Joe Gebbia: Designer-in-Chief

But at its biggest mandate, it's in the next 3 years, how do we touch every digital surface of the United States government? This is brand at civilization scale.

First of Kind is a new series about design and tech told by its pioneers, sponsored by Framer, Cursor, Vercel, and Profound. In September 2025, I flew to Washington, D.C. To sit down with Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and now America's first-ever chief design officer. Joe, welcome. Saleo, good to see you, man.

You too.

Yeah, I feel so honored to be having this conversation with you in Washington, D.C. in the year 2025. And I want to start off just with a simple question of like, why are we having this conversation in this building, in this room? Where are we right now?

We're in the heart of Washington, D.C. You could say at one of the most prestigious addresses on the planet. We are in the White House grounds at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This is a building from turn of the century, 1800s, that I think is one of the most architectural masterpieces of Washington, D.C. And I thought it would be a great backdrop for our conversation today.

I love that I learned yesterday this room used to occupy the founding documents of our nation. That the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, resided here for decades as part of the State Department Library and is now the epicenter of this new initiative that you're overseeing. Now, most people know you as the co-founder of Airbnb, and I think now Americans are going to recognize you in a new role, in a new capacity: Chief Design Officer of the United States of America. I wanted to start off there with this question of how did you end up arriving in Washington after a storied career in Silicon Valley?

It wasn't a straight line, that's for sure. I remember when, when I first heard of the government doing things with Silicon Valley was during the Obama administration back in the day. And I, I was deep, deep in Airbnb at the time, building the company with my co-founders Brian and Nate. And I remember thinking, wow, what a cool application of design at such a grand level, you know, design for society. I remember it planted a seed in the very back part of my mind. You know, years went by and you kind of see what was going on and kind of look for these moments of like, can the government adopt, you know, high standards around design and actually push through to the other side, which would be you go to a website, or you have an experience with the government, and it doesn't feel like the one that you're used to.

And you've recently shared a figure around that. I think it was like an order of magnitude greater than the largest number I could come up with. Like, how many people are we talking about here in terms of the surface area for the American, you know, citizen interacting with the American government?

It's a lot higher than I ever thought as I've, you know, gone deep into this. It turns out that there's 8,000, around 7,000 to 8,000.gov domains. There's about 27,000 web portals with all the subdomains and everything. And within that, there's 9.gov websites that 160 million Americans go to every month. That's practically half the nation. Wow. Going to 9 websites. And what's occurred to me, especially since being here the last 8 months or so is that at one point in history, Americans would access the government by walking into buildings to get stuff done. And I have to imagine at that time, the lobbies would be impeccably designed, great lighting, nice art on the wall, clean floors every morning when people walk in, a nice reception desk, good wayfinding and signage so people know how to navigate the building. And the reality is the front door to government is websites. And so why wouldn't we treat at least those 9.gov domains, if not the whole surface area of the government, with the same care and attention that those lobbies got all those years ago?

You're working on this initiative today, but didn't it start off in its current form? And so help me walk through those 8 months of you first coming to Washington, seeing the scale and the scope of the problem set, learning that there was this much traffic to these properties. And that this was the impression that we were given to the American population in terms of what government stood for. How did that ultimately materialize into the National Design Studio and the role you currently serve in?

So in February, I got an invitation to come fix a digital problem in the government, which is this. For decades, going back to the 1960s, federal employees have retired using paper. Paper forms, paper applications. The process hasn't changed since the 1970s or so. Also, the time with which it takes someone to retire in the government also hasn't changed in about 4 decades. It can take up to 6 months.

6 months?

6 months. In fact, it's so complicated, federal employees are required to do online trainings just to figure out how they retire from the government. So you've served for decades of your life, 30-plus years, 40-plus years, given so much effort to our nation as a civil servant, and then you're met with this complete obstacle course to try to exit the government and receive the benefit that you deserve.

Yeah, the designer inside me cringes at that.

That's what happened to me. That's why I said, "This is an interesting problem. I'll give it 6 months and I'll see what we can do here." And so, I put a small team together of software folks out of Silicon Valley, designers out of industry, And we set off on this adventure. That's what it was, to figure how do you turn a paper-based process to something that's fully digital, completely online, in less than 6 months. Now, granted, you just have to understand the context here. The government's been trying to digitize this since the Bush administration in 2002. It's been 20-plus years. Reports are that it's been over $100 million on contractors that kind of fizzled out and never really solved the problem. And so most presidents have tried to solve the speed problem by putting more headcount on it. And so now there's, you know, close to 1,000 people or so that just process paper for retirement in the government. So this is the backdrop with which I came into to help solve this. I got paired up with the career folks at OPM, which is kind of the HR department of the government, and started to realize the problem at hand. And very quickly discovered that it involves a mine in the side of a mountain in Pennsylvania.

