Tuhin Kumar - From Airbnb to Apple to designing with AI

Summary

This episode of Dive Club invites Tuhin Kumar, the head of design at Luma AI, to discuss his expansive journey from working with tech giants like Apple and Airbnb to leading design in the AI space at Luma AI. Kumar delves into thought-provoking aspects of the design process, especially within the realm of AI-driven products, emphasizing the importance of creative collaboration and the evolving role of designers. As AI continues to advance, Kumar shares his insights on navigating the rapid pace of AI research and product design, and the intrinsic value of maintaining a growth mindset.

Highlights

• Tuhin Kumar's career transition from companies like Apple to an AI-focused role at Luma AI reflects a significant shift in the design landscape. 🌟
• Emphasis on the soulfulness of design—combining art with science to bring a signature touch to AI products. ✨
• The role of a designer in AI is evolving, requiring knowledge of AI models and the ability to collaborate seamlessly with researchers. 🤝
• Kumar advocates for a fun, engaging workplace culture that prioritizes creativity and inclusive design practices. 🎉
• AI innovation is happening at a breakneck pace, necessitating designers to stay agile and adaptive to new technologies. 🚀
• The episode spotlights how establishing a robust design team can lead to breakthrough product development and market success. 🏆

Key Takeaways

• Tuhin Kumar transitioned from traditional tech giants like Apple and Airbnb to leading AI design at Luma AI, showcasing a dynamic career path. 🚀
• Designers are increasingly required to integrate AI into their workflow, pushing them to expand beyond conventional design skills. 🤖
• Maintaining creative energy and designing with intention are paramount, ensuring that AI products do not lose a human touch. 🎨
• AI's rapid development necessitates a balance between innovation and practicality in product design. ⚖️
• The importance of a growth mindset and curiosity in the design field is echoed as vital for personal and professional advancement. 🌱

Overview

Tuhin Kumar's journey from elite tech companies like Apple and Airbnb to his current position at Luma AI signifies a notable shift in the design industry. His narrative is rooted in a passion for blending technology with creativity, driving him to lead design efforts within the AI field. Kumar's experience hints at the evolving demands placed on designers, urging them to embrace new technologies and methodologies in their practices.

At Luma AI, Kumar is tasked with the challenge of integrating artificial intelligence into practical design workflows. He discusses the necessity for designers to step beyond traditional boundaries, delving into AI systems to enhance their craft. As AI reshapes industries, Kumar emphasizes the importance of injecting personality and a signature touch into AI applications to maintain their human-centric essence.

The conversation accentuates the importance of a growth mindset and continuous learning as AI continues to redefine the design landscape. Kumar's insights offer a fresh perspective on balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of design, underlining the value of staying current with technological developments while honing one's craft within this dynamic field.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction to Generative and 3D Design In this introduction, the focus is on exploring the intersection of generative and 3D design. The discussion revolves around understanding what makes a design desirable and how this understanding influences design processes, particularly the interface design. The conversation reflects on the often-debated distinction between design and art, suggesting that well-designed objects possess an artistic quality. Additionally, there is an interest in delving into the beginning stages of the design process, where the designer actively engages with creating from scratch.
• 02:00 - 05:00: Tuhin Kumar's Journey and Background This chapter discusses Tuhin Kumar's professional journey and his background. The conversation touches on how the value proposition of design has evolved, particularly in the context of AI-native products. The discussion is led by the host, Rid, who highlights the constant learning required in the field of design. The chapter portrays the innovation processes driven by ideas that evolve by building upon existing concepts, emphasizing the urgency and opportunity to act on these ideas, given that others are ready to take them forward in the competitive space of design and AI.
• 05:00 - 10:00: Transition to Luma AI and the Role of AI in Design The chapter features an interview with Tuenkumar, head of design at Luma AI, a leading company in generative AI. The discussion focuses on design patterns, interactions, and the intricate process of creating a great AI product. It also includes insights from Tuenkumar's experiences at Apple, Airbnb, and Meta, particularly on integrating generative AI into design work.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Challenges and Strategies in Designing AI Products The chapter introduces the theme of designing AI products and explores the various challenges and strategies associated with it. It begins with a personal anecdote from Tuin, who shares his journey into design, which began with a blog during his engineering studies. His desire for a more aesthetically pleasing blog led him to self-learn HTML, CSS, and PHP, demonstrating the importance of adaptability and continuous learning in the field of design. This narrative sets the stage for a deeper discussion on how evolving technology influences design practices and what this means for the future.
• 15:00 - 20:00: The 0 to 1 Design Process and Signature in Design The chapter discusses an individual's journey through the design process, beginning with their experience in India, where design work didn't have a formal name. The introduction of the iPhone marked a pivotal point, particularly as Twitter became a gateway into the design world. The narrative highlights how following a few designers on Twitter sparked an interest that led to significant learning and growth in design through college, mostly through self-directed freelance work.
• 20:00 - 27:30: Collaborating with Research and Evolving Design Roles The chapter discusses experiences of working with a small company called Pulse, which was a newsreading app. The speaker shares how they became the first designer for Pulse, motivated by being a daily user of the app. They express their disbelief at who was behind the app, indicating a sense of admiration. Their involvement with the company came through their work on an unrelated project - a hacker news theme modifier called 'georgifi'. This particular tool was favored by a web engineer at Pulse and ultimately led to the speaker's recruitment. It's noteworthy that the project hadn't been updated in 10 years yet remains available in the Chrome store, indicating lasting relevance.
• 27:30 - 32:30: Designing with AI and Importance of Visual Design The chapter discusses the speaker's journey in the tech industry, starting from Facebook to startups, Airbnb, and eventually Apple. It highlights the role of influential figures like 'Stephven John' in emphasizing the value of design in the late 2000s. The speaker reflects on the dynamic experience of moving between big and small companies throughout their career in product and digital design, noting the significant changes and influences during their tenure at Apple.
• 32:30 - 45:00: Tuhin's Experience at Leading Companies The chapter discusses Tuhin's desire to transition to a smaller, more dynamic company environment, especially with the rapid advancements in AI technology. He mentions making a move to a company called UBA."
• 45:00 - 60:00: Advice for Designers in AI and Growth Mindset This chapter discusses the rapid evolution of software design and the inadequacy of current tools that were designed for past tasks. It highlights a new design tool, Paper, which prioritizes designers, offering features that cater to the modern needs of design work. A call to action is made for designers to join an exclusive early access list to experience this next generation tool, with early access launching in May.

