Everett Katigbak
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First of Kind · Everett Katigbak: Indie Streak
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Why Do People Credit Steve Jobs for Someone Else's Lines?
People credit Steve Jobs for lines from a Stanford speech that someone else planted. Everett Katigbak was drawn to Stewart Brand because of that gap. He wants the unseen figures, the person behind a result the public already repeats.
Luis Valdez fits the same pattern. A huge impact, no film about him, and a career spent behind the scenes. Katigbak started that film before he worked at Anthropic and kept it equal in commitment to the day job while he was there. A side hustle, in the advice he repeats, is a person's true form. The picture he gives is a day job and ceramics at night, a compulsion to do something different that should be honored and explored.
Working with the director of the L
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Why Join Stripe and Anthropic Before They Looked Big?
Everett Katigbak joined companies before they were big and before other people saw anything in them. Colleagues asked why. Before Facebook he worked at the Getty museum. Facebook was still talked about as a college website, and social media was not a category yet. Pinterest was easier to place, a quirky consumer brand. Stripe was a weird, small financial tech company. Anthropic looked like a fad to a lot of people. Soleio was skeptical of Anthropic too, and later said he was glad Katigbak ignored that advice.
There is no special radar in his account. He looks for cruxes where something is about to emerge, and other people's doubt is how he knows the pull is real. Soleio calls the pattern a
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What Was Facebook's Analog Research Lab?
Facebook's Analog Research Lab was a physical way to argue about what the company stood for. Soleio says a startup would not obviously build one at that stage. Everett Katigbak and Ben Barry turned mantras into war posters that left the company and entered ordinary American speech. Move fast and break things is a turn of phrase because of those posters, the lab, and their friendship.
The two of them started the same day and grabbed the same doorknob at orientation. The assignment was a marketing design team. They refused the name and called the work communication design, because they communicate, and that felt bigger than making the number go up. Short lines do what a bumper sticker does, a
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What Does Making Technology More Human Mean?
Everett Katigbak means intimacy, not scale. At Facebook the company was described by the scale of the network, the investments, and the valuation. Nobody was talking about the intimacy of the product. The industry stayed on infrastructure, and the flip was to show what the product did for a person.
Calling his family in the Philippines is the case. He could reach them without staying up late, waiting until everyone was awake, and passing the phone around. People outside the industry recognized that story. Those details make the work worthwhile. Hide them, and a system that reaches humans on the other end is only a backend.
Soleio takes the same moment one step further. The intimate relatio
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How Did Figma Help Someone Buy a First Home?
Soleio says Figma, a company he helped build, created prosperity for somebody in Minnesota to buy a first home. A kid posted a photo of the home and thanked Figma, and the post gives him enormous meaning. Eighty percent of his job is opportunity routing.
The routing is a string of introductions. A founder should sell to a customer. An investor should talk to a team because the team is amazing. A designer looking for a next gig has a you-size hole on a team. He can build an entire life resume on finding novel connections. For him, the act of going independent is an extreme act of meaning.
Sorting the next introductions is the hard part. He names film projects, startups, and a whole range of
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Why Did Everett Katigbak Move to San Francisco?
Everett Katigbak moved to San Francisco because getting to the city came first. He was choosing where he saw himself physically and which city matched his vibe, ahead of breaking into the technology industry or chasing a career move.
His dad had moved from the Philippines in the late 60s, in the summer of love, and would rant and rave about San Francisco. Visits as kids left vivid memories. He grew up in LA and Southern California and did not want to be in a car ever again. He did not see himself as an East coaster because of the weather, but he liked how mobile people were out there, and San Francisco had public transit. Culture was the other pull: density and diversity, artists, music, an