9 learnings from his journey through design and business.
Ted Ko is a brilliant builder.
Son of a self-made businessman, he has always had an entrepreneurial spirit.
After graduating from Harvard, Ted worked at numerous design and innovation companies, and he spent three years growing his own robotics company that was awarded by CES. Not afraid of rejection, he constantly builds and shows the world his creations.
Recently, he joined his family business Techko, expanding upon a legacy that was first established in 1982.
Below are 9 key learnings Ted picked up on his journey so far.
Harvard University, oldest university in the US
Student
Cambridge, MA
2012 – 2016
Lesson 1: Harvard builds grit.
“People say, the network and connections, but most other schools have that too. The content of what we learn is also similar to what everyone else learns.
There’s this visceral feeling of experiencing that grit, and once you get to the other side, you have that sensibility of ‘what else can life bring?’ You realize what you’re able to do. Of course, you’re not 100% ready, but you have that confidence of, ‘I think I can do it.’”
IDEO, design consultancy
Design Fellow & Project Team Lead
Cambridge, MA
2015 – 2016
Lesson 2: Good products need the touchy feely, too.
“I studied engineering in school, so everything was very technical. Part of bringing a cool product or a new service to people is also about the human and the touchy feely side. IDEO and the design thinking process really get you to the technical and business model, but also the touchy feely side and experience. I walked into work every day feeling inspired. I still miss it sometimes.”
Yieldmo, adtech company
UI/UX Engineer
New York, NY
2016 – 2017
Lesson 3: Unlike consulting firms, some startups allow you to implement change early in your career.
“At IDEO, we got a lot of time and space to think about big problems and codify them into frameworks. But at the end of the day, it’s still an innovation consultancy. The keyword is consultancy.
At Yieldmo, my second or third week, I was already designing interfaces and writing code that I would push into servers that would be published on CNN.com. That kind of scale within my second week, super awesome.”
Coral Robots, human-centric robotics company
Co-Founder & CEO
Los Angeles, CA
2017 – 2020
Lesson 4: Developing hardware is hard.
“What they say about hardware being hard is very true. We didn’t make it on the other side. We did OK. I experienced the most amount of pain starting from ground zero, but I also learned the most.
We designed a robotic vacuum cleaner that was a Dyson and a Roomba all in one. We went to CES, won an award. I was traveling a lot visiting factories, sleeping in factories, trying to figure out how we get the products out. On the road and doing sales calls, which has also just been really helpful in what I’m doing now.”
Lesson 5: As a founder, it’s harder to lean on the brands of your previous schools and companies.
“I have been very lucky to be able to fall on the branding of institutions. If you go into a so-called conventional career track, that’s a soft superpower that you have. When I say I went to Harvard, people do think a little bit differently. In the design world, if I say I worked at IDEO, people do think about it differently. When you’re a startup, nobody knows who you are, and it’s an incredibly humbling experience.
Rather than having the luxury of leaning on external brands to legitimize you or get your foot in the door, you really have to just get your own foot in the door. You need to do things well, you need to do them right. Your foundations need to be set, and it’s incredibly humbling because you realize doing this is actually super hard.”
Room, reimagining the modern workplace
Lead Digital Product Manager
Remote
2020
Lesson 6: Things out of your control can completely change the course of your life.
“We had sunsetted things at Coral, and I wanted to get back into the workforce. I was going to try to rejoin IDEO in Shanghai because at that time, that was the boom of Tencent, Alibaba, startup investment, EVs. COVID hit, so that didn’t work out.
Then I was trying to go to New York, to try big corporate tech. The day I was supposed to sign my lease and my Google employment contract, COVID shut down New York City, so I didn’t get employment.
I found Room after that. The founders are great and they have this great idea for modular office furniture. We were selling office furniture during a time when no one was allowed to go to the office.
The founders were in New York, engineers were in India, e-commerce was in Ukraine, Slovenia and Romania, and I was on the West Coast – waking up at 4AM and working until 8PM.”
Moon Creative Lab, venture studio by Mitsui & Co
Chief of Staff & Director of Product Management
Palo Alto, CA
2020 – 2023
Lesson 7: Larger companies allow for the luxury of double checking.
“I spent a lot of my time shopping things around internally before they went out externally. Before, in startups, you didn’t have the luxury of double checking sometimes. You throw out an idea and hope it sticks, and then you move on to the next thing because there’s another fire burning.”
The Techko Group, family business selling home electronics
President
Los Angeles, CA
2023 – present
Lesson 8: Big changes happen after compounding a lot of small changes over time.
“I’m leaning on the shoulders of giants. My dad spent so much time building things up, so I got a network and a supply chain. The challenge is, ‘how do I make sure I’m stewarding it the right way and upholding that vision and that legacy?’
It might be the new blood into the company, but it’s not my responsibility to change everything. Patience or intention has been the big insight. This thing could have an opportunity to improve. Is it the right time?
Maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s the family business, but I think about things with an additional dimension.”
Lesson 9: Values should guide your career decisions.
“As I get older and I think about the experiences I’ve had, my friends have had, my old role models have had, it’s formulating what it is I value.
There’s always an ambition to scale, but then there’s always a cost, which is personal time away from family. What are our actual needs versus our actual wants, and there’s pros and cons to each situation.”
All photos courtesy of Ted Ko.