From Day One: How Brooklyn Entrepreneurs Got Their Start podcast

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Last summer, something monumental happened. One of Uncuffed's founding producers, Greg Eskridge, came home after more than 30 years in prison. In this episode we’ll bring you back to that emotional day last summer when he walked out of the San Quentin gates, free at last. Our work in prisons is supported by the California Arts Council, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, independent foundations, and donations from listeners like you. Learn more, sign up for Uncuffed news, and support the program at www.weareuncuffed.org Follow us @WeAreUncuffed on Instagram and Facebook Transcripts are available within a week of the episode coming out at www.kalw.org/podcast/uncuffed…

From Day One: How Brooklyn Entrepreneurs Got Their Start

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All these entrepreneurs started from scratch, right here in Brooklyn. The From Day One podcast series tells their stories in dramatic detail: their inspiration, challenges, surprises, setbacks, breakthroughs, and their advice for fellow dreamers.

12 episoder

#Business #From Day One: How Brooklyn Entrepreneurs Got Their Start #Brooklyn Based

From Day One: How Brooklyn Entrepreneurs Got Their Start

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12 episoder

#Business #From Day One: How Brooklyn Entrepreneurs Got Their Start #Brooklyn Based

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Joel Hamilton, co-owner, Studio G Brooklyn 44:14

for 6 years siden44:14

44:14

You’ve probably heard music that was recorded at Studio G Brooklyn , the legendary sound laboratory tucked into the border of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Clients of the space have included Aaron Neville, Bonobo, Ani DiFranco, Tom Waits, Talib Kweli, Sesame Street, Spotify , and many more. Our podcast guest Joel Hamilton , an acclaimed producer and engineer who owns and operates the place along with Tony Maimone and Chris Cubeta, told us how the sophisticated studio was built from scratch over the last two decades. Studio G was hip from the start, before Williamsburg or Greenpoint were what they are today. The founders had the good fortune, Hamilton acknowledges, of getting started in the right place at the right time. “For me to comment on the studio business is for me to comment on a very personalized trajectory that operated within a very, sort of, DIY scene,” he said, “and then expanded when the DIY scene ultimately bubbles up from the underground and becomes ‘cool.’” It wasn’t blooming from the beginning, though. Hamilton recalled the Brooklyn nobody knew, as it went from the destination to which “you had to argue with the taxi driver to go over the Williamsburg Bridge” to the place “where everyone wanted to be.” The early days were largely about finding artists willing to make the trek. “That’s a part of the story: convincing people to come to Brooklyn. It’s not like it was the middle of nowhere, it was actually scary to some people. It was worse than nowhere.” Their location, along with being the new kids in the business, meant that a large source of early clientele were Hamilton’s own friends. “When you’re in a band, it’s usually your friends’ bands are the bands that are coming in to record with you, so that’s a double-edged sword,” Hamilton said. “You have access to more people who need recordings and less people who are going to pay you. You just keep the overhead low.” Slowly but surely, Studio G built a stronger resume and Brooklyn started to shift. “There was this groundswell of relevant artists that were living in the cheaper neighborhoods out here because the East Village got expensive. Our business model kept evolving to support that new breed of kid that was starting bands in Williamsburg. We just happened to speak the same language. We came from the same set of influences and had enough gear that we could get the job done for them.” The studio’s infrastructure grew almost as a direct reflection of the community surrounding it. “I had really broken stuff and that was serving a community that could only afford the kind of broken stuff, and therefore they were more patient with me having to kind of make it work,” Hamilton recalled. “And then we moved to the next level because that process and those bands’ patience got me to the next level,” he said. Soon, artists with higher budgets started coming in. “They were a little less patient with my broken shit but they had a little more money to spend. And so I would take a percentage of that budget and put it into the next vocal microphone or mic pre[amp] or piece of equipment that sort of pushed me to the next level on the infrastructure side.” Even as the business has scaled up, the ethic has been the same: make the most of the resources you have. “For me the game has always been: If you have $500 available to make a record, make it sound like $1,000. If f you have $1,000 make it sound like $5,000. And that applies even now. If you’re doing a record with a $100,000 budget, you have to make it sound like it had a million-dollar budget.” The philosophy seems to have worked. Hamilton has been nominated for seven Grammy awards. —By Kora Feder…

