The search for alternatives to business as usual
My journey & lessons learned from Sonora Labs to Squarish
A note from my journal revealed I had fantasized about starting a firm like IDEO since I was in high school. But now I didn’t really have any other option. It was fall in 2022 and I my gut said my impact on the organization had been made and my growth there was both limited and at odds with the growth of my partners. It was time for something new and I was already headed down that path. I cried on the patio of our favorite brewery when I told my partners I had to leave Ovyl. It was hard to imagine giving up something I cherished so much, but I knew it was time.
So in the first days of 2023 I wrote a 1-page letter to myself to set my intentions for building Sonora Labs (which you can read here). But only four months in I had tested five different paths to launch such an ambitious project and all of them were revealing more obstacles than tailwinds. I could have pivoted, but doing so would have meant abandoning or at least prolonging my actual cause. It then became apparent to me that the best course of action to pursue my life’s work lay entirely off the path I had been on in those first four months of 2023.
In hindsight that makes sense, because the idea was half born of me and half born of my environment - Ovyl. I was afraid of how it would look to the outside world to “give up” or “quit” that quickly, but I also knew I couldn’t act out of fear and had to trust my gut, again. My motivations and end goal remained the same but my approach needed to change. I took the following six months to enjoy myself more and to analyze and redesign my strategy before jumping back in. This post is my attempt to condense that story and its lessons down for consumption - I hope it helps someone else get here even faster.
Why I started Sonora Labs
The driving force in my life that would later cause me to start Sonora Labs reached an inflection point in 2020, when the pandemic laid bare how our cult of efficiency and growth was not only weakening the planet but had even begun to weaken itself and become brittle. It was my deeply felt sense that the business culture of America today must adopt an evolved ethic to build more stable systems or face some version of catastrophic failure perhaps even in my lifetime (economic collapse due to wealth inequality, climate change, revolution, or war). I knowingly embraced this obsession because I felt like I was fortunate enough to have the capacity to do so and nothing else seemed more worthwhile.
In my view the dominant system of power in the US what some call late stage capitalism, which I define as the endemic pursuit of wealth concentration above all else. The system is deeply flawed and also extremely successful. But in the greater arc of history I believe it’s having a Kodak moment: evolve and hinder its own growth, or ignore progress and cling onto power. Surprisingly, I am not anti-capitalism per se. That structure is itself too large and complex to call it simply “good” or “bad”. But as a business person who takes risk seriously, an ethicist who considers risks which do not affect me, and a designer who thinks in systems, my framework of late stage capitalism seemed to make sense of damn near everything I’ve experienced, at least well enough for me. I focused on finding a positive direction to go in from within the system, but my conclusion was unfortunate.
I say unfortunate because it’s unfortunately not easy to address. All organisms and their creations cling to survival and late stage capitalism is no exception. One way it resists change is by polarizing people to fear capitalism or fear socialism or fear <insert big scary boogeyman>. For me, fear tactics in the media protect the status quo with divisive takes that lack the nuance necessary for having productive conversations about how to evolve our system into something objectively better for everyone. My first thought was to pursue change through policy but my study revealed the demonstrably null effect of popular opinion on policy compared to corporate lobbying, another way the system tried to keep itself alive.
The lack of nuanced discussion in media and the difficulty of effecting change through policy led me to abandon political avenues. Instead, I turned to the tools I know best: design and entrepreneurship. By thinking of our existing system as a set of design constraints from which to experiment with new systems in a free market I could start building today rather than waiting on policy or politics to catch up. I believed a venture studio would be the ideal way to iteratively design new organizational structures, a concept I introduced in my earlier 1-pager.
Why I needed a New Plan
Deconstructing theories, engaging in discussions, and extensive reading provided me with a solid framework for thinking about change. I felt like I had a good high level understanding of the systems in place, the changes we needed, and the means to affect that change. But my system thinking was top down, and while that approach bore a lot of fruit in design, it did not pan out in entrepreneurship.
I learned a ton about different systems of wealth management and governance in venture capital, venture studios, and startups. I also discovered alternative business models like the metalabel (a common label for a shared purpose), the benefit organization (a model for stakeholder governance), and various DAO structures. However the business failed to gain traction at a reasonable clip and felt like pushing an idea up hill. I did the math on how quickly I was meeting right-fit people from 1:1 meetings and events and projected 2-3 years to hit critical mass at best.
