms of prompts and things like that. You still have to have a person that’s sort of checking that. So it sounds like what Copilot kind of helps you do is just evolve your development in terms of, I would imagine productivity, like helping you out with maybe code snippets or things like that. I mean, I’m not a developer. I have done some front-end development. Like back in the day, you don’t remember everything, so you do end up looking stuff up. And that’s not to say that a great developer never has to look those things up, but at least what it sounds like Copilot does is it helps put those resources a bit closer to you to make that happen.

Anjuan Simmons:

Yeah. I mean, the analogy that I use, this used to be a revolutionary thing, but like spell check and grammar check, right? We all use word processors, whether it’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, where if you mistype a word, it’ll put a little red squiggly line under the word, or if you do something that’s maybe like where the grammar is off, it’ll highlight that. You can click it, it’ll give you a suggestion. Oh, the spelling, try this spelling or try this grammatical construction. And that hasn’t replaced editors. That hasn’t replaced writers, right? People still have jobs as editors, as copywriters, all that stuff, but it just makes everyone’s work a little bit more correct when it comes to spelling or to grammar. So it doesn’t replace the need for people to actually write stuff, but it does harmonize and make everyone’s writing a little bit better. And I think that just like spell check and grammar check have done for writing and we’ve used these for years and they haven’t destroyed entire careers. Copilot as an AI prep programming tool, it’s just that it makes your work a little bit faster.

It removes really a lot of the friction of you having to go over to a web browser and go to Stack Overflow or to Google “how do I do this region” and “how do I do this? What’s the format for this again?” And so by doing that, you really increase the speed of development by removing friction. And I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about Copilot.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah, I mean, it’s just like I’m glad you mentioned that spell check kind of analogy because when ChatGPT really came about and a lot of educators are really concerned about whether or not, oh, is this going to replace students writing and things like that. The language model is trained off of a lot of different data, but just because it’s trained off that data doesn’t mean that you’re getting a perfect output. I’ve used ChatGPT before and yeah, it gives you information. Whether or not that information is wholly correct is up to the human to discern. Now you can take it just like on its face, like, yes, this is exactly what it is because AI told me that’s the case. But you don’t know if that’s actually cognizant code that you’re actually using. If you’re using like Copilot or something like that, you still have to really sort of do that human check to make sure this is something that actually works. Just because the AI gave that to you doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s something that might work for the particular project that you’re on or anything like that.

So I see what you’re saying about that human element is never going to go away because just because the AI can give you the information that you need, you still need to check to make sure it works for your particular situation.

Anjuan Simmons:

Absolutely.

Maurice Cherry:

Now let’s kind know pivot here a little bit. We’ve talked a lot about your work at GitHub, so let’s learn more about you. Of course, you’ve mentioned your family, which we’ll talk about a bit later, but tell me more about you. I know you’re in Houston right now. Is that where you’re from originally?

Anjuan Simmons:

No, I am from a small city called Wichita Falls, Texas; not Wichita, Kansas, which people often confuse the two. And that’s where I grew up. That’s where I went to middle school. That’s where I went to high school. After graduating from UT Austin, I moved to Houston in 1997, and I’ve been in Houston ever since. That’s again, over like 25 years. So I am a Houstonian now. So I’m a Houstonian by tenure, not by birth.

Maurice Cherry:

That’s like me with Atlanta. Like, you mentioned that when we started recording, you’re like, “you’ve been in Atlanta for a long time?” I’m like, “yeah, I’ve been here since ’99.” I came for college. And I’m like, yeah, Atlantan by tenure, certainly not by birth. And I’ve seen how the city has changed so much since I first came here. So I get exactly what you’re saying.

Let’s go back to your time at Austin. You you majored in electrical engineering. Were you first interested in tech once you got to UT Austin? Or did you kind of have this sort of want to work in know prior to that?

Anjuan Simmons:

I’m going to tell you a story about why representation matters. So when I was in junior high, there was a show called Star Trek I’m sure most people have heard about. I find that most people like Star Wars now for these days, like whenever I mentioned science fiction, they typically say, Star Wars, that’s Star Trek. But that’s another podcast.

I’ve been a nerd all my life. I was into anime way before it was cool. I’m talking like 1995 Fist of the North Star, Akira anime. I’m OG Japanimation right here. And so I was into sci-fi. I read Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings way before the movie. So that was me. I played Dungeons & Dragons. I was that Black kid with the weird people in the corner playing Dungeons & Dragons. So that was my vibe circa like, 1985, just to be honest with you.