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Morris Levy, co-founder and CEO, The Yard 32:12

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Morris Levy grew up in the fashion industry, but after 15 years in the business he decided real estate held more of his interest. Now he runs The Yard , the co-working company that started in Brooklyn and now has 14 locations in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. We sat down with him to learn more about his successful and transformation-filled career. “My family is in the fashion business, manufacturing clothing,” he told us of his early work. He joined the family business right after high school, working primarily in the manufacturing of women’s and children’s garments. “I was traveling overseas for the first four years, spending most of my time in China and building product lines, which gave me a great foundation to take something and make it better,” he said in our podcast. That knack for improvement led Levy to wonder about other careers where his transformative spirit could be utilized. “I started going to school at night to learn a little bit more about real estate because I just had an interest. When you’re manufacturing something and you’re improving something, essentially you’re just adding value. So adding value to a property and to a building is not that much different if you can see what something’s potential is.” Levy took on leading roles in real-estate development after that, but in 2011 he got together with company co-founder Richard Beyda to focus on a new idea: a shared space that focused on entrepreneurship and day jobs instead of residential development. Although it still involved improving spaces, this was the next big shift in Levy’s career. The two founders realized there were almost no options for flexible workspaces that didn’t require expensive, long term leases. “It’s about commitment. People don’t want to be locked in,” Levy said. “We had a lot of large spaces and they were always hard to move. But when I cut them up into smaller spaces, they went very quickly. And I had to also be flexible, instead of taking a 10- year deal, I’d take a three-year deal.” The first location of The Yard was a transformed warehouse on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, which became a destination for entrepreneurs to collaborate, share their experiences, and foster new ideas. Original members of The Yard included companies like Uber, Blue Apron, Wanderfly, and the writing team behind Birdman , the Academy Award-winning film. While The Yard was a pioneer in the emerging co-working industry, plenty of competition rose up at around the same time, including WeWork and Brooklyn-based Industrious . How does The Yard differentiate itself ? “There are a lot of competitors that are larger than us. Every Yard member has heard of some of those competitors, yet they choose to be with us,” Levy said. “It’s not only about price, because we’re not the cheapest option out there. People stay with us for the service, for our team, for the support we offer.” At some point in the company’s evolution, Levy said he realized that he’s really in the hospitality business, more so than real estate. While the Brooklyn native remains firmly rooted in the borough—he lives in Midwood with his family—his company has ambitious expansion plans. “I think it’s time to go to the West Coast,” said Levy, who has been scouting locations in San Francisco. “We have so many members that are traveling coast to coast, and they ask us, ‘When are you opening?'” —By Kora Feder…

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Boaz Gilad, founder and CEO, Brookland Capital 40:10

