5 Jun 2025 · 71 min
Colin Dunn, a designer-turned-founder, started Visual Electric after spotting a gap at Universe: AI tools built specifically for professional graphic designers. He explains how AI like Cursor boosts individual productivity and lets smaller teams handle more, while designers move from routine tasks toward higher creative work like art direction.
Chapters
First of Kind Season 1 would not be possible without the support of our sponsors.
Thank you to Granola, Linear, Perplexity, Cursor, and Framer.
Maybe we should go through each of the interviews. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And talk about why they fit that mold of first of a kind.
Colin Dunn was a designer who, to me, was constantly circling around the startup journey for himself. He As Long said, that he wanted to be a founder. He wanted to have his own independence and to have a company be the final form factor of something that he designed. But he understood that in order to get the reps to earn that opportunity, he would have to stay close to the metal and close to the point of creation. Right. And so his tours of duty at Dropbox, but more importantly at Playspace, And at Universe, he was responsible for designing teams, designing products, and ultimately got to a place where, okay, my team members are using AI to generate images and to kind of incorporate that motion into our overall design practice. There's something here, and if there's ever a time to take the plunge, this seems like it's finally it. It's right here. This is the business that maybe I am best suited to create. I grew up in a school of design. I learned graphic design in the classic sense. I'm going to go build a company and pick this hill to die on. I'm going to build a new business for graphic designers in a post-AI world.
I mean, I can tell you that the first— after having had our first, I wish we had started earlier. Well, you don't look that old. I'm 35. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like we weren't super late, but I I guess I just realized that the things that I traded off when I had a kid were all the things that I care about the least. Yeah, totally. The things that I actually care about, I still preserve in my life. I traded a bunch of low-value things for something really high-value, and I just wish I had made that trade earlier.
We should have had this on camera!
Goddamn it!
Oh, shut up, you guys carry on. The reason why I asked you about fatherhood is because I sent over to Bryce ahead of this conversation.
Okay, okay.
Your episode in This American Life.
Oh no.
And I felt like it was, for me, like, it's like, um, you get to know a person, right? And you work with them, you build up a mental model of who they are. And that story came for me much later in our relationship. And it was like finding a secret room in a house, a secret playroom, right? And it like, in so many ways, kind of like made the whole house cohere. And so, you know, you are now father of one, expecting a second, with the perspective of fatherhood. Let's just start right there.
Yeah.
How do you look back on that episode? Is it still cringe?
Scares the shit out of me.
Do you feel like it's karmic?
I hope karma doesn't exist because I am screwed. The lesson I take from that experience experience is I didn't have the right environment for, for me as a kid. Like, I was, I was a fish out of water, and I was struggling to channel my energy in a productive way.
Yeah.
And I would say the biggest lesson I take from that as a parent now is just being very conscious of the environment that we're putting our kid in. Yes. And that feels like job number one. For example, One of the first decisions we made was, do we hire a nanny or do we go to daycare? And we ended up deciding to go to daycare because we felt like the social environment was going to be helpful for his development. We found a childcare provider who just seemed exceptional. And it was sort of at our own cost in the sense that like getting sick constantly and like schlepping to and from childcare, but like Yeah, I would say like that's because that was such an important part of my childhood was the sort of struggle of being in the wrong environment. I think I've internalized that as, as like a primary lesson.
But do you think that struggle is like not a catalyst for your own success? I think that, I mean, like as a father of two boys, one of the central things that I think about is like there is like a boundary between trauma and, and, and the struggle that creates resilience, right? And And so you want to kind of foster the latter without inflicting the former. And so like, how do you sort of at least think about that balance for you?
Agreed. There, there's definitely a healthy amount of, of, of that, but, and then there's an unhealthy amount. And I think for me, it veered into being unhealthy. And had I been in an environment like the Bay Area where there was magnet schools and programs that were oriented towards science and art and the things that I was drawn to, I think that could have really propelled me. And similarly, when I went to college, it was like a binary state change. I went from being depressed and unhappy and struggling to thriving. And it was entirely because I was now in an environment where I got to explore the things that I was interested in. I got to developed my creative side, and I was surrounded by inspiring people, and it was all the things that I was missing as a kid.
Did you find that it was the discovery of graphic design that brought you to San Francisco?
I discovered that before, yeah. When I was in high school, I was making fan art for NBA players.
I love it. Who are your guys?
Like Jason Richardson, LeBron James, Michael Jordan. Nice.
Amazing.
Yeah, I would make wallpapers, I'd make websites. It was my first foray into design. Yeah, yeah. Internet forums, you know, internet communities. I got connected to other creatives that were also interested in this. There was a website called West Coast Remix that would like wallpapers you could download. And so I didn't at the time realize that was a career path. I was like, oh, this is just like a fun hobby. It wasn't until my oldest sister, Katya, asked me had I considered going to art school that I realized this was a path that I could—
When did this happen?
I was in— Were you in high school? Yeah, maybe junior year of high school. Okay. She had a friend who was a type designer. Okay. And she had gone to art school, I think RISD, and that just set me down a whole path like, oh wow, I can make a career out of this. And when I looked at the average income of a graphic designer, I could expect to make as much as $35,000 a year when I graduated. Like, this was not—
That was gold back then.
That was gold. Yeah, I was like, wow. So it wasn't a— it was purely from a place of just passion and this is what I love to do and not at all from a place of this is going to be a lucrative path for me. But once I got into art school and that environment allowed me to really go full-time into exploring that, that's when it I think turned into sort of a, a career and a, and, and something that is today for me. So, yeah.
And I, and I think one of the things I, I wanna come back to eventually is, you know, you, you, you go to MICA, you study graphic design.
Yeah.
You end up in tech.
Yeah.
Which is not typical path. Yeah. For graphic design students coming outta that university. Now full circle, years and years later as a father, you are building a tool for graphic designers. Yeah. And so let's, let's, let's snap to the here and now.
Yeah.
One of the things you said recently that I absolutely love was, you know, you started off working on Visual Electric for creatives, and you found over time by honing in who you were serving, yeah, you started to focus the energy of the company and generate momentum that way. Talk me through the genesis of Visual Electric. Like, why, why did you start this company and not 100 other companies? And what has that process been like honing in on a particular user?
I've always wanted to be a founder. Like this has been a dream of mine for many years. I've had many terrible startup ideas that I'm really glad I didn't pursue.
I've heard you talking about a couple of them, right?
And I think for me, it was always about the right, finding the right problem. Yeah. And, and I have a, you know, a folder of Dropbox Paper docs that were my startup ideas. And I would come up with these, you know, it was any level of fidelity from like a quick, you know, jot of an idea to like a pitch deck with prototypes. Like they all sort of landed on some, somewhere on the spectrum of fidelity. But I met this investor named Greg Rosen, who is a pre-seed investor at Box Group. And he became my like first filter for startup ideas. And so I would bring him my ideas.