However, I had not yet discovered the right entry point, a critical aspect of entrepreneurship. My gut told me there had to be something else I could do for 2-3 years that would create more progress and better position me to raise for a studio or fund in the future if I still wanted to. It was then that I made the gut decision to shut it down and spent the next half of the year reflecting pragmatically on what worked and what didn’t. Let’s get into those reasons (skip to the end for a tl;dr).
The timing of the market was terrible. Bill Gross, the startup studio OG, has a pretty famous slide from a popular TedTalk about why startups succeed (and fail), which states that 42% fail because of timing. The VC market was in shambles after the crypto boom & bust, deal flow and cash for early stage companies was back to lows from years before which is especially tough for hardware, and AI was starting to take off and gobble up all of the funding. Then war. Then bank runs. Then more war. There was no end in sight to these trends so taking a bet that things would change for the better in 2-3 years didn’t seem wise.
The direction of the market was opposite my aspirations. For years I had been bothered by the fact that financiers in private equity outsourced our production capacity for short term profit, leaving our supply chain & ultimately our economy weakened, our middle class shrinking, and hamstringing our ability to build in America. Especially after 2020, this started to become a mainstream observation. I hoped to direct this awareness towards building domestic manufacturing capacity, renewable energy, modern transportation infrastructure, materials discovery, etc. Generally, I hoped to take this energy and dump it into pro-social technology. However, greater geopolitic forces were at work and war was on the horizon if it wasn’t already here. Marc Andreesen’s manifesto pumped young people up with fervor and a16z’s “American Dynamism” thesis defined rebuilding America as investing in its “National Interests” creating a portfolio dominated by defense companies. This in part set the tone for angels, LP’s, and even founders. This focus honed when the “Effective Accelerationism” movement picked up steam in this direction, declaring ethics an impediment to progress and redefining hardtech largely Defense 2.0.
Businesses make money, charities do good. I believe maximization of profit and wealth are the same forces that motivated the destruction of our industrial base and ultimately a loss in national competitiveness. I was championing the idea that business could do both: make money for investors and do good for employees, customers, and the public (society at large). But I knew from personal experience these are often at odds, hence I made one of my values “ethics over economics”. I noticed a large gap between young founders who responded with strong positivity to my pitch, vs. older investors I was pitching who seemed confused or uninterested. No hate here - I think that’s expected given the context of the conversation was about making them more money. But as one investor and mentor put it to me bluntly “ya know Dave, I think some people don’t hear a focus on making money”. No kiddin. He was absolutely right - it was a turn off for many investors I spoke to. A common comment I heard was “you should look into philanthropy” as if doing anything other than profit maximization was inherently charity. I didn’t expect this dichotomy to be so polar. But that is business as usual.
I underestimated the necessary investor/builder credentials. While I believe in myself to do basically anything I set my mind to, I don’t expect others to believe the same without evidence. Still I thought building tens if not hundreds of products from start to finish, earning multiple patents, running a profitable firm for 6 years straight with 30% YoY growth, taking equity positions in 3 companies each with healthy multiples now, and ultimately exiting that firm for a decent sum, arguably more than some startup founder exits,was enough. It wasn’t, at least not for what I was doing in the environment I was doing it in. To convince a stranger that I was capable of doing work of this scale would require a decade long investment history and/or an exit over $100M. Granted I was only raising a $5M fund, and it wouldn’t have worked because of reasons 1-3 above. But I think one can have enough credibility to overcome 1-3, and I didn’t have that.
I couldn’t take the emotional toll of cause-based work at a startup pace. This was a lesson in pace layering (a concept I was introduced to by a friend). I didn’t realize by zooming out to macros just what roller coaster I had climbed into. I was essentially becoming an activist entrepreneur - two of the most soul crushing roles a would-be change maker can hold. Fighting for positive change has a way of wearing people out and leading with that idea meant my audience would be subject to the same fatigue I was. I didn’t realize how much the energy of the moment was fueling my startup-like pace. I also didn’t really grasp the size and oscillatory nature of this ride and how it would come and go with public opinion. Much of the energy for change from 2020 went not into new ideas like Sonora Labs but into existing models of bandaid change like DEI and ESG initiatives which were probably doomed to fail despite their good faith attempt to solve real systemic issues. Rolling out DEI & ESG on top of corporations born into late stage capitalism is like giving leaders responsibility without any authority. It didn’t respect the pace or dynamics of the actual situation. The backlash against these initiatives has now tainted the waters of responsible investing and its unclear if/when that momentum will recover. As positivity around change faded and investors continued to tell me I should be doing something “easy” to make money, my morale dropped and I entered a depression. I learned that this won’t happen over night, and I shouldn’t be running around like a mad man. I wasn’t going to save anyone but myself so I needed to protect and pace myself. This is a life’s work, not a phase of rapid change.