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“I came to New York to study acting,” says Boaz Gilad , but he wound up distinguishing himself in quite another field. He’s currently Brooklyn’s most prolific real-estate developer, as measured by the number of projects underway (three dozen at the moment). “One thing led to the other and I thought to myself, while I’m pursuing my passion, which was acting, I want to make a little bit of money and not wait tables between shows,” Gilad told us in our podcast. He and his wife decided to start buying “a two-family every three, four years.” They ended up purchasing more than one every few years, and soon had a small empire and a new passion. “I’m not coming from a wealthy background at all, but I spent a lot of time learning the market. I knew nothing about it, absolutely nothing about real estate, business, marketing. And one of the benefits was that you could get high-leverage mortgages then.” Gilad got started in the business more than 15 years ago and in 2012 founded Brookland Capital, a real-estate investment and development company. Brookland targets land and neglected buildings in undervalued areas and develops modern living spaces. “I don’t buy buildings with tenants,” he says. “I have a hard time with what’s called ‘repositioning’–or there are other words that are not as nice. I look always for empty spaces. I don’t want to deal with eviction.” His company has acquired more than 100 properties and brought more than 2,000 units to the market. Gilad is also the co-author of The Real Estate Millionaire : How to Invest in Rental Markets and Make a Fortune , and an adjunct professor in the MBA program at New York University. “I grew up in Israel but I’ve been living in Brooklyn for 22 years,” he said. “I didn’t have the money to pay the rent in Manhattan, so when my girlfriend, now my wife, moved to Brooklyn, the only reason was we couldn’t afford the rent. We decided to move in together and we said, ‘Let’s live just across the river, live our lives in Manhattan and come sleep in Brooklyn.” Access to Manhattan is still important for the sites he chooses as a developer, but priorities in the borough have shifted, and Gilad has followed them. “We buy by subways. We don’t like to be 10 to 15 stops away from Manhattan. And I’ll follow any trend. I’m kind of a millennial developer. So if you’re a hipster, I’m going to follow you.” “Every place I can see a cool coffee shop or the potential of a great coffee shop and people on bicycles, that’s where I’m interested in looking at properties,” he said. “ So right now we’re in Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights.” While betting on Brooklyn seems obvious now, Gilad said the road to success was a bumpy one. “I probably made every mistake in the book. I was very lucky because most of my mistakes were made in a market that was going up,” he recalls of his early days in the industry. Finding collaborators who could fill in the gaps in his own skills was one of the solutions. “I needed some help on the maintenance,” for example, “so I got a person who used to be a personal trainer I worked with a few times, and he was also a plumber on the side, so he helped me.” He used a similar technique for finding tenants, looking to the people he knew. “Real estate isn’t about location, it’s about people. So you have to be very clear about who you’re serving. When I was 28-29, I served the clients that I was involved with. So I was an actor, I was young, in my 20s. It was a natural progression to serve that clientele. I put ads in Backstage, a newspaper for actors. I put ads in the Equity Building for actors, trying to find people who could communicate with me.” While Gilad’s Brooklyn clientele has evolved, they’re still not your average American home-seekers. “I think one of the benefits is that the kind of people who rent or buy from us appreciate history, appreciate creativity, design.” Brookland has developed about six old, abandoned churches, for example. “You’re looking for something interesting,” he said. “I want to be creative. I want to enjoy what I’m doing.” –By Kora Feder…

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Danny Aronson, CEO and co-founder, Even headphones 35:14