But Star Trek, you had the initial series of like, Kirk and Spock and all that. But then around my junior high school years, there was Star Trek: The Next Generation, and you had Captain Picard, who was obviously the captain of the Enterprise, but LeVar Burton played Georgdi LaForge. And the first season, he wasn’t in this position. But he became the chief engineer of the Enterprise for basically seasons two through seven. And so he was the key person in charge of all the technology on the Enterprise during this time. And so I’m in junior high then, going to high school while the seasons are going, and this wasn’t the only reason, but seeing LeVar Burton, a Black man, play a Black engineer in charge of this amazing technology was inspirational, right? Representation matters. And that very much was, like, part of the impetus for me seeing myself as an engineer.

And I was always good at Math and science. I was that kid that loved trigonometry, I loved calculus. I loved physics. And so that was what really helped guide my path to UT. And taking electrical engineering with all the circuit analysis and the math, like differential equations and vector calculus, that helped me see that that was possible. And so I became an engineer. And while I never served on the starship, I’ve loved working in technology for my entire career, and that was a big part of my story. LeVar Burton and seeing a Black man running tech in sci-fi.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you ended up going to UT Austin kind of, and we sort of touched on this a little bit before, like, right around those prime A Different World years. I think A Different World ended in, what, ninety…’92?

Anjuan Simmons:

I think it ended…that sounds about right, yeah.

Maurice Cherry:

And you started at UT Austin in, what, ’93?

Anjuan Simmons:

I started in 1993. You got it right.

Maurice Cherry:

Yeah. Tell me what your time was like there.

Anjuan Simmons:

Yeah, I mean, just to kind of put another finer point on that, I grew up with Dwayne, Whitley Gilbert, the whole gang on A Different World. And again, representation matters. I mean, I was a nerd, but I was also a lover of Black culture, right? I was a blerd — I think we call ourselves blerds now: Black nerds. And yeah, I mean, again, another area of representation was seeing these amazing Black people who were casted on the show about Black kids in college. And that really helped me further solidify that I wanted to be a Black kid in college and have that experience.

And so, yeah, I got to UT in 1993. I actually did a summer program called Preview. This was a program designed to give Black students who, for a variety of reasons, would sometimes struggle with the leap from high school to college. In many ways, they may have been the first people in their families to go to college. And there’s all these things about UT. I mean, I always tell people the year that my mother was born, in 1947, UT did not admit Black students. Right? So she was born into a world where Black students could not go to UT, right? So this is not ancient history. This is, like, within living memory, where Black people could not go to UT. And so Preview was meant to be a six week program. So before classes started freshman year, in that, like, September, we got to UT in July. We lived in dorms, we had events, we learned about college life, and that was an amazing program. And I will always owe a greater gratitude to the people who came up with Preview.

So after Preview, yeah, I started my time going to classes. I had a very hard degree, so I spent a lot of time studying. But UT is a huge campus. We’re talking 50,000 students, but when Black people are like, maybe roughly six or seven percent of 50,000, that’s a lot of Black people. And so I was able to find Black people who I could fellowship with. There’s a lounge in Jester West, which is like the kind of the main dorm on campus called the Malcolm X Lounge, right? Which was called the Malcolm X Lounge back then; I think still called that now. And that was a place where Black people went. We went there to play dominoes, play spades. If you were willing to risk your life, we would play Taboo, which can be a very…I’ve seen some people almost get into a funeral for Taboo, but I very much was able to marry my academic experience and grow as a college student with the very rigorous courses that I took as an engineering student. I was able to marry that with the Black experience. I mean, I went to a Black church that I found in Austin called St. James, and so my active experience at UT was really quite special, quite amazing, because I think we were at a time where that generation of Black students who saw A Different World in high school came together, and it was just really amazing.

Now, I will say that this was also the time when affirmative action was being challenged in Texas, right? There was something called the Hopwood decision, and I was the person who, before that decision was handed down, would protest. I mean, the newspaper of UT is called the Daily Texan, and there are letters that I wrote. You can write letters to the editor. Just anyone can write them if you’re a student. I wrote letters that you could find online to the Daily Texan about affirmative action and about Hopwood and why that decision was really wrong and would cause harm. And I took part in marches and protests about it.

So my college career also involved not only growing as a Black person and enjoying the Black experience, it was my first experience engaging in Black protest and really advocating for Black people as a Black person. So that was all wrapped around my experience at UT.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. I mean, it sounds like your whole time there was really transformative.

