An Interview with Yatú Espinosa

This is the latest installment in the series It’s Not Business, It's Personal, which consists of interviews with people whose careers we find fascinating. Previous interviews were with Emily Segal, Malte Müller, and Margaret Lee.

My first exposure to Yatú Espinosa and his frequent collaborator Norm O’Hagan was through their group Teal on Are.na. My initial feeling of coming across their channels and work was hope! They appeared to be artists in the truest sense — intellectually adventurous, ambitious, highly productive, and unconcerned with genres or labels.

Teal Process & Company (as I understood and understand it) is the umbrella organization for Norm and Yatú’s practice, which doesn’t neatly fit within technology, art, theory, or business, but encompasses aspects of these categories and more. Their projects range from the strictly theoretical (e.g. Paragonday or Careering) to the actualized and tactile (like USB Club), but they always come from a unique perspective and with grounding that is equally conceptual and principled.

Yatú approaches his work with a type of energy that is different from almost every other founder that I’ve come across. My wish is not for more founders like Yatú but for more founders to realize that they can approach their own work in a similar way to Yatú — to give themselves freedom to explore their own ideas to the fullest extent, with humor, creativity and ambition.

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Charles Broskoski: Where’d you grow up?

Yatú Espinosa: I grew up in Golden Gate, Florida. It’s an area within Naples where a lot of the people who worked in the hospitality industry lived. I was never exposed to gentrification until I went to a metropolitan city because they just kept cutting down trees where I grew up. So it was like, okay, now there’s a new lot.

Cab: What is the first thing that you remember being super into? 

Yatú: Man, I mean, I obviously skated. When I was 12 I had a mini — I got a small board as a gift, I mean a mini, mini, mini board, like literally only one foot could fit on it. Not even like the fat ones that people have, it was more jank than that. I remember once we even built a ramp, which is...

Cab: You taught yourself how to build a ramp?

Yatú: I didn’t see it as building at the time, I saw it as solving the problem of not going to the skatepark. We would play S.K.A.T.E all the time and that would get competitive. But yeah, I enjoyed skating. I tried to make music for a little bit. My mom was really good at discouraging me in that career direction. 

Cab: [Laughs] What did she say to discourage you?

Yatú: It's not what she said. She was just not even supportive of it. She was just not interested in hearing my music. She just wanted me to study STEM. Now I DJ [laughs].

I didn’t like math until I discovered I really enjoyed geometry. During my freshman year, there was a CAD program I could take, and I absolutely loved it. It was my first class of the day — you know how in high school you have to wake up really early, often before sunrise — and even so, I looked forward to it. That class could have led me toward fields like industrial design or architecture, but then I transferred to the school I was actually zoned for, which didn’t offer the program. I had to make the best of that new environment.

Cab: What would you do instead of the CAD stuff?

Yatú: I was in a digital design class that no one was paying attention to, even the teacher. I was just teaching myself by reading the textbook, and everyone else was like, “why are you doing that?” After I transferred, I was in an atmosphere where not many people cared about getting good grades. If you actually did, then you would find a small group of very supportive people. 

Cab: What were you teaching yourself in the digital design class?

Yatú: I was playing with new 3D features that had just come out and on Photoshop. I also started a small business while I was in high school where I would make websites for people off of Wix. I made a website for my barber who was also a rapper — 

Cab: Was it about rapping or was it about the barber shop?

Yatú: It was about rapping. I made websites for local rappers when I was in high school.

Cab: Are any of the websites still live? Or can you find them on the internet right now?

Yatú: I doubt it. They're probably on Internet Archive. I used to put SoundCloud embeds in there. Hey, I was getting paid. Yeah, I started a business.

Cab: That's really advanced for high school.

Yatú: I went from taking a digital design class to finding out about how websites work and being like, “all right, let me flip this.” I remember the website was $400.

Cab: I was digging through some of your channels on Are.na last night, and I saw a hidden fact that I didn’t know about you — that you were into dance. Was that also in high school?

Yatú: Yeah, I was in a dance crew. This is like a Nardwuar moment. There's a video of me in a dance squad and it has over 10K views. We were the coolest dance squad in the area. 

Cab: One of my best friends was super into breakdancing in high school, so I only know the terms peripherally, but what was the style that you were into, what was your specialty?

