Piggybacking off this question, what do you plan on doing with DN?

or, for how much price did you buy DN?

My Medium post lays it out pretty clearly. I was a longtime reader and have always thought DN had a ton of potential. When I heard about LayerVault going under, I jumped on it.

I've hired a great little team ( Jody, Max, and Farzad) and we're focused on growing the community, improving the quality of the content, and generally making the site better in whatever ways we can. So far I'd say it's going pretty well. Would love to hear everyone's take.

...but mostly because I saw a great opportunity to turn into a link-bait content mill and sell everyone's emails to spammers ;-)

It was a really slow transition, that went something like this:

Phase 1: I did all the design, front-end development, and client management.

Phase 2: I did all the design and client stuff, but I started handing off front-end development to contractors.

Phase 3: Still did all the client stuff, but I focused on just doing the high level design, then worked with other designers and developers to finish the work.

Phase 4: Fully handed off all the client relations to someone else. I still creative directed and did meetings with clients, but I was much more hands off in terms of the actual pixel level design work.

Phase 5 (Today): I found an amazing CEO to actually run MetaLab day-to-day. I focus on high level strategy and chime in on design projects on a high level. I loved running the company, but I was trying to run multiple companies at once and it ultimately just broke down. I find that I'm still able to have a major impact on a lot of the work that goes out, while leaving the day-to-day running of the company to someone else. Loving it so far.

In terms of my advice, my friend Jason Fried from Basecamp wrote a great piece about giving advice. My perception of how I got here is probably totally inaccurate, and my advice probably doesn't apply to today's world.

That said: entrepreneurship is really just delegation. I just kept progressively delegating more, and more, which allowed me to grow my company, then eventually multiple companies. It took 9.5 years, so it's just a slow and steady process of delegating little bits here and there. One day, I woke up and I was like "holy crap I have 120 employees and four companies". Wat.

If you ultimately want to do design work every day, and stay heavily involved in the day-to-day pixels, then scaling will be challenging and you will probably want to stay smaller. If you relish the idea of focusing exclusively on the high level, then hop on the delegation train :-)

6'1.5'', but you already knew this Pasquale.

Why are you going to school? I'd say just jump into the pool and start swimming—you'll learn way faster and gain real world experience.

Self-taught... Yourself?

I've always been someone who learns by messing up. That said, all my screw ups have been relatively small, and I'm not sure if I would have ended up here had I not been through them.

I can think of a couple:

• Not learning accounting soon enough. I had zero clue how financial statements worked or how companies were measured until a couple years ago. I'd basically just do the mental math: was there more money in the bank than last month. Yes? Success! Now I advise anybody to spend an hour or two learning how a P&L/income statement works, and ensuring that you get a great bookkeeper early on.

• Not charging enough. We used hourly billing for a long time, and it cost us a hell of a lot of money. When you work hourly, clients feel like they own you and it can breed bad behaviour.

• Not taking equity in more startups we've worked with. We've always chosen to take cash instead of equity. Longterm, I think this has paid off and allowed us to build our own products with that cash, but there are a few situations where I wish I'd jumped on the equity train. This is a really tough one though—equity is glorified toilet paper in most cases.

• Feeling lazy and beating myself up for hiring people. I used to beat myself up about hiring others to do design work I felt that I could/should be doing. Now I look back and it seems insane, but it really does feel like cheating at first.

• Not learning how to negotiate. In the early days, any good business person would try to haggle with me on our rates. I'd immediately get offended, but roll over and lose out as a result. I felt that negotiation was dirty, and didn't realize that it was a totally normal part of doing business with people. People expect to be negotiated with, and when you don't, it can actually weird people out. This douchey-looking book was super helpful.

Pretty sure somebody else already bought it :'-(

Aw, thanks man. Appreciate the kind words.

Can't share any details about our deal with Slack, but I will say that I don't have a faberge egg collection or solid gold rocket car.

Curious about this as well. Did you get some equity in Slack for your work or just the cash?

We found that we got a ton of people emailing us saying stuff like "Hey I have a billion dollar idea: how about you do all the work and build it, and I'll give you 5% of it?". Now we just make cash investments in companies we love, and occasionally some of them are our clients.

I'd way rather write a check than do work for equity. Way simpler. I've found that when you do design work in exchange for equity, people feel like they can lean on you for free work forever.

By default, my fingers type "desi" when I open a new tab.

“There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.” ― John Kenneth Galbraith

I have no clue, man. If you'd asked me to predict where I'd be and what the companies would look like five years ago, I would have been way off. I want to wake up every morning and work with people I like on things I enjoy. Full stop.

I actually love responsive DesignerNews.co on mobile Safari. Just made it a home page icon. Previously I was using DN Paper, which was pretty good, but I couldn't moderate the site from it.

I'd pay real money for it, if it came with support. Always liked the DesignerNews UX better than other offerings out there.

Not something we've spent much time thinking about, but definitely something we'll consider. That said, Jody has been sharing code whenever he can. Most recently, we open-sourced The Pixel Picker.

Not to speak for Andrew, but from a general point of view... open-sourcing commercial/revenue-generating websites is an incredibly risky business. Running DN costs money, and of course it would be nice to turn a profit to either put back into the business or funnel into another venture. When you open-source something, it's like fully opening the kimono. There is no more secret sauce that makes the site special. By handing the entire platform to anyone who wants to build a ___ News offshoot, you eventually water down your audience and spread them across many sites, which will detract from eyes on DN.

As for your examples... Hacker News is not revenue generating, as far as I know. Y Combinator makes plenty of money from investments, so they can probably fit the bill for HN pretty easily. Reddit is already designed such that it's a meta-community, so creating a reddit clone wouldn't have much appeal since you can just create a new sub-reddit for whatever topic you're interested in.

Believe me, I am a huge advocate of open-source software, but I think DN is handling it the right way so far. Open-sourcing small parts of the site as separate libraries is a great way to give back to the community without sacrificing the business in teh process.

Oh man. It's all over the map. More email than I'd like. Lots of phone calls. I spend most of my time finding great people to join our companies and doing product stuff. Where are we headed, what are we doing next, what do our customers want, etc.

An average day:

Wake up. Go grab food and coffee at my favourite cafe in Victoria. Skim the NY Times + Wall Street Journal. Go into the office. Check Designer News. Delete a bunch of link-bait BS that people have posted overnight. Open my email. Grimace. Start doing my email. Remember I need to make a phone call. Get sidetracked. Back to email. Get coffee with co-workers. Crap I forgot about Slack. Jesus there's a lot of messages. Realize I missed a huge conversation about an important product design decision. Chime in. More email. If I'm really lucky, design something or write. Dinner with my girlfriend. Read a book, see a movie, walk my dog, in the evening. Sleep 8-ish hours. Repeat.

Working on getting more chunks of time to just dig into stuff and get into the zone. I'd say the hardest part about running a company is that you don't really have a clear set of tasks to complete every day. There's always 10 things waiting to sidetrack you at any given moment.

+1 For another Vancouver designer.

As someone who quit his job to start an interface design agency, what would you say were the key lessons you learnt along the way that allowed you to not only land the clients that you did but also focus on the type of work that you guys are doing (lots of focus on building products)?

I actually wrote two good pieces that summarize my advice well. They're a couple years old, but they still apply.

TL;DR: Do strategic favours for influential people. Don't waste your time doing any work that isn't the type of work you want to be known for. And FOR GODS SAKE DELEGATE.

Once MetaLab grew out of the initial phases, how closely did/do you stay involved in the day-to-day design process? How did you balance management vs. design and were you still able to practice the craft (albeit in a different form) that got you to start the agency in the first place?

Growing an agency really means transitioning from being a day-to-day designer into a full-time boss and business person. It's a slow transition (I detailed it in another answer) but longterm you can't really be a full-time designer anymore. It's a tough transition, and I miss doing design work for 6 hours a day, but I would never have been able to build my companies if I hadn't started delegating and letting go.

Would you be open to grab a coffee sometime? (context: I'll be in Vancouver for the next four months)

For sure! I'm in Victoria, so come over some afternoon and I'll give you a tour of our office and we can grab a coffee.

Did you have any formal education when you started designing and developing, or did you just learn from resources online?

I dropped out of journalism school after 4 months, and ended up teaching myself front-end development on Lynda.com back in 2006. From there, I got into design and found my calling.

How do you weigh a portfolio with real client work vs self initiated projects.

Both relevant. We love seeing that you are capable of collaborating with a client though.

Do you look for more experienced designers, or are you open to hiring designers that are still early on in their career?

Open to hiring people at all stages except total beginners.

Don't have MAU offhand, but in the past couple months we've doubled page views, so things are moving up and to the right :-D

From the start, I knew I wanted to work on our own products. Client work can be great, but ultimately there's nothing more satisfying than building something for yourself, especially when you're solving your own problem. In our case, we were looking for as solution to track all the estimates we were sending. We built a simple internal system to track estimates and invoices, and it ended up turning into Ballpark.

I did it for less than $30,000. I designed the whole product and did most of the front-end development, and I hired a student developer (still with the company) part-time to build the rails app.

I started building it in 2008, so just one year into starting the company. It was difficult because I was already insanely busy, but I just worked on it slowly for a couple hours every night. Gary Vaynerchuk puts it best: Want to do something great? Stop watching LOST.

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Rdio: Best looking, great discovery, but slow because it's not native.

Spotify: Bad discovery, but I end up using it because it's so bloody fast and native/high quality audio.

Apple Music: What a clusterfuck.

I also spend a lot of time on Soundcloud (I'm a bedroom DJ but haven't posted anything in a while) and love Songza.

Currently listening to this: https://soundcloud.com/tropkillaz/tropkillem-all

Threw you into the pool when you were just a pup. And look at you now.

Any plans on updating the DN Twitter DP? (Newspaper icon is cute but too generic)

Working on Twitter stuff right now. Stay tuned.

There's been a lot of interest in the future of Design tools lately. Where do you think this is headed? Any plans to get involved?

We love that there's an ecosystem of apps using the API. We want to do whatever we can to support them and help them get users.

I highly recommend you come work at MetaLab ;-)

This post explained our reasons pretty well: https://medium.com/@awilkinson/were-selling-ballpark-4bc2720403b0

Raise your prices every year. Fire the clients you don't enjoy working with and replace them with ones you can do amazing work for. Relentlessly publicize the work you do, like we have done with Slack and others. Try to get into conferences like TED and Summit so you can connect with the CEO's of the world's biggest companies.

Cheesy, but I always dug this: "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" - Chinese Proverb.

Just keep taking small steps every day. Analysis paralysis kills ideas.

I really just look at stuff and think "if my mom used this, what would she be confused by and how can I make it better". I'm definitely not an artist, but I know designers who I'd say are very artistic. Don't have much to say about this though—different strokes for different folks and all.

1. I only learned basic HTML/CSS. Could never get into javascript. I understand the very basics of how a Rails app works, but I'm hopeless with it.

2. Check out this post: http://blog.metalabdesign.com/post/386280147/the-fallacy-of-hoop-jumping

3. I'm very lucky, and I'm definitely proud of my accomplishments, but I'm usually thinking about the next thing instead of relishing what I've just accomplished.

No idea, I haven' been unfortunately. I'm not huge on conferences, they seem like a really inefficient and expensive way to learn. That said, there are some standouts like XOXO, which I'd recommend.

Check out the podcast interview I mentioned in the description, good overview of my whole story. Too long to type :-)

All about dat pep.

Hiring people is fucking scary. Especially when they have families to take care of. That is definitely the biggest jump I made, getting comfortable with the fact that if I took a wrong turn I was putting an increasingly large group of people out of a job.

Otherwise, I'm not a big risk taker. Pretty careful and conservative, profitable from day 1, no crazy credit card stories or anything :-)