I’m currently living in the beautiful rural town of Georgetown, Massachusetts, with my beautiful wife Pam, our daughter Kennedy, and our two little morkie dogs Oreo and Max. From an early age, I was always fascinated with technology and the things you could build and make from nothing. As I got older, I started finding ways to dabble in anything related to building for the web from using Angelfire to Geocities. After high school, I pursued a computer science degree at Bridgewater State University, as I always wanted to be able to build what I would conceptualize or design.
My professional career really started to come into focus in the mid-2000s. Early in my career, I spent a few years at a small software company, PMWeb, where I learned a great deal about designing, building, marketing and selling software. In 2008, I left that company and I co-founded Epicio, a small web design & development firm in the greater Boston area. After a few years growing and learning at Epicio, I decided it was time for a bigger challenge and set my sights on working in Boston.
Through a series of interesting chance events, I ended up landing an amazing opportunity with the orange unicorn HubSpot, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Little did I know this was going to be the spark that ignited my love for startups by bringing together my love for entrepreneurship and my passion for designing and building products. After a few years at HubSpot, where I managed and grew the Interactive Design Team, it was time to find a smaller and earlier stage startup with the HubSpot IPO getting ready to take off.
After doing my homework, I came across and landed an opportunity as the Director of User Experience at Assembla. They make really powerful software for managing and building software projects with a distributed team. About a year later I transitioned to Kyruus, as the Director of User Experience to help improve their products in the healthcare space. After that, I learned about an amazing company, Datto. I joined their team as the Director of Product Design with an amazing team tasked with improving the user experience of our platform, which focuses on the business continuity (disaster recovery) and networking markets.
Visit my work page to learn more about my work at these companies!
In addition to those opportunities, in 2017 I stopped to focus on something that I am very passionate about, design education. The field of design has come a long way, but there are still some big gaps in access to educational design resources and mentors. I deeply believe that design thrives on diversity and inclusivity, and I believe everyone, anywhere deserves to be connected with great resources and mentors. It was this passion that help me found the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization Designed.org. If you are interested in learning more about our mission and vision, or want to volunteer please visit Designed.org!
It isn't likely this section will grow in leaps and bounds, but from time to time you never know what will pick up the interest of all the different news outlets of today.
I was incredibly fortunate to have an opportunity to speak with Scott Kirkwood of CommArts magazine. We talked about the importance of mentorship and how Designed.org, the non-profit design network I founded is working hard to connect ambitious designers to mentors across the world.
This was a fun little project that the growth hustler, Smit Patel, came up with during our time at HubSpot. The idea was to make a simple and friendly site that allowed people to quickly post what resolutions they had to support the startup community in the coming years and show an aggregated feed of all the posts. Turns out that mentoring was by far the biggest resolution out there!
I say a lot of things on Twitter; it is without a doubt my social network of choice. I do my best to keep up with showing off my design work-in-progress on Dribbble. You can subscribe to my updates on Facebook, and endorse me on Zerply. I don’t post much code anymore these days, but the little I do still work on can be found on Github.
Feel free to read on if you would like to learn more about me. If you want to chat about design, startups, or what funny things I’ve seen on the train recently, you can email me at [email protected] or send me a DM on twitter @simpson.
Are you interested to learn more about me, or work on a new fantastic product together? Don't hesitate to reach out soon so we can chat!
Let's Chat!