There’s no rule against that

One of the most rewarding feelings is working on projects with friends.

I’ve always embraced hackathons as an opportunity to have fun by building something fun with friends. In high school I was lucky enough to attend a few college hackathons. My favorite memory was at UCLA's LAHacks. We wanted to build something playful and fun, and came up with a creative game - how fast can you throw your phone?

During the science fair style demos, the UCLA organizers would identify tables with the most popular projects and move them to the front. I’d taken one of the many beanbags scattered around the hackathon and used it as the throwing target. Before long, we were pulled to the front with this hilarious line of people waiting to throw my iPhone 8 at the beanbag. Unfortunately, our success was short lived after one player managed to miss the beanbag.

Last summer when I was working at Uniswap Labs, we had our biannual company onsite and accompanying internal hackathon. I had an idea to build something physical that would add some character to the new office that we’d recently moved into.

What if we built a photobooth?

And that was the start to my most memorable experience at Uniswap - a 16 hour project that included accidentally shattering a windshield, designing an iPad holster with wood, and coding in a U-Haul across the Williamsburg Bridge.

The goal was simple: have some fun with our hands and build a photobooth.

We also had this crypto idea angle where the photo booth would mint photos onchain. Visitors to the office could take a photo in the photo booth and get onchain proof that they were there.

The first step was to figure out what we needed to buy in order to run the camera and photo printer mechanics. Since there was a minting component, we had to have a computer or device that could run some code. For simplicity, we opted for an iPad with a bluetooth Polaroid style printer.

The second step was the physical design. We browsed Google Images and Pinterest and found one vintage style photobooth that served as our primary inspiration. For ease of transport, we decided to build it in two parts - the main hold and the seat. A shower curtain rod would hold up the curtain, pressed against the two parts.

Home Depot was next. Thanks to Callil's industrial design background, the shopping list was created in realtime. I played the role of cart-pusher as we picked up 2x4 beams for the main structural frame and Fiberboard panels to complete the look.

The first mishap of the project was after we got back from the Home Depot. Somewhere along the drive back on the BQE, we broke one of the fiberboards strapped down to the roof. Not a big deal though, we had more than enough.

The second mishap was unfortunate and a slightly bigger deal. We didn't want the 2x4 beams to be hanging out of the trunk (TBH I forget why, did we think someone was going to steal it?). So we tried to arrange them in the car diagonally and close the trunk. The length seemed to just fit diagonally against the windshield. Slammed the trunk door and crack. Oops.

We all had separate evening plans, so planned to meet back together at 10pm to start the build:

After transporting the photobooth to the office, I had to go return the UHaul in East Williamsburg. I remember riding a white Citibike ebike as fast as I could to Soho, listening to Dominic Fike's newest album - tired and sleep deprived, but feeling content and happy. It was all just an idea in our heads the afternoon before.

I remember this experience so fondly because it reminds me that the most fun you can have is to work on fun projects with friends. There was no rule against building a photobooth for the hackathon. All it took was getting a team together to do it.

I think we should have this mindset across everything that we do. There are no rules against what you can do. Why not have fun with it?

Thank you to Callil, Noah, Eric, Mark, Tina, Chelsy for teaming up to make my little photobooth idea a reality. I hope you had as much fun as I did 🙏

There are 2 stories that have personally inspired me along this theme:

Jeremy Giffon shares a story of being creative in negotiating:

A classic scenario is, a business owner who is selling his business and he's got different offers, and we found out that he's really into Ferraris. It was basically implied that he's going to sell this business for $30 million, $40 million. So it's obviously not a problem of affording it. But what we realized was that like his wife is not going to let them buy a Ferrari on his own self isn't going to let them buy a Ferrari, it's uncouth in his neighborhood or whatever. In the LOI, $25 million and a 488. Why not? There's no rules against that.

And so these are the kinds of things with negotiating where you can just get really creative as long as you're willing to just be a little weird and just be a little vulnerable

Andrew Kortina shares the story of the Lucas uses Venmo NYC subway ad campaign:

I was in our office with Iqram and Neil, our creative director at Venmo. Everyone was dejected and sulking because this ad campaign proposal just didn’t feel right. Iqram said, “If we are going to spend a ton of money on ads, at least we should do something fun, like billboards or taxis.”

Yea, that would be fun, we agreed.

He continued, “Something dead simple. Look at Lucas over there. He makes coffee. Lucas uses Venmo.”

Neil and I looked at each other, excited.

That would be pretty cool.

Neil grabbed Lucas’s photo off of the Venmo team page and photo shopped a Santa hat onto him–I don’t remember at all why. As soon as we had a “Lucas uses Venmo” comp, we hit the streets and started tapping people on shoulder, showing it to them, asking them what they thought. “What the heck is Venmo?”