Koen & Jorn: Framer Reloaded

We actually just laid out the options. It's like, well, we can either— we can do 3 things, right? We can quit. We could see if we could sell the company. Or option 3 is we can pivot.

First of Kind is a new series about design and tech told by its pioneers. Sponsored by Framer, Cursor, Vercel, and Profound. Coen Bak and Jorn van Dyck are the Dutch duo behind Framer, the world's best website builder. Designers by trade, they've navigated through one of the most impressive startup pivots of all time.

I appreciate you guys doing this with me because when I got started with this project, I made a shortlist of people I wanted to talk to who I felt like were design pioneers doing new things. Right. And your names were at the very top of that list. I want to start with a simple question. Where the hell are we right now and why are we here?

We are in a bar, but not just any bar.

Lone Palm Bar.

Lone Palm.

So this used to be the old hangout, I guess, right? When you were still drinking?

Yeah, that's a long time ago. So we're talking 2011, 12. I actually stopped drinking 3 years ago, but no, yeah, we spent an awful amount of time in this bar just because it's a good vibe. We thought it was fun to do the shoot here with you.

It's a nice spot to bring folks because it feels like, it feels like a San Francisco institution. It is. In a sense, yeah. And on the topic of institutions, Congratulations with all the success of Framer. You guys built a phenomenal business and it's one of those classic 10-year overnight success stories. The things that I want to talk to you about is how the genesis of Framer got you to where you are today, but more importantly, how the relationship between the two of you guys has evolved. So maybe we can start at the top. What is Framer today? It's best way to make a website.

Best web design platform in the world.

Yeah, it's probably a lot more than that too.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, I can summarize it really quickly. I think, you know, Framer is a web design platform used by design-forward companies to produce their entire marketing site. So some of our key customers are Perplexity and Miro. They use it to run their entire.com all on Framer. And typically designers and marketers are now owning the entire website front to back.

That's the thing that we figured out. The designers run the website. They don't just design it, they build the whole thing. They run it together with the marketing team. And yeah, that makes it much easier to execute really fast on cool ideas, to make much higher quality websites and to have like a level of ownership that like previously didn't always feel the same way if you kind of had it, had to hand it over, right? Like, and let other people figure out the last details.

In your minds, when you sort of think about where you started off with this business, there is a through line and the through line to me has always been this idea that you guys champion, which is that Coding is not that hard. Shipping feels great. Designers should be much more responsible for shipping the things that they envision, actually, like taking the thing that they've generated and putting it out there in the world, right? Or making it as real as possible. But when you think about the business that you've built today, how dissimilar is it from like the one that you imagined when you first got started?

So you're meaning like all the way at the beginning of Framer?

Yeah.

When it was more like a prototyping tool.

When it was Motif.

I think it goes back further than that. Like, we like working on tools because it gives you that feeling of like showing what you've made to somebody else and then seeing them respond to it, right? And that made us decide whenever we picked a new startup, we figured, what if we just pick a problem that we like working on, right? And that's how we ended up with making a design tool because we figured, okay, design is cool. It's really cool if you work for a group of people that make stuff for other people to kind of consume or, you know, to use. And that's the best feeling. And I can do that if the startup isn't doing so well at any given point. And that's going to happen a lot, unfortunately. And now we still have something really fun to work on. So that's kind of how we got to— it's more like, I mean, you're right, but it's also very practical to choose that problem.

Yeah, I think if you look at the last 10 years of the company, then the first years when we were building the prototyping platform, the whole idea that we wanted to build a platform around was that if you look at the creative process, right, from an idea to now it's time to produce it, then we look at prototyping as that's the last phase that designers should own, right? And so, you know, if you have an idea, let's say you're building an app or you're building anything creative, it starts with an idea in your head and it needs to get out of your head onto paper or you make a mockup or any of those things. And you kind of like up the fidelity level of your idea until you're kind of satisfied with what it, what it is. And that was our whole hypothesis around Framer V1, if you will. Right. And so a lot of designers were using Framer to prototype their ideas at a very high fidelity that was almost the same as the real thing. And the second part of Framer is where we kind of like went all the way, uh, because we started asking a lot of designers, what's the most frustrating thing about your day-to-day job today? And the answer for all of them is kind of the same. It's like, I have to rebuild my ideas. I have this idea. I know what I want it to look like. I know what I want it to feel like. I even made a prototype and still after all that work, I have to do it again. I have to work with an engineer or I have to teach myself how to code. To get it out in the world. And so for us, starting with websites was where we thought we could merge the two. We can make a design tool that lets people publish their work to the world immediately, right? Just click publish, goes out. And that was a big aha moment for all of our customers. Like that, the moment we shipped that, that the sort of the thing that we saw with most of the users is that that feedback loop and how fast that is. It gets to a point where it's almost addictive.

It's hard to move back from, right?

It's really hard to go back to like, oh no, actually let's do, you know, let's do the handoff thing again and like wait for 2 weeks to see some progress.

Yeah, I love that framing because it's like you described Act 1, what you ended up shipping now today and supporting as Act 2. We'll talk a little bit about Act 3 later in the conversation. But when we first met in the spring of 2011, was at Facebook. We had acquired the company Sofa. Our design tooling back then, we were in the Stone Age, right? Mobile was starting to take off. And so that whole space of like software development was like extremely mature in terms of tooling. And I seem to recall like the prototyping tool was trying to also address that to a certain extent, that we have this new medium in the form of smartphones and we need to be able to like quickly generate ideas and, and put them out in production. And that there's something very fundamentally tactile about the smartphone that was very different than the click and point environment of the desktop web. How did the experience of Facebook kind of feed into the genesis of Framer? That circumstance, like what was it about like that company culture that started to guide and shape and inform the earliest ideas of Framer Studio?

Uh, when we joined, so when Sofa joined, uh, Facebook, a bunch of other stuff like Mark and Chris Cox, they were kind of like figuring out what other companies to acquire to put together and really make, make Facebook a pioneer, I think, on the design front. And so I do think that, you know, Akun and a few of these other folks were trying to figure out how do we, how do we prototype so that we get to play on device with, with these interactions, because we went from 3 interactions, which is click and scroll and maybe resize on a desktop with a mouse to 50, right? Overnight, double tap, triple tap, swipe up, down, left, right, toss it around. And so we really had like zero tooling to do any of that stuff. And what I think Facebook then, even after we left, like I do think that became sort of like part of the culture. And I think Facebook, the design team has definitely like pioneered some of the prototyping that then became sort of standard in a lot of the other startups that were like Facebook, like a Twitter or Microsoft, Amazon, companies like that.

So, you know, earlier we talked about like Framer as like Act 1 and Act 2, and I think one of the things that often gets undertold with startup success stories is how the relationship between founders starts in that context of building a new business, because you fundamentally change the nature of the relationship, right? You guys had worked together at SoFi, worked together at Facebook, but co-founding is a whole different beast. And how that relationship evolves through those acts to confront that decision as two founders, two friends, and then to find a course out of that situation and to build a successful business with people that have been with you for years, right? And have to go through that transition Don't do it. That is rough, man.

That is rough, right?

Yeah.

There's another— there's a graph someone made on the internet of famous companies that did a pivot to get to product market fit.

I hope you guys are on that list.

We are. But then they rank it by years because typically I think it was like Slack started out as like a gaming company and then they built this own chat thing and that became Slack and it did it in the like second or the third year and it just gets later stage and later stage and later stage and we're not all the way at the bottom but we're like, you know, year 5, that's when we did we did the pivot. So it's pretty atypical, I think, for companies to do a late-stage pivot. We just raised our Series B a year before that.

How much of that was driven by the mechanics of VC, where like you feel like an obligation to kind of like see through a strategy you raise money against? Or was it more like, no, we kind of bumped into the glass ceiling of the market and we had to kind of confront reality as it was?

