Q&A with Rex Sorgatz

I'm Rex! For the last several years, I've been in the consulting/incubating/investing game via my company, Kinda Sorta Media. I work mostly with NYC-based startups on product dev, marketing, and business solutions. I've been involved in the launches of VYou, 4food, Of a Kind, Rookie, Mediaite, Goviva, Stylite, ProjectBly, and Nearsay. I've also worked with How About We, RecordSetter, Buzzfeed, Newscred, Roomorama, and others. Lately, most of my time is spent on Agogo (beta!) and Tipjar (alpha!).

Hardware

Computing. I move around all day from office to office, so I'm usually dragging around my 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro and Retina iPad Mini. At home, I also have old HP PC with Windows 7, which is used mostly as a media server (music and movies via Plex) and testing environment.

Smart Phoning. Despite the "champagne stigma," I got the gold flavor of the new iPhone 5s. I hate phone cases, but I very highly recommend Corners4, which are a wonderful anti-case.

Listening. I love situations where it's appropriate to pull out my Jambox Mini, which is magically small and loud and wireless. For walking around, I use Beats by Dre, mostly because I wanted red headphones and I'm a simple person.

Drinking. Coffee is the most important tool!. I just got a little coffee heater that makes me conspicuously happy.

Sitting. My Herman Miller Mirra is approaching a decade in age, but I still love it. It has a lifetime guarantee, so if something goes wrong (the mesh seat will occasionally rip), they will replace it for free.

Living. The Nest smoke detector just arrived with the Roomba Scooba. My house is filling up with robots, but my Internet of Things dream becomes fully realized when SmartFeeder launches. I will then remotely feed my pup, Kafka Suzuki, without leaving my bed in the morning.

Commuting. I am absolutely addicted to Citibike -- the fastest way to get from meeting-to-meeting in NYC. The app is on my homescreen so I can quickly look for stations.

Software

Designing. For wireframing, I still use Balsamiq, even though I know everyone has moved onto more powerful tools. Similarly, I still use Photoshop via the Adobe Creative Cloud, despite everyone around me jumping onto Sketch. I'll get there one day.

Coding. I don't write much code anymore, but I still open Coda, just to have it open. It's the only text editor I've loved since Homesite (RIP). GitHub is going to take over the world, so my wimpy repository saddens me.

Collaborating. The usual: Dropbox and Google Drive. Depending on who I'm working with that day, I might also be in Pivotal, Basecamp, or Trello.

Emailing. Gmail rigged up with Rapportive and Boomerang.

Communicating. HipChat, Google Hangouts, Skype.

Listening. Agogo is the best. I'm biased, but this audio service lets me remove every other audio app. You can connect podcasts (NPR, Marc Maron, etc.), your music subscription service (Rdio, Spotify, etc.), TV programming (Daily Show, etc.), text-to-speech (Deadline, Dealbook, etc.), live audio, personalized traffic reports, and much more -- all into one simple place.

Broadcasting. Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Wordpress, Mailchimp. And most of all, Foursquare. No consumer internet company is iterating on product ideas faster while staying focused on the same goal.

Organizing. I've tried to use Evernote so many times, but it just doesn't fit into my life. I'm a huge fan of Wunderlist for its multi-platform simplicity.

Calendaring. Google Calendar is the hub, but Sunrise is the spoke.

Browsing. Chrome. 100%. I love that my browsing history is persistent across innumerable devices. I accept this degree of evil.

Writing. I wish I used Scrivener, cuz all the smart writers seem to use it. Instead, I throw everything into Google Drive. (The last writing I felt any pride about was a series of essays I did for Tribeca Film.)

Reading. I spend more time in Instapaper than literally any other app. Even when I'm not reading articles on it, I'm saving articles to it. I don't use RSS anymore, so instead I use IFTTT recipes that push directly to my Instapaper.

Dream Setup

My dream would be that the two things above (hardware and software) merge. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I know it's the future.

Also, typing is clearly an intermediary step, somewhere in the timeline after writing with our hands on paper but before imagining with our brains on screens.

Inspiration

Most of my ideas arise from frustration and annoyance with broken things. So I say, look for more broken things!