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.

— Yatú Espinosa

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.

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.

— Yatú Espinosa

If you're learning on the job, then how you work is an indication of how you learn.

— Yatú Espinosa

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.

— Yatú Espinosa

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.

— Yatú Espinosa

I think the way one chooses to garner their relationships with others is deterministic of the way they're living life, because you are who you surround yourself with.

— Yatú Espinosa

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.

— Yatú Espinosa

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.

— Yatú Espinosa

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.

— Yatú Espinosa

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.”

— Yatú Espinosa