Was he really nice with those ideas?
Was he gentle?
Or was he like— He was gentle. Was I not gentle?
Yeah, not as gentle as Greg. You were not my first filter for ideas.
Just your last.
Yeah, exactly. What Greg told me later was he was looking for— a great founder has a good slope of curve, and that's what he was looking for. So we would have regular meetings. He would see how much progress I made over the course of a week, 2 weeks, whatever. The idea wasn't what he was interested in. He was interested in seeing my progress. Oh, interesting.
Okay.
And at some point he observed, this guy seems to be very driven to figure this out. Now I just need to direct him towards the right problem. Luckily, I didn't pursue any of these other ideas. I was patient. I waited. And when I was working at Universe, I noticed that some of the designers on my team were using AI in their work. Okay. And that was the first clue to me that, oh, there's something here. This is giving, this is providing real value despite the tools being primitive.
What were they using it for? Even though it was in its primitive state?
It was like concept development, sketching, just trying to get an idea out quickly to react to. And I was using it as an art director, creative director. I was also using it that way. I was like, okay, what about this? Have you tried this idea? And then I was talking to my friend George at Humane. GK3, and he, I mean, Humane was early into AI. They were using all of the tools from GPT to Midjourney to DALL·E, everything. And he commented to me that the tools were, they were so primitive. They were not, they were not for him as a designer. Right. And so it felt to me like there was an opportunity to build a new kind of creative tool around this technology. And then the next question I asked was, So when there's a disruptive technology, where does the value accrue? Is it going to the incumbents or is it going to the startups? And my conclusion was that if the technology is disruptive, I think there's an opportunity for a startup to build, to capture the value. And what makes a technology disruptive in the creative tool space? I think it's when the workflow changes. And with AI, the workflow is being rewritten. It's completely different the way you make things with AI.
And so it makes a lot of software from the last 8 years feel instantly obsolete, 100%, in like an almost perilous way. Where does rock bottom lie?
And even when you just open up a tool like Adobe Photoshop, or the amount of complexity that's on the screen is a result of the way in which you have to make things in a pre-AI world. With AI, you can make an interface and a product that is an order of magnitude simpler, which will also change who is the buyer of the design tool. And so we're at this moment of market expansion as well as disruption. And it felt like there was a, an opportunity that I was uniquely positioned to solve or to work on. And that was specifically about How does AI disrupt the way that creative work is done in the brand and marketing space? Right. And I ended up doing a broad survey of creative tools and I thought about everything from music to 3D to motion. And the reason I landed on branded marketing is that one, it's an area of interest and passion of mine. And two, if you look at what branding content is, it's basically images, videos, and text. Yes. And so those are the three types of content that exist in the largest volume on the internet, and therefore we have the most development in the models that are being trained. It seemed like they were the fir— they'd be the first to reach a quality level that could be used by professionals in production. So there was a combination of market fit, technology fit, and personal interest and expertise that aligned there. It felt like there wasn't a clear company already formed at that moment that was going after this. And so that was the conditions that sort of led me to making the leap.
Amazing. And I, and I think the other question I have is you didn't come into this as I think most first-time founders. I, I find like a lot of first-time founders are coming from the bowels of a larger company, or they're coming fresh outta school. You've worked at a whole range of startups prior to, to, to embarking on your own venture. And you accumulated a lot of scar tissue, right? You've seen different approaches, not just of how CEOs run businesses, but how designer CEOs run businesses.
Yeah.
Tell me a little bit about what you decided to bring into your toolkit.
Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway that I've had from my experiences in other startups and even larger companies, I was always working on the emerging products within those larger companies like Graph Search at Facebook and Dropbox Paper and Carousel. And so I've basically been working on zero-to-one products my whole career. Yeah. And, and as you mentioned, you know, either design-focused teams or design-focused leaders or design-focused problems like That's been sort of my area of interest.
You've always been amazing at that. I've always felt like it takes both like a degree of courage of like leaning into the ambiguity, but just raw inventiveness, right? Where it's like, some products I can describe to you, and you can kind of picture what needs to be designed, right?
Right.
In some cases, like graph search, it's like, I can picture a dozen ways in which this manifests. But like, I don't know if any of the 12 that I thought of is the right way.
Yeah.
And so there is like a very prototype-y, dogfoody, kind of highly iterative approach to it. And so I've always loved that as like, you're just personal Ben. But how, how, how has that approach worked out in practice?
So I think the, the, the biggest takeaway I've had from working with, on these kinds of problems with these kinds of people is that designers, and I'm gonna make a generalization here, but I think they tend to be poor at problem selection. Uh-huh. And what I mean by that is designers, I think as a type of person, care more about certain types of things than the average person does. For example, designers care a lot about interface design.
Yep.
And, well, you know, Rdio and Spotify is a really good example. Like, I think there's a lot of designers who are really sad that Rdio didn't win the Music Wars.
Yeah. And whoever's in the other column, that's— I'm at the top of that list.
I was an audio guy. Like, and not to say like Rdio was a bad problem with poor problem selection. But, um, but I think I'll say that when I worked at Aspen, you know, we were basically a design product studio. We didn't have a strong bent towards picking business problems that were going to be valuable if we solved them. We were picking problems that were interesting to designer people to solve. And the overlap between what is a good business and what designers care about is unfortunately can be small. And so if you think about what Apple has done a really good job of, I think, is the problems that they have chosen to work on have very little market risk. You know, when they introduced the iPod, it was already an established market. Yeah, there just wasn't a clear market leader.
Yeah.
And there was an opportunity to design something that was just gonna be a much better experience.
Yeah, they weren't manufacturing inactivity. People were listening to music on the go.
100%.
The problem was that they were sort of constrained to the amount of music they can bring on the go.
And they were operating in a market where the consumer cared about design. Like, general consumers care about user experience. They will vote with their wallet to buy something that has a better, you know, UX than something that doesn't. So they were very good at problem selection, I would say, with that product. And then the risk— once you've selected a good market and you have an opportunity to make a 10x better product, it's execution risk. Yes. And that is the kind of risk that I think designers are best suited to take on because where designers spike the highest. So at Aspen, for example, we were— I mean, to the credit of the founders, they were early into the idea of chatbots and conversational interfaces. So all those instincts were right, but the problem that we were trying to solve was I think in hindsight, clearly not a valuable problem to solve, which was a better way to build meeting agendas. The thing that I've spent a lot of energy thinking about with Visual Electric and the problems I work on is how do I, how do I prove to myself that this is a valuable problem to solve, right? And the best way to do that, I think, is to, is to do what you just said, which is to go to where there's existing behaviors, because human behaviors are slow to change, even if the technology is fast to change.
So probably the greatest bottleneck of this whole transition, right?
100%. 100%. Yeah. And the technology is way out ahead of human behavior. And so graphic design, the need to create graphic design assets, is a proven market. There's, there's zero market risk there. And so for us as a design-focused team, we now can, I think, take on the execution risk of how do you build a 10x better product using this new technology, right? Right.
I want to circle back on something you said that, that struck me, which is the, um, that tiny gap or that tiny overlap between like interesting problems to solve and problems that are actually valuable to the world. Do you think it's folly for designers to be creating their own to-do apps? I feel like it's like the design equivalent of like recording your own EP or like baking bread. And where there's like an artisanal itch that's scratched, but nobody's buying your to-do app. Nobody's buying your note-taking app.
I think there's like an asterisk after real problem, which is If you're funded by venture capital, the definition of real problem is very different. And so I think there was a question, I think we were talking about earlier that Henry asked, which was, why is there not as much great design as there are great designers in the world? And I think it's because so many designers are working on venture-backed companies and the, and the bar for building a venture-backed company is very high in terms of market cap and, right, and sort of what success means in that category. If you look at apps like Darkroom, which is a, you know, non-venture, or Glass is another example, like both of these are bootstrapped design-led companies that as a lifestyle business I think would be considered very successful, right, and are certainly examples of beautiful design. Yes. Now if you tried to raise venture capital, I think they That would maybe be the death of those products. Um, so I think of it as really coming down to what is your goal? Like, is your goal to found a venture-backed startup? Then probably working on a to-do app is not going to get you there. If you want to be a great designer at a company, showing great examples of design is— it doesn't matter really what it's about. Any— if I'm hiring a great designer, I don't— I'm looking at your ability to solve problems, to I don't need you to be necessarily great at problem selection if you're joining a startup. Okay, that's my job. Okay, it's to like define problem selection to some degree. I mean, yeah, um, I mean, obviously we want entrepreneurial-minded people on the team, but it's not this sort of most important thing that I'm looking for. And we can talk about that, but like, I'm sensing some, some hesitation there. But if your goal is to build a lifestyle business, which I think AI is actually creating an interesting opportunity right now for people who have great taste and great ideas to create software that would have required a larger team in the past and more upfront capital, right? More upfront capital. Like, I actually think there's a window of opportunity right now to create new kinds of— like, go to the App Store, find anything, any category, any app that's making a lot of money right now, and do a better version of that.
Take a bite and win.
Do what Apple did with the iPod. Go find a category where there's no clear market leader. There's a handful of successful apps. None of them are very good. And you as a designer now can just come in and build the iPod of X and, and there's no market risk. It's all execution risk. As a designer, you are excellent at that. Like you could build a lifestyle business, you know, potentially with a team of one. It just depends on what your goal is.
Given this, this trend towards requiring smaller and smaller teams to get stuff done. How are you at least leading Visual Electric through that transition? Is it merely through like constraining headcount? Do you kind of push your team to be tool-forward in a way that, you know, Humane was very early to adopt a lot of these very nascent, squiggly, squishy, you know, software products? What's the approach that you're taking right now, given that in some respects, the adoption of new tools can introduce execution risk rather than mitigate it?
I think our company is about half the size that it would be in a pre-AI world. If you had to rewind the clock 5 years ago, if you said build a team that can output this amount of product at this speed, I think we would have to be twice as large as we are today. I think that is because of tools like Cursor. I've had conversations with our engineering team and they have all said that they think they're twice as productive with Cursor than they were before Cursor. On the customer support side, we have the ability to use AI to answer questions. We have one customer support person working 10 hours a month right now and can handle all the volume of— that probably wouldn't be possible without AI. So I think across the board, we're just seeing people are becoming more productive, and they're also becoming full stack. That's the other trend that I'm seeing is that AI tools are giving people the ability to extend their capabilities into adjacent functions. So I think Phi from Perplexity is a good example of this. He is a brand designer and he's also a marketer. And like 5 years ago, you probably would have had to have multiple people to do the amount of output. He's making podcasts, he's doing videos, he's like a one-man band. And I think we're seeing that across the board. I think if you're a, if you're a product designer, you can now write frontend code. You can ship components.
We're really running out of excuses.
Yeah, exactly. And so it's like you're seeing people kind of expanding into adjacent functions and you're seeing higher efficiencies. And then, and there's like a compounding benefit of that where you need fewer people. So you have less communication overhead. Yes. You have less cross-functional. Overlap because you have one person doing the job of multiple people. And so it's actually—
it's interesting because there are fewer boundaries in some ways, right?
100%.
It's like the organizational chart of yesteryear, where like there was such a respect for like marketing and engineering and design.
Yeah.
Sort of antiquated in this new model, right?
I think so. It's the overlap. Like we, when we're hiring people, if you're just X, it's not enough. It's like, you have to be really good at X for us to hire you at that. I think everyone we're bringing onto the team is, it's like, okay, you can do your job well, but what else can you do?
What else can you do?
You're full stack. And so I think 1 1 3 here because you're not just getting all the benefits of the improved efficiencies, but you're, it's like addition from subtraction, right? You're not paying the price of organizational overhead.
Yeah. Where has that backfired in some respects? Because like, at least in the model, in the classic model, you've got like clear division of responsibilities and some muscle memory around how these functions typically operate. In this new regime, I can touch all the cookies, right? And you can touch all the cookies. And now like, who, who's responsible for this? Have you, have you encountered instances where it's like, it's unclear who's driving the car, or where there's like, heavy overlap in responsibility?
I mean, we're 6 people right now, so I don't think we've hit that problem yet. It's a good insight. I could see that happening in the future, but right now there's the only team that has redundancies is engineering right now. Otherwise it's 1 person per job.
That's amazing, man. I mean, I'm so amazed at just the output of the team. It just takes it out.
It's incredible. It's, yeah, it's pretty impressive. I think, I think there's some founders who see the size of the company as a measure of success. Yeah. And I think we're already kind of getting to a point where that's not really in vogue.
It's like, it's like your metabolic rate or something. It's somehow like, you know, the measure of your success versus like revenue to employee being like a figure that I see increasingly.
Exactly.
In pitch decks and memos, right?
And just from a quality of life perspective, I think selfishly, I mean, we're— we have an in-person culture. I love that we can fit into a small office that, you know, doesn't feel like I'm badging into a building.
It's portable too, I imagine, right?
100%. Yeah, we can fit in a single car when we go on an offsite. Like, obviously those things are going to break, but like, yeah, but like right now it's— I love the size. And I, I'm personally— I've worked in enough startups where we've prematurely scaled just to know the cost of that. And like, and I would much rather I would much rather err on the other side where we don't scale fast enough.
Yeah. Um, I am, I wanna go back to this observation you made around starting broad and then narrowing in. What was that like for you all? How is Visual Electric today a reflection of that journey? What do you sort of feel like you are on like the product market fit spectrum? Yeah. And then lastly, I, I do want you to steelman again for me. I will. The case for the graphic designer.
You can respond this time.
This is just, now I can respond in, in turn cuz To the cynical eye, yeah, one might say there are whole fields that are just going to go away. Yeah, I agree. And why is graphic design not early in that list?
Our success as a company has tracked almost one-to-one with the specificity at which we understand who our customer is. Okay. And when we launched the product, our positioning was image generation for creatives.
Yes.
Which was a very broad position. And I could tell you that Everything downstream of that becomes very difficult, right? You don't know who your customer is.
Like AI for people.
Yeah, I think the problem with not knowing who your customer is is everything downstream of that becomes very difficult. What features do you build? How do you go to market? What value props do you put on your homepage? Uh, how do you know which feedback to listen to. So all these things were just way too ambiguous. And I think the reason we positioned ourselves that way is because we did see that AI is going to be this broadly disruptive technology. Yep. And it felt premature to single out one particular segment of the market without more confidence that that was the right part of the market to focus on.
Did it give you surface area to identify where the pull—
it did, but also there was a few, I mean, It wasn't a very good— the scientific rigor on this test was not very good because everything that we did from the beginning was really oriented towards graphic designers, whether we realized it or not.
I see. So there was already kind of like a bias in the test inside there.
The biggest one is the infinite canvas. Yeah, that's a good point. That's, that's already— it's always been there. It's always been there. That was already making the product not a consumer product.
Yeah. There are people who see infinite canvases and they're like, That's not for me.
Whether or not we admitted that to ourselves, we, we had prematurely decided that before we ran that experiment.
Um, right. Interesting.
Okay. The second is everything around the branding, the imagery we chose to feature in this. Mm-hmm. All of it was probably because of my personal taste was oriented towards the graphic designer persona like that. We hired a really great design agency to, to to our brand named Manual.
Manual is graphic design firm.
Yeah, pure graphic design. So yeah, um, and great, great at it. Amazing, like world-class. Um, but so we made all these decisions before we were willing to admit to ourselves that this is what we were building. We, we kind of laid the groundwork, and unsurprisingly, the audience that I think responded most to what we had built was the graphic designer. And so It was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I think the other— I'll steel me on the case for it now though, because I think there is a strong strategic argument to be made for graphic designers. I agree that AI has the— as I was just describing, AI has the ability to displace jobs, and we can get into the sort of morality of that and the ethics of that, but sort of However you feel about it, it's happening. Correct. And, and so the question is, as a founder in this space, how do we skate to where the puck is going, right? How do we make sure we're not building a product for somebody who isn't going to be, uh, doesn't, isn't going to be employed in the future? My prediction is that, you know, as these tools get better, as the technology improves, the types of people that will be able to use design software will expand. In the sense that design tools are going to become easier to use. Yeah, prompting is much easier than manipulating layers and, right, all the sort of intricacies of design tools today. And so what is actually the skill set that will be left over when everyone can, you know, make things? What you need then is taste, and you need to tell a story. Yeah. And who are the best at doing that today? I would say creative directors, art directors, brand designers. Their job is to come up with a narrative, build a world, and pick the art direction, the brand voice, the individual elements, the colors, and, and put it together into a cohesive, recognizable system, and then to execute on that across a bunch of different marketing channels. And So the definition of who, what a graphic designer is, I think is going to change.
Yeah. But so almost what you describe isn't a graphic designer in so many ways, right?
How do you mean?
Well, I guess like when you said creative director, that archetype, I guess I see omnichannel seems like they are directing, you know, the translation of a vision into a central kernel. And then how that kernel feeds all the constituent parts.
Yeah. I think, I mean, if you go into like a design agency studio, the ranking order will be creative director, art director, graphic designer, or brand designer. And these are all just steps along the same ladder. And the creative director sits at the top. Their job is to architect the vision. The art director then will essentially manage the team of people who are then implementing that vision. And the graphic designers are doing the actual work of building it out. Right. Wherever you sit along that hierarchy, I think, I think AI kind of gives— that's your customer, right? That's our customer. And I think AI gives everybody the opportunity to kind of go one click up the ladder because the tools are getting better. And so you can now, instead of being the intern, I can direct the tool and it's my intern. And like, instead of being the art director, now I get to be the creative director. So it's— everybody kind of gets to increase their output. But I think that customer, that, that skill set, the thing that's going to last is you need to have great taste and you need to be able to tell a great story. Yeah. And we want to go to where that person exists today. Yeah. And empower them. Like, we see ourselves as the, like, the cursor for graphic designers. Like, we're going to the professional. Yeah. Now, in the same way that you can have vibe code and cursor and, like, types of people who are making software is changing, same thing is going to happen in, in design. You're gonna, you're gonna bring in a new class of people who who wouldn't have been considered creative directors before, or they wouldn't have had the time to kind of come up through the design studio. You know, you don't get to creative director until you've been a designer for 10 years. Correct. And you put in your, your time. Yeah. Now you can just try your hand at it. Right. On day one. And there's going to be a new class of people who are AI creative directors.
Right.
Right out of the gate. Right out of the gate. Yeah.
When you look across the landscape of other AI companies, that are building for this market segment, this, this space in general, like the Midjourneys of the world. What are you kind of drawing inspiration from or learning from? I feel like when, you know, early Facebook, we studied social products, we studied anything that smelled like it's in our neighborhood, for sure, mostly just to understand what the state of the art was and what, what, what, what patterns we could just take and do a better job of, um, what we can kind of learn in terms of like this broader social engineering that was happening across the web. And I feel like the same is sort of happening today where it's like we have like a new genre of music and everybody's not just like producing records, they're listening to records as they're being released. They're studying the work of others to figure out what are the emerging patterns that might work better in my environment. Um, what, what are the companies that you're drawing a lot of inspiration from?
What are the lessons you're gleaning? I mean, Midjourney is obviously out front in terms of image generation. They were the first to the party and they have built out not just the core model, but a lot of the features around the model and figured out how do you— one way to think about AI, like visual AI, is it's a new kind of camera. And in the same way that when the camera was invented, we had to come up with a bunch of concepts for zooming and panning and aperture and exposure and all these things we take for granted now. All these were at one point new ideas that people had to learn. And what they are is, that is the interface to controlling the technology. And to be a photographer, you have to learn all these things. You have to understand how they work so you can take great pictures. The same is true for AI, where there's a technology layer that is quite sophisticated and complicated. And our job is basically to figure out what is that interface layer that sits on top of that. And a huge amount of that is actually language. Yeah. Language is important because it, you know, each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. And our job is to sort of invisibly guide you to using these models in their best way. Right. And so the way we talk about it, the way we describe it, are these sort of subconscious suggestions to the user on what you should be using it for.
And so, yeah, there's almost like a teaching element to it, right? There's prompt suggestions, prompt engineering in some respect, something that you're productizing in the context of editing visual imagery. And so was that a big unlock from like a user standpoint? You sort of find yourself shipping features where there's like a step function increase in either sentiment or daily actives or how people are using the product?
The biggest step function increase was just the quality of the outputs. We were basically on life support until August and then we shipped a new model and it was like overnight everything went up into the right and nothing else changed in the product except the quality of the images that we were able to produce. And then that makes sense. I mean, if you're a professional, one lesson we learned was Early on, we were thinking that, okay, even if the images aren't good enough to be used in a production environment, they might be good enough to use in a concepting stage. And instead of, as a designer, instead of presenting to the client or to a teammate or whoever, you know, it's like A plus B where A and B are reference images you found on the internet. And then the client has to imagine C. You can say, I can just show you C. Directly.
Yeah.
And that's sort of what we were imagining would be a use case. Yeah. The thing that we learned is that designers— it actually wasn't even good enough for that, because for concept, for concepting, because designers would rather have beautiful reference imagery. Yeah. Then that required the viewer to imagine what it would look like when combining these concepts, then having a bad-looking image that shows the concept directly. Wow. Their job is to inspire, and if it's not inspiring, it's not doing the job. And so it's fascinating. So as soon as we hit this quality bar, everything started working, and it was, it was working largely for concepting. That was the first use case. And like, it was also being used for like some production things like marketing channels, social, sort of higher volume, maybe lower quality, or lower quality could be accepted.
But I mean, that begs the question, is like, is that where you find yourself like bumping into, oh, actually What our users are actually doing is like, they're not shipping, they're, they're selling in some respects, right? That, that is the core job to be done with our tool.
Yeah.
Right. And maybe there's a separate set of tools or a separate use case for production level assets. Yeah. But in, in the sphere of like concepting where you're creating alignment and you're selling a vision to a stakeholder. Yeah. The requirements differ quite a bit, right?
Yeah. For sure. I mean, what's great about where we kind of sit in the creative process is that, and where just AI generally sits today, is that we are the first place that people go, right? We are where you go to start the project. Yeah. And that is the best position to be in because now the job is how do we extend deeper and deeper into the later stages of the production process? I've heard from people who work at Adobe that one of the things that they've seen is a huge number of images that are being brought into Photoshop today are AI-generated images. And that has Adobe worried because they're no longer the place you start.
They're not like an exploration mode, right? Exactly. Another design-led company, Granola, introduced me to this framework of explore mode versus exploit mode. And I'm actually kind of curious to hear your take on it because I feel as though, like, to me, they are often very distinct spheres of work. One being more speculative, a little bit more freewheeling, more like, don't take this seriously, it's just to kind of like create space for new ideas and sort of like riff on things. And then there's like exploit mode when you find the hit, you know, the hook, you're like, that sounds so fucking cool, we have to make this record tonight. Like, we got to get this out the door cuz it's just too, too great. A lot of these tools seem to in some respects be exploiting explore mode. They seem to be almost like mitigating its influence, right? I would imagine if you were at Figma in the year 2025, you're seeing all of these generative AI tools that allow developers to skip straight to designing components in a web browser as like deeply disruptive to anything that precedes at work, right? Yeah, it's like a lot of like it's doing an end run on a lot of like, you know, exploration design work. What does that say for the field if we can kind of snap to the final product with increasing agency? Like, are we doing away with explore mode altogether?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the differences of AI is that typically in creative work, the fidelity you're working at increases as you move down the sort of production process, right? You start with the thumbnail sketch, you move into the like more detailed renders, and then you eventually go do the photo shoot, right?
I'm picturing Court Skrumpf pose here somewhere in there.
Exactly, exactly. I think what's interesting about AI is you design at full fidelity from the beginning. Yeah, yeah. The first thing you put into the prompt box, what comes out looks like an image that could go into production. So it's a different way of working, but you're still in exploration mode, but you're just exploring at a higher degree of fidelity. And in terms of the way that I thought about the exploit versus explore, I was thinking about it more in terms of the product itself. I would say we've just been in explore mode for 2 years and we were AI generally is in an explore mode right now. Like, one of the biggest inhibitors, I think, for us getting adoption is actually just people not knowing how to use AI in their work. Like, you've been working some way— we were talking about this earlier— behavior change is the hardest thing, right? You've been working a certain way your whole career, right? Now suddenly you're being told, like, forget all that.
Yeah, you don't need to—
vibe code. Yeah, vibe code. So the world right now is in explore mode.
But I think the lesson for me, at least with vibe coding, What, what Cursor gets dinged on is their, their, their insight that like start with where people are, right? Fork VS Code. Yeah. Because now you don't need to kind of manufacture a new way of doing things. You're just taking the existing way and making it way better. You're sort of branching it. Are you thinking about where people are today and helping them have a smoother transition? Yeah. Or is it more like, no, we need to just find the folks. That are fully committed to this new model, this new regime. Yeah. And giving them the best tool possible for it rather than insisting that the old way is somehow like worth all the trouble of like transitioning folks into, right? Yeah. There are two very different ways of thinking about it.
Change is hard. Everybody falls at a different point along the adoption curve.
Mm-hmm.
You're gonna have your early adopters, your late, or your early majority, late majority, laggards. Like everyone kind of can self-identify probably into which category they fall. I, I'm glad that we're, we're rolling this out sort of slowly in the world in the sense that there is a lot to figure out here, a lot of unknowns. And I don't think the technology is ready yet, and I don't think people are ready yet to have a hard switch to some entirely new modality. Yeah. And so the people that we're working with right now are by definition like our customers are the early adopters. They're the people who are out on the forefront and they're, they see what's coming. They want to be part of it. I think there's tremendous economic and creative opportunity for the people who decide to do that. But I also don't think everybody should do that. I think it's okay to be skeptical. It's okay to be, I got my way of doing things. I'm going to continue to do that. It's working for me. But at the same time, like we're seeing inroads, like we're seeing ways of talking about the product that gets people excited. And doesn't feel necessarily threatening to their identity. So instead of searching for stock photos, you can now just generate a photo that— and the experience is not all that different. Searching and prompting is a similar experience, and you're kind of replacing this, what for many feels like a non-creative task of browsing through a library of photos trying to find the one that meets all your criteria to something that feels very creative where you can art direct and you can steer the model however you want. So I think there's like, there's these little inroads we're seeing and we're finding our audience who's adopting these things early. But there's a lot of work to be done still around, okay, what are, what is the interface? What are the buttons on this camera? What is the, what is the way of working with this technology?
So like, what are the concepts?
I find, what are the concepts? What are the, what is the mental model? And by the way, these are all moving targets as the models are getting better. And I find that like, we've learned that the complicated interfaces usually are just because the models aren't good enough. And once the models get good enough, the interfaces become very simple.
