The Designer Who 'Liked' Everything | Soleio

I found it enormously inspiring to know that there were guys out there in the world writing the music for video games. And I wanted to be one of those guys.

How does one go from that to being the second designer at Facebook?

While studying music on nights and weekends, I spent a lot of time making Internet. And so in undergrad, I started up a web development business where I did design work, I did motion graphics work, and I did a lot of web development. And that's how a side passion became a career path for me.

You've called the like button a visual language for human emotion. Love that phrase. What is the AI version of this?

There's something about spending time with Claude jamming on an idea that I find really resonant because it feels like a really great creative collaborator. I don't think it will take the form of a like button, but I do think that there is a whole space of visual language to communicate conviction, understanding, and, like a bright spark of joy.

Sam Altman, kind of. I think he said this. He's like, oh, my God, people are wasting billions of GPU seconds by saying, good morning and thank you to their AIs. And I was like, is that a waste? Hi, everyone. My name is Aditya Agarwal and I'm the host of the Minus One podcast where we interview the most interesting people in the world and talk to them about the set of decisions that they've made in their life to pursue their life's work, and in particular, around those areas where they've had to navigate the mile as one part of their lives. I'm joined today by a dear friend, frequent collaborator, sometimes partner in crime, Soleo Cuervo. Soleo, welcome to the show. It is an honor to have you and I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

I'm thrilled to be here, man. Thank you for having me.

So to jump in, I think that I don't know how many people on the board might be aware that you did not study design as kind of a discipline. You were doing music composition.

You know.

Listen, life is long. We are young, you know, so I'd say that the Rick Rubin in you, you know, still. Still is. Is in there. But. So talk us through a little bit about, you know, what. What are the. What is going through your head? What is the decision process? As you were graduating from Duke with a music composition degree, how does one go from that to being the. The second designer at Facebook? You know, like that. That seems like a. And that too, you know, from one coast to the next, it's not an obvious through line there, so talk us through that.

So winding the clock back, I went to Duke in the early aughts, sort of. We were there in undergrad through the dot com boom and the dot com crash. And while being at Duke and being surrounded by folks who are studying computer science, I wisely decided to zag and explore music as a career path, because it felt, at that time, the easiest way for me to explore a potential career in writing music for video games. It sounds a little bit absurd, but music composition felt like the most naturally natural way for me to creatively express and participate in what I felt was one of the most inspiring fields out there, which is generating these, like, novel experiences that kids were playing all around the world. I grew up on Sega Genesis titles like Sonic Hedgehog 2, and I loved the music of these games. And I found it enormously inspiring to know that there were guys out there in the world writing the music for video games. And I wanted to be one of those guys. And when I was at undergrad, I had spent a couple summers doing desktop publishing back home for my alma mater. And if you're in desktop publishing, you spend a lot of time working in design tools like QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign. If you go to undergrad and play in bands, as one does as a music composition major, you quickly find yourself to be the de facto marketing department for a band. You are the guy making the posters, putting up the flyers. And we were pretty progressive as a undergraduate band. We felt like we needed to go beyond just having cool posters in the cafeterias. We felt like we needed to have a website. And I felt like I was pretty good with computers. And so one of the bands was a band called Mojo Train that I was in in undergrad. I played electric violin and saxophone for this band. And so we were like, all right, we're gonna have a website. And, you know, my bandmates humaned me, but I was really intrigued with this space of design tools that were specifically made to parlay people who were familiar with desktop publishing into the great world of the Internet. Dreamweaver was the tool that I kind of came across my freshman year. And while I was studying music and music composition on nights and weekends, I spent a lot of time, like, making Internet, making a website for my band, for my buddy's band, for, you know, bands that I heard about. And sure enough, like, it came across the plate of one of my professors at Duke, and their department needed a new website, and they were like, well, instead of paying this Raleigh firm. 80 grand for a new website. We should just pay this student of ours to do it for a fraction of the price. And that was great money for me. And so in undergrad, I started up a web development business where I did design work, I did motion graphics work, and I did a lot of web development. And that's how essentially, like a side passion became a career path for me. So how did I end up all the way on the West Coast? Well, in spring of 2004, Google launched Gmail on April Fools. And once it became clear that that wasn't some elaborate April Fool's gag, I. I felt like it was my siren call. I felt like I was really passionate about this next stage of consumer technology. I felt like it was going to take the form of web apps. And web apps were going to be a way in which you can deliver software, desktop software, like, experiences through the web browser. You were going to be able to skip app development in the classic sense and just, like, ship software through the Internet browser to people. And at the time, I was living in Durham, North Carolina, and I felt like the feature was being written out in San Francisco, not in North Carolina. So I felt like it was a good opportunity to move out West. And, you know, as fate would have it, my first day in San Francisco, I met a guy who worked at Google. He was working on Maps at the time, and it felt like my Hollywood moment of, like, making it out there in California.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, he. He has played a big part in your life, even if you. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Because I'd never met anyone who did what I did out in Durham, North Carolina. The only person came close to it was a dear friend of ours, Blaze of Persia. And, you know, we were sort of way far afield of the industry, but we had this, you know, mix of, like, creative prowess, but also, like, a technical bent, a desire to make stuff and put it on the Internet. And so he and I had teamed up in North Carolina working on client projects. And so he was intrigued to kind of hear how my. My story was progressing out in San Francisco. And, you know, when. When I reported back, I was like, hey, there are other nerds like us out here in the Bay Area making Internet. And so that's. That's how I ended up in. In San Francisco. And I was an independent developer and designer for about a year, working with different startups. And one of my projects ended up coming across the plate of an early Facebook hire who reached out to me and was like, hey, you want to come down to Palo Alto and meet us. And I'm really grateful that he circled back with me a month later because I just sort of said, yeah, that sounds kind of cool. I'd never been to Palo Alto because the air persistence ended up being the reason why I took a caltrain down to PA and meeting you guys down in Palo Alto.