Tuhin Kumar - From Airbnb to Apple to designing with AI Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 The entire conversation was a lot more around what would it mean to bring generative and 3D together? You described design as knowing what is desirable. So, can you unpack that a little bit and talk about how that shapes the way that you've designed the interface? I think this is one of those perennial quintessential design versus art and blah blah blah. But really, the things that are really well designed do have an artlike quality. Can we dive into the 0 to1 design process? The person designing has to actually take
• 00:30 - 01:00 the idea that's in their head, in some cases influenced by 10 other ideas people have built upon it, but then someone has to resolve it into something that makes sense. Are there other ways that you've seen the value proposition of design shift now that you're working in this type of AI native product or you now have the opportunity to do more. Whether you do it or not is up to you. The caveat being someone else will be willing to do it. Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. This
• 01:00 - 01:30 week's episode is with Tuenkumar who's the head of design at Luma AI which is one of the companies really leading the charge on generative AI today. So we're going to get ultra specific on the types of patterns and interactions and all of the thinking that goes into designing a truly great AI product. And one of my favorite parts of the episode is when we kind of zoom out a little bit and Tuon talks about his time at Apple, Airbnb and Meta and all of the ways that working with generative AI as a new
• 01:30 - 02:00 material really changes how he thinks about the design process and what it means for the future of the practice even. So let's start by getting to know Tuin a little bit and hearing about the journey that led him to Luma. I studied engineering and somewhere mid-engineering I started blogging and then I wanted a prettier blog. So I taught myself HTML and CSS. Then I realized oh that's not enough. Back then this was WordPress era. Uh and so then it's like oh actually I have to teach myself PHP. I taught myself that. And
• 02:00 - 02:30 then by the end of the whole process I was like the blogging part is fine. What was this other thing I did in India? There was no real name for it back then. iPhone had just kind of come out and that was when Twitter honestly became my really peak into the world. I would follow all the 10 designers at that point who were on Twitter really it was it was that field uh and that kind of led me to like understand oh this whole field. So most of my college I basically just started like picking up design doing freelance and then kind of got
• 02:30 - 03:00 here uh for a really small company called pulse. Uh it was a newsreading app. I joined them as a first designer. I was a daily user of pulse. So as soon as I found out that you were working on that I was like this is amaz I've always wondered who did it. Yeah, the pulse I feel like life is really funny. The false folks found me because I had written this hacker news theme modifier georgifi and really the the web engineer there uses it to this date I have not updated it I kid you not in 10 years I don't even know how it's in the plug-in store but it is uh in the chrome store
• 03:00 - 03:30 and so that's kind of how I got in here from there Facebook another startup Airbnb and then Apple was always just like I got to work there for the most part in ways like product design digital design do owe it to Stephven John to usher in like the value of design in the late 2000s that was like I need to at least understand what makes this tick. Obviously by the time I joined even Johnny had left. Uh but that was like a really interesting experience and from there I was like back to I keep doing this like pendulum of like big company small company big company small company
• 03:30 - 04:00 and so that was kind of when I was like itching again of like okay I want to join something a little smaller. AI was happening and it was pretty clear this is moving at breakneck speed and you needed to be in an environment that really promoted that. And so that's kind of what led me to UBA. Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. I'm all in on paper as the next great design tool. And this is coming from someone who's taught Figma to more people than just about anyone. But I'm ready. It's time for a tool that puts creativity at the heart of everything,
• 04:00 - 04:30 not systems and processes. I mean, the way that we design and create software is changing faster than ever. And the tools we're using were made for yesterday's tasks. Instead, Paper is putting designers first and building all kinds of features that I've always wanted. So, if you want to be one of the very first people to use the next generation of design tooling, then head to dive.club/paper to get on that list. Early access launches in May. So, that's
• 04:30 - 05:00 dive.com/paper. Look, you know how big of a Jitter fan I am, but their latest release is hands down the best one yet. Now, Jitter has an infinite canvas for animation design. And I mean, within 30 seconds of using it, I knew that this was always the way that it should be for motion design. It makes iteration 10 times easier. Collaborating with team members makes way more sense. And you can scale content across formats using multiple artboards in a single file. Jitter is crazy. Like, this product is so incredibly good now. You got to try
• 05:00 - 05:30 it out. Just head to dive.club/jitter to get started. That's J I T E R. Okay, now on to the episode. Can you give us a rundown of the state of the product when you joined and what those first few months or initiatives looked like where you were getting momentum on the design front? The Luma journey was interesting. I first met the uh founder in Feb. He had reached out to like just learn a little bit more about how to hire designers. Back then this they were still doing a lot of like 3D
• 05:30 - 06:00 and Nerf. they were like trying to figure out okay what kind of designers should we go after uh and so honestly the original conversations started there and then as I learned a little bit more about what they were trying to do what kind of problems they were running was I was like actually this is kind of exciting let's talk more let's let's try and see if there is uh something here that was in Feb and then this was when I think we were talking and it was a little bit of why 3D though I think video models had just started coming but it was one of those like yeah we don't
• 06:00 - 06:30 know if it's actually going to be a thing anywhere. Uh and so the team was still very much like focused, the entire team was 3D background and so they were very focused on like the 3D aspects and so I let that go. It was like okay they seem very interested in 3D that's not particularly my thing and so then we caught up again in like June and by this point I think seeds of the idea of the video side of things had started happening but the company was still in the generative 3D land of things. I was still at Apple. The company had released a text to 3D model called Genie. And so
• 06:30 - 07:00 that had shown the idea of like okay this can be a generative company. We can attract the right kind of researchers. We can get the right kind of compute to train these models and all of that stuff. And so this time the entire conversation was a lot more around like what would it mean to bring like generative and 3D together. And throughout the whole conversation, I would basically do this thing where I would try and understand how much flex there was in 3D as like only 3D versus
• 07:00 - 07:30 creativity at large. And once I saw there was like enough give there honestly and nobody was like no no no why would we ever do anything else? 3D is where it's at. I was like okay this feels like a very opportune time. The other thing that really made it very interesting to talk to these folks was I think it was the only research company that still was talking about product. I had talked to like most companies uh that were doing stuff back then and they were pretty much like full-on research labs and like trying to be a product
• 07:30 - 08:00 person who has all their career done product. It is a little bit of a learning challenge because the incentives the like time scales all of those are just a little bit different when you're in a proper research lab versus when you're in a research and product company. And so those two stars align and that's kind of what led me to UMA. But the day I joined the company was still technically doing generative 3D. I think the first week we had this like group team huddle. I think the team was what like 10 15 folks I don't even remember. Ahmed the CEO he's like so we
• 08:00 - 08:30 should talk about what we're going to do next. And that's when like the idea of the video model and that that's something that you know in talking with folks in the industry investors that's something that's been picking up steam. And that's really was when like, oh, I guess I've joined a video model company. Uh, the classic pivot a week after you joined, you know. Yeah. I I think like in my case, it turned out to be a happy accident. I was like that's amazing cuz I had always wanted to broaden the sphere of like why one modality in some ways the real like unlock in the whole
• 08:30 - 09:00 like AI stuff there are two. One language is now an input and then two any modality can be any modality. Like those are the two most like foundational unlocks. And so in that world like trying to limit yourself to one modality always felt a little like shortsighted to me. And so for me this was like this could not be more amazing news. Okay. So can we dive into the 0ero to1 design process? I want to learn about how you even figured out what this could be after you know the company kind of pivots a little bit a week into joining.
• 09:00 - 09:30 And you said something interesting to me before we started recording. You said 0ero to1 is your opportunity to put your signature on it. So what does your signature look like? I think this is like one of those perennial quintessential like design versus art and blah blah blah. But really like the things that are really well designed do have an artlike quality. Like yes, I understand theoretically art is not design and design is not art, but they do have that like special quality that is not a rational approach to design.
