David Gensler admits to having a slightly off-centered opinion on most things. So it comes as no surprise that any time he has a chance to share something, it’s not in his own words, “something the dense little space between my ears dreamt up, most likely at a drunken moment at the bar.” An entrepreneur, strategist, designer and photographer, the 39-year-old is well-read, never short on interesting life stories—he worked extensively with Jay Z, going as far as to call him “rich uncle”—not to mention scary talented at what he does. Gensler is the founder and CEO of The Keystone Design Union (the KDU), whose mission is to “locate, unite and utilize the world’s top creative talent and innovators,” as well as his own clothing brand Serum Versus Venom (SVSV).
So how did this all happen for the Art Center graduate with an industrial design background who had been working with traditional business models in the corporate world for years? Gensler puts it simply: “I was young and dumb with money in the bank.” Surely, it’s much more complicated than just that. As he prepares to launch You Are We, a new professional network, and a book with IdN magazine called Open Source that looks at the first ten years of the KDU and SVSV as active laboratories, we decided to pay the polymath a visit to mine his thoughts about the past, present and future. (Scroll through the gallery above for a peek inside his Brooklyn live-work space.)
THE EVOLUTION OF THE KEYSTONE GROUP (THE KDU)
In every industry—fashion, music, entertainment, advertising, marketing—everyone asks for the same thing, which is innovation. It’s a buzzword no one seems to be able to define. We built this private network and it’s giant by tangible, old rules. The KDU houses over 3,000 people in 250 cities. If that was the metric you’re using to gauge any digital product, it would be the definition of failure. If you’re launching a digital product and 3,000 people show up, you’re out of business. So the best thing to do is to take that piece of hardware, walk it outside and throw it in the trash. It literally took an entire year for me to wrap my head around that. The past ten years was nothing more than a beta test that got me to what’s happening now. The only way to move forward is to stop engaging with what came before so that I might one day reinvent myself. It’s as if I had a private Kickstarter for ten years that you sort of knew about, but didn’t really know how it worked. Then all of a sudden, I said I have this thing and everyone could use it. There’s no idea in the marketplace competing with us right now, which is almost bad. I talk to the press before it actually launches, hoping more people will try to do it just to stimulate the idea that you can build virtual teams around the world. These teams, in turn, have the potential for becoming companies, brands and enterprises. We don’t have to depend on the federal government or SVA loans for support. I’m not going to lobby Washington. That’s not how the Internet works, so I’ll just change it. It’s like, how do you fix the KDU? You blow up the KDU. How do you fix troubled economies? You create a single, global economy. Can you really do that? Yes, on a micro level. I’m going off the fucking grid. We’re basically repackaging the KDU methodology for a new venture called You Are We.
NEXT CHAPTER: YOU ARE WE
You Are We is a professional network that helps assemble business teams, whether it’s from scratch or expanding on existing ones. Let’s say you have a micro team of two to five people. How do you go about finding different assets in the tech world? CoFoundersLab and FounderDating help people find co-founders, but then what? That’s just the beginning of the problem. There are millions of sites like Behanced that helps you promote yourself like LinkedIn, but there’s nothing that actually assembles teams. The model for The KDU is completely based on collaboration. We have important assets in places like South Korea, Germany and Iceland. I was so busy defending the idea of curating that I missed out on the obvious. The Eureka moment came when I stopped caring about the product and turned the system into the product.
A SIGNIFICANT STEPPING STONE: ADIDAS
For the past five or six years, Adidas has pretty much been our largest client that has allowed me to really explore different models. For Adidas, I would essentially create macro and micro trend reports that show global economic shifts, color trends and everything in-between such as technology, how to deal with collaborations and how a brand can become more competitive. Looking at these larger models, it becomes so much easier to convince somebody that their model is wrong and they have to go about it some other way. Of course, brands don’t change instantaneously and it’s the big gripe for agency consultants. Clients, while asking for change, are too afraid to rapidly implement change. Adidas can’t do this, but I can.
THE NUMBER ONE PARTICIPATED SPORT IN THE WORLD
Do you know what the number one participated sport in the world is? No one ever gets this right. I’ll give you my dog. Dragon boat racing! It’s a giant wooden boat with a dragon face at the front and a guy beating a fucking drum to a team of rowers. They haul ass. Another sport that’s up there is fishing: sports fishing, river fishing, lake fishing. We spend all of this money licensing basketball in America, but how many people actually play American basketball? Fighting is huge, too. Martial arts isn’t even that male-dominated anymore, especially in this country. I’ve been giving Adidas these numbers for years. Why are you spending all that money on David Beckham domestically when he plays soccer? The number of people who play American football is nothing. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain a presence in male-skewed American football because the person in charge of making the decisions happens to love football. Chicks don’t want to get tackled. You can show them numbers to point out how wrong they are. Luckily, the company is controlled by Germans and they’re very analytical.
THE PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL CONSUMPTION OF A PRODUCT
There’s no real difference between the real world and the virtual world anymore. Take a pair of Adidas’ Boost and a pair of Nike’s Flyknit. They’re both awesome products, but how many of these pairs of shoes can be produced? How many distribution points sell those shoes? Obviously, there’s way more distribution points with the Internet and everything else. It’s that versus how many images of those shoes can be consumed by someone liking it on Facebook, sharing it on Instagram, spun around my head on Vine or put on a board on Pinterest. The answer is limited versus unlimited in the extremes of both worlds. At the KDU, we don’t cover mass-produced ideas or products. What we’re interested in are limited edition or exclusive offerings and collaborations. We’re looking at a smaller part of the market, so there’s way less physical product and much more digital consumption of a product. The production and marketing of the product is the same thing because we can just share and consume the image of it. We can digitally alter products very quickly and don’t have to depend on whether a certain fabric is available in the factory. We don’t have to call up the Shenzhen factory in China to change production schedules to meet demand. Let’s put it this way: The majority of the cars that I like and share on Facebook are virtual renderings of cars. The majority of architecture that I love are 3D models on the theory of architecture that stimulate dialogue and get us excited. The majority of the greatest architects alive are known for famous buildings that have never been built. I think that idea bleeds into where we’re at now.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND SELF-BRANDING
Really great brands have key, core archetypes, which is to say they have the characteristics of a person. Maybe that person is subtle, cool and understated, and you don’t see or hear much, but they’re actually saying something fucking profound. Maybe your brand is a riot with a crazy energy that’s punk rock. All of the things that we use to describe brands are things that we use to describe humans. They’re writing all these books using “future shock” by saying everybody has to do this and you have to get on the lean start-up movement. They don’t look at the basic fundamentals. Brands have the money to promote themselves and take on common archetypes to say, here is the ultimate person. Now it’s the exact opposite. Humans have more ability to document and upload their own brand, faster than any corporation just from a cause and execution standpoint. So now what do these brands try to become? If every human is now their own brand with the ability to promote themselves, why would I go out of my way to promote Louis Vuitton when I can just promote myself? If I happen to like Triumpth motorcycles, that’s just a part of promoting me now. I’ll just use them to populate the wall of my Facebook page and other social media channels. This shift happened really quickly. Brand managers that are trained in business schools and art schools aren’t educated on how to abruptly change the methodology of their marketing tactics to compensate for this. So what you have is media like Anthem and Hypebeast becoming more and more popular, much more than the brands they cover. We’re more concerned with accelerating our own personal brands. Just because you came out with some cool new shoes probably isn’t enough. All I know is that people will continue to use these things to empower themselves and I just want to connect like-minded people.
A NOBLE EXPERIMENT: SERUM VERSUS VENOM (SVSV)
With SVSV, I set up a factory with 25 people working full-time in what looked like a sterile white lab. I didn’t want to adhere to the rules of a seasonal calendar that dictates when I have to be creative just because some retailer wants to buy it. It drove everyone crazy when I would take 1 jacket and create 400 variations of it, but each variation would become a digital product that you can consume in an online store. I built a new economic model where the customer was the theory of a customer and the product was content. SVSV was never intended to be a commercial model. When people would criticize us, I laughed my ass off. People would tell me the brand is fake because there’s only one store in the fucking world carrying us, but I had the largest private showroom, my own factory and used fabrics that competing brands couldn’t even begin to afford, let alone breakaway from a calendar to understand what we’re actually trying to accomplish. In terms of where SVSV headed, it will be a series of collaborations until I get the itch to touch fabric again. Also, I’m shooting old school 4×5 film portraits with mixed media. I thought, if I wasn’t asking for permission to do any of this in the first place, why can’t I just launch a collection with no clothes and just images of naked people? Can you sell that to market? I can make a book and sell that at market and say it’s the new SVSV collection. What sense does that make? Well, what sense does it make to have limited edition anything where you have no idea who made it, where the materials came from, where the factory is located or how many were actually produced? We took out the variables of fashion where if something isn’t economically successful, it isn’t successful at all. One way to reinvent SVSV is to stop making tangible garment-based products. I thought I was really going off the deep end because it was becoming data science, but I realized what I’m really trying to do is impact a larger audience.
