About Brandon Lipman.

I grew up in Naples, Florida, and I was born with a cleft lip and cleft palate.

I had several surgeries in my first two years to repair my lip and palate. In kindergarten, with my mom's help, I wrote My Puzzling Smile, a children's book that explained to my classmates why I looked different, and that being different is okay. In 2002 Disney named me one of its Dreamers & Doers. Lipman Creations published it, alongside my mom Karen's own book for parents, Don't Despair, Cleft Repair!, which I wrote about in 2015. By seventh grade I was doing book signings, and the Naples Daily News wrote about it. I gave a copy to every kid in my class each year, and the books made it to hospital waiting rooms as far away as Beijing and Australia. In 2008 I started Clefts United to keep them going out to families, and around 2012 Procter & Gamble funding helped us reach more of them.

I studied entrepreneurship at Xavier University in Cincinnati from 2012 and graduated in 2016. In Nov 2012, my first year, Pablo Arellano Jr. brought me on as 3DLT's second co-founder. It was a 3D printing marketplace, and on 30 April 2013 it launched in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. It also went to SXSW V2V. In 2015 I wrote a guest column for TechCrunch and talked it through on 20VC, and I ran a Medium publication, Startups & Venture Capital, that grew past 5,300 subscribers. That older writing now lives here as the first entries in Dispatches.

In October 2016 I started Redwhale, the company that is now OffDeck. Through it I've worked with Lovable, Weights, Inspired Instruction, Health Carousel, Newark Venture Partners and Spire Global, among others. At Chainlink Labs, from 2021 to 2024, I was the second person on the growth team. The full record is below.

The thread through all of it: I'm on the field. I still work every day in the weeds of the systems, not directing from arm's length.

I lived in San Francisco, then New York, and now I'm home in Cincinnati. I still love the New York tech scene and stay close to it, and OffDeck works with companies wherever they are.

I recently married Maria. Her wedding gift to me was a tree from Rookwood Pottery, which has been making pottery in Cincinnati since 1880. That tree is where the root mark on this site comes from. I wrote about it in Planting Roots.