for 7 years siden35:14

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“If you think about every headphone you’ve ever tried, the assumption is that you have perfect hearing across all frequency ranges, your hearing is completely symmetrical, and it miraculously never changes,” says this week’s podcast guest, Danny Aronson. “I found that to be untrue,” he says, which was the germ of his business idea. Aronson is the co-founder of Even , a Brooklyn-based headphone manufacturing company that aims to individualize sound . Based on a 90-sec., self-administered hearing test that checks a user’s sensitivity to various frequencies in each ear, Even’s headphones are tuned to personalized settings. Aronson is a classically trained composer with a degree in music from Tel Aviv University. He plays flute, piano and guitar, and has written and produced music for theater and ballet. Before starting Even in 2013, he spent two decades as a partner at Israel’s largest post-production sound studio, working on thousands of radio spots, TV ads, and feature films. “A headphone is a tool of work for me,” he says, “and I’ve tried just about everything out there on the market.” The company started with a call from a friend looking for advice. “Ofer, my cofounder, gave me a call when I was still in Israel and said, ‘I’m going to Best Buy to buy a pair of headphones, what should I buy?’ And I said, ‘It doesn’t really matter because they’re basically all the same. It’s a lot of over-hyped, over-priced stuff. I don’t understand why headphones aren’t like glasses.’ It’s still the tagline. We spent a lot of time with music-mastering engineers and audiologists to build this test. And once we did that and tried it for ourselves, we really felt this was a good enough idea to pursue and really dive into.” The concept caught on quickly, with the company’s first batch of earbuds, priced at $99, selling out within 48 hours. Then came headphones, currently the models H2 and H3 (both priced at $149), which were named by Popular Science in 2017 among the top tech innovations of the year. While Even is run from New York City, the headphones are made in Shenzhen, China. “We have our own dedicated space there and manufacture everything ourselves in China,” he says. “We do lean manufacturing, which means we don’t do 50,000 headphones at a time. We do 5,000 at a time. We don’t have a lot of inventory to manage.” Here in Brooklyn, Aronson has somewhat unusual hiring criteria–he looks for musicians in prospective employees. “I started out as a musician. I started playing flute when I was very young and I just drowned into it. I just completely lost interest in everything else and spent many, many hours a day practicing,” he recalls. “This combination of very intense physical work and creativity I found very appealing. That’s why we love to work with musicians. Eighty percent of the people who work at Even are musicians because it’s exactly that combination of people who have self-discipline–because you have to have that if you’re a professional musician–but with creativity.” Finding a musician in search of a day job can’t be too hard in this city, but that’s not why Aronson moved here. New York was somewhat of a compromise–Aronson was based in Israel while his cofounder was in San Francisco. “It was clear to me that Brooklyn was the place. It’s the New York of New York.” He had a prior relationship with the city as well. “My wife’s family is from New York, not from Brooklyn but from Yonkers. It was a lifelong dream of mine to move here and Brooklyn just felt like home immediately. It amazes me how quickly we–I came here with my three kids–how quickly we felt at home and were embraced by the neighborhood we’re in.” –By Kora Feder…

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Ro Gupta, co-founder and CEO, Carmera 34:28

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For a human driver, Google maps may be good enough to find one’s way around. But for a self-driving car, officially known as an autonomous vehicle (AV), a lot more information is needed to safely navigate a complicated place like New York City. Brooklyn-based startup Carmera aims to solve that problem with its “street-intelligence platform,” a high-definition mapping service for AVs of the not-so-distant future. Robo-cars are always asking themselves three basic questions, Carmera CEO and co-founder Ro Gupta told us in our podcast. One is, “Where am I, exactly?” Another, essentially, is “What am I seeing?” which the AV figures out by redundantly cross-checking its sensors. The third is, “Where do I go next?,” the planning function, Gupta explained. Carmera not only provides HD maps to help answer those questions, but continuously updates the data to account for changing conditions. After a couple of years in stealth mode, Carmera publicly launched last year with $6.4 million in funding from investors who included Brooklynites Bre Pettis , co-founder of MakerBot, and Notation Capital . Why did Carmera decide set up shop in New York City? “One of the things that’s hardest about what we do is keeping the maps up to date,” said Gupta, “but the other thing that’s really hard abou t high-definition maps is doing them in dense urban areas as opposed to highways. Highways are much easier to map for autonomous vehicles. But there is so much granularity and chaos in cities. There’s also urban-canyon effects with GPS that cause your maps to be inaccurate. We wanted to prove we could do this in one of the hardest areas in the country.” A native of Kolkata, India, Gupta studied civil engineering at Princeton and earned his MBA at Northwestern. Among other roles in business before launching Carmera, Gupta was vice president of business development at Disqus, where he was on the forefront of building massive online-discussion communities. “That was part of what made me want to start a company in the data space. But my background in transportation came from my undergraduate days in Princeton back in the ’90s,” he says. “I was even working on autonomous transit back in 1998-99.” “Another reason that subconsciously influenced me was being born in a developing country in India, and also having spent some time in other developing countries,” he says of his inspiration. “When you’re living in that environment you don’t take infrastructure for granted, especially roads.” Carmera’s mission didn’t come into focus overnight, says Gupta. His first idea was simply a dashboard-mounted camera for cars, to be sold as a consumer product, but he moved past that idea. “The way we approached it was like, ‘Let’s get confidence that the model and problem we have is a big enough problem to pursue.’ So I did my homework, talked to people at Google and some of these driverless-car companies, often off the record. I also did my homework on how to keep these maps up-to-date. I had a few ideas of how I could do that, and started to talk to fleet drivers and managers and got confidence in that.” Carmera now partners with fleets to gather information from sensors mounted on their vehicles. Along the way, Carmera discovered other prospective uses for its information. “The data we collect can be useful for nonautomotive industries like city planning, construction, architecture,” says Gupta. The last big step in launching the company was building a team, which meant carefully acquiring talent in “some of the hardest-to-recruit disciplines like machine learning, computer vision, robotics, and geospatial engineering.” In some of those areas, New York City has talent second to none, he says. “New York is also really good because it’s almost like its own country in terms of GDP and population and things like that, so you can really test things out here and be pretty confident that, ‘Yeah, this is a big sample size,'” he says. Part of the company’s Brooklyn attachment, though, is just personal for Gupta and his team (including co-founder Justin Day). “Honestly, a lot of it was because we live here. We have kids and personal lives here. We were both in New York tech for over a decade and our networks were here.” –By Kora Feder…