• 09:30 - 10:00 And so when I say putting your signature, I don't mean like just doing something cuz you want to leave your mark. I mean putting a signature so that it can have somewhat of an essence or soul that speaks to some people on a more visceral level. There's no you couldn't like honestly rationalize it if you sat in a design critique and someone asked you why did you do it this way and honestly the answer will be cuz I just thought it was better like really there is no rhythm or rhyme for that kind of reasoning. So that's what I mean by putting your mark. As designers like
• 10:00 - 10:30 this is going to sound like too heady but I think as designers one of the fundamental things we are charged with is what should come into existence in the world and that is you know a great opportunity but that is I also think that is a moral responsibility especially having worked at like different companies uh I feel like I have a fuller picture of what you know business means business incentives means what user incentives means and all of that stuff but I come back to the same idea. Yeah, all of that's fine. But the
• 10:30 - 11:00 whole profession of design came into being because we wanted a function to fight for the user. Now it's like, well, designers should talk business metrics and this and stakeholder alignment. It's like, yeah, but the whole function really, it was brought into existence because we needed a function to fight for just the user. And so it's like really interesting to me that we now look at this as like well design should do this and balance this and balance that. It's like yes, but we also as a function have this moral responsibility of like we are choosing to bring
• 11:00 - 11:30 something into the world. At that point, you have the most influence on what the shape of something can be. And so when I say signature, I mean it at that like deeper level than you know just doing something fancy cuz you thought it was the coolest thing ever. I felt that in the product for what it's worth. Like there were multiple times where I think even when I hit the brainstorm panel and I felt like this little background animation and it kind of took me to this like almost peaceful state where I was like okay they didn't have to do that they didn't have to do that and they did and I appreciated it. So uh there's
• 11:30 - 12:00 definitely a lot in that product where it's clear and I'll pass it on to the team as well. So this is the other thing that I've learned. I think you can make your life very easy by just surrounding yourself with like-minded people. There are environments, you know, often time people will ask, I think we've been asked when like we interview candidates for engineering or design where, oh, how did you like convince XYZ to invest in this? And honestly, I think the answer is we didn't have to. We interviewed
• 12:00 - 12:30 every person. A lot of the core team I brought them on and like the whole point was there was this philosophical alignment. We shared a worldview of how should we make things? What kind of things should come into existence? What kind of love and care is put into that? Designers are really good at justifying anything we want. But a little bit of like, you know, bullshitting our way through it. But really, it's magic when everybody is like aligned. You don't have to justify things. It's a little
• 12:30 - 13:00 bit of like okay but we have this kind of time constraint. How do we do it in like the most efficient way? And that's where like you know having experienced team members who've done this before in other places makes your life ridiculously easy. I've interviewed so many designers at these like really craftoriented companies and I used to try to get at oh how are you doing it? How are you doing? And I've actually stopped asking the questions because it's super clear. It's just like well everyone just cares a lot more than your average company and it's as simple as that. I think I learned this at Facebook from the paper team. Paper RIP. Uh but I
• 13:00 - 13:30 like I would ask my friend Brandon and it's like how are you able to justify so much work and like this paper curl animation and all of this stuff? And that was his like cuz we hired and interviewed every single engineer who joins the paper team and if they're not aligned they don't get to join the team. It's as simple as that. I was like okay I see. Uh and so yeah now like having seen it at multiple places like yeah you you either get it or you don't get it. All right I want to talk about this idea but from a slightly different angle
• 13:30 - 14:00 where right now we're talking about building products the way that we believe products should be built and there's also this concept of desiraability which you mentioned to me the first time we chatted you said you described design as knowing what is desirable. So can you unpack that a little bit and talk about how that shapes the way that you've designed the interface? The thing that I believed was the essence of the idea that we were trying to explore and we could really amplify that like of course there's a
• 14:00 - 14:30 job to be done you know people who are using it a lot of AI creators and video production people and people in like graphic design end of the day of course they are looking for an asset you know they're and then they can take it to their tool and whatever their current production pipeline flows are like that is knowing of course that's the job to be done but what can we bring to the table where it's not just your typical here's a prom dogs say something you'll get a video off you go that doesn't to
• 14:30 - 15:00 me feels even from a business perspective sticky the day a better model comes you will switch and we now we've seen this play out in like LLM land and like different lands and so that was always like something we you can say believe in or you can say we had like thought deeper enough about it that we knew that the product had to give you something else so that was one idea the second part of this was because of language being an input. One of the other things that is a thread that you you got to be a little careful in how much you pull on it especially in like a
• 15:00 - 15:30 professional setting thing like dream machine but there is this idea of another entity that is there and like you can try to resist it and you know I think like Chad Gibb does a good job of like really resisting no it's a tool it's like no but you're talking to this thing you cannot at a deep deep subconscious level ever think of this as a tool you'd have to think of it a little more than a tool and then it's up to you like you know how much do you want to personify this and all of that stuff. So for us that was the second part which is how do you contextualize
• 15:30 - 16:00 this in the creative workflow and like if you think about it like creativity is actually pretty isolating like it's a very solitary activity like no matter how many people you're jamming and brainstorming with but when the rubber meets the road the person designing has to actually take the idea that's in their head in some cases influenced by 10 other ideas people have built upon it but then someone has to resolve it into something that makes sense. And in that there is no one with you. It is truly
• 16:00 - 16:30 like isolating. And our thinking was that if we could design the whole experience where it could have just a dash of creative partnership where it didn't feel like this was a servant just waiting for your commands, but that it had ideas of its own. It could help your ideas get better if you were someone who was a novice because that was a lot of the other things we were seeing which is a lot of people who didn't really know a lot about design, photography, film coming in and just like picking up
• 16:30 - 17:00 prompts from here and there and just like putting them. You would see things like Octane, 8K renderer, glitchy noise. I'm like those terms don't even mean anything together. Uh and so like our hope was that if you use something like this, a it should feel like this is a partnership. It's not just you having to work with the machine and tell the machine what you want. It should feel like a partnership and then b as you use more and more especially if you're someone who is not been deep into this field or has like a proper creative art background. You can learn. So brainstorm
• 17:00 - 17:30 was very much from that lens of like you can come with the simplest idea. Our favorite example of like testing these flows when I was designing the language entire architecture was like red kitchen what do you mean red rustic kitchen red modern Italian kitchen red farmhouse kitchen what kind of red kitchen one aspect is we show those variations but then brainstorm lets you kind of go deeper on these so that you next time you come you learn the vocabulary you learn other ways you learn how red can be connected to terracotta how that can be connected to brick and the now their
• 17:30 - 18:00 entire play of materiality in kitchen design and that's the kind of stuff we wanted to like imbue in terms of what makes it feel different. So those were the things that we were trying to build uh on top of like conversation as a foundational thing and then this idea of a creative partner back then I don't think agent was even a term looking back pretty clear we were just scratching the surface of that idea but when we started the idea was very much instead of trying to build an AI artist uh we wanted to build a creative partner. Are there any
• 18:00 - 18:30 challenges that come with designing an AI product that you might not even be aware of until you actually join a company like Luma? Lots of them. Uh I think like the time scales are rapidly different. They're both different and a little bit unpredictable. The reason they're unpredictable is because research is unpredictable. I say this all the time. I think this is the first time design has met a function that is even more timeline averse than design has been historically for the last 1015 years. And and it really it's not
• 18:30 - 19:00 because uh someone is trying to be difficult to work with. It's they're actually inventing stuff that wasn't possible before. Even when it's like a paper that someone else has written and published and the team is like trying to just adopt those methodologies, those papers were designed and written from a research POV. They were not designed and written from a productization point of view. And so when you start productizing it, you realize, oh, this method is, I don't know, too costly, uh, too slow,
