48 hours in New York

I was in NYC this past week for my first-ever hackathon.

Walking to the event

I'm not technical, but this was put on by Slow Ventures - a firm that, among other things, invests in creators. They have some great folks working there, and I've wanted to attend their events for a while.

You may or may not be familiar with the term "vibecoding"- it depends on how much of your valuable life you spend on Twitter/X and listening to business podcasts, haha.

The current suite of tools allows you to go from idea to working prototype remarkably fast. Like in a day.

Believe it or not, I actually won first place at the event. My idea was pretty good (an app that creates furniture pairings according to my taste), but developers Eric Skiff & David Renz of Tanooki Labs were there as mentors and helped me enormously with my prompting.

Presenting for real people is so much more fun than just making videos. Need to find a way to do this much more often.

Eric had actually built something pretty similar previously - a fashion app that created pairings from a catalog of clothing and accessories - so he was a great help to me and almost certainly the reason I won.

I figured I'd be embarrassed by what I made. I wasn't. Reminder to put yourself out there — there's no downside to quick, bounded experiments and surrounding yourself with people doing the same.

It was a very packed schedule the whole time- fun but totally exhausting.

Outside of the hackathon, I got to meet Jason Saft of Staged to Sell Home at King Cole Bar. I'd never been there before - they have an incredible mural of, no surprise, King Cole, hand-painted by Maxfield Parish behind the bar.

Maxfield Parish mural

They also had these Morris Armchairs by my friend Lulu Lafortune flanking the lobby - cool to see it in the wild!

Jason's story is incredible - he started off as a leasing broker and quickly figured out how to get apartments rented much more quickly by making small aesthetic improvements.

A large development firm noticed his system and taste, and he began overseeing all their leasing. He always loved design and decorating and, over the years, stopped transacting real estate and became NYC's premier stager by significantly reducing days on market for sellers via decorating.

Increasingly, he is selling his staging directly to the end buyer because it's so dang good.

a staged project, via Staged to Sell Home​

Jason has impeccable taste and furniture curation. It's fascinating to look at the before-and-afters on his website. So much of what he's doing is putting things on walls, correctly scaled and hung at the right height. This makes an enormous difference in how a space feels.

We pay so much attention to furniture; we often forget about walls. Jason is creating a skyline in his spaces, drawing your eye up and emphasizing the walls' height and volume.

I also got to very briefly check on a project I helped design in Flatiron. The renovation is ongoing while the family lives there, but I'm excited to share more once it's complete. It looks so good! Always amazing to go from concept to reality; never gets old.

Finally, before I left, I popped over to the West Village to meet Mark O'Brien. He is a local (now global thanks to IG) legend who renovates and sells old brownstones for profit, but also very clearly for the love of the game. He is exactly the same off-camera as on-camera.

In Mark's living room

He has a cool, hard job where he gets to work with his hands and live in the physical world. He was recently interviewed by my friend Sam Parr; check it out!