Ryan Freitas

I’m posting this as a public answer for two reasons. 1. I’m hoping that if anyone in the Seattle area that qualifies sees this, they’ll reach out to you. 2. I actually get this question a lot. Like, a lot a lot. While the network of UX practitioners is fairly well-connected, right now there’s a tremendous amount of demand for what is in reality a very small community. I wish I could be of help, but this is a problem that quite a large number of organizations (of all sizes) are facing. User experience expertise is highly sought after, and there aren’t enough designers to fill the need.

Best of luck.

Dash (by rcarver)

View high resolution

Feeding Dash his first solid food.

Anonymous asked: Cliche, but what have you learned about love in the past year?

My friend Ryan Carver took a picture of me holding my newborn son a few minutes after his birth. I like to think it captures both of us at a moment of awakening - both of our lives have just begun. Until that moment we had never met, but I felt as though I had been waiting my whole life to meet him. I loved him instantly and unreservedly.

I have learned this year that there are many types of love, and that the presence of this child in our lives has changed and deepened the love I have for my wife, and for my family as a whole.

I think the most important business decision I’ve made in my career thus far has been to never make anything resembling a business decision*. Without realizing it, from the very start I have trusted in relationships and circumstance to provide the right opportunity at the right time.

I wrote the sentences above not entirely sure if they were correct. In order to prove it to myself, I wrote out the story of how I got to where I am (included below). It might only be interesting to me, but I think it pretty clearly establishes how much of what’s happened has been dictated by the people in my life, with a significant amount of chance thrown in for good measure.

*ahem*

How I Got Here:

Kristen Meuter** introduced me to Ryan Hoguet. 

Ryan Hoguet got me hired at Sapient. 

At Sapient I met Alder Yarrow and Zack Gottlieb. 

I also met Bob Skubic, Shawn Collins and Pascal. 

Alder Yarrow brought me to Tokyo to open Sapient Japan’s offices. 

Sapient Japan fell apart in the Dot Com Bust, so I became a professional cook***. 

Three years later, when technology consulting heated up again, Zack Gottlieb got me hired at MetaDesign. 

MetaDesign got weird, but Alder Yarrow came along and hired me to work on HomeDepot.com. 

At HomeDepot.com I got to work with Ryan Hoguet, Bob Skubic and Shawn Collins again. 

Bob Skubic found out that Adaptive Path was hiring from his old Studio Archetype colleague, Peter Merholz. 

Peter Merholz and I had met years before, at the second Fray Day party, back when I wrote a blog called Gangcandy. 

Peter Merholz hired me at Adaptive Path, where Shawn Collins (who also had known Peter from Studio Archetype) sometimes contracted. 

At Adaptive Path I met Jeff Veen, Bryan Mason and Lane Becker. 

I started a new blog, and called it Second Verse. 

Lane Becker created a program called New Ventures to provide Adaptive Path’s UX consulting to startups. 

My first New Ventures client at Adaptive Path was Sphere, led by Tony Conrad. 

The visual designer for Sphere was Kristen Meuter, who by that time had moved in with me. 

Working on Sphere changed my entire perspective on product design for startups. 

Lane Becker left Adaptive Path to start GetSatisfaction, so I led the New Ventures program for a while. 

I left Adaptive Path to work on a startup of my own. 

But first I got married to Kristen Meuter and had a nice honeymoon in Buenos Aires. 

I forgot to mention that I went to high school with Jason Shellen. 

Post-Adaptive Path, Jason Shellen hired me to work at his post-Google startup, Plinky. 

I left Plinky after about 4 months, unsure on what I’d do next. 

I started doing what I liked best, helping startups design products, and built that into a consultancy called Second Verse. 

Jeff Veen and Bryan Mason were nice enough to let me work out of their space while I got my consultancy up and running. 

Tony Conrad called me up and asked me to help him put some ideas together for a new startup.

I ran my small consultancy for a year while Tony Conrad and I put the pieces together for what we called Pumpkinhead. 

That included hiring Shawn Collins and Pascal while Tony Conrad made a series of heroic negotiations to turn Pumpkinhead into about.me. 

Mike Arrington told us to let users reserve their names during our private beta. 

We couldn’t open publicly to everyone because we couldn’t scale fast enough to meet the demand. 

When we were finally ready, we opened to the public. 

Four days later, we were acquired by AOL. 

Tony Conrad and I run the team together inside AOL to this day.

The words “coincidentally” could easily go in front of a half-dozen of the sentences above. Things just sort of always worked out, even when they didn’t look like they were going to. I have put faith in people, and relationships - perhaps a foolish amount of faith, to be honest - to put me in the right place at the right time. I count myself fortunate to have befriended so many amazingly talented and driven individuals, and for the fact that they have so unselfishly shared such tremendous opportunities to grow, both personally and professionally.