• 19:00 - 19:30 doesn't actually converge at scale, is good for like handpicked data sets, but not really at scale. And you then have to solve each of those things. And each of those things, the solve is unknown. This is not engineering, at least like normal engineering that we've seen for the last 15 years, wherein, oh hey, this thing doesn't work. Oh yeah, we know five other ways we can solve this problem of performance that we're hitting. No, this is really it's unknown. It could be they can figure it out in a weekend, but it could also be it'll take them 3 months to figure it out. Uh and that makes it very
• 19:30 - 20:00 uncertain. But coupled with the race that is AI field right now means the moment you do have something ready. It is in the company's best interest and your users's best interest to get that out in the market as soon as possible. I think the 0 to1 phase is really good at trying to establish some I would say big borders of like okay creative partnership one big thing ideation as a core thing okay one big border to establish but once you have those like these new capabilities are a little bit
• 20:00 - 20:30 like as they come figure out how they fit in the product and get them out the door because if you don't someone else will right now like it's very easy for people to switch to whatever tool that is of their preference and so from a company's sustainability perspective from users like using this on a project that is mission critical to them. The sooner it gets out, the better it is for them, the more they can try these things and better the model gets. And so, you know, you're probably first like 1 month soon. But because of your feedback
• 20:30 - 21:00 cycle, next time you do an update, you are 2 months sooner than everyone else. And that gap only increases like compounding is real. Uh, and in AI field, it is like even more so real. So how we balance that with like you know the tricky part is if you don't do that in a way where end of the day your product is just trying to be a wrapper around the core model whether yours or someone else's if you're doing that that's fine you can just keep shipping things each model each capability becomes a button but when you get that in like an agentic workflow uh you have
• 21:00 - 21:30 conversation you have all these like different pathways that's where it gets like really tricky cuz you have to design the product this is something that I think honestly we are now learning that you have to design the product in a way where these are extremely modular and resilient and you can just hot swap them as new capabilities come and so that's like a good lesson for us uh I would say cuz uh I think we tried to be one big monolithic thing in the past it is pretty clear modernization should have been the way we had approached this but those are the things I would say that makes it like particularly difficult and
• 21:30 - 22:00 lastly you don't know the kind of edge scenarios in that like what I mean is we started with like in 2007 with capacitive touch And soon within I would say 3 4 years we had tools where you could actually feel what capacitive touch unlocked. And in the beginning everyone was still doing really fast buttons. And it wasn't until we got the slide to unlock that we realized oh gestures are a whole new capability of this medium. From that point onwards
• 22:00 - 22:30 many designers were like actually experiencing the medium. They were designing these as if like they were controlling the gestures. They were controlling the touch points and in origami or whatever tool you were using, you could have control over all of these things. That doesn't exist in research land. You can kind of use comfy, but it's not the same. And you have to build a little bit of like intuition of where the arc is going. Like you kind of in your head be able to see like okay, what are the curves and where are they going? Where are they landing? And in many ways
• 22:30 - 23:00 you kind of have to like guess a little bit of like I think in like two months we will likely have this in six months we will definitely have this like fundamental step change capability and then you kind of like work a little bit backwards from that. It's like okay if that is roughly landing in 6 months what fundamental decisions we shouldn't be making right now because in 6 months they will be completely the wrong decisions. Not to say you can't ever change, but then there are some things that are so foundational that you know it's like okay if this is landing in like 3 to 6 months why would you make
• 23:00 - 23:30 this decision and so you do have to like think a little bit forward which I think is not a trait that I think we've ever had to honestly we we see the problem. We know the tools at our hand and we solve them. Even with like tech and touch devices it was pretty clear how to do that. Now you kind of have to also assume like the arc of technology a little bit and so you do have to be a little closer to like the medium. You do have to be a little aware of like what is the research happening like you know something like how far are we from real-time video models you you
• 23:30 - 24:00 at least should have some theoretical answer to that question and based on that a lot of the decisions you are making dayto-day might shift uh you can nudge research at some point towards those directionalities so that's how it's different you know is there an example that you can share of a type of problem where you can make the strategic decision like this is not worth solving I can probably tell more of the ones where I think we learned this the hard way. So for the agentic stuff we were still dealing with 3.5 when um I had
• 24:00 - 24:30 started like writing like the basic system prompts and stuff and the way that process worked was the first step was like no language should be something we invest in uh and kind of getting everyone aligned on that idea to like okay but like how are you even approaching this problem you know so like a few of us got together uh I just wrote a rough notion doc of these are the broad like ways to think about the problem this is very broadly speaking like I think architecture is probably even a cringe word to describe what I wrote in that document, but roughly this
• 24:30 - 25:00 is these are the like stages. This is how like the agent should think. This is when it should like rethink and re-evaluate all of that stuff. From there began the work of okay, this is all great in theory land. Prove it. Uh and so like writing the first system prompt to like just seem like you know getting all the tools installed and spending time in terminal because it was the fastest way to get this all done. And so that whole process we were dealing with 3.5 and so we had to create so many of these like special case rules like if this happens do this in this
• 25:00 - 25:30 case do this this is how you break it down. Lo and behold now like 4 and 40 like I think one of the things we are realizing is every time you approach in the LLM side of things a problem like that you're putting a ceiling on the intelligence yourself because the way you wrote those logic pathways and those rules are the limits. No matter how intelligent the model gets, that is all it can ever do cuz you're literally telling it not to do anything else. And I think in hindsight, we should have, you know, this wisdom that I was spewing
• 25:30 - 26:00 a second ago of like knowing the arc and everything. I should have taken that myself and been like, "No, no, no. By the time we launch, we would have it." That's like a perfect case of like where clearly the methodologies got better very quickly over time. This one is tricky though. I think there is a constant push and pull in AI of like you can wait for two more months and a better method will come but you will also have waited for two months and I think this is like on a case-by case basis uh every company every feature you
• 26:00 - 26:30 kind of have to make the call of like when is it worth it to still ship the thing you have versus actually no it's not good enough hold on wait for it to ship because you have a better model um that we can't have cuz there will always be a better thing I think none of these are anywhere close to like plateauing even video models like yeah in 3 months we will probably have a better video model in 6 months even a better one than that but there obviously we're not going to just wait till the ideal happens cuz it's never going to happen but in core architecture stuff I think knowing that
• 26:30 - 27:00 like helps a little bit uh and you can just plan your work around that otherwise you just end up rewriting like we rewrote the agent architecture I think a month before because structured responses all of that stuff came out and we were like this is so much better than all the logic that we were having to Right. And so we rewrote it's okay. It's interesting to hear you talk about how much of like the design output is being captured in like the system prompts and you've used the word language quite a few times now and even getting into terminal and just how much the role is
• 27:00 - 27:30 even changing based off of the medium. I I think there are like two parts of it probably. One is my personal view of what I think I do and I want to do more of. I think it was for the last decade or so I didn't feel like a UI designer. I was decent at it. I never quite felt and I think like Facebook was the first time where this idea of a product designer was exposed like that was our role title. Um and the idea that your job is not to just create like designs
• 27:30 - 28:00 or pixels output. Your design is to actually think about the whole thing. And then Airbnb I think we were called experience designers and not in like user experience. It really meant what is the end experience a guest is going to have and whatever vector can control that think about it. uh that's the role of that you have as a designer and so in that broad view yeah I I I I would call myself a designer in the tech view of like UI design I feel closer to a product architect than like a designer
• 28:00 - 28:30 but a lot of this I think has become much easier to apply honestly with AI it's so much easier to be able to express this is the like rough architecture that's in my head but I can't just talk about it now I can actually go and execute a rough version of it in playground and then show it to people and then you know people who are way smarter than me can like build on top of it. Uh and so that I think is like a fundamental shift in what design means from like before UI design was
• 28:30 - 29:00 there, we had graphic design, we would look at static things and then with UI design, interaction kind of became a big thing like prototyping and interactive design and knowing between state A or view A and view B, what were the 100 in between micro moments that happened that took you from here to there? That became a thing you had to think about. And I think in this case or metaphor I think we're just going deeper. You now have to understand the material through which you can influence because it doesn't need to be deterministic code. Now it it