You know, maybe we spend a minute on this. Now that you brought this up, I still remember the first time I used Gmail. And this was probably. Yeah, like call it August of 2004, maybe July. Right, Maybe. And it was one of those moments when you use Gmail even in the early days, you know, kind of what you're like, oh, oh yeah, I'm never going to use any. Like everything else is. It's not even close, right. You make like a hard shift within 30 seconds. And I remember feeling that exact same way about using Facebook Firefox for the first time. When you use Firefox, you're like, oh, this is just way better software. Right. And I remember feeling that way about Google. Probably I used the search engine for the first time, maybe 98, 99, when I was still in high school. You're like, oh, everything else is just so much worse, right? It happens pretty quickly. When you see like an amazing product, you just are like, oh yeah, this is obviously the way that software should be built. Then there's no point. Like there's no comparison here, you know?

Yes. And it is, it is seismic. It happens very abruptly. I always love the term paradigm shift because it does feel like a shift, like a dramatic change in force. And it's remarkable, at least working in technology, how those moments arise with small teams at startups in such a consistent fashion. And when you see it, it feels like a blessing. I often call them these Jurassic park moments. There's this great scene in Jurassic park when they're on the ride in the amusement park and they bail out of the ride because a dinosaur is about to hatch. And watching this creature be born into the world, for me it's resonant because John Hammond describes, he's like, he's like. The whole reason why I built this park was to be able to have front row seats when these animals are born. And I often feel like there's a comparable to my career where it's like, if you get to work with exceptional founders building new things, new products, new paradigms, there are sometimes these moments in your career where you get firsthand look of the first version of that and it's very squirrely. It's very prototypey, but you're like, yeah, that's the future. It's right there. It's like it's not. Its final form won't look like this, but the world has suddenly shifted, like on a dime for me. First time I saw Evan Wallace demo both multiplayer for Figma, it's like, oh, yeah, that's it. That's the feature right there. There's a lot of work between now and getting this to market, but that unambiguously is the way people are going to be designing in the future.

Yeah, I think that if I have to. If I have to kind of look back on at least, you know, my career slash, my journey so far, probably. There are probably three almost categories of moments that I really cherish. The first one is when you see this Promethean kind of like, you know, you discover fire for the first time. Right.

You.

And it could be a personal experience. So you see the team, you use ChatGPT for the first time, you're like, oh, oh, oh, yeah, okay, this is very good, very different, you know, or you use the iPhone for the first time, you're just like, oh, this is a religious experience. Like, it is like the world level. Or you use Waymo for the first time and you're like, oh, actually, absolutely. Like, there's no chance my kids are going to drive cars. Right. This is a big step forward. And so I think those moments are filled with wonder and joy and like, just, you know, a sense of gratitude for, like, oh, my God, like, I got to see something. Like, in some ways I saw the future, you know, and it'll take a while, it'll be messy to get out there. But I know that that is the future. And I think it's a beautiful. It's almost like a religious experience, at least for me.

Yeah, I wholeheartedly share that. And I think just to build on that further, when you have an existing relationship, the makers of the software, I feel like it really compounds that feeling further where you can look across the room and be like, you have done something wonderful, like, you have done something extraordinary. And like, I'm so grateful to be in your orbit right now because, like, you are launching us, you're propelling us.

Forward, you know, just to maybe come back to the prior. The two other categories of experiences that I feel, you know, I carry with me the first. The second one is, for some reason, launch days. And launch days are a little weird because, you know, 48 hours or even 24 hours before launch day, there's not Much you can do. The product is kind of set, the messaging mostly set. You'll do some things live, like, famously, like Bill O'Reilly, but ultimately it's kind of set. But there is a beauty in kind of having one moment of, like, a long journey that everybody collectively pauses to celebrate. It's for a short moment because ultimately you get back to fixing, launching, iterating. And I view those as kind of these moments, which is. It's not about the launch as such as much as it is about the collective celebration of the journey. Right. Like, there will be more journeys. This journey is not done. But let us, for 30, 40 minutes, just, like, pause and stop and celebrate. And I look back in my life, whether It'd be like, F8 or a lot of, like, the Facebook announcements or like the Dropbox announcements that you know, and look back, and I view those with great fondness. And the third category, and this is really, I think why SPC is such a special place, is when you see founders meet and you know that, like, they have now, like you in some ways, like, the pairing of great minds that results in, like, the substrate from which greatness can come about. That is a great privilege to kind of be able to kind of, like, facilitate that.

Yeah, it is really special. I mean, I do like that there is this, like, incredible through line across all the generations, through technology, and it runs straight through South Park Commons, which is like the hackathon culture of kind of spontaneous, emergent teams that arise from just, like, being in one space, having, like, a common set of assumptions and understandings about the state of technology and itch to make something right, to make something that's. That will impress their peers. And sometimes those, like, primordial ingredients are all you really need to make something that can end up being, like, much longer lasting than you would ever imagine. And, you know, my first hackathon experience at Facebook, I ended up just making a T shirt. Um, but it was weird that, like, it ended up being on, like, Justin Timberlake in a movie reenactment of Facebook years later. There's no way anybody would have predicted that happening.

Was this the one with the pigeon and the jets? Yes, I remember. That's a great T shirt.

Yeah. And so I felt like that was a formative moment for Facebook culture in so many ways, because it gave people license to build stuff that was outside of their purview and to creatively express themselves in an environment that was really familial. It was an environment in which everybody's just encouraging one another to Scratch that itch. And we knew that we're going to have to go back to our jobs a couple days later. But I love that the teams that assembled weren't necessarily ones that you would have predicted or put into a spreadsheet and allocated and assigned as, oh yeah, these are natural collaborators. And I've always found that like environments like hackathons, environments like South Park Commons, create that, that, that spontaneity that is really difficult to otherwise orchestrate in a top down fashion or that may not happen organically out in the wild. And so like I'm a big believer that hackathon culture, there's like, there's there's an important story to it that needs to be propelled forward and that like deserves its time under the sun. Like not just in Silicon Valley, but just around the world.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I think that when we, when we talk about Silicon Valley being special for entrepreneurship, for founding things, I think a lot of it for me goes back to this idea of undirected in some ways just like expression and exploration, right? Which is that you start, it's not about a finely honed sense of like, this is exactly what I need to build for this person. It's very much kind of like this primordial mix of like just start building something, right? Have a vague idea, it will come into focus as you build and the act of building will give you clarity. And I think that this is something that's very hard to explain to people who like to think of like writing code or designing as like a structured process. I'm like, there's some structure to it, but a lot of it is an iterative, like you build a little bit to figure out what to build next, right? You don't know where this tunnel leads. And in some ways the more you try to articulate the entire tunnel, the more you'll end up building something that is not that inspired, you know. So here's my question in it, actually, my question is, do you think there's an analogy here for music, right? Like, do you think that you're thinking in chords, thinking in tempo? Because when I see musicians, I see the act of creating a song as being just like jamming. Like they're just kind of like they're just, you know, they're strumming, they're jamming and then they kind of do some things and they iterate on it. I think there's actually a lot of analogies, so help me understand that.