Anjuan Simmons:

Absolutely. Totally.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, after you graduated, you ended up working for Accenture, and you were at Accenture for a long time. You were there for a little over ten years. Tell me about that, because I think for people graduating from college now, working any place for ten years after that almost feels like a fairy tale. What was your time like there? And what made you want to go to Accenture?

Anjuan Simmons:

I should also mention that my wife, my now wife was going to — if she hears this — I met my wife at UT, right? That’s a big part of our story. We did not get married in college because we were young, but that came later. But to answer your question, so when I was in my junior year, my senior year at UT, you’re going into the job search field. And one of the things that I learned about myself at UT is I love technology. I love the ones and zeros, I love code, I love software and all those things are true. But I also really like people. Maurice, I’m not sure we’re talking about my public speaking career; so I’ve spoken on stages all around the world. In fact, I’m going to be in Copenhagen, Denmark next week to give a talk, right? So I very much engage hundreds of people on stage. I am not bothered by that at all. But I’m a classical introvert. I am a classical introvert. Most people don’t believe me because I’m a manager. I live with people all day long, I speak in front of huge crowds, but I’m a very big introvert. So I went to UT as that kind of shy, introverted kid. But being involved in what I just described, the Black experience, that really drew me UT of my shell. And I realized that I really like people.

I felt that one of the biggest things that I like about people is helping people. And so when I was looking at jobs to do, there were like the regular software companies, the people that made circuits like Intel and AMD, and then there were software companies that I was looking at and I got offers from those places. But one of the things I loved about Anderson Consulting — which was the name of Accenture before the name change happened — one thing I liked about the consulting model is that you could dive deep into the technology, but you could also dive into the people as well. Because Anderson Consulting very much was hiring engineers, not just business majors, but engineers to join their technology practice because they felt that you really get beauty when you can marry technology and people.

And so my transformation from this shy, introverted kid when I first went to UT, becoming someone who really likes people very much, informed my desire to go into consulting and to go to Accenture. And then one of the things that I really learned to talk a little bit about my early years there was all around consulting is a great way to learn a lot of things very quickly. I learned in the first two years of Accenture things I probably would have taken me three or four years to learn somewhere else because you’re donating these huge projects, you’re learning how to work with clients, right? People who are paying you to be there to communicate the value of the project, to guide the project. And that was really my first few years of working at Accenture.

I learned how to be a better software developer. I learned how to work on teams, I learned how to be managed by a manager. And that was really very much the early part of my Accenture experience. I was in the Houston office, and there was a very vibrant Black community of Black people who worked at Accenture Anderson at that time. And that also furthered the connections that I made with my fellow Black people in tech. And some of the people I went to UT with went to Accenture as well. And so my experience at Accenture was almost in many ways, like the next version of what I went through in college, right. Deepening my technology bonafides and also deepening my identity as a Black person and being in the Black culture, right? All those things really work together, and I was there for a long time.

I mean, let me pause here and say, if you want to know more, that’s kind of the first, let’s say zero to five years of my time at Accenture.

Maurice Cherry:

What were the other five like?

Anjuan Simmons:

That first five years was learning to be really to be an employee at a large company. I eventually became a manager where I was not being managed; I was managing teams. And so that’s a whole ‘nother level of responsibility. One thing I should mention, and I mentioned that I met my wife at UT, is that I got married around year five. I guess around when I made a manager, I became a manager. That point. My wife and I, who had honestly lost touch a little bit after college, we reconnected, we got married. And so it was learning how to be married, which is a thing, to be honest. I’m still learning how to be married 21 years in, Maurice.

I was learning how to be married, learning how to be a manager, and shepherding people’s careers, learning how to be a technologist. And so that last five year period was all that. But the reason that my time in Accenture lasted that long is that I was learning, and I was learning new things about myself all the time. I was learning new things about technology because the technology field is always changing. I was growing, but I was also traveling a lot. And so my new wife, who we eventually became a wife and my first born child, and then we got to child two. My wife was saying, “you travel too much.” When they’re babies, it’s not like that big of a deal. But when they begin to know who you are and they begin to miss you when you’re gone when Daddy has to go away Monday morning to fly wherever and then come back Friday night, I began to see that, wow, this travel thing is really becoming tough on my very young family. And so I began to think about what to do, right? Should I leave Accenture, go work for maybe a company where I don’t have to travel as much or do I do something else?

And so my wife and I talked about it and we made a family decision that I would leave Accenture and get my MBA. So I went to get my MBA. So that was like a two year period that let me get off the road, it let me also get a credential that would help my career. Those were a lot of the bigger decisions about why I left Accenture at around a kind of ten year mark and earned my business degree.

Maurice Cherry:

So I’m glad that you mentioned that sort of you leading up to getting your MBA, it sounds like each of these experiences just kind of like built upon each other. So it wasn’t oh, I felt like I was maybe edged out at work, so I needed to get more education. Everything is kind of built upon each other. In terms of your career up to this point, I’m curious because you sort of alluded to this a bit beforehand. Was this your plan to kind of structure your career in this way?

Anjuan Simmons:

I wish I could say it was a plan, Maurice, but no, I fell into…I mean, there are these things in this part of my life, right, growing as a technologist, growing as a Black person, and yes, very much going from UT to Accenture to my MBA were growing those things as well. Because a big part, like I said about Accenture, is you marry technology and people. And I would also say when you marry technology and business, that’s powerful, right? So my undergraduate degree in double E [electrical engineering], right, that kind of engineering undergrad was kind of getting the technology part in place and working for a technology practice in a big company. My technology credentials are very strong. I also wanted my business side to get stronger as well. So the MBA was a very nice kind of pair to that.

And so these tracks of technology and business and Blackness, I would say, they all kind of built along very well, but it wasn’t planned. I mean, I was, I think, a very smart person married to a smart person, kind of trying to figure this stuff out. But I have to admit, luck played a factor, right? I was able to stay at Accenture when we had a few rounds of layoffs during my time there. The economy took a nosedive, right? I joined in 1997. A lot of people — if you’re old enough to remember 2000, 2001 — was kind of the dotcom crash. I survived that, kept working. And so luck went my way and I was able to have these themes progress by avoiding a lot of the disruptions that a lot of people go through. I mean, I was thinking through this. Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, yes, I was a smart person, I think, making smart decisions, and I was lucky to be able to, like I said before, be married to a smart person. My wife is brilliant, who was my partner in navigating this part of my life. But I want the people here in this to know one of the biggest things that are so important in your career and in life is luck.

And I think that you can’t plan luck, you can’t schedule luck to appear, but what you can do is do your best to be prepared for when luck appears. And I think that I was very much, if anything, always prepared for luck to enter the chat in my life and then use that luck as the stepping stone to the next opportunity.

Maurice Cherry:

And now, since then, you’ve been pretty much working nonstop. Like looking at your LinkedIn, you’ve mostly worked as a technical program manager, in sort of the pre-GitHub years. What lessons did you learn from those experiences that prepared you for what you do now?

Anjuan Simmons:

Oh, so many experiences and so many lessons. What I would say is that, and I should say I did go back to consulting briefly at Deloitte after my business degree because I graduated in 2008. And the people again, if you want to remember, there was a big recession in 2008 — right? — that lasted through 2009. And so I got a couple of offers when I was studying, when I was applying for jobs, when my business school time was coming to an end. But the best offers, to be honest, came from big consulting companies because I had Accenture on my resume. And so I went back briefly, but soon after that I left the kind of big company model and I’ve worked at startups. So look at my resume. You see these names that weren’t nearly as recognizable as Accenture and Deloitte. You see Assemble. You see Allcenter Software. They’re all technology companies, but they were really startups.

And what I wanted to do and again, this was not entirely planned, but what I wanted to do is experience the startup life because I had friends and colleagues who went to startups, like way before I did, and I wanted to see what could I do in an environment where I didn’t have massive resources, right? When you work for Deloitte and Accenture, you have billions of dollars backing the company. You have a massive number of resources, but when you go to a startup, it’s scrappy, right? Everyone wears a lot of hats. I’m having to lead the technology team, but I’m also having to understand the business. I need to support the product, I need to support HR, I need to support recruiting. And these functions existed at the bigger companies, but they were way smaller at these startup companies.

And so that helped me to understand and really put my business degree to use because I was never going to be able to peer deeply into recruiting at Accenture, but I could at a startup. I could know the person running that function, I could really understand their day to day. I could understand how my technology function really interacted with their non-technology function and see how we can harmonize those things together. And so I would say that the lessons that I learned were all around, really, how do these functions interact with each other. And I also learned how to lead teams better, right? Because at Accenture, and the way as a manager, like, there’s massive resources. When I became a manager at Accenture, I went to something called New Manager School in Chicago, right? So they flew people to Chicago from Houston — really all over the world — to learn how to be a manager, right? I didn’t have that at the startup. It was like, “you better…here’s your log on, good luck.” And so I had to learn how to be a manager at that scale.