I think VC is a part of it, but it was our own ambition to build a really significant company. It's always been, you know, we were at, we were doing really well in the early days of Framer getting to a million in revenue, getting to, you know, 3. We hit 4 or 5 and then it started to slow down, which is the opposite of what needs to happen, right? Like you need to smooth curves. 5 years ago, definitely the goal was to triple, triple, double, double. That's changed now a little bit, but we were not tripling after 4 million. And so it's always been our dream to build something, you know, significant for the creative industry, something that, you know, potentially one day could IPO or could become the new Adobe. So you get stuck at $5 million. That doesn't sound like that's working. And then the other part I think is like, if you take on venture funding, the goal is to build a significant company.

Yeah.

And that's looked at like negatively typically, but it's a really good forcing function. Right.

Right.

Because otherwise you're just going to maybe, I see a lot of founders like, well, but it's grown 20% a year and, you know, I can pay myself like market plus. So maybe I'll do this for a few years and then you meet them 5 years later. And they're like, oh man, I'm so bored. I lost touch with like that stuff. So like, I think VC in that regard is much better than most people give it credit for, as in like it really forces you to do these things. And it also fixes itself. If your company isn't doing so great, the VCs tend to not really care as much. It kind of like, you know, they literally write you off. Yeah.

Yeah.

So like, it buys you some time to kind of figure out either like if you want to continue or like, or pivot, right? So I think honestly, all those things were a lot more positive than they typically get credit for.

Yeah, but how's this? When you guys were 5 years into it, if you had sent me an email saying like, hey, Saleo, sad news, we lost your money, or we're giving you like $0.10 on the dollar, we drank everything.

This is not going anywhere. So we just—

this isn't going anywhere. We talked to each other.

We're going to spend it all. Do the lights out.

We peered into each other's souls and we just don't have it in us, I'd be like, yeah, that's totally understandable. You guys had a good ride. You guys did your best. But that's not what happened. So what I want to know is like, what was that interaction like between you two? To confront reality in that way?

I can tell the story. So it's not as black and white. It's a gray area where you're trying to figure out, and we speak to a lot of founders these days that are in a similar situation because not everything just takes off on day 1 and also not on day 100. Nothing takes off, right? And so everyone's trying to figure out what's real. In trying to figure it out, people always say the same things like, well, we're just building this one more feature. Like if we build, if we finish this one more feature, then it's gonna, it has a chance to start going or it's something like, oh, but you know, we're doing another push on marketing and then, and so it's just, it's, and that people are doing that, us included for, for for 3 months, 6 months, 12 months.

Like, this is the question, like, for most founders also, like, how long do I give myself before I'm like, okay, this isn't working, I should change something drastically. And then one part is like, really, what is the time that I need to figure that out? Like, just from the sort of dynamics of it in the market. But the other thing is like, how long do I feel comfortable still giving this pitch that it's gonna work with the real belief behind it. You can do it without a true belief for a little bit longer, but it's going to eat on you fast.

And there's two timelines here. Two people are kind of going, running down that meter. And so what was the catalyst then?

Pretty in sync in that regard. I think maybe we gave it too long. Like that's an old, like a whole other story, but I think we were both always very convinced that like design would need more high fidelity tools., right? That's the whole sort of like reason why we started. We thought, okay, you know, the last big innovation in interaction design is somebody who touched— it's like touch, right? And it's not invented by designers, like an engineer. So we need tools like that.

So let's build that.

And we did a lot of Flash and stuff back in the day. So that's how the future of tools looked like. But we were wrong. Like the future of design tooling looks like Notion, if I'm super honest, right? Or FigJam or something like that, like lower fidelity. Yeah, I don't really know why, like we need like some proper alcohol to figure that out. I just know that like it happens and then you kind of got to switch it up. And that point, like at some point we were like, okay, it's happening. So what do we do about it? Right. And that's, that's the point where we decided to pivot.

And did you guys both feel committed to seeing it through? Was it one of those conversations where you're like, you should tell this conversation?

Yeah. So you're on paternity. I'm pitching that it's going to work for the Nth time. And then I just like, after them, like, yeah, I don't really, I don't think I really believe, like everybody has their own way of making big decisions. And for me, it's like, uh, you know, it just comes up, right? Like, I'm like, ah, I don't believe in this shit anymore. So I'm like, okay, we should switch it up. So I start thinking we got a canvas, right? Like, or should we stop? It's the first question. And then we build a bunch of technology.