I think it'll vary. Musician to Musician. But for me, there was a couple things that music taught me that is only obvious now through the lens of my own life. And one of the things that it taught me, and I really appreciate now as a. As a father of two boys, is to play the violin. Well, I had to spend years playing scales. And playing scales is a like, soul sucking exercise, if you make it so. Or playing scales can be a way in which you can just essentially almost like wax on, wax off, get to a place of flow and get to a place of like developing an ear for being in tune, knowing that you can hit a note reliably to such an extent that you don't have to think about it like having an excellent first touch in soccer, right, because it allows for you to be able to now think on a different plane. Now you're sort of like your brain is operating in different part of the field. You're not thinking about what your body's doing, you're thinking about what you want to do next or what's happening around you. And for me, playing scales was an essential part of being proficient at the violin and taking pleasure in playing that instrument. It gave me a little mental engine of like, the work will pay off. You just have to have the discipline and you have to have a little bit of joy in like the soul sucking part of it to get to the other side of it. Because once you've earned that discipline, that proficiency, new capabilities are unlocked. And if I can sort of put that little Mandela engine inside the brains of every child alive, I think that, you know, human beings would be much better for it because I think it's one of those things that's. It's really difficult to read about, it's really difficult to sort of talk about in the abstract. You have to go through some journey of proficiency of this sort to understand, like, how useful it can be over the entire course of one's life. But the other piece about like music composition to me was that there is a lot of benefit to understanding the structure and the systems of things because it gives you an insight into the mind of the creators. If you study the music of the masters and you understand the mechanics of it, you sort of appreciate its genius not merely for its aesthetic qualities, but for its intellectual qualities, for the decisions that are behind the specific notes, right, and how a piece is constructed and what are its artistic qualities that go beyond just like how it makes you feel, but rather like how it was intentioned, like how, how like the, the writer intended for this to have this effect and how they went about creating it. And I felt like, for me, music, you know, it was a way in which to see the mind of another person who is long past right, and understand their reasoning, how they were able to reason towards some sort of creative effect that would give you a visceral quality that you can put onto the stereo and listen to and appreciate for its aesthetic qualities, but also for its intellectual qualities. And for some reason, like, those two big lessons to me made me realize that my way of expressing creatively is through a form of spontaneity. I love improvisation. I feel very comfortable improvising. I felt like I was very good, not at songwriting, but helping other people songwrite because I can be almost like, punitive and wanting it to be its best form, trying to get it, race it from, like, interesting idea to like, something that really sears and sings. And that, to me has been at least the role that I kind of consistently find myself playing in creative endeavors years into technology, which is that I can sometimes be the impatient person in a room wanting something to kind of search for wanting to something forward, especially if it crosses over into that, that, that threshold of promise of, like, that's the thing, that's what the future looks like now. Let's get it out there, let's sort of push it forward right now. And I find that, you know, every, every. Every creative person sort of finds through these different mediums their way of contributing collaboratively with other people and who they're most like minded with, who. Who they tend to work best with.

I mean, that, that's beautifully put. And I think one of the analogies I have for that with respect to building products and also with respect to South Park Commons, is really that how, how do you, how do you enable that combination of patience and impatience, right? Because you need to be impatient because you need to be moving with velocity, with clock speed, right? Like, you know, I do think that the best, the best creative people are incredibly prolific. And this is not just across software, it's across music. It's across, like, you know, videographers. I think it's actually quite universal, this desire to produce output. But you need to be patient for greatness, right? Like, you kind of need to have a pretty high bar either by yourself or in concert with like a kind of a critic model or a producer model, right? And I see this, it's an interesting juxtaposition where, like, greatness will not come about until you start producing, but just by the act of producing is not sufficient for greatness. You also need to have a high bar. And I think you need to almost hold those things in concert. So, I mean, some of my most fun meetings at south park are like, when I'm meeting with founders. And a lot of what we are doing is like, is this good or is this great? Right? Like, what is that fine line? And, like, let's be honest with ourselves because, you know, we are the ultimate arbiters of, like, this thing that we are birthing. And those are the most fun meetings, even if they can be infuriating at times. Right? Because a lot of the times you walk away being like, yeah, this is pretty good. I don't think this is, like, great yet, you know, and then you kind of let it stew over. You kind of have to, like, you know, keep on going back to the drawing board and so on.

Yeah. And I agree with this notion that there is a. To use your word, a balance. Because when you sort of look across the pantheon of some of the most incredible endeavors, sometimes there is an element of conflict slash, urgency, slash, like, it almost died in the cradle, right? And I feel like sometimes it helps to have people pushing on an idea or being sometimes even adversarial with an idea in order for it to kind of, like, feel its own urgency, right? To sort of, like, claw itself into existence. And to me, like, it's sometimes those pressure cooker moments where the most transformative ideas come out because it has to fight for its own survival. And so it has to be its best version of itself immediately. And that, to me, is like, it requires a balance because you don't want to stifle innovation. You don't want to discourage the idea prematurely. But more often than not, I don't see that as I see ideas that sort of get stuck in a cycle or ideas that stew in mediocrity or in just being pretty good, you know, and don't break out in the way that they might otherwise could have. I did not sort of face some existential threat. You know, we used to have lockdowns at Facebook, and I honestly felt like my best work at Facebook were in these, like, arbitrary lockdown moments where the urgency of shipping, the existential threat, the existential nature of it, acted as a clarifying mechanism of, like, action. It's like, we have five minutes to score the winning goal. Now you know what has to happen, right? Everything suddenly becomes focused. You're like, man, if I just played the whole soccer game this way, I'd.

Probably win every single game. I mean, listen, there's a lot of clarity when there's, like, a sense of, frankly, wartime, you know, like, it kind of, like, forces clarity, because the penalties for not having clarity are pretty high. Maybe to kind of have one more question about Facebook before we kind of move on. You know, I think that you've called the like button a visual language for human emotion. Love that phrase. Okay. And in some ways, it's kind of wild to me that prior to the like button and now, obviously, all the emojis, all of the way, there was no visual language for actual, like, expressing human emotion. I guess we had, like, emoticon. Like, I guess we had some, like, hacky versions of it, but they were so crude. Right. So what is the. What is the AI version of this? Like, is there, like, will it require. Like, will we require. Is there an AI language for, like, human emotion? I don't know the answer. It's. It's. But it's something I've been thinking about.

But I think that one of the things that is remarkable to me about the currency of this technology is that people feel understood, and that is not the de facto human condition. You know, we. We take for granted sometimes that we have parents or peers or. Or people in our environment who understand us. And now, through these technologies, like, every person with a phone can be understood in a. In a new way. That these devices have, like, infinite patience. They'll take your questions seriously. They can almost, like, tease out from, like, malformed queries the intent of the. The question or the prompt or the thing that they want from the machine. And my brain, I guess, went immediately to that. It's like, how might we, in turn, help people see the value of being understood? Um, and. And give them a. A clear sense of what it means to understand other people like, that they, in turn, can project that to other folks. Right. The thing that the machine made you feel, which is you feel understood. How can you, in turn be that for other people? Right. Um, I don't know if that's asking too much of software, but I do think that there's something about, like, you know, spending time with Claude jamming on an idea that I find really resonant because it's like. It feels like a really great creative collaborator when a malformed idea can sort of get teased out and understood or reflected back to me in a way I hadn't thought about. And that magnifies the idea and brightens it. And it makes me, as a person who works with founders, works with designers, it makes me want to be that in the flesh. It makes me Want to be that for my kids. I don't think it will take the form of a like button, but I do think that there is a whole space of visual language to communicate conviction, understanding, and, like, a bright spark of, like, joy when one is understood and one and is able to reflect back in understanding of what's said to them. And I wonder if maybe there is an interesting space of, like, visual communication there that software might be able to prime people with and give people a visual language so that they can reflect it back to their friends when they feel like they're seen. Right. Or they're, They're. They're. They're empathized with or the idea that was malformed was suddenly sharpened and enhanced by.

By their best pal, Sam Altman, kind of. I think he said this last maybe a couple of weeks ago on stage. He. Then I made this slight throwaway comment. He's like, oh, my God, people are wasting billions of GPU seconds by saying good morning and thank you to their AIs. And I was like, is that a waste? Like, if I'm going to be Talking to my AIs about stuff that is, like, personal or create, I kind of want to, like, I get it, maybe it's odd, but I want to say good morning. It's like, hey, good morning, Cloud. Let's jam on something. Or, like, if there's an awesome kind of, like, interaction, I kind of want to say thank you. Right. And I think that's good. You know, I think that, like, the. I don't know, I think our relationship with these things, maybe the other way to put it, you know, kind of the famous Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. Right. These are not computers in the conventional sense. Right. They're also clearly not humans in the convention. But there is something that is an emergent property of them that feels human like, but also something different. I don't know. I don't have the terminology for it, but I think it's going to be a pretty interesting thing for us to figure out as a species because, you know, they're clearly very, very powerful. And in some ways, like, they draw out the best in us in some ways.