tl;dr the timing was bad, the tailwinds in the market were my headwinds, my thesis was either wrong or too unconventional, and I underestimated the credentials and mindset needed to overcome those obstacles. Whoopsie daisies :)
After all this, I was still committed to pursuing my work, but I was tired and I knew my strategy had to change. Instead of building a holding company with the venture studio model that relied on outside capital and factors unaligned with my direction and outside my control, I needed to focus on building within my control and in alignment with my purpose. I immediately started New Plan Studio, LLC, so named because… I needed a new plan. I didn’t love the name New Plan, but I took the action anyway. It was funny to me, but it was just a placeholder. My goal was to rest, recover, and relaunch my effort somehow by 2024.
Becoming Squarish
Beyond all the practical reasons above for why Sonora Labs failed, I also had a brand strategy problem. Sonora Labs was too many things in one and therefore nothing much to anyone. Business design, product design, brand design, hardware, software, investing - each is a massive category with unique audiences. Dabbling in all of the above only made sense to people who knew me, and knew me well. It’s hard to believe someone can have so many interests and pursue them all at once successfully - for good reason. I heard over and over that I was too scattered and needed to focus.
There was truth and falsehood to that idea. Some of those folks were just projecting their own limiting beliefs. My multi-faceted interests and voracious learning are some of my super-powers that make me a resourceful entrepreneur. But there was much truth, too. A lack of focus has always simultaneously been my achilles heel, and I knew that. There’s a flip side to every coin. I can do it all, but definitely not all at once. Still, this belied the brand problem: perception. No one understood what the fuck I was doing or how… or why.
While my close confidants loved what I was up to, I needed to make my endeavors palatable for people who didn’t know me. My Sonora Labs biz-partner Kei affectionately called it “the dave show” because I was the only consistent thread. I needed to unbundle Sonora Labs, and to start that, I needed a home base from which to operate across categories in a way that would make sense to the outside world. I needed a core brand that was like a Ditto (shoutout to my pokemon fans). A parent brand that could launch basically anything and somehow you’d say, sure, that makes sense. Essentially I wanted to create a “house of brands” with a highly adaptable parent. Enter, Squarish.
I tested lots of other names but when I found Squarish I knew I had it. It was a reference to the shape of a physical object or container that you could fill with anything. It was familiar but unique. It was not quite something aka “ish”. It was a play on going one “square” or step at a time. It was slightly outside of the “box”. It even reclaimed a bit of my lost identity from leaving Ovyl by representing a throughline in my branding work. Anything can be squarish, and Squarish can be anything.
Square One, Two, Three, Four
My plan for squarish was simple.
Refine & share my ideas around redesigning business as usual.
Hit one man financial stability through creative direction.
Begin work on my first project & launch a product in 2024.
I have ideas for square four, but it isn’t defined yet.
Focus comes first.
You’re currently reading Square One.
For Square Two, I’m actively engaged with one paid client and four collaborative projects as a creative director. I am available for hire and my sweetspot is product+brand work with folks who are redesigning business as usual. If you’re an unconventional product or brand, I’d love to help you change things up. I’m currently working on everything from a brand refresh for a consensus driven organization to creating a theoretical magic system for a fantasy world. If you don’t know where to start, call me. If I can’t help I probably have creative friends who can.
Square Three is my first portfolio company. For that I decided to go back to my roots in product design to develop something novel for myself first. I’m choosing to leverage my own creativity over an analytical approach. The product roadmap starts with bags and I promise you won’t expect where it goes next. That’s part of the fun. If you want to follow along with that development, you can follow me on instagram @uhmmdave and/or @squarishdotcom.
Alternatives to Business as Usual
The purpose of Squarish is to empower people to pursue alternatives to business as usual by championing equitable and sustainable approaches to growth. Growth is a good thing, but it doesn’t have to look like it used to. It can’t. At squarish I’m experimenting with radically different ways to organize people to build value for society. We have to take baby steps before we can walk or run, so I thank you all for following along and for reading these posts, because interacting with this content is square one on the journey to creating alternatives to business as usual. If you have any reflections to share on my journey or how it relates to your own, I’d truly love to hear from you in the comments.