That's gotta be challenging because it's almost, you know, you're making something that's gonna be obsolete or you're trying to at least disambiguate like what's the part that we know is obsolete versus the stuff that's load-bearing. Like when the model is improved dramatically, people will still want to think and operate this way and manipulate imagery this way.
And the good news for us, I think, is that because our customer is the professional designer, we get to not— we don't have to be on the frontier of every single new thing that comes out. If you're a professional designer who's trying to implement this in their work, you have a very different set of features that you care about: team collaboration, quality of the image.
So we get to be a little bit more It's a casino versus poker table, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I think we get to be a little bit more selective about what we put in the product. We don't necessarily need to be first. We just want to be best, right? We get to, we get to be the HBO of, of, of the sort of AI design tool space. Quality over quantity.
So, and HBO is a good— that's a great thing to aspire to.
Yeah.
And the cultural influence there is resounding. I want to go back to the, um, your role as a CEO and designer. Chief designer. Do you look back on other CEO designers with like greater compassion or, or with like gratitude? Or like, has that been a new lens? Or is it roughly— or maybe another way to ask the question is like, what's been surprising to you about this role, in spite of the fact that you had all this scar tissue, all this, like these direct reps around this archetype? And once you are now in the pilot seat, what's kind of like startling or surprising or novel to you?
I mean, the, the most surprising thing is how my attachment to being the designer has not been very strong. Like, okay, I was expecting the opposite. Yeah. Um, I think what I've realized is, like, I think designers are often— being a designer is a big part of their identity. Yeah. And yeah, you know, it's, it's not just a job. And I think For a while, I thought I was a product designer in the sense that, like, yeah, that was my identity. Yeah, that's who I was. Who I am. Yeah. Yeah. And, and in the same way that I was a graphic designer. Yeah. Before that. And I think what I've realized is that these are all just different flavors of an orientation to the world and a way of seeing things that is actually divorced from the specific task that I'm doing. And so really what, like, my job hasn't actually changed the way I see it. Like, I'm still a designer if you want to call it that. Yeah, but I'm designing a company now. It's like the materials have changed. The materials have changed. And I think what I've realized is that the thing that got me into design in the first place is there's something deeper than just what it is that I'm actually making. Yes. There's a way of thinking. Yes. There's a way of problem solving, of tapping into just how do I bring something into existence. And in that sense, it's— this is just the next sort of step for me in my career. And I, and I, it's a privilege that I get to try to take on this bigger challenge of Yeah, you know, I'm not just designing a product and designing an organization. Yeah, I'm creating a culture, and these are design problems I haven't worked on before, right? And I— that's very exciting to me. And I get to— I get to meet amazing people who are further along on this journey than I am, right, and are able to help me and sort of give me the wisdom that they've— they've learned. And so, uh, it's— I don't see it as actually being a different job. I just see it as being applied to a different space.
Yeah, yeah. The thing I always appreciated about you since I first met you is that you can spot folks that like want to punch above their weight class. That's— there's a certain mindset to it, right? And it's like a— it's an— just an ambition that's not manufactured. It's like, I'm willing to put in the work and step into that fight. And you know, like that, that's— it's a mix of like So confidence and courage, and maybe a little bit of like, dude, do you know what you're getting yourself into?
For sure.
Um, but like, with what you know today, like, and you look back on the past versions of yourself, yeah, what do you wish you had known then?
I think that I always understood that autonomy was really important for my motivation. I don't know if I was listening to that as much as I should have been. So, and I don't know that this is true for everyone, like I think there are, I assume that it's not, like I think there are people who have a different configuration of things that motivate them, but generally when I think about the best career advice that I've been given, it has been to get in touch with what is uniquely motivating to you Yeah. And yeah, figure out how to optimize for that. And I think that is a harder thing to do than maybe it seems like on the surface, because most people don't actually know what they want. If you talk to people about, well, what do you want? Where do you want to be in 5 years? Where do you want to be in 10 years? Let's design your career as a path to getting there. Yeah. Most people can't answer that question. Yeah, I think most people make decisions about their career by collecting a set of offers and then making a pros and cons analysis and choosing the one that seems best.
It almost has like a LinkedIn quality to it, right?
Yeah, and I think that is a really good way to sort of find a local maximum, but it's not a— it's not the way to find the thing that's going to make you most happy. And, um, and so it's really hard. You have to do the work to figure that out. And for me, it's just been thinking back on the experiences. Where did I feel the most energized? Where, where did I have the feeling that if I could just go to the feeling factory and just keep manufacturing that over and over? Yeah. What were the set of experiences where that feeling was present? Yeah. And what is the common threads within those experiences? And for me, autonomy was a big part of that. And so, so being a founder was just a perfect fit for me, because it is maximum autonomy, right?
You just own your destiny.
I own my destiny. Yeah. And like some people, I think another mistake people make is they assume that what they want is also what everybody else wants. Some people might want that. And as somebody who's hiring, I need to get really clear on what each person on the team wants and try to optimize for them. But it's also true that some people don't actually want that. They want clarity and stability and they just wanna know, here's the job that's in front of me and I wanna do that job really well. And so then my job is to create that environment for that person. And so, each person is a unique puzzle to solve. Yeah. And you may have to solve it before they've solved it for themselves, right?
Yeah, that's a really good insight. I, um, I want to, I want to talk a little bit about how you think about design at Visual Electric today. You are chief designer. You will build a design function, and it will carry your signature. What I always feel like I have to tell founders is, like, if you're hiring for design Don't give me a generic job rec and a generic shape of a thing. I need to know like what your band is comprised of and what is this instrument and how do you envision it and make it so that it's like as clear as day what that role will entail because it's unique to the culture, to the configuration of the band. It's unique to the problem you're trying to solve and the year that you're in. And that's important to make explicit rather than to assume people will infer it because There's thousands of startups hiring right now at your stage. Yeah. So, so tell me, like, how would you summarize like the Visual Electric design environment? Like what is, what is, what is it that you haven't had a chance to kind of instantiate elsewhere that you wish to instantiate here?
I think what's unique about this company and this product is our customer is graphic designers. Mm-hmm. And a lot of the engineers on our team have a design leaning, I would say. So we already kind of have this orientation where everybody is a bit of a designer at the company, but when it comes to the actual product designer role, they're designing for graphic designers. And the more that that person is that customer, the empathy, their ability to be empathetic just goes up, right? And in the same way that we want everyone to sort of be increasingly full stack, I think AI, we were talking about this earlier, AI is making everybody more of a full stack creator. I think the opportunity for designers on our team is that we would love for our project designer to also be a creative director. And that is an unusual combination of skills. Yeah, I think typically product designers are more likely to become more like an engineer. Yeah, they're more technical, more in the code. Yep. But straddling that line between being a great creative director, product designer, storyteller, that's like a really interesting combination. And the other thing I'll say just generally about hiring is, you know when you've found the right person because you think that they're better than you. Yes. Yeah. And the problem with being— I think I'm a pretty good designer. The problem with that is it becomes hard to find a person that I think is actually better than me at the product design job, especially in the context of the company that I created. Right. Yeah.