And I do like that you brought up this simple. I mean, I felt this yesterday, got out of the. Waymo, said thank you over the shoulder. Right. And I wanted to write, you know, a friend of mine who works at Waymo, be like, you should have the Waymo, like, say, like, you're welcome. Have a great day. You know, because that acknowledgement, it's just good practice. It's good hygiene, it's good manners. And I feel like Facebook could make the world that much better at scale if one of its emojis wasn't just a care or love, it was just like a simple thank you. Gratitude. That's it.

Right.

It sounds so trite and silly, but I think that when you encounter that affordance, it's a reminder that it is a core expression. It's probably as fundamental as anger, right?

Yeah. But maybe to pull on the thread. Right. I think that this is super interesting. In some ways, computers compress compressed down or like, you know, computing technology compressed down the range of emotions that we were able to express over the Internet, but then bled over to the range of emotions that we could express in real life. Right. And I wonder if this is your point through AI is as we kind of are able to express more emotions to our computing interfaces that also actually bleeds into the range of emotions that we can express to people, you know, and I. And I suspect that they're very connected.

Mm, yes. Yeah. And I think that that practice of gratitude, it's like a form of, you know, practicing scales. Right. It can, it can, it can make you realize, like, the different ways in which you can kind of tap into that emotion around not just like your friends and your competing devices, but just every interaction that you encounter, maybe to.

Kind of circle back to some of your own minus one journey. You know, you had an insanely successful career at Facebook. You know, you launched many products that we use today. Launch a bunch of shit that we don't use today. That's okay. That's par for the course. You know, I think if you have a 20% hit rate, you're doing well, you know, so you, so you leave Facebook after a long time, obviously, kind of a intense, emotional decision. You go spend time at Dropbox and you kind of do an insane job of kind of, I would say, creating one of the most well known, well regarded, well respected design teams in the industry. But I'm actually asking about your journey after Dropbox. Okay. What did it feel like to kind of be back in the minus one stage where, you know, I kind of liken this to the early founding of SPC, right. Where, you know, when Ruchi started SPC circa 2016, she often talks about the fact that I was in a incredibly fortunate position of being able to do whatever I wanted. I had kind of earned those stripes. I could go start a company, could go be an executive, you know, I could go be a venture Capitalist, or I could, you know, start my. But she talks about how her motivation to start SBC was just like, I wanted to go back to the pure joy of tinkering, exploring and building, right? And in some ways let the answer be emergent from it. And this is actually what has led to SPC today. So maybe, I mean, you are also in a similar position. You could have done anything, right? Like, you had earned your stripes. So what, what did, what did those minus one days feel like?