HYPEBEAST AND GIVENCHY’S $750 CREW NECK SWEATER
I know in our digital media space Hypebeast sort of runs the traffic game and they need to feed their audience a lot of content. I saw that Givenchy came out with a crew neck with a grey American flag on it that costs $750. When Hypebeast posted that, its forum lit up with people saying stuff like, “I don’t have $750, you fucking idiots!” At least they’re not supporting it. It just goes to show that these large brands depend on our digital culture to launch single products. But it’s like, who cares? What asshole would spend that much money on a crew neck sweater? Even if it was cashmere, the price would come under their asking price. If you go on Hypebeast and search “Nike”, you’ll find several posts about the same exact sneaker or whatever in different colors, all posted within the span of the past two months.
THE THING ABOUT NEW YORK CITY
Have you checked out notjustalabel.com? It’s the largest marketplace for independent fashion designers in the world. When they say the greatest fashion designers, art directors and illustrators come from New York or London—my ass. They’re all hiding in fucking Poland, Russia and Brazil. It’s just that nobody pays attention to them. When I found these guys and united them through the KDU, and Belsky came along with Behanced, the whole fucking world was a free for all. I don’t even know good fashion designers in New York. Who do we have? A couple of chicks are doing some cool shit right now, but what about for menswear? I don’t know one. Alexander Wang? 1 in 200 designs are even worth looking at. Everyone lives in some nice place elsewhere. Don’t you think New York should have a lower cost of living? I don’t need to fucking be here. I don’t need to walk outside and have it be dirty, violent, and nasty. You can’t go for a bike ride without some motherfucker riding you. Anytime you go for a ride, you might become a “ghost bike”.
GETTING AWAY WITH ART
Business has one single function, which is to make money. Business is business and everything else falls into the realm of art. People used to tell me that SVSV is my art project and I wanted to beat the shit out of people for saying that. Do you think I have finger paint in my back pocket? I love fighting and it often got me into trouble. I used to think that was the biggest insult, but now I’m like, it’s an art project. There’s obviously a lucrative business aspect to art, but generally speaking, the best art is produced when you don’t think about it. The best artists who hang all over the place are the most fun, most fucked up people to be around and have access to the best drugs. You can’t go to Warton’s or Harvard business school and, in the first meeting of any new colleague, just bury a bunch of lines of coke off an X-acto cutting board. Wherever you happen to be standing or whatever flag happens to be flying, there are a bunch of variables that’s part of the equation whether you like it or not. Not in art. You can’t go around saying, “I want to kill the president.” It’s a crime and you’ll be put on a list, especially in this country. I don’t want to kill the president and you can’t say stuff like that, which is probably a smart law. But you can make art that says that. If I said to someone, “I’m going to punch you in the fucking face if you look at me,” that’s aggravated harassment and I could get arrested. Did you see Sammy the Woodchuck that’s all over Williamsburg? It’s a little woodchuck holding a flag that reads, “I want to fucking kill you.” I don’t feel threatened because it’s a funny cartoon character.
“INNOVATION MONOPOLY”
Scott Belsky built Behanced really early on, which was an amazing idea then and I don’t know if it will ever be replaced. I think he has created Google in the sense that it’s unfathomable to think that anyone will ever improve on Google. You can certainly attempt to, but Google will continue to improve at a faster rate than any competitor trying to catch up. Google has created an “innovation monopoly”. Yahoo! is never going to launch a Google X equivalent and they won’t come up with a secret project like Glass. So you start looking at these extreme examples of how technology in the marketplace creates a kind of monopoly effect, but in a positive way. I don’t want to shift the KDU and compete with someone like Scott because if I have my own Behanced account, why would I suddenly get rid of it? It’s good and easy to use. He sold the company to Adobe, right? It’s like, why would anyone decide to use anything other than Photoshop unless they’re a dickhead? What else would you use? Are you the one idiot that likes Corel Draw?
KICKSTARTER’S DICTATORSHIP
Kickstarter is ridiculous. The laws of our digital system will come in and crush their balls in the next 24 months. Can you imagine going to a bank with your coffee shop idea with a $100,000 proposal and the bank thinks your plan is brilliant? What if they give you $1.2 million? Do you just buy a Ferrari and ride to the coffee shop in question? Why would you fund more than the asking price of anything? What are you doing with the surplus of capital that was raised? Is the first round of investors that enabled you to achieve the intended goal now getting a higher return? Nope. They have an incredibly fucked up mindset where they think they’re playing God in deciding who gets on Kickstarter and who doesn’t. You have to be a dickhead to think that, in a digital realm, you’re deploying a dictatorship filter. What digital dictatorship has ever lasted? They don’t. That whole company is like an experiment that brings out the desperation in people who want to engage with alternative systems because government and entrepreneurial lending are flawed. They’re willing to lunge aggressively at anything, even when it’s as illogically structured as Kickstarter. It’s done a lot of good, don’t get me wrong. I think all crowdfunding is a great idea that will never leave our economic future. I hope the ten or so companies coming out of MIT will dismantle them. I’m really not trying to pick on them. It’s an aggressive, democratic and global ether. If you slip up and fuck up, I’m just assuming that a shark will digitally manifest in the air and eat me.
