Opendoor’s Emoji Master
With Opendoor ($OPEN) trading publicly for the first time today, I wanted to share one story of a fun little tradition I started there— and introduce you to The Emoji Master, the artist behind it.
The first time Opendoor made an About Us page, each of us had a picture from a different photographer. They weren’t (all) bad photos, but they had different lighting, colors, and styles.
We tried getting a professional photographer to take a standardized style of everyone. But it was hard to stay consistent as new people joined.
“What about standardized cartoon emojis?” I asked.
Opendoor had a bit of history with emojis. Slack had introduced the ability to add a custom emoji of 128x128 pixels. Coco, one of our engineer’s dogs, became the icon (and personality) of an otherwise boring slackbot.
The team said yes to having emojis for the About Us page. And thus began the emoji tradition at Opendoor. Each new employee would get a personalized emoji added to the About Us page. Fun poses or accessories encouraged.
Eventually, we grew too much to have everyone in the company on the About Us page, but everyone still got an emoji. Besides, the emojis had long since expanded their function. People used them in Slack (especially as reactji, or when putting the team in a line), on social media, in emails, and in internal presentations.
We considered dropping them at one point:
“Ryan, you know making hand-drawn emoji can’t scale,” someone said.
Rarely have I heard a phrase so motivating. Everyone will still be getting an emoji when Opendoor goes public, I said. (and with $OPEN trading today, it’s mission accomplished!)
Early on, there were several artists, but Rin was by far the best. His style was crisp and uniform, but he gave each person their own flair. Soon he became the sole artist.
He said he could make 10-20 per day, and I built a Rails app to automate the ordering. Opendoor kept expanding and hiring more employees, and Rin kept making more emojis.
Rin lives in Bandung, Indonesia. After his work became so well known at Opendoor, I just had to go visit him. I gave him a copy of the Opendoor yearbook (with his work spanning the cover) and some swag.
To this day, new employees eagerly await their emoji. It’s a small tradition that informally initiates them onto the team. I’m glad my pet project grew to be an enduring tradition.
I’ll never forget my time at Opendoor. It was apparent early on we had a special team and a special product. When I later left Opendoor, this was my farewell gift
Beyond Opendoor
Rin is still going strong at Opendoor, with no end in sight. But he now also creates emojis for my current company, Culdesac, and all of its future residents. In addition, he makes them for others at mymoji.co, which I built using a low-code tool.
Go to the link if you want one. 100% of the revenue goes to Rin.