But this was the conversation, right? This was, we basically had a conversation some I think it was in the summer of what was it?

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

So we sit down, Jørgen's on maternity leave. I'm like, Jørgen, let's sit down for lunch. And he's like, yeah, my kid's doing great. I'm like, great. Like, let's talk about the pivot.

3 weeks old.

Yeah, 3 weeks old.

Your firstborn?

Second.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh, then it was fine.

Okay. I feel a lot better about that.

So I'm like, okay, we got a canvas. No mercy. We can do 3 things. Like, I don't know, like this is where it gets like maybe a little bit boring, but it's like a real design tool or like whiteboarding or Or maybe we make a web design tool, right? Like, but like one that like the cool thing is that like we can probably with a visual tool deliver the highest quality websites, right? And that's also like something important for us. We don't really want to work on a design tool that like I really like Canva as a platform. I think it does amazing stuff, but just for us, for what we really enjoy working on is sort of like pushing, like being at that top level of design. So the fact that we could build a visual tool that would allow you to build websites that would win prizes, right? That was like pretty appealing. And then solving all the problems below. Yeah.

What do you, I mean, what do you recall?

Because from that conference?

Yeah.

It's like, you're charting like what it's like, what do you recall? And also what advice do you give to founders that are in that situation? Because again, the natural thing to do is surrender. You are fighting entropy and you're at your weakest state. Yeah. Right. Like that, what you just described to me sounds like pulling teeth. It's like, which limb do you want to cut off?

Yeah. And I think like the thing that you didn't mention is like, we actually just laid out the options is like, well, we can either, we can do 3 things, right? We can quit, give everyone the money back. We can find our way, like the money that's left, right? Uh, after expenses. And so we could see if we could sell the company, but we had sold our first company to Facebook. So that didn't look too appealing to do that again. Right? But then at least we could maybe make all the investors a return or option 3 is we can pivot. And so practically, you know, we also, we had still had a bunch of money in the bank. And so it was also a practical decision to just look at, okay, these are really the 3 options we have, which one do we like the most? And so we didn't really like the acquisition path. Quitting with a bunch of money in the bank sounded like, okay, but then what's the next thing we're going to do? And the answer was like, we'd probably start another company. It's like, okay, then we might as well. And then Koen came, you know, with the technology that we had built up over the first 4 years, the idea of like, maybe we can do something with websites is where, that's where we landed at. So I think like the process of pushing when we should have stopped, because you just asked like, what advice would I give other founders? Like that pushing to see if you can get something to work. In hindsight, that is almost, I don't think that, I don't think that, that, that can really work. Like it seems that startups either build something and hit a nerve and people are excited and they start using it. And from, from that initial spark, you can build companies, you can build functions in the, in the company, you can build marketing, you can build influencer, you can build, you can build, you can build on that initial spark. But if that is not there, then it's very, very hard to try to do all the right things that companies that have that initial traction that take off, like you can almost not make that work in reverse. And there's no features in the world that kind of like 5x the whole thing, right?

Yeah, there's like some magic unlock or something that's going to make it take off. That's a trap.

That's hard. And that's something that I feel in hindsight, you know, we kind of felt like, hmm, people aren't really prototyping as much as we want.

But because this is on TV, I also want to push back a little bit. Oh no, you're saying, yeah, because it's a little bit hindsight where you say like, okay, it only works in the beginning if you can feel it take off. But when do you feel it's taking off? That's also hard in the beginning because one, like you need a little bit of time before, like, can we tell within a year that we had product market fit? Maybe like at the end of the first year. But the other thing is also you're very, you want it, you're biased for it to take off. So all the founders that you talk to that have like nothing, there was like, people are so excited about my stuff because you want to believe, you know? So like you're so biased to see something working that like you can't really be a good judge of that.

So it wasn't purely like a seeking motion. It was more like identifying, okay, there's this huge inefficiency in how designers have been working up until then., right, that Framer kind of like did away with that nobody wants to retreat from, which is that you'd spend all this work carefully generating a facsimile, a blueprint of what you're gonna do. You would be like putting breaking points inside of a canvas-based tool, and then as soon as it was time to actually go into production, you were starting from scratch. You were kind of recreating all of that work that existed elsewhere, and Framer kind of did away with all that. That was, was that the, the key insight?

