For the past three years, we’ve been organizing WalkaboutNYC for technology companies, as a way to give people a behind the scenes look at how these companies get work done. Last month, we organized our very first WalkaboutNYC Agency Edition. We invited 28 independent creative agencies to open their doors, and share how they work with the public. We held a kickoff event in downtown New York’s SoHo, to bring together some of the participants, share lunch, and have some interesting discussions related to design and getting work done at an independent creative agency, with sponsorship from Mailchimp and Behance.

During the kickoff, Sam Potts, Communications Designer at IDEO, discussed his circuitous path through the world of design. What may, in retrospect, look like a master plan, was really an unplanned route that included publishing, superhero supplies, travel in China, and now IDEO. Hear why he made the decisions he did, and how he traveled from A to Z.

We had a great panel discussion, that touched on thoughts about the culture of work, creative inspiration, scaling with teams, and education. Moderated by Harvest co-founder Danny Wen, we heard from the founders of Big Spaceship, Moment, and Method.

If you want to see how the rest of the day went, check out our WalkaboutNYC Agency Edition Storify, where you can see tweets, photos, and write-ups from the day!

A few cool things that we discovered from this WalkaboutNYC Agency Edition:

  • We had people checking out the WalkaboutNYC site from over 100 countries.
  • There were 24,615 visits to the site in the month between launch and the event.
  • Over 700 people participated in 58 events spread throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.

We had a great time, and we hope you’ll join us for our next WalkaboutNYC events (we’ll continue to run the Tech Edition in the spring, and the Agency Edition in the fall). Sign up for our newsletter to hear about upcoming events.