Yatú: Jerking. Yeah, that era, 2009, I feel like it was an early version of Jersey Club.

Cab: I got out of my depth with this very quickly. But I’m empathetic towards skateboarding and dancing. All that kind of stuff is related, because there’s an open-endedness to both of them and they are both activities where you really have to teach yourself. And then you were in that digital design class where, as you said, no one is paying attention, not even the teacher. You were basically doing your own Montessori school. I'm wondering if you recognized that at the time, your own independence. Yatú: I was going to an out of zone school that had a better “education,” and then I got rezoned to a place where people weren't taking school seriously. I got exposed, you know what I’m saying? I got exposed to quality, and I was around people where the common thing was like, “yo, work hard in school.” Then I got into an environment where being cool is more important. And I'm like, I’m gonna do both. 

I had a close relationship with my guidance counselor. I’d often stop by and ask, “what can I do? What summer internships should I consider?” I won something called CEO Academy — there’s a video of it online somewhere, which I need to upload to my USB ASAP. Looking back, there were many stepping stones that shaped me. The natural progression of those moments has been about staying curious, resourceful, and open to what feels most resonant to me. 

I would say the artistic expression didn't come out until late college, but I feel like there were remnants of that in my early childhood. It was probably just suppressed by the goal of putting myself in a career path that is “respectable,” and being able to empower myself socioeconomically. I saw doing well in school as my way out. So I got a bunch of scholarships and I only applied to one college. I didn’t want to have to depend on other people and get into too much debt.

Cab: Where did you go to college?

Yatú: I only applied to one school because I didn't think I was going to get into college. I had this imposter syndrome even though I had a bunch of scholarships, which is a crazy concept. I went to Florida State and it was a big party school, which I actually enjoyed because it was fun. When you're in school you should socialize. And then sophomore year, I found a tech club.

It was very welcoming and diverse. Diva, a friend of mine, was the president. She was an international affairs major and she was running a tech club. There were people from all different backgrounds and majors. I'm like, “I like this energy,” you know? And we ended up all going to hackathons together. Eventually I threw a hackathon at our school with Norm, and that’s how our relationship started.

Cab: I always forget that both you and Norm went to Florida State. Did you like each other right away?

Yatú: Like each other? No, no, we got frustrated with each other quite a bit. We're completely opposites. We were not even friends like that at first. I think we became closer friends once we saw how often we were willing to take responsibility for our larger group and actually hold roles of leadership. We both like each other’s leadership style, integrity, and ethics around the decisions we make. 

We also both discovered art around the same time. I started taking photos. I was really inspired by my friend Aziz who I also met through hackathon culture, and when I visited him in New York he had converted his whole room into a photo studio. I didn't know you could do that, my mind was kind of blown. I started turning my living room into a photo studio and doing a bunch of photography. And one day we had a photo shoot day and Norm was like, “yo, can I come along?” And I'm like, “yeah, sure. It's pretty up in the air.” 

We love changing spaces, physically rearranging space to achieve the flow we would like. We rearranged Norm’s living room, and instead of going out for spring break, we stayed in and basically recreated school. We had recess time. We were trying to create our own educational environment around artistic interests because we weren’t exposed to it in our curriculums. We were hacking it.

We weren’t taking a lot of artistic classes, we were both taking a bunch of technical ones. My world is much more information architecture centric and his is engineering. We were both designers at hackathons, and there weren’t many other designers there. So we’re like, “ok, who do I have to learn from?” We saw that design could expand beyond just function. Norm even did their own DIY study of the philosophy of aesthetics for their last semester. So that's how far it went.

Cab: Both of you seem like you really understand that creativity has more to do with decision making. I think it takes a lot of artists a long time to understand that. 

The way you’re describing staying in for spring break and rearranging spaces and time — can you describe what that’s like? If you and Norm are trying to rearrange a room, say, what’s an example of a conversation that you might have?

Yatú: For the hackathon we organized, we simply grouped together chairs, tables, and other furniture and told the hackers they could move things wherever they wanted. At the time, I was reading Stanford’s design book Make Space, and perhaps implicitly, almost metaphorically, we wanted people to break the ice, or the “glaciers” of grouped furniture, with each other before forming a team. 