Part of it. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

I mean, uh, or Webflow and Figma made a baby.

I see.

Yeah. Yeah. It's as simple as that.

But that handoff, it still happens today if you build apps, right? Right. If you look at the design file of, let's say, an Uber, actually don't know what it looks like today. But if you looked at that 4 or 5 years ago, see all the screens laid out from the onboarding and then there's the actual ride booking thing. It's like screen, screen, screen, screen, screen. Maybe sometimes it's prototyped a little bit, but then at the end, all that detail needs to go over into production. And it goes to some other person. Hopefully the designer and the engineer work together very well and they can get it produced quickly. But this is another rebuild, right? And with sites, that happens all the time. And that's the thing that we felt we could tackle very well.

So the story of Framer has gone along this arc where Act 1 was 5 years of working on a prototyping tool that helped designers kind of make their ideas real. Make it easy to be able to try things out and to share with others. That hit a glass ceiling and you guys faced this really difficult crucible moment and had to decide to pivot. Act 2 was this 10-year overnight success of building the premier website builder, right? The best way to build amazing websites. 50% of YC companies—

55%.

55% of YC companies use Framer. And when I think about the aesthetic, the language, the medium of the web, you guys have really put your handprint on it. Like you can sense and feel the aesthetic of Framer Motion and a Framer website when you go to one. It's night and day. If you look at old startup websites, they're terrible 7 years ago. They're awesome today. I wanna talk about Act 3, cuz we are now in the midst of this huge paradigm shift with AI. There are all these new entrants that weren't around 2 years ago, ranging from V0 to Lovable. We've got entirely new tools for development. We even have like new incumbents like Figma, right? And so I like to think of like Framer as this Millennium Falcon in the midst of like intergalactic war. What's the path forward for this company? What's going to be, uh, yeah, what's going to be Act 3 for, uh, for Framer? I really want to get into it. Are we gonna do cheers? Yeah, absolutely. To Act 3.

Framer to millennial fountain.

Yeah, so what is Act 3 gonna be for Framer? How do you currently see the landscape and then your place, your lane in this new landscape that's emerging? Yep.

Yeah, I know this is really hard to predict what's gonna happen and I can talk about like the specific problems that I think we can solve next, but the real question is a little bit like how good can LLMs, text-based stuff, get at design? Because design is something different than writing really good support or code or some something like that, right? Like a structured, like 2D document with the right hierarchy to deliver that in a way that other people, that it looks good and that people actually can adopt in using it might be very broad problem, but maybe Gemini 4 can actually solve that. So that's like a bit of a, a question, is that going to happen or not? And if that happens, will that just push the expectation of the best brands more up? Because it's easier to make something decent looking, right?

On the bottom end, like where did the differentiators emerge? Exactly right. Yeah.

And that's what I believe. I think it's just going to compress sort of like how you want to present your best brands. It's just going to be even like an even higher bar because it's going to be so easy to make a SaaS page, like that's being like chewed out by an AI.

For sure. I think, I think like, you know, you can, you can do this for yourself. You can just try any of these products and get it to make a landing page for Saleo. And it's going to give you something fast. That's the main advantage, right? Just really fast, but it's going to look pretty similar. And that's because very generic. Yeah. Very generic. And what's interesting to me is that a lot of the new players are now trying to solve the problem of making it better by adding controls to the output. So you have the chat, you chat to, let's say, v0, make me a landing page. To get specific things different about the landing page, you can either chat more, but everyone that's tried to do like, make that button blue, right? Very hard, right? You keep chatting to it and it's just not, it's like walkie-talkie instructions. It's just not doing what you want. And so what they're now trying to innovate on is you get to click on the button. You get a popover and you get to choose a different color. And that's where I think our positioning, uh, with all the AI work that we've been doing over the last year, that we're going to put into the product in Q1, we're almost in a reverse position because Framer has all the control and it has like this, the ergonomics, everything, everything that you need to, to be very precise with anything that you want to put on the screen from a button color to a form, to the animation, to the breakpoints, to like how the thing looks and feels and breathes. That's there, that's our basis. And so what we're trying to figure out is how do we add AI on top so that we can get people to be faster and take away some of the mundane work that you now need to do manually. Right. And so some of the mundane work, good example is like just getting started and getting the bones of a website up and running, right? The navigation, the footer, the layout template that you need for different pages. That's kind of repetitive work that people either now buy a template for or use the templates or they do from scratch. This is good for AI to solve that. Getting a visual direction going, maybe starting from a, from a screenshot or a picture that you have and translating that into something that you can use on the canvas and start to manipulate. That's another cool use case. And so we're trying to go use case by use case and trying to figure out what's work that people are doing that we think AI can do equally well so that at the end of the day, people are faster, but they have the same amount of control to make their web presence a lot more premium than what you would get if you were just using an LLM.

