Month: January 2020

Intentional Distortions

We are honored to have been selected by San Francisco Design Week as the agency partner for 2020 and to launch this year’s theme: Intentional Distortions.

If a distortion is a change, then an intentional distortion is an experiment. 

By challenging existing beliefs or accepted truths, we can provoke the familiar and welcome in change. As designers and creatives, our ambitions to explore our world comes to life in our work and, in turn, pushes us forward beyond the expected.

A concept that plays with the idea of perception, intentionally distorting realities means understanding what else might exist in a world we find familiar, improving our collective, and ever-evolving experience on planet Earth.

• How can you look at the same thing in different ways?
• What tools can you use to change reality?
• What processes and programs can be manipulated to rethink the familiar?

Today, momentum can look more like a ripple than a line. By engaging intentional distortion in our practice, we can upend good to discover great. Intentional destinations, unknown distortions. This year, we invite you to challenge familiarity, bias, and what we know of reality. Visit San Francisco Design Week to look for opportunity in optimism, lean into your process, and loosen the grip.

See you in June!

Simple Tools, Better Remodels

Crunchbase Exclusive:
Punch List Raises $4M Seed To Streamline The Home Renovation Process

By: Mary Ann Azevedo

If you’ve ever remodeled any part of your home, you know the headache that comes along with the process. It’s not nearly as glamorous when you don’t have the deep pockets (or expertise) that HGTV’s Chip and Joanna Gaines have to deal with unexpected problems.

Kyle Zink, the first marketing hire at Square, found this out firsthand after purchasing a home in Southern California a few years ago. Zink hired a contractor through a trusted source and was excited about fixing up the house. But the process turned out to be a nightmare.

“Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong,” he recalled.

Opportunity

The experience got Zink thinking. His time at Square taught him how much small business can benefit from technology. Zink was dismayed to discover his own contractor essentially relied on a legal pad and text messaging to communicate and for checks to get paid.

“I looked around in the marketplace and saw there were a lot of companies tackling really big commercial problems and projects,” Zink told me. “But on the residential side, there were no real tools for small, independent contractors.”

It was then Zink teamed up with Andy Vella to come up with the concept behind Punch List. The San Francisco-based startup has just closed a $4 million seed round, Zink told Crunchbase News exclusively. It also today launched a mobile app that aims to help independent contractors and homeowners more easily navigate the remodeling process. The digital platform gives contractors a way to provide real-time views on progress, get approval during different phases of a project and get paid as they go.

For Zink, Punch List is “the first modern tool for contractors to grow and run their business.” (In the construction world, a punch list is a list of items that need to be addressed before a project can be deemed complete.)

Bling Capital and Bedrock Capital led the seed financing. Ludlow Ventures and Mayfield Fund also participated, as did a group of high-profile angel investors including Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, Rippling COO Matt Macinnis, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and Opendoor co-founder and CEO Eric Wu.

View full case study here

Read the original article on Crunchbase