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Andrew Walcott, founder, Fusion East restaurant 28:53

for 7 years siden28:53

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When Andrew Walcott founded Fusion East , the beloved East New York restaurant that merges Caribbean and soul food, he was responding to a gap in his community. To get the kind of cuisine he wanted, he had to leave his neighborhood. “It just got tiring,” as Walcott describes the challenge of getting to upscale restaurants. He would drive to Downtown Brooklyn or Harlem, a long journey. “Then you got to hope there’s not a line once you get to the restaurant. I knew there was a community need,” he told us in our podcast. What was it that Walcott couldn’t find in East New York? Quality dining that represented the neighborhood’s own demographics. “The neighborhood is predominately black Caribbean and black American, so I wanted a menu that would reflect those demographics. So you’ll see oxtail for the Caribbeans and pork chops for the African Americans. If you go inside, say, Gateway Mall , you have your all-American options–your Applebee’s, Olive Garden, Buffalo Wild Wings–so even though they are competition for us, none of them have the exact menu that we have,” Walcott says. “We try to appeal directly to the African American and African Caribbean marketplace that surrounds us in the neighborhood.” Fusion East opened its doors in 2015 on Elton Street near the sprawling mall. The restaurant is a hit locally, but also draws people into East New York for the culinary experience. The space offers classic dishes in a modern setting, with new takes on jerk chicken wings, jerk salmon, chicken and waffles, shrimp & grits, and roti. Walcott and his team recently opened a second location, the Fusion East Cafe, at the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center. Walcott has many career accomplishments–he served in the U.S. Air Force, is a corporate attorney and a certified public accountant–but before Fusion East he had never opened a restaurant. “I reached out to other friends of mine who were in the industry,” Walcott recalls, to hear feedback about his original idea. “I would also speak to attorneys who have been involved in the process,” who he asked about getting an operating license, a liquor license, and other regulatory questions. “The biggest component,” he said, was “talking to people who already owned their restaurants.” Walcott is well aware that opening a restaurant for the first time does not always end in success. His words of advice for budding entrepreneurs in any neighborhood: “Do your research. Get to know people in the community. The community board can be a great resource. I’ve been on the board 20 years and the people there definitely want to see more economic activity. They can be a huge resource. Get involved with the local community so you can meet the movers and shakers.”…

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Brian Vines, founder and host, ‘Going In With Brian Vines’ 33:33