A mine?

A mine, yes.

Like a tunnel underground?

Correct. And I had a similar impression.

I go, what's in that tunnel?

What is the government doing with a mine? It turns out there's this service called Iron Mountain, which has this mine underneath this mountain in Pennsylvania.. And the government's been a tenant ever since the 1960s as a place to store paper. If you're in the business of storing physical media, this is the perfect place. It's highly secure, climate-controlled, and no natural disaster is ever going to touch anything in there. So it makes total sense if you have a lot of paper, put it in such a safe place like the mine. That was great in 1960. It's 2025. What are we doing?

Yeah, what are we doing? And it's a live product out there in the world serving people. Right? Meaning you can't cavalierly change everything over because you have people presumably retiring on the order of like what, hundreds of thousands?

Oh, this is a high-speed train in motion. Right. You can't stop the train. Right. However, it is ironic that there is a bit of a limit to how many people can retire from the government because of limitations on how much can get processed because it's by hand.

Right.

It's moving physical goods around. There's somewhat of a limitation on that unless we add more people to it. I always thought it's a little unusual that shouldn't anyone just want to be able to retire when they want to retire and not get stuck in a backlog, right? And so it's 2025, we have modern tools at our fingertips that have, you know, are so easy to access and costs keep going down year over year. So what would it look like to bring the entire retirement process completely online without any new paper created?

That's what we worked on. Amazing. When your role was first announced, I remember my eyes like lighting up because in my mind there is this trope that designers are always begging for a seat at the table. And here Joe Gebbia has found a seat at probably the almightiest table on planet Earth. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about how your past experience as a designer across a variety of contexts, as co-founder of Airbnb, how that experience is now lending itself to this new problem space. And starting with that case study of having to go down to the mine and figure out how you can transition away from paper and give people a modern consumer experience to the work that you're doing today, what are the kinds of design challenges that you all are tackling?

So to continue with the mine story and share how we got over this Rubicon of paper, we, with the team of 4, started to really understand how the whole process works end to end. And we did something very, very early on, which was we sat down with the career teams, meaning the people who are in government. They're not political appointees. They're with whatever administration comes through. They've been trying to solve this for decades. And they were very happy when we showed up. To say maybe we can try some new ideas, provide some air cover to do things a little bit faster than they've been done in the past. I remember on the very first day, my very first day back in February, we're in the room with a couple of the retirement services team who's been trying to solve, working on this problem. And we talk about what would it look like if we took one retiree And we, we handheld their application to be an all-digital process along the way. This is the roughest prototype you could possibly imagine, just as a proof of concept that there is at least one way to keep an application all digital, because there are some that start digitally but then they end up on paper as you move through the weeks to months long process. And so remember, we pulled the room. How long do you think it would take if we were just do this all digitally? And someone raised their hand and said, I think about 4 months. Somebody raised their hand and go, that's at least 6 months. Somebody on the screen goes, ah, that's probably a year. And my colleague and I, we look at each other, look at the room and said, what if we did it in a week? And everyone was like, and we started to say, well, if you had support from leadership on the top. And we actually just took this by hand. And anywhere it got blocked or stuck, we just figure out where is it stuck and we go call the person or go actually down to the floor and talk to them at their desk. Say, "Hey, we're running this experiment. Can you help us out? We're trying to move this along as quick as we can." So the atmosphere turned from fear to excitement pretty quickly where people said like, "Okay, wow, this is We've never had quite a challenge like this before. One week to move one retirement digitally without any new paper. And so we found— eventually found one retiree, and we called her Julie. And the team went off, and they didn't do it in a week. They did it in 4 days.

Wow.

