Alchemy: New Zealand Design, Tech & Business

Natasha Lampard is a major reason Webstock is one of the world’s top design and tech conferences. She explains how her passion for the web intersected with her childhood fondness for throwing parties to create a festival that attracts the most talented, inspiring leaders in the industry to come from around the world to New Zealand to share their expertise and their stories.

Tash does everything with a lot of heart and soul. You experience that when you go to Webstock and it's what's so inspiring about our conversation.

Some key themes emerged from our conversation that I want to highlight:

• First off, the importance of giving a damn: sweating the details,
  constantly improving your craft, deeply caring about the impact of
  your decisions, and staying focused on who will be impacted by those
  decisions.
• Which leads to the next theme. As makers, the work we do
  is in service of others. Our work needs to serve a wide range of
  people, who don’t all think the same, don’t all look the same and
  don’t all behave the same. Natasha describes her belief in a Japanese
  philosophy called Omotenashi – a spirit of service and hospitality.
  We have to be mindful of the responsibility we have as makers to
  think about the long term impact on society, not just our short term
  personal gains.
• And finally, the power of words. How words are the
  starting point for great ideas, words inspire people, words set a
  mood, words also connect us, words help us understand the greater good that we can all achieve together.

Below are links to some of the people, ideas and talks we discussed:

• Natasha gave an inspiring talk about Omotenashi and how it relates to the design & tech industry
• Natasha also wrote a short essay on Omotenashi
• Sacha Judd's funny and fascinating talk on how the tech industry can and must embrace diversity
• Sacha Judd's slides and notes from her Webstock talk
• Nat Dudley's revealing talk on design patterns that unconsciously exclude and alienate people
• Anil Dash's talk on creating businesses that are more humane

Charli Prangley was a student herself not that long ago, but these days she’s running her own design-centric media empire. Her YouTube channel recently topped over 100,000 subscribers! Plus she does a popular podcast called Design Life.

The Design Life podcast is brilliant and I highly recommend you give it a listen. It covers everything you ever needed to know about design and working as a designer. Every episode is both entertaining and full of extremely useful insights.

Charli’s You Tube channel also covers design topics, but it’s more like mini case studies on tools and techniques. And obviously with video she can show you how she works.

And those are just her side projects! She also has a day job at Convert Kit, a growing startup that’s 100% remote, leading a growing trend of remote businesses that are reshaping our industry.

Ultimately, Charli is designing her life – doing work she loves, living where and how she wants to live, while sharing her experiences and expertise with people all over the world.

Related links:

Design Life podcast https://www.designlife.fm/

Charli's You Tube channel https://www.youtube.com/charlimarietv

Learn about “place-based storytelling” one of the most interesting and fun jobs you never knew existed.

Among many topics, we discuss:

• Designing cultural and tourism experiences around the world
• Working across print, mobile apps, games, audio, video, sculpture and architecture
• Augmented reality: the possibilities, limitations and challenges

For more shows & details go to AlchemyPodcasts.com and follow us on Twitter & Instagram

Sharesies is an app that makes investing super easy and cheap, starting with as little as $5.

It launched to great success just 9 months after the idea was formed. Their approach is a master class in building and growing a startup.

Here are just a few reasons for their success, that Sonya and I discuss in depth:

• They spent a lot of time doing customer research and market validation
• They developed product-market fit before building their product
• They used their research phase as a way of growing a large following
• Sonya is Chief Officer of both product and marketing, a very unusual combo – you’ll hear why that’s so important
• They started with 7 co-founders, which gave them some distinct advantages, not least of which was gender diversity
• They established their company values very early on, which helped them make pivotal decisions

PS. In the interview, Sonya talks about an app that filters job descriptions for gender bias. That app is https://textio.com/

For more shows & details go to AlchemyPodcasts.com