Surviving is the new thriving.

Years ago, okay maybe decades ago, I worked at the most successful Boulder restaurant that nobody even knows is there…

Dojo4 is building a product - here’s what you need to know about DeathApp:It’s quiz-based death preparation and planning, mobile-first application.Its purpose is to make it easy, engaging and enlivening for people of all ages and backgrounds to prepare practically and psychologically for death.

Dojo4 Playbook of best technical and operations practices. How to run a small custom tech agency, open-sourced for all to use (and build on).

Wow, this is taking us a really long time to do. Granted, I had a baby and we bought our building since we first started the process to transition to a cooperative 6 months ago. But, this process takes serious attention, commitment, and buy-in, all of which can be in short supply when you are also trying to run a business, even a small business like Dojo4.

We ask each other a question every Friday at dojo4. It helps us understand ourselves each other better. Recently the question was: what makes an exemplary leader?

It was like pulling teeth to get everyone in a room once a week to check in with each other. Just the word 'meeting' made people avoid eye contact with me…

For years, we've talked about how we might diversify ownership of Dojo4. Ara and I have been 50/50 owners of this little company for several years now, but have recently decided to move ahead and substantively explore transforming Dojo4 into a worker-owned co-op.

We're getting close but need to make a foundational decision before the deal can be done - we have to make a choice about what kind of entity this cooperative is going to be. Shall we be Cooperative Corporation or Cooperative Partnership LLC?

There is a difference between having a lot to do and being busy. And there is an even bigger difference between being busy and getting things done, i.e. being effective.

It’s a misconception that culture is born out of operations, that the personality of a business (what we usually call culture) could is shaped by its operations. While this may, in some cases, be partially true, more often than not, it’s the other way around and it is useful and prudent to let culture dictate operations. Let nature (culture) set the ground for nurture (operations) and both will thrive.

Dojo4 helped Active for Good and UNICEF’s Kid Power by redesigning their website and corresponding mobile app, and serving as the “central organizing force” between the Active For Good’s various teams in Pakistan, China, Cambodia, and right here in Boulder.

Cancer is hard enough—fundraising to fight it should at least be free from technical difficulties. Dojo4 has built mobile web applications, data crunching solutions that span social media platforms, and multiple static, responsive websites for SU2C to ensure that their live, televised, fundraising campaigns continue to raise millions of dollars without a glitch.

Despite that purely mercenary consumerist capitalism still rules the roost of business, the ideas of using business as a force for good and conscious capitalism seem now to have fully entered the popular mindstream.

Clients often want to know if and why an agency, such as ours, charges for the time we take to fix bugs. The misconception that development can happen completely sans-bugs is understandable and common.

Turns out that financial capital is just one form of wealth worth measuring. Permaculture offers us some classifications for appreciating and evaluating several other forms of capital.

Dojo4 just recertified as a B Corp. Again. And we'll keep doing it, for lots of reasons. It's been almost 6 years since we first certified as a company that is committed to changing the world for the better, by how and why we do business.

To combat feelings of isolation and emptiness that can arise in our industry, we are introducing an Antidote to Tech.

Here at Dojo4, we have been (and continue to be) committed open-source contributors. For example, there's a tasty pantry full of contributions to be found by any of the Dojo4 members.

We’re making our land acknowledgment more meaningful by donating to The First Nations Development Institute, which is headquartered just a few miles North of our office.

Whereas being parents or caretakers, having a family, is something that we should be able to celebrate and have pride in at work, we declare this Family-Friendly Workplace Manifesto.

As the humans who build the internet, now more than ever, we are responsible for infusing our work with real, human qualities and values. In our work, we have the opportunity (and responsibility) to reinforce interconnectedness…

Avalanches kill more people in Colorado each year than any other natural hazard. The Colorado Avalance Information Center (CAIC) analyzes complex, overlapping dataset to issue life-saving avalanche forecasts, and Dojo4 has been one of their core technology partners since 2018.

Working in remote areas of Tanzania presented numerous technical challenges for Zola’s field agents, so they teamed up with Dojo4 to write an Android application that enabled them to upgrade systems and diagnose issues on-site.

We partnered with Greenpeace as they were preparing to launch the Click Clean Chrome browser extension, helping to consolidate a well-designed, robust database on the back-end of their extension, and solve some gnarly and complex issues related to its functioning globally and multilingually.

Every year New Era engages directly with tens of thousands of young people to get out the vote, but back in the day helping those young ‘uns update their voter registration through the Secretary of State’s (SoS) behemoth of a website was proving to be a significant barrier to participation. Enter Dojo4…

Dojo4 worked with TCF and Code for Boulder to create the first interactive version of The Boulder County TRENDS Report, hosted on its own static, responsive website.

Dojo4 partnered with CSPH to create an interactive website where anyone can pair our state’s Covid-19 datasets with county-level data on socioeconomic, demographic, mental & physical health risks, immunization rates, and other attributes.

Looking for a strategic advantage for your organization this year? A way to set your company aside, to differentiate it from the rest? Consider further cultivating generosity as a core component of your business.

So you want to change the world? Well good, we do too, and we think we can do it by building a better business and helping other people do the same.

The election happened. We looked around and suddenly understood that other people might see us as possible haters; that as far as they could see we could be secretly (or not so secretly) harboring ill will…

We did it! We cooperated. We cooperate. We are a cooperative. Almost six and a half years after filing our Dojo4 articles of organization as a Limited Liability Company, we've converted to being a Limited Cooperative Association (LCA).

As entrepreneurs, we are often expected to tell a seamless and aggressively positive story about the dauntless progress and profit that our businesses are making and the unparalleled "solutions" we're offering…

Parents and families make strong, profitable businesses. Instead of asking parents and families to sacrifice themselves to support a grinding work culture, we can adapt our businesses.

Technologists hold the keys to the most powerful force in the modern world, but recently they’ve forgotten not only how to wield it, but that they own it. It wasn't so long ago that technology represented hope; that it represented power; and, most of all, that it represented change.

The painful truth is that solving the problems of human and environmental dis-ease is one of the only guaranteed growth industries. That may sound like a dismal pronouncement, but I also see it as the greatest opportunity of our time.

We do it every week, whether there are 2 of us or 12 of us. We do it with guests. We do it whether we're busy or not. It's part of how we've overcome the inevitable seasickness that comes with the swells and dips of being a small business. No doubt, it's made us a better business.

One of the most rewarding opportunities we have as entrepreneurs is to build a dynamic, reliable, and resilient team. And yet, hiring and retaining the "right people" is also one of the greatest challenges in business.

Each year the Alliance Center awards Colorado businesses dedicated to making a positive impact with Best for Colorado Awards in several categories. This year (2020) Dojo4 is honored to be awarded as being Best for Colorado in the Workers category.