Right, right, right. I can get very specific about what we think we could solve next year that will be the big breakthroughs is one, right now there's like a huge boom of like people generating code that does something useful for them. But these people typically don't code. And this is your walkie-talkie problem, or it's typically like one shot, you get it to 80%, and then like $1,000 and two nights later you're at 70%.

Yes.

Yeah, you're moving backwards. You're like, no, no, go over there. No, no, exactly.

Go back two steps.

So the question is, when is somebody going to make an AI where the output is something that everybody can control like a canvas, right? Like why not directly output to the canvas and then move some shit around and then the AI can pick it up? And that's obviously what we're trying to figure out. But it's much harder. And spitting out React. So that's one thing that we're gonna solve. And I was very skeptical that like we would get there by the beginning of this year. I'm much less skeptical now, but I'm still not 100% sure, but we're getting very close. But this is the big thing that we wanna solve. The other thing that we wanna solve is like a more vertical version of the problem. So asking AI to design anything great is pretty broad, right? But if you think about how teams publish to websites, let's say your marketing team, right? Then for some reason that I don't, I don't really know why, but the ceiling is the CMS. So you can update the text and you can upload the image, like different image, and that's it. Beyond that, many have tried to also get marketers to design their own websites. And apart from like some very niche tools, that seems to be some sort of weird maximum that like marketers can contribute creatively.

Is it lack of imagination, bad tooling, both?

So I think— Hard to build.

Yeah, I think—

I see. But you see, like, now that we have AI, there could be an unlock there. I see. Right?

So—

But can you get other people to contribute by feeding in maybe the talent or like some of the inputs of your designer so that they can use it, make the problem more vertical?

But scoped to specific surfaces on a website. Yeah. Interesting.

I can't wait to see this.

So these two things are breakthroughs, I think, but they're a little bit harder than just like doing another React tool.

Correct.

And I like that it also expands the surface area of the tool to marketers. It gives them superpowers that they previously did not have.

Yeah, but it's important for us, right? Because to be honest, I love all the personal portfolios and I still want to push that. But to build a business, we're really pushing for companies, like whole teams, to run their entire marketing department on Framer.

Right.

That'd be great. Yeah. Also because all that shit is normally a mess, right? Nobody knows how many signups and where the people are coming from and if you would have like one platform to kind of run that, everybody, like, you know, like what's the data? Like the data is always broken, right? Like, and I'm so annoyed, like a certain investor, you must have the same thing, right? Like where's everybody coming from? Yeah, we don't know. We have the JavaScript in there, but it's always broken. So we can fix that. So like that combined with sort of like these advancements are pretty interesting.

I'm glad you brought up investing because you guys have started a fund, Pastina. You've backed some amazing companies in Europe, in the US. Yeah. And so what— you guys got a great portfolio. We horse trade on things. That's right. And, and, and it's— I know what I get out of it. I make assumptions about what you guys get out of it. What has investing kind of introduced to product development, to the way that you operate the business? What, what new lenses has it equipped you? Because I feel as though like we may have an obligation to get more designers to invest. And to show them the ropes. I feel as though like that there's, we apply a lens to these companies that's very unique and different. I know what my answer to that question is, but I want to hear yours.