I’m in Daycare right now, a space we share with one other studiomate, Carson. We recently rearranged it. One example of a decision I made is my preference for being close to the sun. Since the sunlight hits my desk so strongly, I’ve adapted by using only e-ink devices during that time. I use the Daylight tablet to mirror my MacBook and the Remarkable for my notes and to-do lists. This approach allows me to adapt to the environment rather than change it. I could install blinds, but this is my time to enjoy the sun. The issue isn’t me — it’s the computer. I’m supposed to get sunlight.

Another project that’s had many spaces is our educational program LRFT, shorthand for Leave Room for Thoughts. In 2018, LRFT started out as an art project. We made sure that the space by the production floor area remained empty. There were desks and then the stationary area. A couch and a place to chill. The joke was that we were leaving room for thoughts. So that’s also how we arranged the space.

Cab: How much humor is involved? What is the feeling when one of these terms emerge?

Yatú: One way to look at it is that the words we choose to use influence the mental models in which we operate. Aaron Z. Lewis told me “Language is the ultimate form of augmentation.”

For a while, we were just creating words that fit within a language design system. It got to the point where we developed a tool called the Working Dictionary. This tool became part of our process for understanding which words to use. In the Working Dictionary, you can look up the definition of one word, then type in another, and the words will appear side by side, making it easier to distinguish between similar terms.

For example, we created an alternate time system from this approach to language called Paragonday, which is a theoretical system for space and time. Paragon means ideal, day is day, so “ideal day.” There are different types of days and the time is more like solar time. 

Cab: How often do you find yourself having made an entirely new baseline of rules?

Yatú: Not often — it’s always a continuous process. I’m still revisiting ideas from four years ago and finding excitement in how they’ve evolved over time. There’s something more rewarding about building on a concept rather than moving on from it. It also aligns with a recurring theme in my life. For instance, we call our home Playground, the studio Daycare, and past spaces have been named School and Factory. I even refer to my partner’s place as Campgrounds because of her patio. It’s a way of reshaping language to create a metaphorical framework that adds depth and meaning to spaces.

Through our typology, we can envision how New York functions as a campus. This approach also helped us reshape people’s understanding of what a networked space can look like. It showed us how education can expand beyond a single room, encouraging people to navigate and utilize a pre-existing infrastructure. It offers a fresh perspective, allowing one to see educational opportunities that exist beyond the confines of traditional institutions.

We started calling this “Schoolscaping.” That’s the new word.

Cab: How about the titles you gave yourselves at USB Club?

Yatú: Head of Fiction is Norm. Head of Reality is me. 

One joke is that in the middle is magic. Because you see what fiction can bring into reality and what reality brings to fiction.

Cab: Genius.

Yatú: We are really great co-founders. We’re perfectly smiley faces on all of Co-star. Norm didn't believe in Co-star but now I think he’s coming around.

We’re still focused on community building, but now we’re tying it to hardware while simultaneously engaging in world-building. For those who don’t know, USB Club is a USB powered social network. Our USBs unlock access to your friend’s favorite files via a Desktop and Mobile app. What started as simply bringing a group of people together on the ground floor — through things like the ATMs — has evolved into a global community that can reconnect with each other across the world.

It’s about recreating that potluck story I always reference: the essence of USB Club being a gathering where people shared files in one place, and the act of returning those files felt like a shared responsibility. It’s about making file sharing more social, moving away from its typical association with work.

At the same time, we’re filling in a lot of gaps as we navigate this journey. It’s challenging, but it’s also about understanding our roles and staying clear on our purpose. Creating a role can be risky for both the person and the organization. 

Cab: Why do you think it’s risky?

Yatú: One, the person could just end up doing something that they don’t like and then they’re confused about themselves. Two, for the organization, it creates instability because the outcomes are a bit more unpredictable. 

When Careering, in an organization, there's a lot of trust that’s involved because you’re trusting a person will make the most out of the learning opportunity of the role they’re in. What I’ve learned so far from my role, Head of Reality, is that I always deal with the bad news. I’m always acting on what I can do now. I always say the hard things, and if there’s an elephant in the room, I address it. 

Our friend Carson likes to describe Norm and I in terms of “velocity.” Velocity needs speed and direction and Norm has a lot of speed and I have a lot of direction. Norm knows how to care about the micro parts of things. I’m more macro. We both don’t like to think about the other side too much, so we cover each other’s bases that way.