• 29:00 - 29:30 is like probabilistic language which can shape this can happen or then that can happen. It sounds intuitive but when you actually start like working with it it is very non-intuitive especially trying to turn off your brain's 10 15 years of like very deterministic ways of thinking in programming and stuff. you start designing and like you find yourself catching yourself being like wait why am I doing it this way like that's the old way I would call it like the old way of thinking about this problem let's shift
• 29:30 - 30:00 gears and think about it this way so I think like knowing what capabilities exist how many of the capabilities you can literally like give birth by just writing you know four lines of prompts like concept pills in the UI came like that brainstorm can you share the story on the concept pills yeah I mean it started off with the idea that like oh it would be nice because again going back to like people were thinking of these just as prompt but we wanted this to feel like an ideation partner. Uh and
• 30:00 - 30:30 so like what are some ways we can think about it. Of course you can always ask anything and so in dream machine you know of course you can get a video you can get an image but you can also just get ideas. You can literally just ask give me more ideas like the one above and it will give you ideas. In trying to first productize that, we were trying to think of okay but like when people are trying to like riff on prompts often they come people who are like noviceses are not like prompts smiththers. They would come with like very um simple vocabulary and so how can we give them options that lets them understand okay
• 30:30 - 31:00 what is the slightly more nuanced way of talking about this still in the same periphery of ideas. So it's not quite about you know brainstorm which is much more go broad um but this is like no within this realm how else could have you said it uh what are other things that are in this realm that like let you quickly explore in like the latent space way of thinking about it the more like peripheral regions of the latent space where you're right now that's kind of how we started off with like at first it was oh let's do some projects matching and this and that or have like a
• 31:00 - 31:30 hardcoded list very intuitively I feel like that just felt wrong to me I like we have LMS why the hell would you have to do this and so I really just like wrote a few like things in cloud I think at that time just to prove out could it be done and this was something as simple as like hey for every term that's being given figure out the right set of keywords and for each of those keywords figure out other creative alternates uh and then like I had to like prompt Smith a lot on that system prompt to like
• 31:30 - 32:00 because otherwise sometimes he would start writing essays then it was like okay how do you sanitize the response problem but that's kind of how the original idea came. Once that came, some of the more essay kind of responses is what led to brainstorm. We were like, "Holy actually this thing can go so deep. Let's actually take this other essay form that we didn't need here. Let's like repackage it as like another feature." And so really, this is like if you think in abstract, you wouldn't likely think of brainstorm as a feature. But when you're in the medium working
• 32:00 - 32:30 with these things, each response is a possibility of a new direction you can take it in. And so that's how concept builds happen. That's how like the brainstorm stuff happen. And they're all coming from the same place of just playing with language models. Once we had the models ready, then kind of hooking it back to like then optimizing, okay, what kind of prompt works with our model better? Uh so that the users don't have to think too much about this stuff. they can just come with the most simple version of the idea that they have in their head and not have to work so hard
• 32:30 - 33:00 with like prompts smithing or this like alchemy of words. You can just come and say things naturally. Just be human. Just come and express and it should be the model and the things in between the systems job to like really take your input and do what is the best way to express that. Is the cloud artifact part of you know the quote unquote like handoff process at that point or you just basically as the designer being like okay I have confirmed this is possible. I think when we came up with some of these I don't think we even had
• 33:00 - 33:30 a language engineer. So the language team was me and the person on iOS who was like very passionate about it like he helped me set up with like all the terminal and all the stuff and we were just jamming on these ideas to like really prove it out. No, this can be done. And so at that time it was just me like prompts smmithing cuz really what's special there. You're just saying it to do things in 50 different ways and seeing what works across like a broad set. Like I think the idea of eval was not a thing then it was very much wibes
• 33:30 - 34:00 because it was early days and so we were just like okay this feels good for these queries. And so after a while we started having like you know set of 10 20 prompts that we wanted to test these with. And so that was like I think I have like three or four CLD chats where I've basically run out of context memory limits. Uh literally every time I now go back Claude just says please start a new thing. At that point you do get to some prompt but back then again something I didn't know back then was like actually that is very different from how the
• 34:00 - 34:30 playground models behave because there's a lot of sanitization anthropic or um you know OpenAI is doing in the public version of chat GPD. So then you kind of take that in the playground. you decide are you using open AI's model are you using anthropics models and then you kind of then work in the playground because it's slightly different again not day and night but just a few things are different and so you use that at this point now obviously we have like proper evals uh and there's a whole team it's a much more proper process but back
• 34:30 - 35:00 then yeah it was the system prompt ended up becoming the like here is the thing that works and then someone once we had more folks who can help us just go and run eval like iterate on this at this point honestly I can't even recognize the code like I know the rough shape of it but when I look I'm like what is this doing here I I don't even recognize it anymore so you talked a little bit about collaborating with research you talked a little bit about the language system prompt element are there other ways that you've seen the value proposition of design shift now that you're working in
• 35:00 - 35:30 this type of AI native product or for me it's like twofold uh at least the ones I've seen happen especially if you know you're working at a company that has either either applied research or if it's also like a foundation model company has like foundation model uh research team one is you know your good old there's a capability what should we do with it that's like your typical product design process um it's the same way hey we can now do this figure out how it should work out in the product I think with AI we talked about some of
• 35:30 - 36:00 the applied stuff there's a lot of applied stuff that you can actually like in it if you use comfy you can do it on the visual model side um so like someone else on our team right now is playing with how do you like actually interpolate the embeddings to get better results. Uh and like they're a designer, they're not researchers or even applied researchers. So there's like that layer of like a little bit of like contribution to the applied side of things you can do. And then the thing that I think is new especially if you're working with foundation model folks is
• 36:00 - 36:30 often you can shape and guide what research should even research. like they're not coming with these like ideas in like vacuum, right? Like once a product is out, it is in the service of product. There is always like some arcs that are like very dear to research because you know they like make the process of training much more efficient uh or you can get a lot more with the right data uh instead of you know always being data hungry. But then there's a lot of stuff of like how should people
• 36:30 - 37:00 work with camera control. designers probably are able to come up with pretty good like prototypes of what that could be. Don't get too hung up on one because you know we don't know if there's a direct research methodology for it. But if you have two or three of these, go talk to your researchers. Really show them. Chances are at least one of the three or four you will show it to will get very excited because that is something they have like dreamt about. They just couldn't quite figure out the right way of doing it or the most elegant form of it. But once they see
• 37:00 - 37:30 it, they're also able to connect it with like just the way when you see something, you connect it with like, oh, here are all the 50 design patterns I know that will apply there. It's the same. Oh, actually that's very easy. I have this other research technique and then there's this new research paper. Let me try something. That's kind of how you get to the tricky part is in research, you wouldn't get exactly what you asked for. That's just the nature of things. It would be like 60 70. And so there is another phase of design that happens. So think of that design as like
• 37:30 - 38:00 a rough sketch of an idea that you collaborate with research team. Once the capability happens, that's when you're probably doing the production version of that idea. But if you go in with that mentality that what you're first talking about is not like you know you said it once it should be this way kind of approach then yeah like I think that's a new kind of role that design gets to play if you have the chops like being able to do that uh in the applied side of things uh in like model behavior all of those are like very important but there you probably have to like pick up
• 38:00 - 38:30 some new skills there's so much role of like designers or just people in general with like very keen aesthetic eye that you can probably like bring to the table. Um you have so much deep knowledge about the workflows that people do in creative industries like you bring that to the table and that's very helpful for the research folks because it truly impacts the direction of research. So those are I would say like the big buckets helping see where should research team even channel some of their energy because of what can be
