Hatters Gotta Hat
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Josh To. I’m a designer, an entrepreneur, and a passionate advocate for user focused, socially responsible innovation. I’ll be blogging about the intersection of these: my experience and thoughts on using design and technology to scale businesses and products, company branding, and social entrepreneurship and nonprofit work. Much of this will be informed by what I’m doing right now with Hattery. Hattery is a seed-stage investment fund and consultancy that has a strong tendency toward fostering projects that contribute to a greater social need. It’s the expression of a vocation to build extraordinary and innovative companies that make a palpable, positive difference in people’s lives -- a conviction shared by my partners Josh Mendelsohn and Luis Arbulu. We want to fundamentally change the way businesses are created and scaled, and in doing so we’re equally guided by an exacting focus on user experience, design, finance, and operations. Each of my experiences has led me in some way toward what I’m doing with Hattery -- my passion to work in this space is informed by both inspiration and also frustrations with the current model for startups. Too often I’ve witnessed unsustainable non-profit projects and business models, and organizations that are hindered by excessive bureaucratic processes. But these as well as other experiences have fueled an excitement for enriching the existing startup ecosystem -- many new companies have the ability to make massive change with the platforms they have managed to build; Google, Facebook, Twitter are obvious examples of new companies who have enacted large-scale change in the lives of many. I studied design/media arts and communications at UCLA and was inspired to harness design in a way that was not purely driven by aesthetics but that was also useful and served a meaningful purpose. While still in college, I co-founded RESONANCE with James Buyayo — who is now a design lead at Hattery — and used design to strongly convey wearable social messages. I then worked at Google in various roles — technology development for global communications, product management, and business development for Google.org, the “philanthropic arm” of Google. Between Google and Hattery, I was an Entrepreneur in Residence at C2, where I ran idea generation and innovation workshops in Saudi Arabia and spoke at TEDxArabia to encourage innovative entrepreneurship among young Saudis. During this time, I also launched BRUTE LABS, a collective of young volunteers with a “do whatever it takes” attitude to fostering socially responsible entrepreneurship and providing open source solutions to worldwide problems. Out of BRUTE LABS stemmed a variety of different projects, from WellDone which brings clean water to African communities to Air, a solution to Silicon Valley public transportation deficiencies.
So that’s me, and a sampling of what is important to me. I hope you’ll keep reading, and join myself and the Hattery team on our journey forward. This is an opportunity for us to share our knowledge, skills, and experiences -- I’m excited to learn from you and I hope I can return the favor. Josh @joshto