Working with Norm is interesting because he constantly has so many ideas about what we can do. We can do it all but we have to make sure things make sense sequentially.

Cab: I relate to that a lot. One of the hardest things to come to terms with when you're doing business is that you can 100% do it all, but you have to do it in the right order. Once you do some of those things, the other things might not make sense anymore. You have to pay attention to one thing at a time and then reevaluate. Do you agree with that?

Yatú: I agree to a certain extent. 

I think we’re both so ambidextrous that we actually do well when we’re doing multiple things at once. It’s pretty aggressive right now, the way we’re working, but we check in with each other every two hours.

Cab: What’s a check-in like?

Yatú: Just very casual, just like, “Yo, what did you do? What are you up to?” “These are all the things I still have to do.” “Which one has the highest impact?” “Do you agree?” “Cool. Okay, back checking again in two hours.” That’s what it looks like.

Cab: That sounds so healthy. 

Yatú: It’s very intense. We’re working on this new device, it’s called Transport. And we have this thing on the whiteboard right now called “Hurricane Transport” to represent the launch. So we have a list of things that, if they are true, then we’re at a category five, or category four, or three, or two, or one, all the way to tropical storm. We’re at category five right now.

Cab: [Laughs] Is it better to have a category five or worse? 

Yatú: No, it’s worse. It means bad, very, very bad. 

Cab: Oh ok, you’re not the storm, you’re surviving the storm. Got it.

Yatú: We’re surviving a storm. A lot of brainstorming, you know? 

So that’s another example of creative mental modeling around an organization. I feel like consultants get paid a bunch of money to put this kind of stuff in a deck without even implementing it.

Cab: I’m just curious, are you laughing when you’re coming up with this terminology?

Yatú: Yeah, yeah, for sure. We’re laughing, but the humor often carries uncomfortable truths. 

Cab: I’m thinking about the typologies that you create, or the way you structure spaces, and how those are such good examples of creative decision making…do you feel that same sort of sense of agency to create orientations for yourself within a business model? 

Yatú: Yes, for sure.

People talk about culture all the time, and it means so many different things. I’m thinking about something like a business culture where “hustle culture” is the dominating vibe. Norm and I hustle — a lot of times people tell us they can’t believe how hard we work and how much we do — but we don’t lead with that energy. We lead more with bias towards action. “Yo, all things are possible and we can show you.” That’s our culture. 

That was the hackathon culture, too. In the same way as I would just make something in a weekend, I'll keep testing how much I can actually do in this lifetime. 

It really depends on the type of business. When you're working on something tied to cultural relevance, an emerging market segment, or a phenomenon you’re pioneering, there’s an added responsibility to contextualize it for a broader audience. That responsibility falls on you as the one leading the effort. Ultimately, most businesses aim to be profitable. Some prioritize profit at all costs, while others take a more deliberate approach, ensuring that growth happens at the right time and on a solid foundation, rather than rushing it.

I think the approach of how we’ve been building USB Club has been a foundational approach, finding the lines between helpful friction and unhelpful friction. It’s working: People are getting USBs, people are signing up, people are using it every day. People are sharing files. It’s a great community of people.

To speak of “It’s not business, it’s personal,” there's a lot of wealth in human connections, I'll tell you that much. And I think that the way one chooses to garner their relationships with others is more deterministic of the way they're living life than others, because you are who you surround yourself with. 

Cab: I wouldn’t have thought that this was interesting 10 years ago, but now having worked on a business for a little while, I find myself being in awe of simple businesses that are done really well and with a lot of care for the people. 

For example, there’s a handful of grocery stores semi-near me in upstate New York. There’s one extremely exceptional grocery store that is a 40 minute drive away. This is the grocery store that I go to. It’s called Guido’s. When you go in there, it feels like the employees are just stoked to work there. That to me is so fucking impressive. It’s not the bougiest grocery store, but it’s not the worst either. It’s a very straightforward grocery store, and it works well and everyone is happy. You see one of the owners in there all the time, he’s stocking the produce. He’s talking to people and he knows everyone. That’s the kind of thing where I'm like, “yeah, the personal part of business really matters.” There are probably so many straightforward strategies for how to do things the right way and make money, but the key to this business is that it feels nice in there. And everyone around here says the same thing about Guido’s. 