• 38:30 - 39:00 or what would be nice to have on the applied side like helping out with some of the systems engineering plus just a dash of applied to like make things that already existed. you just connected them in slightly new interesting pieces. On the language side like the concept pill brainstorms are like very simple examples of that but you know you can be as complex as your skill sets allow and then of course there is the good old there's a capability get it to market there being just fast on your feet like being able to think through problems and systems and having a system that is
• 39:00 - 39:30 modular so you can just like quickly plug and play because their velocity ends up being the key. So th those are like I think the new and slightly different than before because previously I feel like I definitely remember projects where I would just spend weeks just thinking about the right design and iterating. There are probably some projects where you get to do that but for the most part it is spread out in this process like you get to do that before research happens a little bit then you get to do that a little bit as research is happening but once things converge it is very much go go go. I'm
• 39:30 - 40:00 sure there's somebody listening right now that is like, man, I've listened to a bunch of episodes and it feels like every designer that comes on is just tacking on more skills that I have to learn and my bucket of responsibilities just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So maybe the flip side of that based off of your experience at Luma, do you think that any skills that we would traditionally associate with design become less valuable in an AI world? I don't think I've ever thought about it that way, but that is a very good question because you are right. Uh,
• 40:00 - 40:30 everyone just adds more. It's like they should be aware of sales and business. It's like, okay, I will just be a one-man company at this point. I think some of those skills might be a little less important. Maybe I don't think they go to zero though. I think this is a real issue in that if I were like a new grad designer or studying design right now. It is actually hard to understand how would I myself think of what to give my skills in. designers before this were
• 40:30 - 41:00 so boxed into the idea and some of it is like us but some of it is also like just the way the industry boxed us in to the idea of being able to create something that is a good visual artifact even if experience is considered even end of the day it's a good visual artifact like that was the job of a designer in tech especially the right typography the right UI the perfect like crisp like looking things the right spacing, right
• 41:00 - 41:30 rhythm, harmony, all of that. Like, but very much visual attributes, those don't go away. I I'm like hesitant to say they become less important because what I don't want people to take away is like, oh great, visual design doesn't matter. It's like, no, I kid you not, that is still baseline like the thing that you will get in the door with. Cuz if that can't be like if that basic like taste and not just taste but actually the execution capability to make something good, beautiful, efficient uh and effective
• 41:30 - 42:00 and desirable. Going back to that word, that's like a foundational skill. The think of these at this point as like amplifiers. They don't define you, but if you have these skill sets, you're going to go much further along. Uh like think of it as that. Think of it as like investing in we're starting to see the arc of things in like fuzzy not fully definite ways for the next 5 10 years and think of it as like future investment and like oh my god if you don't have the skill today you just can't make it. Um, no. Your baseline
• 42:00 - 42:30 skills are still the time true and tested things that will get you in the door. You will land the perfect job that you've been looking for and and with the right set of people, but you now have the opportunity to do more. Whether you do it or not is up to you. The caveat being someone else will be willing to do it. And so that's I think like the real thing which is once you're in that situation at the grand level we each design our lives and in this case we
• 42:30 - 43:00 each design the exact career we want to have. Uh it's the same way when people would be like yeah business skills and like you know how business works all of that is super important for designers to understand. Would you have a really great designer who has that skill set versus a really great designer who doesn't? Yeah if all things equal you will prefer the one. But if you're looking for someone who is a great designer but you know typical great like visual UI all of that stuff like the right UX that site or someone who is
• 43:00 - 43:30 okay at that but is also really good at business depends on the company. Like it could be that in like super early stages a company might prefer like this bucket but the moment they have two or three designers they will very quickly realize yeah we got the right product but they don't feel good to use and they'll then they'll need this. So at end of the day the team the skills have to be like balanced and this is not a if you don't do this you're done. I think think of it as like an investment and of all the
• 43:30 - 44:00 places you could invest in what are the ones that would give you the most return. This does feel like it is a new material. The same way when touch came, people who could prototype went further. That's just a fact. Looking back, we see that doesn't mean people who didn't prototype couldn't do anything. Like, no, they were still valuable. It's still a fully like it's actually still a very hard skill set to acquire, but if you could do the other stuff, it was more valuable. And then of course you also see people who push so much on the prototyping side that if you did that
• 44:00 - 44:30 well with enough of design you became a design engineer. It's magical that we get to have so many choices in the different strands of skills that we can acquire and there are very few things that are like well baseline you should know this. From there it's like what are you excited about this? Cuz if you're not excited you're not going to enjoy it. So, it's not a requirement, but it is a nice to have. And it does feel like something just the way prototyping proved to be a pretty good amplifier for
• 44:30 - 45:00 careers. It does feel like it would be a pretty solid amplifier and like something that you can contribute to the company beyond just the immediate project that you're on. You're hiring right now. So, if someone's listening, they're inspired, they want to join, what are the amplifiers that you care the most about right now? I think growth mindset it's like one of those before everything if you don't have the growth mindset you wouldn't even be asking this question of like what else can I learn right now and so fundamentally that and curiosity are like the most foundational
• 45:00 - 45:30 things we're a small team so I I will say like you know being good at visuals being good at product design like the good old basic stuff is important we're not yet at the point you know where we can like really mentor people a lot so we definitely are looking for people who are in the middle stages of their career and you know are self-sufficient but if you're hungry for more if like AI is exciting to you if you're curious of like what what else can happen here how do we move beyond just like you know
• 45:30 - 46:00 prompt boxes and getting outputs to like what are 100 other things and these ideas are just bubbling in your head yeah this is the place to come and be I want to zoom out for a second and maybe even just give a little bit more context about how you're thinking about the luma or Because if I would to ask a random listener right now, name the top designdriven companies in the world, I guarantee both Apple and Airbnb would be on that list, which is your past experience. So, what are you drawing
• 46:00 - 46:30 from at those companies and what it was like being a designer there? That's then shaping how you design the org for Luma. I would honestly call it luxury that you get to have when you are the Apple or the Airbnb because they are established products. They have a clear product market fit. They are mature products and so you actually can afford as a product team as a design team to really go deep on one problem. And in cases of both the companies honestly spend months. I think
• 46:30 - 47:00 my average time for any project at either of these companies was 8 to 12 months. Almost everything I worked at these companies was that long. And they were like, don't get me wrong, they were like very like deep things. They were like, you know, a whole window management feature or a whole redesign of the entire design system of Airbnb. But like they did span that kind of time horizon. So the thing that I draw from is the like relentless pursuit of trying to be good or better than where you were
• 47:00 - 47:30 yesterday. These are like good north stars to have. But at some point you also have to realize even Airbnb is not like Apple and Apple obviously is not like Airbnb. They are completely different businesses. Uh they exist in completely different sectors. And so they have like very different business dynamics and market dynamics that affect like how things work and how things don't work. And so the same is likely going to be true uh of Luma and the same is probably true for whoever is
• 47:30 - 48:00 listening and is in a similar role at a different company. So try to not think of these as like this is the archetype. This is exactly how design should be. Take the parts that are more universal from there. Uh so I think like one of the things that Johnny he left these like deck of cards that every new hire would get. One of them that has stuck with me is trust the expert. Especially true in case of Apple because you would have probably someone who has worked at Pixar and like done characters all their
• 48:00 - 48:30 life. So you should at least have one second of thought before you give them feedback on mimojis or something. You know, it's like one of those it's like dude this is all this person has done. They are probably the leading expert on this in the world. like not even in the country like actually in the world. The other thing both these places had is like huge huge respect for individual contributors. Uh that is something that I as much as I can I do try to bring