And I think that that deepened what I bring to management today, and that is people over process, people over technology. If the people are right, everything else really doesn’t really matter, right? Because if you treat the people right, any technology, any process will do. However, if you don’t treat people right, then no technology or process will save you. And that is a core part of my management style. And it was really birthed in that sort of experience where I had to deeply integrate with this team. Because at Accenture, I’m leading teams, but I’m working on projects that have a beginning and an end. So I have a team for maybe four months and my next team might be six months and my next team might be a month. And then we’re changing technology stacks, we’re changing the business problems that we’re solving, right? It’s all changing. But at these startups, I’m with the same group of people, the same stack, the same product, the same customer base for a very long period of time. And so those lessons were all around how to be really a people manager.

And I think that I’ve gotten feedback from multiple people — people who’ve worked for me, people who are peers, people who I reported to — that my people management skills are very strong and those skills were very much honed and sharpened in the startup world. So that’s a big lesson that I learned during that time. One of the other lessons that I learned is you got to manage up, right? I mean, when I started my career, I was thinking, “well, if the work’s good, then people go and notice, right?” I thought the work speaks for itself. No, work doesn’t have a mouth. It doesn’t speak.

You have to speak for the work. You have to make sure whether that’s in your status report, that’s in how you communicate to your supervisors, and that’s how you really take advantage of opportunities to be in front of leadership. You have to market the work. And so marketing the work as an engineering leader was a huge lesson that we can go into more, maybe later, but it’s very important that technology leaders are proficient in technology, in process, in people management. But you have to market the work, because if you don’t do that, the work is going to be invisible. And invisible work does not get rewarded; invisible work does not get promoted.

Maurice Cherry:

Wow. That, I think, is something that’s super important for people to know, I think, in general. And I mean, one…that’s true, closed mouths don’t get fed, right? But also, just in terms of how much is out there, in terms of social media and user-generated content and things like that, you might hope that the work will speak for you, but it can easily, very easily get drowned out by other things. So I like that you’re saying that, especially for engineering, because I’ve been a creative on marketing teams at very tech heavy software companies, like tech startups and stuff. And yeah, getting the engineers to talk about any of the work they do is like pulling teeth. They don’t want to talk about it. They feel like, “oh, it’s enough that I just did it.” And it’s like, “no, we’re trying to build stories around the work that you’re doing so people know that you did it.”

Otherwise, people — I mean, that’s not to say that people have a negative opinion of tech; I think certainly people’s opinions around technology and the tech industry have kind of changed a lot over the years — but certainly being able to speak about the work that you’ve done and to promote it is something that is super important. That’s for developers, designers, whoever.

Anjuan Simmons:

Exactly. And I really think that goes back to what we talked about with my experience going to UT as an introvert, this shy quiet kid, and learning what you just said. Closed mouths don’t get fed, no matter how good looking you may be as a, you know, the ladies like the Hollywood dude who has game, right? I mean, it’s just little things like that. And so, yes, all those things kind of continue through UT, through Accenture, through business school…you got to market yourself. So many opportunities that I’ve received is because I did interesting things in public all along this timeline that we’ve been walking. Twitter came on, Black Twitter came on, right? And by doing interesting things on Twitter, interesting things on social media, I got speaking opportunities, I’ve gotten job offers through just being interesting in public, right? Marketing yourself.

And I think a lot of engineers — I mean, very much this has been my experience working with a lot of engineers — we very much skew introvert. We very much skew quiet, usually very intelligent, but also very quiet. And you’re exactly right, pulling things out of introverted engineers. And again, I don’t want to stereotype, but it’s an archetype that I’ve seen, and that for whatever makes an engineer engineer, often what comes with it is just this kind of maybe quiet nature. And so I realized that that would hold me back, that in my career, being quiet would not redound to my benefit. And I needed to learn to speak and present not only my work, but the work of my team. And that, honestly, has been a big accelerator to my career in technology.

Maurice Cherry:

What still keeps you interested in tech? I mean, you’ve been doing this now, like you said, for over 25 years. What still drives you?

Anjuan Simmons:

It’s a blessing and a curse. And that is technology is always changing. We didn’t have Copilot, we didn’t have Kubernetes, we didn’t have all these tools. When I started my career over 25 years ago, the tools that I had back then would be considered like rocks and sticks today, for the most part, right? It’s very primitive. I mean, not all of them, right? I mean, a lot of those languages still exist, but there’s so much I don’t know. There’re like so much…just sophistication, I guess, is what I’m looking for, in the tools that we have now.