Well, first of all, we started a fund because we weren't rich enough. So that one, that's the main reason.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the other one was very practical. Like we've always, because we're builders first, always kind of like on the phone with other founders anyway. And at some point we're like, hey, we should probably figure out if we can also, you know, bet on the ones that we think are gonna be the best.

There's definitely a bell curve that's submerged there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, we have different bell curve meme. But, and so yeah, we kind of like just figured why not start it or try it and see if we like it. And I learned a lot from listening to pitches of fellow founders with a forced investor hat on because it's just very different to listen to someone trying to articulate the thing that they want to do or the growth stage that they're at. And after listening to, you know, 100 or 150 of those also shapes your own perspective as a founder because it makes you more honest about how you run the business. So I think for us, it's both been just interesting to learn how this part works, but it does definitely have, has an impact on how we operate as a founder, right? Because you get more exposure to two sides of how the dynamic works.

What we do, this digital design, has a weird vibe of where artistry met Wall Street. Okay, say more. Well, I mean, I'd probably still be going to this bar if I'd not work in tech, because that's fine. But there are some things that I can only do in life because my design skills were worth something, right? And I think for the last 10, 15 years, something especially like in these Facebook eras or something, it's really hard to figure out as a creative, like, you know, how that manifested itself. And also very driven by like some of these, you know, run after the pot of gold. I think if you talk to the right design leaders across now the second generation or maybe like early third generation of designers, you can maybe define more what it is to be a digital designer, just like graphic designer, like you can kind of define what it is over a long time horizon. But I think we're now looking at like the third sort of like 10-year generation of designers that we can finally kind of like start articulating what the real work is and kind of maybe like separate it from, let's say, the Wall Street part of it where we're just like chasing whatever's making the most money to apply our skills with.

Interesting. I think as a parting question, guys, you know, you look back on the qualities that have brought you to here and how early in your life they first appear to you, you sort of have an instinct of like, this is my way in the world. For folks that are at that age right now, like what would you want them to know about like identifying and acting on it? Like what is that for you?

I think for us, the thing that's always been true for us is it comes back to we enjoy building things, right? And even I would say that even today, if something in the company wouldn't go the way that we wanted it to go, something growth or something, whatever. Our response to that is like, let's try to build our way out of that.

Right.

And that for us has always been a very powerful way to solve problems and book progress.

To deal with nos.

To deal with nos.

You get a lot of nos as a founder. Yeah. Even at our stage, I couldn't believe that, but yeah, it's still true.

Yeah, you get a lot of nos. But this would be the thing that I think, you know, young founders have to hear today probably more than before, right? With all the noise around AGI. It's coming, it's going to do everything for everyone. Yeah, but just, you know, keep building your own little versions of what you want to see in the world and see if you can do more of that and build on that. And don't get too stuck on some of the negativity around everything else. Like, just keep building. Yeah, yeah. How about you, Koen?

If you're talking about like really young, then the things that like other people consider like your hobby might be like the next big thing. You know, like computers, they used to be seen as a hobby. They became a big thing. Then the creator influencers, the ladies that were doing makeup and like teaching themselves like videography and stuff. It's kind of funny. Now they're a big thing, right? Like that's the YouTube business. And like all these things kind of like stack up. So I would like say, you know, like, like I'm trying for my kids to take their hobbies very, very seriously.

So have weird hobbies.

Keep building.

Yeah. First of Kind Season 2. Awesome.

We're good.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Thanks so much. 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.

Now we have to figure out who's Chewbacca.

We're not into that stuff, to be honest. Yeah, Star Wars. I was like, is it Star Trek?

Star Wars?

Let's do it.

Sounds like he's on something. Overrated, underrated? Yeah, kind of overrated.

Overrated for me too.

It's fairly underrated, man. Underrated?

Oh man, that'd be like— how's this? Darth Vader is going nowhere. Like, most of what we experience day in and day out will disappear with the ebbs and flows of time. That's way too deep for me.

Yeah, can we overrate it? Underrated?

Star Wars? Star Wars. Uh, I think it's right where it should be.

Oh man, it's way too safe.

You? Over.

Over.

You?

Currently over.

Currently? What? I'm not a fan.

See?

Oh my gosh, underrated, underrated, man. This thing's got legs.