• 48:30 - 49:00 over to the Luma both on the design team but also on like the larger product and engineering side of things which is we're a small team and especially with AI it's possible that small teams actually have way more of an alpha than like much larger teams with layers of management. The more you can empower engineers and individual contributors or designers, the faster you can go, the more ideas come into table. Like historically, you wouldn't think of Facebook in the same breath as Airbnb and Apple, but this one actually is one
• 49:00 - 49:30 of the core things I picked up from Facebook. Anyone could just come up with any idea. Like the number of product features that were created in like an overnight hackathon that are now used by billions is shocking. Like literally video chat was a thing someone created in an overnight hackathon. I was like, "Oh, it would be cool if you could just video call someone and then it became a product feature. It's it's insane." And so like when you give people that kind of agency, beautiful things happen. Different companies work differently. At
• 49:30 - 50:00 Facebook it was like go try, we'll see. At Apple, it's a little bit of like go try, but then we will, you know, really be the editor of the entire experience and then bring that out into the world. Both can work. uh the fundamentals are still the same. You know, you value the people who do the work. You give them the agency to do the right kind of work. And lastly, the thing that like these companies have that I think we're trying to increase more of but are not fully there is just the time and space. Good things take time. U this is like, you
• 50:00 - 50:30 know, one of those duh kind of statements, but good things do take time. You need to then learn how much you can go deep on something given the time constraints you have versus trying to craft this like masterful web of ideas. But because you don't have the right set of time, it all comes crashing. And the good part is it's a small team and you have all the agency. So once this version is out, nobody will
• 50:30 - 51:00 stop you from coming up with the better version of this idea. And so that's I would say something that is actually different from the Apples and the Airbnbs of the world. But really in in its most like fundamental form, the thing that both companies share is design as a very almost optimistic view of the world. It's really funny to think of designers as optimistic cuz we are one of the most judgy people in the world. We like critique everything. You go to a restaurant, you're like why is this like why is this like this? But
• 51:00 - 51:30 like behind all the snark and whatever I I think is this like relentless like hope of like it can be better. And to me that is extremely extremely true at places like Apple and Airbnb. And my hope is in all of this we're able to bring a little bit of that idea of like the optimistic aspect of like design and and product at large at Luma and in this like AI field where right now everyone seems to be the velocity is the only thing. But my hope is if we do this right, it's sure velocity has its value,
• 51:30 - 52:00 but it's a lot of other things that make the product sticky, make people actually love our product, not just love our models. You've talked about a growth mindset a few times now, so maybe I'll even flip the question back at you. When you reflect on your time at these companies, was there a specific inflection point or a particular area where you feel like you really grew as a designer from those experiences? something changed when I joined Airbnb.
• 52:00 - 52:30 I don't know what I I really don't know what. Like I think at Pulse like I was too new. I was new to the whole country. I was like I I remember going to get rent a house uh with my co-founder cuz I didn't have any credit score. Uh I didn't know that was a thing. Uh and so like one of my co-founders had to come with me and really vouch for me. And Bryant, I remember the landlord's name. Uh really cool guy. uh and like this old dude and he's like, "Oh yeah, I can tell
• 52:30 - 53:00 you just landed. You're so lost." So I think like at Pulse I was, you know, like trying to do the thing, but honestly Pulse was very much like understanding what design meant. Facebook was this like step change in like seeing what the grits look like in design. Everyone was there. Tim Vanam, Wilson, Mike Mattis, Supa. Honestly, I the name there's like enough more than enough people to name for like hours, but everyone was there. And all those
• 53:00 - 53:30 like 10 people I said I started following on Twitter, they were all there. That exposed me to both like the things that they were like really good at, but it also exposed me to like end of the day, they were people. Once you started sitting in crits with them, you could see the things that they were excellent and world class at and the things that were their like weaknesses. Uh and they were different for everyone including me. And so that made it much more normal to be like okay uh it almost like I would say anchored and grounded me a little bit to be like it's not this
• 53:30 - 54:00 like imaginary you become this like star designer. It's like no everyone has their strengths and everyone has their weakness. One person can't be doing the best branding and the best interaction design and the best product design. It's just not possible. And so from there like knowing okay what excites you? What do you want to go deeper? So that was like a lot of Facebook. And so for me like Claraara the next startup that I joined was this like um coming out of age experience a little bit. I was back on my own. Uh I felt
• 54:00 - 54:30 like I had picked enough skills uh where I could like see things in a broader perspective and I was able to do everything from like the brand design to like the product uh and like be in AI like at a point where nobody even knew AI was what was with AI. So that was for me like very interesting and I think like bit by bit like the fact that I could do that on my own made me actually become very confident in my own set of skills like now getting like comments and DMs from like people again the same
• 54:30 - 55:00 10 people uh some of them like complimenting the work praising u you know talking nicely about the things that we had done or we were trying to do. That was a huge you can say a confidence boost but also like it really made you realize that when you do things from things that you deeply believe in they are good things and so then honestly when I started at Airbnb I felt overprepared. I don't know what changed in my mind but I remember even through the interview loops I had like zero
• 55:00 - 55:30 shred of doubt I wouldn't get the job like it just was not a thought of like oh maybe I won't get I was like no like you can call it overconfidence possibly was a little bit of that I was like oh this hot shot designer from Facebook probably probably some of it but I never felt that I couldn't do the job for me like what was important at Airbnb was to make sure I was able to like actually have impact on the company. And so like the first year's project was a little bit like very experimental. The second
• 55:30 - 56:00 year I just went deep uh into something that was both work-wise hard but also organizationally challenging. And then in my third year I think for the first time in my career I had a manager who I would say truly saw me that just gave me winks. Uh I I think I was just like I am truly unstoppable. I was suddenly leading like organizational meetings with the GMs of a different org to like work on some design system and make sure their entire product line can like adopt
• 56:00 - 56:30 the design system. um meanwhile also redesigning the design system, having brand reviews and all of this stuff. And so I think maybe that's the like inflection point like having someone who like actually believes in you, having someone who is able to provide the air cover for you, especially in like larger companies uh where there's like a lot of like other agendas going around. That was life-changing. Some of these things you work on, you kind of never realize you're getting better at it. I never
• 56:30 - 57:00 thought of myself as like good at visual design, but towards the end of my career at Airbnb, I was mentoring people on visual design. I still don't think of myself as a good visual designer, but I guess these things are always relative. Uh, and so I think I've taken a fine comb through your UI, I'm going to say you're a good visual designer. So, I don't know that. I feel like I look at some other people's work and I'm like, how did they how could they even see this? This looks so pretty. Uh, I I don't think I'm there. I I can make
• 57:00 - 57:30 things look pretty, but not that level of pretty. But that's okay. I'm things I'm good at, I know I'm good at. So, it's okay. And I think that's like a that's what I'm going to underline, too. Like what my interpretation of just connecting the through lines of some of the things that you've been saying is how important it is to recognize the fact that you can't be great at every skill. And and even the people that we look up to on Twitter, they're probably not great at every skill. Like, everyone actually is human. And so so much of like I love that your inflection point
• 57:30 - 58:00 was about people and like this inner belief rather than Yeah. And then I learned XYZ. The thing that I resisted for the longest time in my career personally was being a manager. I just didn't want to be one. The thing that I'm most passionate about is being able to make sure the individual contributors have the space that many times I didn't get to have in my career. And so I think because I was an IC for so long, I have
• 58:00 - 58:30 like a very different kind of empathy for that body of work and that career track. I'll I'll do whatever it takes to like preserve their creative spirit, their creative energy and channel it. You know, of course, you still need like to give feedback and all of that stuff, but uh I I think like creative energy needs to be preserved and protected in some ways. People think of design teams being very exclusive because you know you should invite everybody for a conversation like yes but you know sometimes ideas are like I think
• 58:30 - 59:00 Johnny's another one of those things like ideas truly are fragile and you can't just go around poking holes in them but also like you have to have thought about the idea deep enough to be able to have a discussion at the similar enough frequency wavelength. If you're just shallowly thinking of ideas, I personally think it is unfair to like expect everyone to like bring you into the discussion because no, you haven't thought deeply enough about the idea.