* That’s a bit of a trite fiction - of course I’ve made business decisions. I’ve hired, I’ve fired, I’ve purchased and sold. But I like to think that the most important decisions I’ve made have come from a very personal place, rooted in the things I believe are important. Almost all of those things revolve around how I relate to others.

* How I met Kristen, and wound up marrying and starting a family with her, is a story for another day.

** The second best business decision I ever made was to leave technology completely for a number of years, and indulge my desire to cook professionally. I left behind my entire life, trained hard, busted my ass, and gained a new perspective on life that has been absolutely invaluable.

I’m gonna split this into two answers:

1. The absolute scariest event that’s happened thus far was the baby’s delivery. During labor, Dash had managed to get his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. The OB was calm and methodical, got him delivered, and gingerly cut through the the cord - only to realize that he had managed to get it wrapped twice somehow. She snipped again and he was whisked away to the pediatrician, who got his breathing and heart rate stabilized.

Through all of this, I was standing at Kristen’s bedside, holding her hand, hoping that my face didn’t convey how terrified I was, or how helpless I was to ease the trauma my wife or my baby had just experienced.

2. The most persistently scary thing about fatherhood is the generalized anxiety. We were celebrating Dash’s first month, and Kristen and I actually high-fived when we realized we’d kept the baby alive for 4 weeks. It sounds ridiculous if you haven’t had a child, but the reality is that most first time parents spend an awful lot of time thinking “holy cow how do I prevent this small helpless creature from starving/getting hurt/going missing?!” Most of this anxiety is misplaced (e.g. the best sign that you’ll be a good parent is a willingness to admit that you have no idea what you’re doing) but you don’t realize that till the kid starts gaining weight and looking slightly less fragile.

If you’re a dad, that anxiety eventually transfers itself from the baby’s immediate survival to questions like, “do I need to set up a 529 account now?” and “we should really start thinking about preschools.” It’s good that you’re thinking about these things, because they will distract you from the realization of how useless you are at soothing the child when he is inconsolable. You can change him, rock him, shush him, swaddle him, give him a bottle, and burp him (and you absolutely should do all of these things as often as possible, because it’s awesome) but you will never be able to calm him down the way mom can.

As terrible as feeling useless can be, the whole experience is still pretty incredible.

I’m terrified of actually becoming as cynical as I used to present myself, when I was younger and so dreadfully insecure. I don’t know if diligence can ward it off - I like to think I have a talent for managing risk, and taking a default perspective that it’ll all end in tears hasn’t really worked against me over the years.

That said, I think my boy deserves a father who’s convinced that everything will work out beautifully, regardless of the odds against. The grand beauty of life is that the bits between its beginning and end can pleasantly surprise you.

Work In Progress: An update to 35 in 35

My 36th birthday approaches, a bit more quickly than I’m entirely comfortable admitting. I wrote a post last year around this time about some of the things I’d learned - it was a cathartic experience to put it out into the world. The response was more than I’d anticipated (it’s been liked and re-blogged more than 1,000 times).

After some careful consideration, I’ve decided to update the post for my 36th birthday. Since that post was based on an article format from old Esquire magazines (of which I am a fan), I decided the update should be done in another favorite format: Playboy’s 20 Questions interview.

The only problem? I can’t really interview myself. That’s where you come in. If you liked “35 Lessons,” please consider this an invitation to ask me a question, any question, about this year (it’s been a big one: fatherhood, homeownership, sold a company), or about life, or about where the hell to find a decent pint in San Francisco. I’ll combine any questions I get with some of my own.

If you don’t feel like using tumblr’s ask form, you can always shoot a question to @ryanchris on Twitter (that’s me). I’m not so arrogant to assume that people have a ton of questions, but I’d love to give this a shot. Let me know what you think.

Meet my newborn son, Dashiell Christopher Freitas. Born June 14th, 2011, 6 lbs 14 oz, 19.5 inches. We call him Dash.

(via second verse. tumbling.)

rickwebb's tumblrmajig: Jill Simonsen →

rickwebb:

And then this Thursday night, at a SXSW party at Mugshots, amongst friends I see annually, having a great time, a text from an LA friend - one of the many who Jill has touched, and I’ve known so long in so many different ways, but originally through Jill’s amazing brother Corey. A text that I needed to call her. We have some business dealings, this friend and I, so I texted if it was important. She said no. I figured it was something money related. But the next morning, when I had two other friends tell me I needed to get in touch with them, I knew.

It’s always good to see my friend Rick, and this past week in Austin was no exception. I didn’t know until the night before he left that he was leaving for a funeral. I didn’t know it was for his friend Jill til I read his post on Tumblr.

I empathize with Rick (and all of his friends) for Jill’s passing. His account is touching, and very much worth the read. Going over it, the part that jumped out was the passage above. It’s sadly reminiscent of my own recent experience.

Rick, I’m sorry for your loss.