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“The underserved community, the overserved community–we meet them where they live,” says TV journalist Brian Vines about the variety of people he meets on his beat: the borough of Brooklyn. He’s the host of BRIC TV’ s Going In With Brian Vines , a magazine-style show that takes viewers into the streets to hear Brooklynites talk about such topics as gentrification, institutional racism, and the tech boom. Along with launching his own show, Vines plays many roles at Emmy-winning BRIC TV, including senior correspondent and host of BK Live and the #BHeard Town Hall series. All told, BRIC is the city’s largest presenter of free cultural programming. Vines sat down with us for our podcast to talk about his current work, but also his earliest days in journalism and storytelling. “My grandmother was blind, so when I was a kid I would do everything with my grandmother,” Vines says. “She was my life–and I was her eyes from the time I was a little boy. We would watch TV together, and my grandmother loved the news and soap operas. She taught me how to watch, because if someone was in the news, she was listening to the story, but she asked me what pictures they were showing, so she was creating a news producer without me even knowing it.” Vines, from Chicago, earned his bachelor’s degree in international relations from Knox College in Illinois, but found himself drawn to journalism. “I won a fellowship my sophomore year and I did a media study,” he says. After spending a summer in New York City working with a professor of TV news at New York University, he was hooked. “I then applied to graduate school for journalism,” earning his masters degree from Boston University before moving back to New York. While Vines has now lived and worked in Brooklyn for well over a decade, it wasn’t always his first choice. “I wanted to move to Harlem. My boyfriend at the time wanted to move to Brooklyn. We flipped a coin, saw a place in Harlem, saw a place in Brooklyn and Brooklyn won. It was the best thing that ever happened,” he says. “Brooklyn has completely embraced me. I feel so at home here. When I moved to Bed-Stuy, I called my parents and said, ‘This is it. It’s just like home.’ There’s old people, there’s dogs, there’s kids, there’s messy people, there’s every other cousin. I feel so comfortable and I love it here. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.” Embracing a community is a large part of what Going In With Brian Vines is all about. The show, he says, “was about this idea of going inside issues, going inside people’s worlds where it can be sort of immersive and also thinking of new ideas.” While he feels comfortable working in a studio with a parade of personalities passing through, the Going In show is on a mission to “get into the stream,” he says. A show about community in Brooklyn is naturally going to be talking about gentrification. Vines is no stranger to the topic. “I’m about 16 years in now. I do see that change. I remember being a youngster when I was first here in Brooklyn and I was in Williamsburg with all of my friends,” Vines recalls. “We were one of the early waves when you could only rent from old Italian families or Hasidic landlords, and now there are these spaceships that have landed right next to the old, horrible architecture that was there,” he says. Borrowing a line from Ru Paul to describe the community’s changes, “It’s like if you went to your class reunion and your best friend had gender-reassignment surgery. You still know all about them, but it’s completely different at the same time. And that’s what it feels like sometimes walking around this place.” Even with the tension and constant change, Vines sees the best in Brooklyn. “I’m from the Midwest. I know what it’s like to be nice and to get along. But I’m also from Chicago,” he says. “It’s the mix that happens in Brooklyn. We have the tension, we have the creativity. There are lots of things in flux right now. The best of what’s happening in this country is happening in Brooklyn.” –By Kora Feder…

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Jacqueline and Scot Tatelman, co-founders, State Bags 32:31

