Ty Hagler brought a business strategy problem to the Whole Mind Game. He left calling himself a different person. I'm not exaggerating, it's on the recording.
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I got to know Ty when I was a professor at NC State. He was a grad student in the business program, and he'd already started his own industrial design firm, Trig. I was so impressed that I asked him to come speak to my graduate biomedical engineering students.
We became friends.
In 2018, I made a career pivot. I'd spent two decades studying, living, and teaching engineering design, and I wanted to go deep on industrial design. So I turned to Ty and asked if he'd have me on his team. I spent two years at Trig. That's where I came up with one of the ideas behind a startup called CanvasGT.
Remember my conversation with Etienne Nichols a couple of episodes back? I met Etienne after Greenlight Guru acquired CanvasGT.
The rest is history. Ty and I still get together for lunch a couple of times a year. Having him on the show was a real pleasure.
One more thing. You may have noticed I added an intro at the start of this show. Two episodes ago I told you: no intros. Sorry, folks.
Then we brought on a production team, The AGN Group, and with them handling the edit, I have time to write intros. My gut still says no intros. But I know I have to do them.
Back in June, before Ty and I started recording, I even told him I don't read a bio at the front end. Then, same breath: sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. It depends.
Today it does.
One day, when I'm as successful as Chris Williamson over at Modern Wisdom, I'll see about going back to no intros. Current me isn't smart enough to know what future me will want when we get there. And it's a when, not an if.
Also, I laughed my ass off listening to my new opener and closer. I sound like a bad actor. Hahahaha! It's embarrassing, and I'm putting it out there anyway, because that's where I am right now. I'll get better at this stuff.
Most importantly, this show is for you. I'd LOVE your feedback on the new format.
The first time Ty spoke to my students, at the hospital in Chapel Hill, he showed up with giant sheets of paper, an ideation framework, and Nerf guns, so nobody could shoot down a fragile idea. I didn't know then that his story started on the water.
Ty grew up about fifteen minutes from the flatwater kayaking venue for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. His mom volunteered, Olympic gold medalists ended up staying at the family's house, and teenage Ty spent the warm-ups trying to keep up with them. He chased it for ten years, all the way to the World Championships, where a fifth-place finish in the B final ranked him fourteenth in the world. He plays that down. I won't.
That result got him into Home Depot through its Olympic sponsorship program, holding an industrial design degree and no design job to use it on. So he moved print ads down a wall on the sixteenth floor. Then a VP wished out loud for a better product, Ty's manager handed it to him, and somewhere out on the river he landed one of the best ideas of his career: what if the fertilizer spreader's hopper was the bag the fertilizer came in? The vendor hated it. Years later, a strikingly similar system launched at Lowe's. Home Depot had never filed a patent. That's where Ty learned that organizations grow antibodies to new ideas, and that a good idea has to be protected long enough to grow up.
He went on to build an innovation department inside one of the biggest retailers in the world, eventually hung up the paddle, followed his wife's career to the Research Triangle, and started Trig while doing an evening MBA at NC State, right into the 2008 downturn. Almost nineteen years later, Trig is still standing, and he had big news when we recorded: his wife was about to join the firm.
Then we got to Couplet Care, and this is the part I'd want every founder to hear. Dr. Kristin Tully's research found moms, alone at night and recovering from C-sections, in tears because the hospital bassinet made it impossible to reach their own babies without a second person in the room. Couplet Care set out to fix that. Ty walked me through eight rounds of full builds to get a mechanism a new mom can work with five pounds of grip strength. And through the money: venture funds that loved the mission but needed an 11X return, a plan that honestly penciled out at 3 to 5X, and $2.5 million in non-dilutive grant funding plus mission-aligned investors who were good with that. When we talked, about 150 bassinets were out in hospitals.
We covered givers and takers, why anyone who buys from a startup deserves hero status, Henry Ford's faster horse, and AI. Ty's frame for AI is loop A and loop B. Hand your thinking over to the tool and you're on loop A, the dangerous one. Stay in charge and use it to shrink the gap between idea and execution, and you're on loop B. Then he shared his screen and showed me his second brain.
And then we played the Whole Mind Game.
We played a full round this time. Ty brought the tension from his own business: chase the next interesting opportunity, or niche down and commit.
Focus & Openness.
The best of Focus is satisfaction, the feeling of diving down and touching the bottom of the pool. Keeping your promises. Deep work.
The worst of Focus is saying no to a lot, including friends and family. "I have lived it," Ty said. Sacrificing relationships. That's the shadow.
The best of Openness is the dopamine hit of a new idea (Ty's tend to show up at 7:15 a.m., mid-run). Listening, empathy, low ego, high trust.
The worst of Openness is always diverging. Boiling the ocean. Never getting anything done. Unreliable.
Together at their best: a complete day. Ty boiled it down to creatively overcoming a challenge. I added mission-driven.
Together at their worst: the Lonely Inventor. Off in the workshop, guarding the idea, always tinkering, never done, never touching grass.
Ways to live the synergy and dodge the trap: don't sacrifice the run or the family dinner to get the work done, they're part of the complete day. Take one slice of cake at a time. And if you catch yourself living like the Lonely Inventor, take it as a sign you're headed the wrong way.
Then Ty took it one step further, with an idea from The Courage to Be Disliked. We're not on a line, climbing toward a goal. We're dancing. Looking back, he quit kayaking the moment he stopped enjoying the dance, and that was okay. I told him we could end the show right there.
If you're building something that matters and the venture math doesn't fit, or you're worried AI is doing a little too much of your thinking, this one's for you. It's also for anyone who's ever locked in on a goal so hard they forgot to have a life.
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Ty Hagler is originally from Gainesville, Georgia. He holds a BS in industrial design from Georgia Tech and an MBA from NC State's Poole College of Management. He founded Trig in 2008, under the name Studio Hagler, and has grown it into an award-winning industrial design and innovation firm based in Chapel Hill, built around a 100-year vision. The Couplet Care Bassinet alone has picked up four international design awards, and Ty now also serves as Couplet Care's COO. At home, he's the family's official collector of dad jokes. His daughter has graduated from giggling at them to rolling her eyes, and he counts both as a win.
Find Ty and Trig at trig.com, and read the Couplet Care Bassinet story.
Thanks to Ty Hagler for the conversation, for playing the Whole Mind Game like he'd been doing it for years, and for being exactly the kind of giver he talked about. Go check out Trig and Couplet Care, linked above.
And thanks to everyone following along with Authbition as this show continues to grow into what it's becoming.
If you like what we're building with Authbition, please like, subscribe, and share.
I appreciate you!
This show was produced by The AGN Group. Design by Stefanie Morejon. Intro music by Jeff Tollefson.
Health, happiness, kindness, respect
for every being and all things.
— Andrew