And so that ever-changing landscape where you have to stay on your toes, the cutting edge, the state-of-the-art is always moving. That can be stressful because you have to keep upgrading yourself. You have to really re-invent yourself at least every two to three years in software development because things change that quickly. And so that can be stressful. It’s so compelling because there’s so many cool things that would be hard to do now using the tools I had when I started my career. I mean, spinning up a development environment with a click; all the tools that we have right now, they’re like higher order languages now that really didn’t exist now. I mean, I learned COBOL and C and all these things early in my career, and those languages are still used today, but there are so many more human-friendly languages like Python and other languages that, I mean, Ruby is a very human-compatible language, right? And so there’s so much power in the accessibility to get into technology now that I’ve seen grow over my time.

And so that evolution and watching it, that keeps me interested. That’s one big thing; it’s just the ever evolving nature of technology. And to be honest, I like people, right? I love helping people find capabilities and potential that they may not have found if I didn’t work with them, right? And I’ve seen in people that I’ve managed over the years, I’ve helped to help debug imposter syndrome. I’ve helped to support, I’ve helped to mentor, I’ve helped to sponsor people and then be able to be that force for what I hope is good is also compelling, right? So those are two things that have kept me intact and they add a bit of a bounce to my stuff every day when I walk into my office.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, I mentioned before how people’s kind of opinion about tech has sort of changed over the years. For developers that are listening,I’m pretty sure they might want to know the answer to this question. But what opportunities do you see out there now for developers? Are there certain skills they need to be learning to stay competitive? I feel like you’re like the sage on top of the mountain. From your perspective, where do you see the opportunities for devs now?

Anjuan Simmons:

The opportunity for devs is like…it has, I don’t think ever been stronger because of a couple of things. One, there are so many engineers that I’ve worked for and work with, right? So as people who were like VPs, or people who reported to me, who did not have the traditional computer science background, engineering background, the same background that I came from, but who were so talented, so brilliant, some of the smartest people who became my right hand as tech leads did not study computer science, right? I’ve had people who were speech pathologists, I’ve had people who worked in retail, worked in bookstores, but they went to a boot camp, they learned how to code, they were great at it, and they became developers. So I think one of the biggest opportunities — and I said it’s the people of color who I think are the primary audience for this podcast and the people who have very much been instrumental in my career — because we often don’t have either the funds or the opportunities to go get computer science degrees from the MITs and the Stanfords of the world. And I’m here to tell you that that’s not really required. You can even be like a self-taught programmer.

I’ve even had people who taught themselves how to code, right? So I would say that the barrier to entry to get in software development has never been lower. There are all kinds of opportunities for people to come into this field and there are people like me who are waiting for you, who are here to welcome you, who are here to support you if you’re willing to come in. And so I would say that these tools are so powerful and the things you need to know to be successful in software development oriented technology in general have never been more available, have never been as powerful. So I would say that’s one thing that you should know. The opportunity is so strong, I hope people feel that they can do it. Because if you’re hearing my voice right now, then you can.

I would say the other thing that is a key part of the opportunity is, yes, there are technical aspects of the trade. Yes, there are things that you’re going to have to learn. There are hard things that you’re going to have to learn. But the number one trait that will keep you in this field, that will help you get in the field and stay, is patience and curiosity. That’s it. It’s not learning object oriented programming or learning highly typed versus not typed code languages or learning the difference between these different things or learning Kubernetes or all these things. But it’s being patient and being curious. If you have those things, if you’re willing to go through…often the thing like this thing isn’t compiling and I don’t know why. Let me figure out let me put in a debugger. Let me figure out how to get it working right. If you’re able to just think, “oh, I’ve always wanted to learn about this,” and then taking time to do that, those attributes would do so much for your career. So if you’re willing to be patient, if you’re willing to lead with curiosity, you can do well here. And I have to say that open source, right? GitHub very much loves open source. I run a program that’s designed, you know, GitHub sponsors for open source. You can learn so much through open source software where you can, with almost no financial outlay, join a project, learn how it works, make contributions. There are so many programs that are basically designed to help people get into open source, where you can upgrade your skills. You can work with teams. You can become a valued contributor to some of the most powerful software on the planet.

