Item — HN Reader

This dude seems cool http://doejo.com/. I saw his design work and was impressed. He has an address listed on this website and I looked it up and it turns out to be this coffee shop near me. I chalked it up that he must work out of that coffee shop a lot.

A few months later, I just realized the guy OWNS that coffee shop :) And another one too in chicago. He also owns a vintage clothing store across the street from me, and sounds like he's building bar.

Looks like he's constantly still designing web applications and manages to run all these other non techy successful projects (his 2 coffee houses are pretty busy and get very positive reviews).

2 comments

Yeah - I'm friends with Phil. He owns http://nobletreecoffee.com and http://www.dollopcoffee.com. Sometimes I wonder if he ever sleeps. He is trying to also open up a bar. He is also constantly photo blogging http://philcoextra.com and just launched www.texthog.com

I see he had a nice write-up here:

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?article_id...

It's a couple of years old but describes his strategy, which seems to be: get a loan to buy a business, add value, sell and move on to gradually bigger loans and businesses.

Nice execution!

P.S.: I don't know why somebody voted down your comment because to me this adds helpful information.

Some very nice design work in that portfolio too - thanks for the link.