After leaving New York, I founded The Rare Studio to test autonomy directly. If my earlier years had been shaped by proximity to someone else’s risk, this was an attempt to make that risk explicit and personal. The decision was not driven by entrepreneurial ambition so much as a desire to own risk rather than borrow it. If constraint was inevitable, I wanted to understand what it felt like when responsibility was no longer distributed upward.
Running an independent studio relocated every pressure. Decisions that had once been buffered by institutions now landed immediately. There was no separation between creative judgment and economic consequence. Autonomy did not remove constraint; it clarified it.
The work demanded constant negotiation—between creative ambition and financial sustainability, between availability and exhaustion, between independence and isolation. It was also expensive. During this period I delayed student loan payments and held multiple adjunct teaching appointments simultaneously, using that income to subsidize studio overhead while the work found its footing.
At the same time, the studio operated as a real organizational experiment. I worked with a range of clients and collaborators, including ArtCenter College of Design, yu+co, Verynice, Sapient/Razorfish, and Downstream. These engagements varied widely in scale and scope, but they shared a common condition: operating as an external partner required translating across cultures, expectations, and tempos without the cover of institutional authority.
Over time, the studio stabilized operationally. By the end of its run, it was profitable, capable of supporting a studio manager, a junior designer, and a distributed group of freelance developers. What emerged was not a romantic vision of authorship, but a concrete understanding of cost structures, cash flow, and responsibility. Independence did not eliminate constraint; it rendered it visible and unavoidable, sharpening judgment by forcing trade-offs into the open.
I am proud of this period not because it produced scale or stability, but because it was an honest test. It replaced abstraction with experience and revealed what kinds of responsibility I was willing—and unwilling—to carry forward.