So those are the things that I would let people know about this field. The barrier to entry is lower than you think. If you’re willing to be patient, if you’re willing to be curious, if you’re willing to be involved in open source, and I can absolutely help you do that. Please reach out. Please come in. The industry needs you to be honest, and there are many people like me who are here to help.

Maurice Cherry:

Now who have been some of the mentors or peers that have helped you out in your career? I mean, I feel like with everything you’ve mentioned, you’ve probably had a really strong community of support behind you.

Anjuan Simmons:

I’ve been super lucky. I mean…so I was a resident assistant at UT. I was an RA, that person who worked in the dorm, who had maybe the bigger room, who was there to tell you, “hey, turn your music down”, or…I’ve honestly walked in on people who drank too much, helped them stumble to the dorm even though they were underage, right? I was that person. UT, I remember when I applied for the RA job, right? I’m probably 19 years old, right. When I first became an RA, maybe 19, 20.

Maurice Cherry:

Okay.

Anjuan Simmons:

And the person who interviewed me, I think they were the head of housing at UT. I remember her office. If I close my eyes, I can remember sitting in her office, and she said, “you know, everyone who talked to you liked you, but you seem a little bit quiet, right? You seem a little bit reserved.” This person was absolutely right. “We want to give you this opportunity, but you’re going to have to lean into the people part of this because as an RA, you are responsible for residents. Residents are people.” And that was amazing. I mean, that little bit of advice, getting that job helped propel this shy, introverted, nerdy kid into being someone who loves people, right?

And I remember — just kind of fast forwarding a little bit — like, one of the managers I worked for at a project at Accenture was very much, again, similar, started the speech like, “hey, we really like you. You’re doing good work. And if I walk over to the place where you’re working with your team, I can see it. But hey, you need to find ways to let other people know about what you’re doing.” And that goes back to the work that speaks for itself. Like, that manager very much was a mentor to me, and so I’ve had people all along the way give me nudges, give me advice, give me support for things that most people can recognize. If you’re involved in Twitter or in technology, Scott Hanselman has been an amazing mentor of mine, and a friend is a very well known person at Microsoft. Kelsey Hightower, who recently retired from Google, is an amazing person, amazing friend.

They’ve mentored me without knowing it, just by having conversations. I’ve met them at speaking gigs, I’ve met them at different places, and I would say that they have been mentors to me. Neha Batra, who is a VP at GitHub, who’s very well known on the speaker circuit in fact, has been a mentor of mine. She really was one of the people who helped me get into GitHub. I’ve learned so much from her about being a better people manager. I mean, I thought I knew what I was doing when I joined GitHub, but she helped me navigate all the special sauce at GitHub, how to be an even better people manager, better technology leader. So I want to make sure people who you can find on Twitter, you know Scott Hanselman, Kelsey Hightower, Neha goes by nerdneha — I guess we’re calling it X now — on X now, and tons of people who you couldn’t find if you looked for them. But at Accenture, at UT, at Deloitte, at startups…they have been all instrumental in my growth and they all saw the potential in me and they saw where I needed a little bit of a nudge to kind of get to the next level.

They basically helped me receive that nudge. And so I really try to pay it forward. And a big part of what I do in my industry, whether that’s the people who report to me at GitHub or other people within the company, whether it’s being someone who is on the speaker circuit and I meet a lot of people out. When I’m on the road, I look for people who like, oh, that person needs a little bit of a nudge. And that same nudge that people gave to me, I try to give people that nudge and just help them see something that they need to do, give them a map for how to do it, and then supporting them as they find their way to higher success.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, you have three kids you’ve just mentioned at the top of the episode. First one is now in college, second one’s a senior in high school. Third one is a sophomore. Are they sort of interested in tech like you are? Like, do they want to follow in your footsteps?

Anjuan Simmons:

Maurice, I did my best, but you know, they’re into, you know, technology toys, the iPhones, the iPads, the Apple Watches and all. And you know, they play on their Xbox and their PS. But when it comes to a career in technology, like helping to design an iPhone, helping learning Swift to create apps on the iPhone, they all did computer science courses in high school. Like, they learned JavaScript and they learned even just regular Java and all that. But I think that my wife is just more awesome than me. And my wife was an MIS major from the business school at UT for undergrad, and they all want to do business work. So I’m like, “okay. All right.”