So it's, it's like almost an unfair fight from the get-go.
It's an unfair fight. It's an unfair fight. And so, but I also know that—
I love that framing so much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's hard, but I think it's also true that if I don't find that person, if I find somebody who doesn't meet that criteria, I'm going to, I'm not gonna be a very good manager for that person because I'm not gonna give them the actual space to—
And that's worth saying, right? Yeah. They're not gonna produce the work. At the caliber of the broader universe, right? It's like when an exceptional director takes on an existing franchise, yeah, they have to kind of like abide by the franchise and extend it. They have to kind of rise above it in many respects, right? Otherwise, they sort of get lost in the, in the froth of trying to mimic somebody else's domain.
I want you to be better than me, and I don't think I'm the best product designer there is. I think there's many people who are better than me, and I want to find all those people, right? And hire them to be— to take all the things that are on my plate right now. Yeah. And do them better than I ever could. Right. So, but, but that is the bar.
And to serve a great field, right?
To serve a great field.
100%. I, I appreciate that at one point you were, you were talking to me about, um, autonomy. Mm-hmm. Because that's a very specific word. And, uh, as somebody who learned English as, as a second language, I've, I've been accused of being really pedantic.
Mm-hmm.
I, I feel like for me, like, My formative experience is like learning English and being extraordinarily frustrated with that translation gap, that gap of understanding. And so like being almost aggressive in like bridging it. And I find with autonomy, that is a, a class of designer. I've said for years that I feel like sometimes designers are, are borderline cowardly when it comes to building new things. Mm-hmm. And, and venturing into this unknown space, right? That there's like a, there's almost like, I think the conventional wisdom is like, oh, the creative folks are inventive and they're crazy. They come up with all these ideas. But I have found in practice, they tend to retreat from risk. They tend to want everything spelled out. They tend to want to delegate the problem selection.
It's the crafts person.
That's right. Yeah. And so like, when I hear craft, I was joking with Henry Modisett about this recently. When we talk about craft and taste, I often feel like Oh, that's just like saying that you just want to make sure that they're playing in tune. That's just like baseline stuff. Yeah, yeah, that's not like, um, a differentiator, right? And so when people are kind of pontificating on craft and taste, I quickly start to get a little bit skeptical. Um, like, are we talking about something that's real here? Or— because yeah, of course your instruments should be in tune, right? That's like, that's just like baseline stuff. How do you sort of think about that vis-à-vis people who may have the aptitude to be great startup designers, but may not be sure about autonomy.
I mean, for me, the autonomy bit has been there since I was a kid. Like the, you brought up the, this American Life episode. Yeah. That was me pushing against the boundaries that were being placed on me. Yeah. I mean, I, And I think to your parents' credit, to your father's credit, like letting you run with it— for sure, it's like what an act of courage. I mean, incredible act of courage. And my dad's job was to, you know, deal with kids with behavior problems. And so, yeah, yeah, he was— the call is from inside the house. 100%. He is— this is his domain of expertise. And so, yeah, I think what he saw in me was somebody who was trying to emancipate early in life.
Yeah.
Like, I was— yeah, everyone goes through that phase at some point. Sure. Normally it doesn't happen when you're in 8th grade, but like, um, everybody eventually does that. And I think parents will let you— they want their kids to go through that, right? You want your children to emancipate, but you might have a little more confidence if they can at least drive themselves to school before you do that. But yeah, so for me, the autonomy piece has been a major driver. But I think I agree with you that designers are uniquely positioned right now in 2025 to be great founders. And I think it's because we're moving, like, taste is the new skill with AI. I think AI is elevating everyone's ability to create. The differentiator is going to be who knows what great looks like. And so designers, I think, have a huge advantage here. I think maybe what people shy away from when you think about, I'm a designer, I don't want to be a founder, I don't want to be doing one-on-ones, I don't want to be doing taxes, pitching VCs. And for me personally, it's amazing what I'm motivated to do when it's in service of a larger mission and goal. I've been every job at the company. At some point, including the office manager, the customer support person. And at no point did it feel like I had to force myself to do that because it was in service of this larger goal. And, and so for me, like I get to design not just the product, but I get to design the experience of what it means to work at Visual Electric, what it means to be a customer of Visual Electric. And I don't know if enough designers have allowed themselves to think about or entertain the idea of what it would mean. And in the same way that I don't feel like I've lost my identity by becoming a founder, I think there is a, there is life after founding for designers. You're not just becoming a suit or something after that.
So, um, yeah, I think, I think designing a company, that's also a key insight too. There's like, there is life. Beyond being a founder. It's not like you're necessarily signing up for a 30-year endeavor. Yeah.
Right.
It's just a matter of like what your personal journey is.
And the privilege of being a founder is you get to design the job to perfectly suit you as a person. Right. And, and there's no definition. There's no one definition of what it means to be a CEO. Every CEO job is different and you get to bring in people to take over the parts that are energy taking for you and you get to focus on the parts that are energy giving. For you. So that is, that is the privilege of starting a company. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, of course. All right, that's fair game. I've steel-manned the case for graphic designers as, as our customer. I'm pitching you as an investor. What do you— what's your response?
I am worried about moving media versus static imagery.
Okay.
There's a broad body of work that's still, right? And so much of like brand marketing, graphic design is motionless. And we are not just pioneering these models to generate extraordinary visual static imagery. We're also pioneering models that are making video content that's just to me also as like awe-inspiring. And maybe they're not mutually exclusive, but I worry about a world where the creative kernel is not centered around visual imagery in the way that we grew up thinking about, like, you know, the mood board and the brand assets, but instead it's more visceral. It's motion, it is video, it is three-dimensional, it's spatial. And, and that, I think that to me is like, that's where, where I get nervous. It's like, is this the most leverage?
Is your concern that does graphic design to you mean static assets?
I think that is a defining feature of it. I think when I think of like graphic design, I think of like the composition of still elements.
I see. So let me, let me use a different word then that maybe doesn't have as much loaded meaning, which is your job is to architect a brand story. So drop the titles, drop the sort of nomenclature that we've used in the past. Your job is to, at a company, you're hired to both conceptualize and bring to life a story about this company, this product. Yes. Whoever that person is, whatever you want to call them, that's who we're targeting. Yeah. Does that change anything for you?
No, it's just the medium is the thing where it's like—
Assume all mediums. Assume video, assume, I think, podcast, assume the written word.