It was a, a little bit of soul searching because I think that, you know, coming out of Dropbox, I started off working with the company one day a week that spiraled into a full time job getting to work alongside Wu and Drew and Raj, building the team that we built, and then toggling back down to one day a week. And what that transition showed to me was that like, I was, I felt like I was having a comparable amount of impact with a lot less like, direct force. And in parallel, I felt like I was really frustrated with the state of design education and design tools. I felt like I was pushing up against a wall that wasn't like a Dropbox sized problem, it was like an industry sized problem. And to me, it felt like it was an opportunity to kind of go back to like, well, how did I end up at Dropbox in the first place? I was working with startups in their formative stages, not on a full time basis, but in a way where I can sort of be most leveraged, helping them with bringing new products to market and building unique and new design teams at the core of their business. Dropbox, fortunately, was the reason why I met Dylan over at figma. And when Dylan pitched me on figma, it was speaking to the problems that I was seeing. As, you know, the head of design at Dropbox, where we had a team that was working on two sets of design assets purportedly on the collaboration software du jour of our age. And that whole setup was a dumpster fire. Nobody knew what the latest files were. There was still a lot of overhead that we felt like we should have been addressing through Dropbox, the product itself. And that said to me more about the tools that we were using than anything else, that the tools were fundamentally single player tools in a multiplayer discipline, in a discipline where like teams and designers were coming together to work on things. And that conflict made me realize, well, I can kind of go back to what I did with Dropbox at the earlier part of the journey, but do it at a company that's even earlier stage. I hadn't even released the product yet. And so my Minus one journey there was exploring, like, how might I be able to work in an applied fashion with founders at the earliest stages, and what's the kind of economic model to support that activity? In turn, I was really interested in exploring how maybe instead of working just with me, I would build a small design studio that would service new founders. Right. Almost be like a design team in a box. Right. And those explorations, in concert with what Ruchi was exploring with this new intellectual salon that, coincidentally, we ended up kind of simultaneously naming. We had a naming exercise one in San Francisco. We had one here at my house. And I think it was like, stocky and John Yang came down. And I remember, like, out of the set of names that we had, sort of like, Isolated Combine was one of them. I was like, that's a great name. I think. Industrial Combine, Combine Harvester. I think it's Take that name for my design studio. But I felt like, you know, the exercise was useful because it made me realize that part of the Minus one journey is not simply workshopping things with yourself or with the people who have skin in the game with regards to what you're working on. It helps to just sometimes workshop it with other people. Right. With people who are at a similar stage and who might also be potential customers or potential design partners who have a perspective that's very relevant to what you're doing. And I think that that simple action of touching reality, of having to kind of confront the merit of what you're doing with people who might be potential stakeholders, is probably one of the most worthwhile things to have to go through for any idea to have to take on urgency and shape of its own. You aren't really writing until you have readers, I think. And there's a reason why the essays we admire often credit people at the end of it for help on those essays, because it's those people that are as much contributors to the artifact as the person in the byline. Like, they're. They're part of that process, too. And I think the beauty of South Park Commons is creating that at scale, creating an environment in which you have your version of those people that appear at the bottom of your essay. The people will help workshop and push an idea forward and to ask the questions that ultimately are essential to creating something that can endure, that can break through.

Yeah, well, really well put.

How was it for you, man? I'd love to know. Like, tell me a little bit about, like, the transition from Dropbox. Right. An incredible tour of duty there. Seeing the company go through multiple versions of itself and. And then seeing what you're doing today with South Park Commons. What was. What was the bridge between those two things? How did. How did South Park Commons in some respects serve as a vehicle for youth exploring that. That minus one journey?

I'd say that my.

My.

In some ways, exit from Dropbox is rough. I felt as though that, you know, we had been. I love the company, love the product, love the people, and I tend to be a maximalist. So if I'm working on something, it is my life, along with my family and, you know, my passions, but it is my life, right? And so I think that circa the IPO and us kind of like going out and me figuring out that, hey, I want to do something else, I had that thought of wanting to do something else, but not a clue beyond that, right. And I think I was pretty lost, actually. I was some combination of lost, tired, burnt out. You know, like, it's a weird term, but I kind of subscribed to it. And I think that in the early days, the South Park Commons community was something that I went to one. One day a week. And I think that. That the biggest part it played in my journey was a sense of lightness, right. Which a sense of building doesn't like. Building can actually be fun, and it can be undirected. You don't need to know the answer because sometimes when you're. I mean, not sometimes if you are running a company at scale, you know, you are kind of. In some ways, the. The decisions you make are big, the repercussions are large, and you're really trying to do right by, you know, your users, your customers, your. The other colleagues and coworkers you have. If you're public, obviously kind of like your public market investors. And, you know, that is a lot of responsibility. And, you know, I deeply admire Drew for continuing to kind of like, you know, play that role, but it's stressful. And I think that in that process, in some ways, I'd lost, like, the childlike joy of this building, right? Like, we don't know where this is going, but let's just hack a little bit. Let's learn, let's explore, let's hack. So I think that if I had to do a through line from kind of my final, in some ways, getting out of Dropbox, and then after that, coming to sbc, to where we are today, it really is about a rediscovery of the joy of building, right? Like coming back to that promethean act of, like, creating something from nothing. And I have an insane amount of reverence, if you will, for that particular act. And now a lot of my life's work is to essentially, like, how do I enable more of those things to exist in the world? Like, I think it's very easy. Like, our job at spc, yes, we are a venture capital firm as well. And if we are doing venture capital, I want to provide the world's best returns for the people who have entrusted their capital with us. But at its core, we are actually about serving incredible technologists and founders to go build the future. And to do so using our philosophy of take some time to go slow before you have to go fast, distinguish the good from the great, figure out the mountain you want to climb as opposed to just trying to scale up some mountain, right? And that's, you know, I think those are all things that I had to do, right. Like, I would have been, you know, knowing my personality without having spc. I would have just rushed into the next thing. I'm like, great. Like, let me go find a cool company that I am, you know, and I'll go completely all in. And then. And I think that allowing having SPC allowed me to be a lot more intentional about, like, what is it that I actually want to do? What is fun for me, right? Like, what is interesting and what is the actual, in some ways, through line through my life, right? And it is ultimately about building new things. Like, this is my through line. It is kind of like my. My note to hit. And whenever we hit it, I feel joy. So I think SPC allowed me to find that. Right. And there's a part of me now that's like, I want to preach from the mountaintop, like, preach the gospel that, like, it's an like, as we enter our careers. And I actually think this is even more pertinent with AI. The biggest thing that I think all humans will need to find is, like, what gives them a sense of creative agency and being able to express themselves. And I think AI will make that a lot easier. But you will not get this agency and creativity by trying to do so in a stifled, kind of structured way. You will have to find more avenues to allow yourself to slow down, explore, go broad before you go narrow. So I think that, you know, I think something like SPC will be super beneficial for a large portion of the world right, over the next decade. So it's kind of nice to be able to be early to the curve there.