And it was the first time someone had ever retired completely digitally from the government. And yes, it was very handheld and not scalable in the way that it was implemented, but it gave everyone a proof point and something to rally around and say like, wow, okay, this is possible. Now with the right tech support behind it, how do we then scale it? And this is an old Paul Graham adage. Do things that don't scale. This is an early lesson from Airbnb. We would run around the country renting cameras, taking pictures of host apartments, meaning we me and Brian. That doesn't scale. You can't be running a company while you're going to take pictures of host apartments in cities around the United States. But in doing so, it taught us so much about what was working and not working with our website because we meet our hosts and they'd tell us, "Hey, Joe, love your site, but I needed to do these 4 things. Your calendar needs to do this. The messaging app needs to do this." And so we were getting feedback, improving the quality of listings by having nicer photos. We eventually scaled out the photography program where we had thousands of photographers all over the planet providing free photography to hosts who signed up for the site. And so, you know, back in February as this is unfolding, I'm thinking back to those days in Y Combinator. I'm thinking, wow, like the threat of YC has actually found its way into the government. We're just employing the same thing that Paul Graham would have said in our office hours, but in a place that has probably never had too many of the YC methodologies applied before. And so with this newfound excitement and prospect that, okay, maybe this is possible, maybe we can conquer this 20-year quest to make retirements digital and make them faster and let people retire with dignity instead of going through this terrible obstacle course of paper where you're filling out forms, you're not really sure what you're checking boxes for things, you don't really know how it's going to impact your annuity payment that you get every month. Most people, they'll miss a signature field here or miss a checkbox there. They don't find out about that until the very end of the process, months later. Then they have to go back to go. Gosh. I mean, the whole thing, I joke, is like a retention program.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's like people see how hard it is and they're like, "I'm going to stay another year." Right.

Wait for a digital solution to arrive.

Right. So we took the Juul prototype, we brought it to, let's find 20 more people that have basic retirements, meaning they worked for one agency, they don't have a lot of the complications around it, and let's just start to move people through the next version of that prototype. And we successfully got the next 20 people through. Their processing times were remarkably, uh, faster than on paper, obviously. And so then we took the next 20, we said, okay, let's take work that OPM's been doing and let's blow it out of the water. Let's completely rewrite the software that they had been kind of working through to try to do this. And so we rewrote the entire software stack, And we're able to develop the product called Online Retirement Application, ORA, through a ton of iteration and tons of user testing, lots of user feedback, talking to HR, payroll, the applicants, OPM, the whole ecosystem of stakeholders like you do with any good design. Who you're actually designing for, understand their needs, translate that to digital products. And so employing those basic methodologies into something that's highly usable, you know, it's intuitive. There's how do we reduce customer service calls through better product? On August 1st, we launched ORA, which for the first time, all new retirements in the entire federal government, which has 2.3 million employees and has 100,000 that retire every year, every new retirement is of August 1st. Flows through our software. No new paper. And what took 6 months before for the basic retirements now takes 60 seconds.

That's incredible. And so no new paper being filed in a mine somewhere deep in the earth. We brought the retirement process.

Yes, all agencies and all retired employees now submit through software. It's incredible. And so it was just an incredible experience to, you know, just do what I love doing, find great people to join for the cause, and fix a problem that's kind of haunted, you know, the government for many decades.

And presumably the political class has been really receptive to these lessons, these tried and true approaches from Silicon Valley.

Well, there's actually— there was an executive order from President Trump back in January around modernizing government processes through software. So what we worked on was just a literal example of his executive order applied, in this case, to retirement. And so the response has been phenomenal. All the stakeholders love it. The completion times for retirement are drastically reduced. And we brought the whole process closer to, you know, consumer app.

And tell me a little bit more about Introducing consumer-grade experiences to federal properties, that sounds a lot harder than meets the eye. Uh, you're talking about a lot of sprawl, a lot of existing systems. How are you thinking about implementing a more unified design language, raising the bar on the quality of experience for people who are interacting with these properties going forward?

Well, my takeaway from the retirement product was people are very receptive to good design, better usability. And I think it's actually one of the most bipartisan things one could work on in the government. Everybody can agree, doesn't matter who you voted for, that they would love government websites to be better designed, have great usability, and load faster.

Yeah.

Yeah. Crosses the aisle. It's the least controversial thing you could be working on. As I've been here seeing the opportunities and actually getting reach-outs from cabinet members and cabinet secretaries, directors from agencies across the government saying, "Hey, Joe, I heard you're on campus. Can you please redesign my stack, my experience of my agency?" And earlier on, I was like, "Yeah, maybe. I've only got 6 months here and then I'm going to roll back to my regular life." But as these began to pile up, that's when the idea began to form. Well, what would it look like if you structured something that could really go after the broad swath of digital surfaces across the government? What would that be? As I was contemplating this and thinking it through, somebody tipped me off to President Nixon and an initiative that he had during his administration in the early 1970s. To improve America through better design. Because it was a presidential initiative, it attracted the best and brightest of the time.

And so what are some of the names that—

well, one of my, one of my all-time favorites, Charles Eames, contributed to that. Massimo Vignelli contributed, and all of their peers. The best of the best designers came to DC to contribute to Nixon's presidential initiative. It's called the Federal Beautification Project.

What are some of the artifacts that one would see out in the wild today?

Well, they left us a lot. They left us literal icons. So the NASA logo came out of this, and anyone in the design world knows the worm and the brand guidelines behind NASA. I mean, it's such a classic. The highway signage system that we know and love today came out of this initiative. The agencies across the government got visual upgrades to the design standards of the 1970s. So the EPA logo, which is a fan favorite in the graphic design world, also the, the National Parks brand system, which is also a beloved brand to this day. These are robust icons. Like, the, the output that came out of this group from that initiative has withstood the test of time. Here we are, 5 decades later, and they're like heralded as the gold standard. These are the things that are held on the pedestal of great graphic design. Yeah.

So with that as inspiration, how do you imagine the work that National Design Studio will get to work on?

Well, the question for me was, how do we continue what started back in the '70s under this president and for the digital age, right, to attract the best talent of our time to come upgrade today's government to be as beautiful as it is usable. The analogy I give is an Apple Store-like experience. What if the government had great design, amazing usability, running on modern software, the same that any great consumer app would have?

Yeah. And in much the way that the NASA logo became emblematic of American excellence, technical excellence, design excellence, you would think that an Apple Store-like experience for the federal government would also be an incredible emblem of today's American excellence.

Yes, it's disheartening to me that we have a nation that has such technical excellence that we can produce the XAIs and OpenAIs of the world, and at the same time we have government websites that still have operating hours, meaning they turn off at a certain time of the day because they have to update in the background. How is that possible? Yeah, I'm not okay with that.

It's like, where are these servers located?

It's like, this is, this is crazy to me. Like, I, I want to be proud of how our nation presents itself to the world and certainly to the people who live here. We can do better. We have the talent. We have the technology. It's just a matter of joining forces, in this case, under the presidential initiative that President Trump has created called America by Design. So this is his version going bigger than President Nixon to really reimagine the digital surface of the US government and really upgrade them to 2025 standards.

And so with that mandate, what are some of the projects currently on your plate beyond retirement, What other big chunks of surface area are you tackling right now on behalf of the American public?

Well, it's literally day zero. The executive order was just recently signed. We're building the team out as we speak. There's no shortage of experiences around here that are ripe for reimagining. And close your eyes and point in any direction, and you'll find a government domain or surface that is begging to be overhauled. At its biggest mandate, it's in the next 3 years, how do we touch every digital surface of the United States government? I was on the phone recruiting a designer the other day explaining this incredible mandate that, uh, they'll be part of a small group that made history, that left the mark for the entire nation, that shipped to the country and said, "Joe, this is brand at civilization scale." It's true. It's true.

That's one way to put it. Imagine having to grow a consumer product from scratch. You've done this. I've done this. It takes so much time. And the team working on this gets to start at that scale on day one, right?

Yeah. It's an immense responsibility. This is the kind of thing that anyone who works on this team, you'll be a legend with their kids. Yeah. I had another designer who said, "Joe, you realize this is like the Manhattan Project for designers?" No one's ever done this at this scale before. I said, "I guess you're absolutely right. We've got 3.5 years to figure this out. I don't know how we're going to do it yet, but I think if you get the smartest people in the room, you can figure out hard problems." That was Airbnb in our apartment in 2008, 2009, 2010. We had no idea how we were going to scale. People trusting strangers all over the world to open up their homes. We got smart people in the room. Yeah. And we iterated our way through it and eventually got to scale. And so I know because the best and brightest are joining the team as we speak that we will figure out this problem.

I love that you brought up Airbnb and some of the lessons from your time there. One of the things that I found was most remarkable by Airbnb was that it was one of the earliest examples of developing and creating trust at scale. You have folks opening up their homes to strangers, and it was a model that scaled beautifully in all the ways that software is designed to scale. How are the lessons in terms of engendering trust in an emerging new product playing into the work that National Design Studio is doing today in an environment where Americans are reportedly having the lowest degrees of trust in federal institutions. I feel as though you must have some insight in what the core qualities are in engendering trust through software.

This was the pitch for Airbnb back in the day. We're going to ask you to take pictures of your home, your kitchen, your bathroom, your bedroom, the most intimate parts of your home, and post them publicly online for strangers to look at. And book to actually stay there. That was an improbable pitch to VCs back in the day. And I often look back and I'm like, "Wow, how do we traverse through that?" Because that's like Olympic-sized trust that you have to build between two people who've never met. And the conduit is design. Like, you design a product that allows that comfort to develop, that allows that connection to develop between people in our brand or people and their host. And there are a lot of lessons from that. And just one in particular is if we looked at our competitors at the time, of which there were plenty, everyone's trying to, you know, angle the other one out. And I look back and I'm like, why did we succeed over everyone else over time? And I think it's because at our core, we were designers. They had other expertise. They were marketers or they're technologists. And so we relied on what we knew in those difficult times. And that was just like, how do we apply design? How do we make it fun and friendly? How do we make it inviting? How do we make it crisp? You know that feeling when you use a website and things really don't line up and then you got to put in something and the website kind of doesn't work. You fill out the form, you hit submit and it says, Your phone number is a required field. I put my phone number in there. Why is it not letting somebody submit? I think all these things like, you know, take away from the trust you have in something. Well, if they didn't get this right, what else about this experience or this, even this brand, you know, what else is off here? And so I think actually just having clear, crisp, concise design is like one of the most basic ways to build trust. And certainly you can imagine it applied across government websites.

It makes my heart sing to hear you say that because I have such an egalitarian bent and this idea that through great design you can create products that anyone can access, right? This idea that the iPhone you carry is the same as the president carries. I've always found that to be the most compelling call to arms when it comes to designing software, that you can provide that same singular crisp experience anybody using your products. I think it's a great way to put it. And in my mind, like, what, what's compelling to me is this question of, well, what are the qualities you look for in the designers joining this team? Because, you know, you've hired across a variety of contexts, initiatives at Airbnb, work that you've done elsewhere. What are the qualities of designers that you're looking for in this particular context? Working for the National Design Studio?

So for the designers that National Design Studio is looking for, the core is like hardcore product UX design. There are a lot of really gnarly processes in the government, retirement being a microcosm of them, that we have to convert to be much simpler, much easier for someone to navigate. So I think at the core is like very, very hardcore UX design. Now, there's only a couple seats on the team. I've got 12 to 15 jerseys to give out here. So everyone needs to have some range, right? Whether that's into motion design or typography or design systems or visual design, I'm looking for designers that can take really complex UX flows and have some range across other talents as well. So think for a second the impact that this effort will have. If you just look even at just a couple of agencies, let's look at Social Security. The, by far the largest user base of any product that the government offers. 200 million plus people are involved, intersect with, have some connection to Social Security card, Social Security account, and eventually Social Security benefit be paid out to them. This touches Pretty much everybody. You know, when you're born in the United States, you get a Social Security number.

It's a central promise of our society.

It's a central promise going back, you know, almost 100 years. So this is something that has just never benefited from the rest of the world as technology has advanced. And so I just think about that one as one of the many opportunities of something that we get to work on that will reach everybody. Like, we will get to touch every American with a Social Security account. Anybody has a Social Security number, we get to improve their experience of that product. And that's for my parents and my, you know, and for people's grandparents. You know, it's like you get to really reach demographics that, you know, don't often get the, the benefit of good design.

Yeah.

And it matters. And it matters. You can point to it and say like, yeah, medicare.gov used by 70 million Americans.

Wow.

You know, it's, it's an okay website. You know, it's, it's not been updated in some time. This is a clear opportunity to overhaul the experience that the 65-year-old-plus population is accessing. I think it's kind of an injustice sometimes, the usability issues that, that come up. These are the kinds of things that, you know, we get to work on that, that have such a ripple effect across our nation and our society. To just improve the experience of people's everyday lives. And I have to say, the amount of support that this effort has gotten has been incredible, whether from the president, from Susie Weil's chief of staff has been incredibly supportive, across the cabinet members, directors of agencies, their leadership teams and deputy secretaries and everybody all the way down. I think there is just an incredible amount of belief and support that with this presidential initiative, with the team that's coming together, we can actually do something that, that benefits the American people, you know, during this administration and long after it.

And what about the support from the technology industry, from your contemporaries?