Yeah. I think this short format video is like—
Because we're working on video, like video is coming. But the reason we started with imagery is because the unique criteria we're solving for is what visual medium, what visual AI this model is at the quality bar where this type of person can get value from it. Yeah, yeah. Imagery just happened to be the first across that, that line.
That's fine. Yeah.
But it isn't necessarily representative of what we see as our long-term goal as a company. Sure.
Yeah. It's just that I wonder if it will be a challenging transition to make. Um, how's this? It reminds me of the stress I felt when we saw the early Android numbers at Facebook. I see. And it was both an opportunity. It was like, oh man, there's like a lot more landmass out there. Right. Like what I thought was the game. Yeah. Is like now like there's like other continents to conquer and there, there are people already there and you're like, oh gosh, this is a big reframing. We have to become a mobile company. And in realizing internally in my, in my gut, it's like, that is very different than what we've done this far. It's a new game and we can maybe be very competitive there. We will bring, we will be competitive.
That's our spirit.
So I think there's, but, but it will require us to kind of mutate ourselves.
I think that's, that's fair. I think, and in the video space, you know, you have companies like Runway obviously that have been working on this for a while. Right. So like maybe there's a fear of like, oh, is there already companies that are more explicitly focused on that particular problem? I can tell you though that I think Runway from what I understand, they're going after the filmmakers, right? Like, this is the people who are making movies, right? Like, their dream is like, yeah, here, like, we're the future camera, we're here to disrupt Hollywood. Yeah, you know? Yeah. And so for us, like, if you think about the type of motion that shows up in brand and marketing, these are, you know, 30-second clips that are going into social media, maybe a TV spot, whatever. 2 things. One, people are already using Visual Electric to storyboard. Right. And now imagine you can take your frames and actually turn that into a film or a video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's coming. Yeah. That's coming this year. I think that's terrific. And it fits perfectly in.
Maybe that's the segue that maybe that's sufficient. If anything, it alleviates my unease to hear this insight around like part of the job to be done isn't like production. Part of it is selling. Part of it is concepting. Yeah, 100%. And the requirements share. So you might disagree with like the selling aspect it. You might think that robots should be selling to robots, but frankly, today people sell to people.
And then it's just a matter of time before the thing that you're using to sell is actually just the thing that you're gonna— right, like, why go out and reshoot everything?
Correct.
Yeah, it's already—
you've got a lot of like the base material there to start.
Yeah.
So, and then you have like your exploit suite.
So I think you have to hold these two things in tension all the time, which is like Where are we going? And where we're going is basically, I think AI models are going to replace brand guidelines. I think the entire creative production process is going to be remade in the image of AI. And so that's endgame. And endgame is you have some person in the team who crafts the narrative, the story, the vision, and then the rest of the company come in and self-serve and generate whatever on-brand assets you need. And almost every function in a company is a customer of brand team. And so the potential addressable market for this is basically everyone at a company that needs branded content. So whether that's like a presentation or a flyer or swag for your offsite, whatever it is, that's endgame. The path to getting there, I think, is one, win the hearts and minds of creative directors. They hold the power inside of the company. Canva right now is trying to sell a tool that lets graphic designers and creative directors define a set of templates that then the marketing team can self-serve from. I've talked to creative directors who have been pitched by Canva on this, and I think Canva has a credibility problem with this customer. Interesting. Yeah. It's like, why am I using this Fisher-Price toy?
Yeah. It's like IKEA is trying to sell me their furniture.
Exactly. I don't need IKEA. I think it's going to be, I think it's really hard to move up market. Yep. Yep. When you've entered into the market at a consumer level or a prosumer level. Right. So we, we think the right strategy is you come in at the top of the market and you move down. Right. But our, our goal is to serve everyone who needs one brand content.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So I've heard, I've read the bit about your hiring of me from Facebook. Yeah. I wanted to ask you, your job was to build up the design team at Dropbox. In part. I learned very quickly you were very good at that. You're very good at recruiting. Um, so what, why did you, why, how did I, why did I stand out to you? Why were you trying to hire me of all the Facebook designers you could have hired? I was just out of college. I was, yeah, didn't have any track record.
It's because, um, the red flag that went up in my head is that there's a lot of stuff happening at Facebook and there were certain things that were like strategic initiatives and it was easy for me from the outside to know what they were.
Yeah. Right.
You sort of have a, a really good intuition for like, what are the things that really matter? Sort of sit at the core of the strategy.
Right.
Graph search was one of them. Mm-hmm. Facebook had a lot of great designers, and so we were not typically ones who like take jokers, especially new grads. Right. And plop them into mission critical initiatives. That was just not the Facebook way. Right. So either Facebook had made a big mistake having a new grad working on it, or that new grad was something special. That new grad was like a rookie getting a lot of reps, getting like field time. And, and of course that's just like that. That's where my recruiting instincts like, okay, out of that whole rookie class, that's the one.
What's funny is that what you don't know is that I was put on the ads team when I joined. Really? It was because I was a squeaky wheel. Ah, that I got reassigned to GlassSearch. I had a conversation with Pete.
Why did they stick you over there of all places? Because you're— oh, I know, because you were punching above your weight class.
I just— I'd started, I was— it was my first week on the job.
Well, it's being a squeaky wheel suggests like, I'm not happy with where I am, right?
Right.
Give me, give me, give me, give me a better job, right?
Right.
I can be better, coach. Right.
Put me in, coach. Yeah. I mean, maybe that is a lesson actually in and of itself, which is— it's funny, like, I, I remember I started the same week as my friend Barton. We were in the same sort of orientation class, and we both got assigned to ads team. And the next Monday rolls around and I'm not at my desk.
Martin's like, what happened?
Did you get fired? Martin's an amazing designer, like incredible designer. There was something in me that was unsettled. It was like, I'm here to like do something important.
And I'm— I joined this company to swing at it.
Yeah, yeah. Put myself in big. It's important to listen to that if you have that feeling. And, you know, as a designer, like, that's— don't quiet that voice.
No, I agree with that. Yeah. And if you want to be a franchise player, like, put up franchise numbers, like, go for it. I feel like so much of it's like, that energy is worth cultivating for sure.
Hold yourself accountable to it. People respond to that. Yeah. Yeah. That in and of itself is signal.
Yeah, I love it.
Yeah.
Like, for me, it's like in soccer, it's like the guy who asks for the ball. 100%. I love that guy and I love being that guy. 100%. Because that's where the whole game flows. It's like you don't play better than the other players, you play like the ball. Do what the ball wants to do. And part of it's like, the ball has to go to the right person.
So true. And if, I think if you know what you want in life and you ask for it, you're already in the top 1%. Yeah, that's true. And so many people don't, have that clarity or the courage. And I think, yeah, if there's anything that has helped me be successful, it is those two things.
Yeah, yeah, you're the guy, man. I'm so glad we got that. Seriously, that was really good.
That's a way better—