To prevail at the tail of my tale
Hi there 👋
My name is Ammon. I’ve created some powerful tools (Starbucks loyalty program), worked on some future tech (HoloLens), and helped create some iconic brands (Nike SB). I’m now working on an idea to bring local communities together.
I'm a long-tail kind of guy, more precisely I often seek the trailing end of the tail.
I shy away from the mainstream and seek out the niche and obscure. Bartles Player Type framework pegs me as a solid Explorer. My Myers-Briggs type is ENFP — a free spirit. In Yu-Kai Chou's Octalysis, I'm 90% Meaning. I also like behavioral frameworks.
The flip-side of the long tail is Bill Buxton's Long Nose of Invention — a favorite framework from a favorite colleague that describes the long journey (often 20 years or more) from inception to success. Ideas don't come from nowhere, and most begin in obscurity.
The long tail and long nose overlap in a place I like to call the crazy CAMP (creative asinine messy place) — where ideas that can change the world are birthed.
This tale is just beginning.
What to expect
Time management has never been my strong suit, but I hope to share stories on a monthly cadence. Don’t worry, I don’t have time to spam you.
Topics will generally include: creativity, community, ethics, spirituality, counter-culture, and music. Often these topics are presented through the lens of technology trends such as machine intelligence, mixed reality, web3, data sovereignty, and digital anonymity/accountability.
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Who are you, Mr. Ammon?
I’m a 5th generation Bay Area native, father, husband, designer, maker, and serial start-up guy. I’ve been a creative technologist (hybrid developer/designer) for the past 32 years. Two exits, one IPO, two major flops, two corporate jobs, eight patents, and a crap-ton of amazing collaboration with the best and the brightest.
In 2014 I co-founded Formation.ai, raising $30m for our series A, and generated more that $1b of incremental revenue for our flagship customer, Starbucks. Realizing I’m not an enterprise SAAS scaling guy, I stepped out in early 2021 to co-found Joinable.us, a platform for community volunteer groups. We raised a $1.5m pre-seed in June 2021.
My side passions are: teaching my girls to code, my wife’s art, collecting vinyl, DJing, cycling, snowboarding, and mushroom hunting (in that order).
You can find my work, thoughts, talks, and music mixes on my website: qaswa.com.
I’m truly thrilled that you’ve made it this far down the page — you are a rare individual!
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