Hey. My wife is simply more compelling. And so my oldest son at UT is in the business school. My son, who’s a senior who you mentioned, is also looking for doing business. My daughter is kind of…she’s my only hope. She’s my last hope for maybe getting an engineer out of the family, but I think she’ll probably go to business as well. But, yes, I would say that I failed as a father to launch technologists, but I think that from my household will emerge some amazing business people. I’ll take solace in that.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, you never know. I mean, I think if there’s one thing that people will kind of get from this interview, is that you can kind of take control and take charge of your career at any given point in time. So I think even just with this show in general, there’s no set path to get to where you want to go in terms of your end destination, based on what your values are, things like that. So there could still be time. Don’t count them out yet.

Anjuan Simmons:

That’s true. I should be more hopeful. So, yeah, you’re right. I’ll never give up on my kids and their future. So you’re exactly right. And you’re exactly right with your career. I mean, one thread that I’ve learned, that I wish I learned earlier, is that your career is not something that happens to you, right? You have agency, you have volition, and then you can take that next step, right? And so, yeah, there may be people who support you. Hopefully the people give you the safe nudges that I receive, but you also can study the game and learn how to play it better.

And that’s something I’ve been lucky to do.

Maurice Cherry:

Now, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What kind of work do you want to be doing?

Anjuan Simmons:

That is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. So if you think about just the career ladder, right? So I’ve gone from individual contributor — or IC, as we say — to manager or eng manager, to senior eng manager, to staff eng manager. And so if you look at most ladders, the next level would be like director, VP, maybe going up to maybe above that. So I think that that’s probably where I want to go. I mean, like I said earlier, what’s kept me in this industry is the way that it’s always changing. There’s always new toys, always new tools, and then there’s also people, right? People to help and people that hopefully that I can impact in a positive way. And so I would say that’s probably from a career perspective, what I’m going to do with my professional career, which is go up that level. I’ve been honestly a little bit hesitant because I do think that the further I get away from the technology, from the people doing their work, the more I may be less motivated.

Because again, I love code, I love software, I love helping people build software. And as you go up toward VP, you’re really far away. I mean, the technology is like a speck on the horizon, and then you’re seeing politics and business and all that stuff. And while I can do that, I’ve been reluctant to do that. But that’s where you have impact, right? That’s where you can impact not just a team of maybe ten engineers, that’s where you can impact a department of hundreds. I think from a professional standpoint, that’s where I see myself going outside of work. I mean, I love public speaking. I have a lot of cool gigs booked for the rest of this year.

I think doing more of that, that’s really what I love doing. And I still love writing, a fair amount of technical writing that gets published. But if I could wave a magic wand and then kind of change the percentages, I would make work maybe a smaller percent of what I spend doing, and speaking or writing a bigger percentage of what I spend doing.

Maurice Cherry:

Well, just to kind of wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, your speaking, your writing and everything…where can they find that online?

Anjuan Simmons:

One of the things that is really lucky about having a fairly unique first name is that you can find me at Anjuan at a lot of places, right? That’s Anjuan. Anjuansimmons.com is my website. That’s kind of my home base. But you can find me on Twitter, or — sorry, X — or Threads or wherever you go. If you search for A-N-J-U-A-N you will probably find me and please reach out. You can follow me. You can connect with me again. I’ve grown into a person who loves people.

I’m always happy to do what I can to help people become better versions of themselves because my entire career has been becoming a better version of the person that I am. And so please reach out. I would love to connect and continue this conversation on other platforms.

Maurice Cherry:

Sounds good. Anjuan Simmons, thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, one, thank you for just sharing your story about how you’ve gotten to where you are, but also from talking about the work that you’re doing at GitHub. And like we sort of mentioned throughout this interview, the thing about your career is that you’ve really kind of owned it, you know what I’m saying? At any place where you’ve been, whether it’s been just getting out of college or getting your MBA and then going to what the next step is, it sounds like you’ve really owned your career, like, every step of the way. And I hope that that’s something that when people listen back to this, they’ll get that they can do that for themselves as well.

Anjuan Simmons:

Absolutely. Like I said, there was a fair amount of luck, but there was also a lot of intentionality. If you listen to this, you can be more intentional in your career. I hope that what you’ve gotten from this interview that that’s very much possible. Let me give you your flowers. Maurice, I want to tell you before I leave, Revision Path matters. It’s important. You’ve done an amazing job.

Please keep doing it. You touch lives in ways that you will probably never, ever know. So I love what you’re doing here. Please keep doing it. And I love being here. Thank you so much for giving me space on this podcast.

Maurice Cherry:

Oh, well, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for that, and thank you for being here. I really appreciate it.

Anjuan Simmons:

Awesome.

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