for 7 years siden32:31

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State Bags is a five-year-old company selling well-made, cool and classic bags, while using the power of business to make a statement about social justice. With every State purchase, one backpack filled with essential supplies is given to a local child in need. It follows the buy-one, give-one formula, but with its own powerful story. It starts with a Brooklyn-dwelling couple, Jacq (short for Jacqueline) and Scot Tatelman, who had careers in other businesses (she in fashion, he in the non-profit realm) but were ready for a change. In 2009, they launched the Country Roads Foundation , a nonprofit that sends underprivileged kids from New York City to a weeklong summer camp in the Poconos called Camp Power. While hauling the kids around one year, an idea hit them. “We do a scholarship trip every year with ten campers and after one of the scholarship trips, we were racing to the train station to get the kids back on the train,” recalls Jacq in our podcast. “One of the girls was running to the train and she had a Duane Reade bag with holes in it and all her stuff was falling out. I ran to the back of our car, grabbed a backpack and handed it to her. Later that night I was like ‘Scot, we have to do more.’” Camp Power had been a dream of Scot’s. “I’d been working in the non-profit space here in New York and was working in the city’s toughest and underfunded neighborhoods,” he says. “I was a camp guy and being in those neighborhoods opened my eyes to the needs in those neighborhoods.” State Bags was the natural progression for the pair, although it wasn’t easy. “We had no idea what we were doing. We just were really passionate about taking the one-for-one model and adapting it for kids here in the U.S.,” says Scot. “We came out with three styles of cotton canvas bags,” Jacq recalls of the first launch. “Not only were they plagued with production issues, but we quickly learned that for people to take out their hard-earned money and spend on a product, it has to be great.” In order to get the proper utility, look and function, Jacq says, “we weren’t afraid to change, pivot, and rebrand.” The bags come with a message, not just for the buyers but also for the kids who receive the free backpacks. “We know that giving stuff away is not going to change a life. So it is about coming with an experience as role models. We have bag-drop rallies,” Scot explains. “What we do is a 60-minute educational workshop, mixed with a dance party, mixed with a motivational rally.” The educators themselves are uniquely qualified too. “Our pack men and women are child-development specialists who have grown up in very similar situations as the kids we serve and they speak to their experiences of successfully rising from these communities.” Since their start, State has given away hundreds of thousands of backpacks, driven by alliances with celebrities from entertainment and politics. “Partnerships have been a huge play for us,” Scot says of their growth. State has worked with Beyoncé, Jessica Alba’s Honest Co., and President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative. That said, building a brand is a huge endeavor. “There are bigger brands out there who can put more money into advertising and marketing. You get left behind if you’re not strategic about it,” says Jacq. Despite the challenges, she encourages more companies to follow a give-back business model. “We hope that more people do this because it is important to society, and for consumers to think about their purchases and not just buy anything, but buy things that make a difference.”…

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Susan Povich, co-founder, Red Hook Lobster Pound 38:53

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From law to lobsters? It’s a career change unlike most, but it’s the one Susan Povich took in 2009, and it has proven to be wildly successful. Povich is the co-founder of Red Hook Lobster Pound , one of the first establishments to bring fresh Maine lobster direct to Brooklyn. Starting with a storefront restaurant in Red Hook, they’ve expanded to outposts in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., and a beloved food truck knowns as Big Red. Povich and her co-founder, husband Ralph Gorham, had lived in Red Hook for awhile before even thinking about lobsters. “We had bought a building in Red Hook that we wanted to develop into apartments,” Povich recalls in our podcast. “The board of standards and appeals wasn’t so inclined to let us change the zoning.” Around the same time, Povich and Gorham happened to go on a family vacation to Maine. “We picked up some lobster in Portland from friends, I cooked it and it was delicious, and it was really inexpensive. My husband said, ‘Why don’t we bring this back to New York and change the building and open a lobster pound?’” Povich was a successful lawyer at the time, working in tech and music. She was not a total stranger to the culinary world, having quit law once before to go to French cooking school. She even ran a restaurant for two years early in her career, but closed it in frustration and continued as a lawyer. “There was always a calling back to culinary endeavors, which was my passion,” she says. So they opened a lobster pound in the spring of 2009. “We called it Red Hook Lobster Pound because if you spit in the street in Red Hook, the media wants to write about you,” Povich says of the name. “It’s this weird place that they’ve always been trying to figure out. Over the years Red Hook has become an international tourist destination.” The idea of fresh lobsters in Red Hook did indeed catch the attention of the media. Sam Sifton, who was then the restaurant critic of the New York Times , happened to live in the neighborhood and mentioned the couple’s new business in an item. (“ These two scamps have been playing Mr. and Mrs. David to the local Fairway’s lobster Goliath since summer,” he wrote .) Before they knew it, they had hit the press. “Just with the live lobster, we had 20 print articles in two months. It was such a weird concept. I couldn’t say it was going to work.” The pound’s first expansion was selling lobster rolls in the early days of Brooklyn Flea. Povich remembers the simplicity of joining the Flea, now somewhat unimaginable given its popularity. “Why don’t I ask them if I can make lobster rolls and sell them under a tent? And that’s what I did.” She describes her first day selling. “I showed up with my little tent and my two tables and my grill and there were 400 people in line.” Slowly but surely, they turned their pound into a full-fledged restaurant. “We took my husband’s wood shop, carved out a little area in the front, and put picnic tables there. And that worked well for a while. Then we put in a steamer, we started doing lobster dinners, then we started expanding our menu.” When Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, Red Hook took one of the hardest blows. In rebuilding their facility , Povich and Gorham took the opportunity to expand further and refurbish their space, selling their first post-Sandy lobster roll to the mayor. Red Hook Lobster Pound’s flagship restaurant is now one of the cornerstone stops in anyone’s visit to Red Hook. –By Kora Feder…