That outpouring has been amazing. So industry has reached out. The Cloudflares and Figmas of the world have all raised their hand to say, hey, how can we help? We see how big and important this is. And the private sector's reached out as well. So the support of Founders Fund and Peter Thiel, 816Z and Marc Andreessen, HBC and Joe Wonsdale, Thrive and Josh Kushner. In fact, Scott Belsky is chairing the National Design Studio Advisory Council for me and putting together an amazing group of these people. So it's been like an all-around, just everyone raising their hand saying, we see the enormity of this. This is a moment in time, a once-in-a-generation moment, in fact. How can we be involved? How can we help? How can we lend our fund support, our company support, our tech stack support? So it's been this incredible network that's been forming around this.

And I think the thing I love about that is that that is so true to Silicon Valley, that people do rally around important causes. Around important shifts, that it, you know, something like this does transcend today's political moment, and that like real technologists recognize its import. And that to me is like what I find most reassuring, that folks from our trade recognize the importance of the work that you're doing and want to beat down your door and find ways to lend a hand.

And that they have, they're flying to DC, been meeting with folks over the last couple weeks. Dylan Field came by last week and spent a couple hours with us and was actually giving us feedback on some of the design work. I think some of the team was blown away. Like, how is this possible? In what scenario does Dylan Field stroll in and sit down and give you feedback on how to make it better?

National Design Institute, dude.

This is just a recurring thing. So, these are the people that we're attracting. And when I say the best of the best, it really is like who's the best of our industry out there right now. That's awesome. And those are the people coming through.

That's awesome. That's really great. What does a day in the life look like? Are folks expected to wear suits?

I love it. I think you come into this building, you're on the White House grounds. You do need to look obviously respectable and dress up. And I think people should generally wear what they're comfortable with.

But there's a gravitas to the place. Oh, absolutely. It's undeniable. When you're a stone's throw from the White House, when you realize that this is the capital of the greatest nation, you realize, oh yeah, there's no higher rung. This is it.

I was on a call with a designer that you and I both know the other day, and he very quickly understood the opportunity of what this means. And he actually described it back to me in a whole new way, which was Joe, you realize this is like the Olympics of design, right? It's like I've done a lot of big things in my career, worked a lot of the big companies, done a really lot of hard problems, and this is like the penultimate dream for a designer to work on. He goes, this reminds me of the dream team in 1992, the Barcelona USA dream team with Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. And he goes, "Man, this is so cool." And then I realized, I'm like, "Yeah, it is a dream team." And you might see people together that might never organize themselves in any other context.

100%. No other corporation will be able to bring those same people under one banner.

That's right. Truly. And for a bipartisan effort, you want to find a unifying topic to bring all political beliefs together, it's through design.

Well, I'm really hoping that you guys design jerseys.

Never say never. You should see our swag. It's coming together.

Oh, I bet it's sick. It's hot.

I bet it's sick.

It's very cool. We used to always have this saying at Dropbox, which is t-shirts travel. Those symbols, they travel. It's a great marketing expense.

Totally.

That's terrific. Actually, I have a parting question. When you look back on this 30, 40 years from now, what do you hope that you accomplish in this role?

I really think weaving design into the fabric of our nation at the highest level of decision-making is one of the things I'd be most proud of looking back decades from now. And of course, having websites that look beautiful, things you can be proud of and say, "Yes, we're part of America. We lead on so many fronts, including how our government works and how our government presents itself. We don't have to have government websites that suck. This is fake. This is a fake norm that I grew up with. Driving around, you'd see a gray drab building as a kid and it became known to me, "Oh, must be a government building." This is fake. It doesn't have to be this way. Look at this building that we're in. Look at the care of detail and craft that went into this exceptional place. That we are appreciating over 100 years later. Websites don't have to last that long, obviously, but in the moment someone experiences, they should experience that somebody cared for what's in front of them, that somebody put the time, attention, and investment into crafting what they're experiencing to make their life easier, to solve whatever problem or task they're trying to get done, to save them time if anything. I would love to decades from now look back and say we did that. How lucky are we that we have an administration and a president in our lifetime right now who cares about this stuff, who signs executive order after executive order to empower his administration and this nation to bring us back to, in his words, a golden age. And what we're going to do is translate that into a golden age of design.

I love that you get to continue that legacy. Bravo. This is First of Kind, a new series about design and tech told by its pioneers, sponsored by Framer, Cursor, Vercel, and Profound. Follow us on X, YouTube, Threads, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. The future belongs to designers who build.