About me
This is about me as a person. Click here to scroll down to the “What do you do?” version, where you’ll find a bio, press links and speaking information.
The basics
I currently live in Brooklyn, where I’m building a sense of home in the Fort Greene neighborhood. My family is from India, but they mostly live in New York. I was raised in Long Island, went to college in Philadelphia, lived in San Francisco for 8 years and spent a year sampling homes across Oregon and Central California before choosing New York as the home for this chapter of my life.
I love to bring people and ideas together, especially when they don’t seem like they would really go well. In this enthusiasm, I’ve found a windy path from rural development to startup hacker and designer to facilitator to community leader and nonprofit founder to corporate social impact and now in product partnerships (what is that even?). Looking back, I’ve made sense of it, but I didn’t quite walk out of college with a career plan mapped out.
Outside of work stuff, I spend lots of my creative and spiritual energy on projects that help me and people around me get to know themselves better. To find this energy, I spent a lot of my free time on long walks, runs, or hikes. In between it all, I try to document my thoughts and observations, so I write often and take lots of photos.
Much of my writing and photography isn’t anything worth publishing, but publishing isn’t the point. These things encourage me to notice what’s happening, to wonder, to make sense of things, and to remind me what “enough” means.
I was raised as a Jain, which I hold close to me, but as I’ve grown older, it often feels to me like I have found my faith in nature, people watching, and reflection.
If you find something around here that strikes a chord with you, say something. I’d love to hear from you. Here are some best ways to reach me.
And if you’re a stranger on the Internet and just doing some general stalking, here’s my Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.
What I think about
My every day is defined by the tension between trying to live as many lives as possible and seeking meaning in the one that I’m currently in.
I’m passionate about people being more understanding of one another—probably out of some deep rooted feeling that I always feared being misunderstood myself. Now, it seems like misunderstanding is something of a societal epidemic, not just a fear I’ve constructed in my mind for me.
I think misunderstanding as an epidemic is rooted in how we’ve learned to consume information and how we haven’t learned how to digest it. This is one of the reasons I’m excited about the Internet, social media culture, and how we choose to express ourselves and connect with one another.
I also think the best way to consume and digest information is through real human interaction. Even better if it’s with a non-judgmental lens of curiosity in understanding why people are the way they are, but it’s still pretty great when it’s just shooting shit about a common interest or sharing an experience.
What I dream for
I have a dream that one day, Internet interactions will fuel more human interactions. That our default behavior will be to use this amazing access to information that we have to learn more, connect dots in constructive ways, understand others more deeply, and maybe even to grow more open minded to who each of us can become.
Right now, though, the Internet feels like a place where people are throwing food at each other and taking shits on the sidewalk. I think we can do better.
Relatedly, I wonder about how we can preserve nature for as long as possible, what it would take for people to spend more time considering the humanity of the people around them, why it’s so hard to find silence, the tension of being a brown man in a white world and of seeking self attainment when my parents sought survival, telling stories that invite people into them, and what it means to grow up (in a many senses, not the least of which include how to address my slowing metabolism, decreased flexibility and inability to keep up with the culture.)
"What do you do?"
Keywords: professional, friendly, smart, sweater, LinkedIn
Ankit Shah cares deeply about our collective thoughtfulness and the things that bring us together. In various lives, he's been recognized as a community builder, a designer and a strategist.
He is the founder and CEO of Tea With Strangers, a global community organization of hundreds of hosts who have brought over 50,000 people in over 25 cities together in real life for small, meaningful group conversations. He also currently works at Facebook, where he focuses on products that enable community builders, like Groups and Events. Previously, he built community programs for Airbnb Open Homes to enable and connect their host community with refugees and other people in need of free temporary housing.
Ankit was raised in New York, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and is currently based in San Francisco, where he spends most of his free time walking, running, hiking and thinking.
Press Links
Speaking + Podcast Interviews
Speaking Background: To date, I’ve delivered TEDx talks in 3 continents, keynoted at a few conferences alongside people far more famous than me, like Chip Conley, Brandon Stanton and Jason Russell, and spoken at Stanford, Princeton, NYU, UPenn, Berkeley, the Thiel Foundation, the biggest high school in Texas (apparently), the most elite high schools in Bombay and Florida (again, apparently) and a religionless church.
Podcast Background: My podcast experience isn’t as extensive; I’ve done a handful of interviews on small podcasts, but they’re mostly on Soundclouds, not the Podcasts app.
Topics: I usually talk about starting movements, community, belonging, loneliness, and social impact.
I’d like to speak more—especially to young people—about building a relationship with yourself, making a life of art, meaning and purpose, growing up, and being a brown person in America.
Contact: For podcast, speaking or interview requests, email me at ankit@teawithstrangers.com. My contact page has a lot of other information about how to reach me.
Videos
TEDxTeen, London
Bringing Community Back Offline
TEDxEMWS, Bombay
How tea is made
(To be clear, it’s a metaphor. I am not a tea expert.)
Start Conference
Starting Tea With Strangers
Brut America
Fighting Loneliness with Tea With Strangers
Brooklyn Free Speech / Erica O’Brien
Tea With Strangers, a documentary
We Are Family Foundation, Three Dot Dash Summit
I wish there were a video of this, but it’s just marketing collateral that puts me between the guy who started Humans of New York, with 30M people following his stories, and the guy that created KONY 2012, the most viral 30-minute activist documentary of all time.
If you got this far down, you might as well say hello.
Email me at ankit@teawithstrangers.com or see my other contact details here.