• 59:00 - 59:30 And so whether you're a designer, whether you're an engineer, that's not the part that matters. What matters is like have you thought deeply enough cuz it's a sign of respect that when you're engaging in like truly dissecting an idea, you have done your homework. You have figured it out. You have thought about it. you have an original point of view that you're bringing to this conversation because you have thought deeply enough about it. Yeah. Then who cares if you're a designer, engineer, or someone else? I don't care. You just need to have thought about it. That is an again another way of protecting the creative energy because it's it's very
• 59:30 - 60:00 easy to kind of not have that be protected. Uh and I think that's when I've seen like designers get burnt out. Some of them like switch over from designs to like never being a designer. They become engineers and stuff. it needs to be protected. So Apple is really good at that. They do that by like really keeping all designers in like an ivory castle. Airbnb also is pretty good at that. They are very good at preserving the creative energy of design team. Uh and I'm sure like other design teams that are like really stellar and world class at what they do,
• 60:00 - 60:30 it's probably like a core aspect of how they allow people to flourish is by preserving the thing that like that's where you get all your good ideas from. That's how you come up with like good stuff. You got to preserve it just like any other resource. We've covered a ton of ground. So before I let you go, I kind of want to just give one more generic catch all to make sure that we're hitting on everything that you want to talk about. So maybe we could even address the person who's listening who is inspired by everything you're saying. They've been kind of keeping
• 60:30 - 61:00 tabs on some of the AI stuff, but they're not at this forward-looking company and none of it is really seeping into their day-to-day yet. Yeah. any advice or any other learnings that you want to share with that person before we let you go? I feel like if you're in the Twitter sphere of things like you will hear so much about taste is all that matters, high agency is all that matters. I think agency is really important. When you don't have agency, you end up becoming this like pessimistic, snarky person. But also
• 61:00 - 61:30 when you don't have enough agency, you also start lacking being curious. So I would say like don't like go after high agency. Like that's not a thing you go after. Like you can cultivate it but like maybe start by just being curious. Okay, you are at a place where maybe it's not at the forefront. Not every place needs to be. There is definitely a little bit of everyone trying to jump into it. At least a year ago, there was definitely a little bit of a lot of companies were just jumping in cuz AI was the thing to do. So maybe you are lucky that you're not at a company like
• 61:30 - 62:00 that. Your company is probably more intentional. I don't know. So the first question to answer is are you drawn by it? Is anything here like somewhat interesting to you? Cuz if it's not, you're just chasing another meme cycle, you know? It's like people who got into crypto because they thought it would make them rich, not because they were fundamentally allured by the idea of like, oh, things can have shared ownership and that can be anything. For me, that was the most exciting part about crypto in this world. Like for AI side of things, first of all, is it
• 62:00 - 62:30 intriguing to you? Is there any of it that like you're like, "Huh, that's exciting, mildly scary, but also interesting." I think the second part is if it's not something that you can see, if there are like small ways in which you can use it in your day-to-day life, like it's not hard. If you're a designer, like using things like cursor, lovable, vzero, whatever it may for creating quick tiny prototypes is very easy. I don't know, you work at Apple where NDA is galore, you can probably find ways to do this. uh and that you're
• 62:30 - 63:00 already like ahead of many many people cuz you're not just tweeting about it. You're actually experiencing it. You actually understand what works and what are the limitations of this thing. And this can be true for you know text or language to like prototyping coding side of things uh text to image text to video. If you're a creative person, see if like the text to image, text to video side of things can bring in a new approach to your creative practice. Can this be some the beginning of something that you've always wanted? Like one of the things I have always wanted to do is
• 63:00 - 63:30 like do a fashion line and so for me like a lot of these end up being like honestly I could just be sitting watching something or commuting and this is like a quick way of tapping into that seed of practice just a little bit. So that's like another way of doing all of this. Lastly, you can always change your job. Wink wink, we are hiring. Uh but but like okay before that last one there's like so many side projects you can do. Like one of them that I saw recently that was uh I was like kicking
• 63:30 - 64:00 myself like oh that could have been an idea. I I shouldn't have done that idea. I think she's someone who works at Meta, I think. But she's done this like podcast where it's her and like an AI thing and they just like talk and I was like yeah and I was just like this is so cool. The field is super fresh. It's like barely 2 years. So again taking you back 2007 you're at best at 2009. Most interesting companies didn't even start
• 64:00 - 64:30 at that point. So there's so much left to do here. So just follow things that you're naturally curious about and see if there are parts of it that are exciting. Again, you don't have to learn about everything. You don't have to learn about agents and all multimodels and all the other 50 things that you know you see in your Twitter feed. Pick the one or two that actually excites you and go deeper on them and see what form it takes. Maybe it'll it will actually maybe lead to your next job or maybe you will actually convince the company that
• 64:30 - 65:00 you're at because by building these you show them the value of what this domain can bring. Both of these in my head are things that high agency people would do instead of just saying oh my company doesn't let me do it's like so who's stopping you. That's that's kind of my advice. I love it. I love it. Well dude, this has been really really fun. Thanks for coming on today and sharing a little bit about what you think and what you're working on. really enjoying just following along with your journey and the products so far. So, appreciate your time. Thank you and thank you for having me. Before I let you go, I want to take
• 65:00 - 65:30 just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand
• 65:30 - 66:00 selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full-time. So, by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at dive.comclub/partners. [Music]