Something you were saying was making me think of this because when people frame it as “I’m grinding,” it implies that you hate your job or you’re doing something unpleasant, which is not how it should be. You should be into what you’re doing. Find something that you’re into. Or find a way to be into it.

Yatú: Yeah, because nobody wants to work. For me, I’m locked in right now.

Cab: You’re doing something fun all weekend. You’re problem solving. That’s cool.

Yatú: Yeah, match the healthy obsession with creativity and understand how you can funnel that energy, you know?

Cab: This is making me think about Campus Complex. How did the motivation for Campus Complex become crystallized?

Yatú: A bit of it was happenstance. I spent most of my college years going to hackathons, working at the official Major League Hacking org, and helping other people throw hackathons. I didn’t see it as an educational thing at the time. I just saw it as my community of friends and peers.

Because of hackathons, I was able to travel and eventually visit NYC for the first time in my life, and I immediately fell in love. Once it came time to leave school, we had a month before we started our first full-time jobs. Norm, our other friend Benji, and I all started thinking about a self-run residency in New York. We were like, “we’ve got a month, let’s see what we can do.” We headed to the city without a plan and leased an art space in Brooklyn within the first couple days. We didn’t even know we were gonna get a space, but it felt like an obvious next step.

I took out a loan for it because I wasn’t on salary yet. And it’s funny because I was more reluctant to take a loan out for school. In retrospect, the personal loan for a space was more valuable than taking out a loan for college tuition. 

Cab: That’s really cool.

Yatú: All this to say we created a space and we found ourselves hosting a space not just for hacking but for encouraging creative exploration. That was extremely fulfilling for us. At the end of the month, we thought, “did we just create an educational institution?” Then we looked at each other like “who told us we didn’t?” And that’s when the Leave Room for Thoughts institution was born.

We had a bunch of documentation for it, a lot of philosophies around it, and created a beautiful visual language, with the principles of encouraging, documentative, iterative, and ambient. It wasn’t until the site was built that people were able to get a glimpse of this world we created. Then Norm went to San Francisco for a couple of years to work at this startup, Plaid, and I started working at IBM. When Norm moved back, our shared creative and educational spirit came back.

The common theme was that we wanted to get a space and create an educational environment encouraging creative exploration. So we kept doing that, and doing that, and doing that to the point where we were sharing studios with other people, and eventually Norm made a Learner card. 

Eventually we looked around and we had access to this space and this space and this space — what if they were all connected? We wanted to make a physical campus. That was our architectural dream. We couldn’t make a campus without a physical building, so using existing spaces sounded like a good start. So we ran an educational fellowship program called Campus Complex that connected the spaces. And we're talking about less than a month of preparation here. We got three fellows: one who lost their job, one who lost his studio space, and one who was trying to finish a master’s program. A creative technologist, a photographer, and an architect. One of them actually got hired from one of the spaces that was in the Campus Complex Schoolscape. That was not something intentionally planned for. 

All while this was happening, I was working at IBM and running USB Club at the same time. We got a grant from Other Internet and Index to run the Campus Complex program. We made the theoretical artifact into a website and paid each steward in the spaces. Each fellow got around a $2,000 stipend, and we ran the program with one other person, Aaron Z Lewis, who is part of Other Internet.

That program was really successful, but then we got some support for USB Club and went full-time on that. I think we will always have the itch to foster educational environments. I don't know if it will ever stop, and it also interplays really strongly in our work environments. If you're learning on the job, then how you work is an indication of how you learn. Seeing how much those lines blur, it’s a missed opportunity for most people. The reality is, sometimes companies get so large and corporatized that they just need people to focus on one thing in order to be super efficient.

But what does it mean nowadays to have smaller teams with fluid roles who actually can trust each other? If you have a team of people who you trust and know, and you reframe “figuring it out” as “learning it” — you realize you're around a bunch of people who just are determined to learn. Then any problem that comes up isn’t really a challenge. 

You know, there’s the joke “it’s a skill issue.” It’s like, well, maybe it’s an environmental issue. If you create an environment where everyone really believes they can understand how to solve whatever problem they’re facing, and see that journey as an educational opportunity, then it’s easier to celebrate the wins because you can also share what you’ve learned. It’s not doing things just to learn, it’s more so reframing your problems as opportunities. 

It goes back to the question of “who gets to decide what you think about?” You can either choose a major or do a DIY study in life.