KANYE WEST KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING
I don’t mean to sound egotistical when I say this, but I remember sitting in a jet flying back from L.A. or Vegas with Kanye and we were watching Chris Cunningham music videos. This was before Kanye had directed anything or College Dropout came out. He’s looking at this stuff and you can see in his eyes, “I want to fucking do that.” The last time I saw Kanye was in Hawaii a couple years ago when he was coming out with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and he openly talked about how cool he thought Jay Z was, but it’s so much broader than that. Jay Z married well, cut a good deal and talks about hanging out with Obama in the same song where he talks about cooking up crack rocks. You don’t know what the fuck Kanye is going to sing about next. Who cares if you love him or hate him? The motherfucker is an artist. He’s no Justin Bieber. If Bieber died tomorrow, who would fucking care? When Kanye comes out with a new album, you culturally have to listen to it. The critics have to listen to it because he has put himself in the realm of cultural requirement. Take his fashion collection, for instance. If he actually went to Central Saint Martins, they would’ve failed him. He would’ve been held back! They would’ve said, “Hussein Chalayan you are not.” If I was his teacher, I would’ve said, listen. Take your Black Card and go buy a bunch of Rick Owens, take a seam ripper to them and stitch Kanye West labels onto that shit. But the fact that he launched his own line with evening gowns… I watched that thing ten times trying to figure out a pattern as if I was missing something crucial. Then I realized he just wants me to sit there doing exactly what I’m doing. Fucking genius.
EDX AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF HIGHER LEARNING
Are you familiar with edX? These are the kind of things that are democratizing and reinventing education. With all the Kickstarters and You Are Wes out there, building on past models with new education is essential. We’re going to unplug from society and go to some isolated campus for two to four or more years, observing the actual world from a distance with the presumption that we’re somehow relevant in the new world after that? That’s a retarded way of thinking. Harvard has great entrepreneurial classes, MIT’s Sloan school has some absolutely amazing analytical classes, Stanford has amazing classes on technology and software, and Northwestern’s Kellogg has a great marketing program. You can attend all of them. In the future, you’ll be able to get the best of the best degree and take classes from right where you sit. They offer adaptive learning systems that, judging by how you engage the software, change where the user interface will literally move and prioritize like active hot maps. If you’re not engaging how they want you to engage, the system will adapt to your learning methods. It’s a brilliant fucking thing and you can take most of these courses for free! If you’re not good at math and want to learn calculus, it’s free. When I was trying to learn the essential algorithmic framing of search-match functionality of You Are We, I plugged up to that 80-inch television. I didn’t have to hop on a train to Harvard or MIT, which I have the option of doing, and sit in a class to disengage. Every class that Stanford has taught in the last ten years were videotaped with like five cameras. It’s an open course where you go in and attend Standford classes. If I get hungry in the middle of class, I hit pause and the fucking class TiVos itself and knows where I left off. If I ever meet a dumb business colleague again, I’m hoping that it’s going to be a cold day in hell. There’s no fucking excuse to be stupid anymore.
INVENTING A CHILD WITH RAY KURZWELL
This is the first time that I’ve told this to anyone and I’m very serious about what I’m about to say. I’m going to invent my son before he’s conceived. I’m not even in a relationship at the moment. I’ve done this whole Human Brand thing where you take humans and accelerate them at the rate of, or faster, than the development of a brand. Why not just make one from scratch? My middle name is William, my mother’s maiden name is Schwarz in German, which means black, and I was born in the month of August. My son’s name will be William August Black. When I find the right woman, I will supply the software and I’m assuming she will supply the hardware. Before that happens, I don’t have to wait. Ray Kurzwell is filing a lot of patents right now that are absolutely feasible, useful devices that require nano-technology that’s not yet available, but will be available in five to ten years time. It’s like, you brilliant fuck! Do you remember that lyric, “Let’s go half on a yacht”? I want to go half on inventing a person with Ray Kurzwell. What if we started building a brand narrative around people before they’re even conceived? I don’t fucking care who the mother is. Maybe there’s some hot supermodel in Brazil who wants to get in on this early with me. William is going to start out as a fine art portrait photographer because that’s how his father (me) got his start in the creative world. I would most certainly teach my son photography. All of the work that I would produce will retroactively become his intellectual property the moment he’s physically manifested on this Earth. I want him to be first human ever to have his own Wikipedia page, a blog and everything else prior to birth. I’m going to “Ray Kurzwell” a baby.