Yeah, yeah. No, I firmly believe this idea that it's early to the curve there, mostly because it's, I feel when you, when you look back on at least the time in which we've been in tech, the rate of company creation, company growth, everything has continued to compound on itself. Even the number of people required to create enormous enterprise value and enormous impact in the world just keeps getting smaller. And that to me speaks of a world that demands more founders, it demands more ideas, it demands things that are even quirkier and weirder and farther afield than what has come before it, and in so many different ways. I think that creating an environment in which people are given the space to look well outside what's possible or what one might expect, I think is the only way in which you can create initial conditions for people, even starting far field from where everyone else is.

Right.

Like I, I, I, I, I feel like for where I'm at right now, having spent four years in London as an investor working with that ecosystem there, it's made me appreciate that the, the, the starkest contrast between that ecosystem and the one in Silicon Valley is that there's a weirdness in Silicon Valley thing. Like the, the things that are, the, there's a there, the things that are sought out here are so much weirder and less predictable in terms of where the starting point is. And I think in many respects, one of the things that's, you know, sacred and unique about the Valley is that that is kind of the de facto stance of people who decide to live and work out here. They do so because the expectation, the global expectation is this is where the weirdos congregate and come up with what, what might be some version of the future. And 10 of those ideas hold no water or just actually zany. But then every once in A while, that 11th idea is the next century. It's the next way in which we govern ourselves. It's the next religion, it's the next version of the, of the American story. And, and that, that to me is like what I find, like pretty novel about getting to work in technology and specifically at the intersection of, like that, that, that minus one phase with founders who are asking those questions and giving themselves the space and permission to say, like, what if in the future people write fables and those fables become worlds that other people occupy. Right. That's the question I'm asking myself these days.

And we should, we should actually do another episode of like this pod, which is actually focused on in a, not like in a judgmental way, but kind of in a way that I think helps to articulate the magic of Silicon Valley. Because I've also spent a lot of time in Bangalore, in London, not as much as you, obviously. And I think that there are things we can learn from those ecosystems. But I think it also in some ways accept, accentuates like what it is about the ecosystem here that I think is not yet completely understood. Right. It is like a certain amount of irreverence, if you will. Like there's a certain amount of. The only way you get the out of the box company is if you are willing to think weird. And that means everybody, everything will look a little zany. Right. And if you try to make it a little bit too legible in the beginning, then you'll only get incrementality. But so we are going to have to have you back on the pod. You know, I feel as though the two of us could continue chatting. I mean, I only got through three of my 20 questions, but that's the beauty of having somebody who is such a lateral thinker. So thank you, Saul. I mean, it's an honor and a privilege to have you on this. And I'm sure that we'll be doing more of these. Thank you so much for coming on.

I love it, brother. It's a blessing to chat with you, man.

That was another episode of Minus one from the team at South Park Commons. Make sure to subscribe to our show wherever you listen to podcasts and find us on social at South Park Commons. And thanks to our friends at Atomic Growth for their support in bringing this episode to life.