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Roberto Gil, founder and chief designer, Casa Kids 37:37

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There’s a reason Roberto Gil’s designs are known to fit effortlessly in any space, as if the simple birch plywood and pop of color were built for each customer’s personal home. Gil has a masters in architecture from Harvard, so he was thinking about rooms long before what to put in them. “I’m an architect for kids, not just a furniture designer,” the Casa Kids founder told us in our podcast. “We are pretty good at creating spaces, especially when they are challenging spaces because of the size or the shape.” Gil launched Casa Kids, a children’s furniture company based in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, in 1992. He was not always a furniture guy, though. After a recession in 1990-91, he lost his job at an architecture firm. “I was doing furniture for myself in my own apartment and I realized I liked it and it was fun,” he recalls. He started selling chairs and tables to his friends. “I didn’t know I had a business for awhile. Meanwhile, I was getting some orders.” Soon Gil was heading to trade shows and showcasing his pieces in museum stores, from Guggenheim to MOMA. As any business owner could predict, Gil needed more than word of mouth to grow Casa Kids. “I have to wear many more hats than I ever expected,” he says of running the business. In the early days, Gil built a website and learned the tricks of SEO. “Suddenly people started finding me on Google. We just started getting random emails. That’s when my business completely changed.” Gil was quickly recognized with high regard in the design scene. “I understand space and circulation, ventilation, lights, proportions. It’s not just the furniture but the space in between the furniture and how you organize all of that.” He knew what people wanted. “People are looking for a bit more than just a bed or a bunk bed. They care a bit more about the quality and the design.” Gil grew up in Buenos Aires and moved to the U.S. to get his master’s degree, then came to New York and began his architecture career. Casa Kids started in Tribeca, but later moved to Brooklyn. “When I moved to Brooklyn 20-something years ago, I fell in love with the area,” he says. “I moved to Vinegar Hill to live near the shop. I had my shop in Dumbo for five years and then they sold the building. They converted it to residential and that’s when I moved to Red Hook.” Although Casa Kids sells its products beyond the city, Gil appreciates New Yorkers as customers. “They have good taste for furniture in my opinion, and they have some money to spend.” Gill’s pieces range from a $200 chair to a $7,600 loft bed. “Of course what we do is a bit expensive. It’s made here in New York, so it’s very good quality.” All of the furniture is built in Brooklyn by a small team of woodworkers, the same people who install the pieces into local customer’s homes. With many hats to wear and orders to fill, Gil sees Casa Kids continuing to grow in the coming years, but maybe with some additional help. “I look forward to keep growing the company and do less things, so I can focus on designing.” –By Kora Feder…

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Steve Hindy, co-founder, Brooklyn Brewery 27:57

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He pioneered the craft-beer revolution and helped turn Brooklyn into an icon

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