Mara Zepeda is the co-founder and CEO of Switchboard, a site that lets you ask for what you need and offer what you have within a trusted community. It's a way to more efficiently interconnect generosity, and is sometimes described as Craigslist without the creeps. I'm used to reading personal histories that have windy roads, but Mara's can't be summarized. Suffice it to say that she's a writer, calligrapher, entrepreneur, and student of knowledge who has worked as a reporter and teacher. We recorded at her offices in Portland, at Wieden+Kennedy's Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE).

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Show notes

• Bay Bucks: business-to-business barter


• The Sharing Economy cover story at The Economist


• Lloyd Reynolds and then Robert Palladino used calligraphy as a teaching tool at Reed for the human condition


• Linda Stone coined the terms email apnea and continuous partial attention.


• A Pattern Language


• The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder