I think that's the thing that with designing with AI, you need to still capture the essence and the magic of it without putting the burden on the user. Think about those existing patterns, but why did we invent them in the first place? It was because we had some intent that
we distill down into knobs and search fields and stuff. And actually now with LLMs and contextual understanding, we can completely rewrite those patterns. This is an ambiguous space with no patterns. Like you have to figure it out. Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning.
This week's episode is with Amar Reshi, who's the head of design at Eleven Labs. And that might sound familiar because it's the AI audio platform that's been brought up multiple times on this show before. So one of my favorite parts of this conversation is just...
hearing what it's like designing an AI native product and all of the different interaction patterns that they're having to think through and also just the culture of experimentation that's been birthed out of that environment. But before we get into all of the details, of how design works at Eleven Labs, I asked Amar to give us the backstory behind some of his earliest AI experiments because one of them went completely viral.
I remember telling my friends actually that I had like very very vivid dreams and I wish I could have someone like paint or recreate a bunch of scenes from them. And it was about the time where I think OpenAI demoed Dali. If you remember, it was like super like waitlisted and very few people had access, but it looked like science fiction. That's when I started looking around and I was like, is there another image generation thing out there? I don't have access to this, but maybe something else.
Because this is exactly what I want for those dreams, right? I remember like searching and searching in the depths of Twitter and I found this account which probably had like... 7,000 followers at a time called Midjourney. And they had a research preview. You could sign up and they gave you access to the Discord. And of course, that's Midjourney like one or two, right? And so I remember entering the prompt though for the first time.
And I was just like, this is unreal right you just felt like your ideas came to life but mid-journey you wanted to like you know people look really weird eyes had like like weird holes in them and stuff so you couldn't share that stuff and so i got close to the vibe of my
dream but never like the scene that i wanted to see and i and i left it i was like okay cool like first i was addicted for maybe like three or four days just like prompting away but then i was like it's just not there yet fast forward to probably i think november 2022 A friend of mine, his daughter turned one years old and I'd gone to visit them.
And I would always hang out with them. And I'd joke like, hey, I'm going to be the cool uncle in this relationship. And one day she grabs my hand and she's walking me upstairs. And I'm like, what's happening? And he's like, she wants you to read her bedtime story. And I was like. whoa, like, I'm finally making it, you know, like, and I'm reading her this book. And the thought crossing my mind was like,
this is so boring. Like this book. And he was like, he's like, dude, I have to read this to her every night. Like, you know, and I was like, okay, like, hmm. And it was a rainy weekend at SF, so that means side project. So I basically was like, huh, I wonder, like mid-journey, I wonder how much better it's gotten. And then a friend of mine was telling me about ChatGPT.
And I was like, hey, this new thing's come out. It's a week old. It looks crazy. And then it just clicked in my head. I was like, what if I combine the two? Could I make a book for her? And as I was making it, I gave myself just the weekend to do it. And then I was like, well, how do I publish this? Like, how do I get this? Because she's not going to read it like a digital book, right? She needs something like physical. And I found Amazon Publishing and I just.
filled it all out. And within 24 hours, the book was on the Amazon store, which was unreal. And then I was like, do they print paperback? And they do. And I had a paperback in my hand. In three days. I remember where I was when I read the tweet because I ran and I showed it to my wife. And I'm like, look what this dude Omar did. Like, I can't believe this. And it was like dawning on me that we could create a whole series of kids books and like.
Maybe a lot of what your kid would consume, you could actually co-create together. And it totally blew the roof off of what I thought was possible. And that was exactly the kinds of messages I was getting. There were people who were like...
oh my god i've been me and my daughter have been like crafting up stories and now i can't wait to like actually make one with her or another person that said like my eight-year-old writes a ton of stories and now he can actually like go and illustrate them and so
It was really cool to see that people had already been looking for something like this and this was kind of the aha moment for a lot of folks, which was, yeah, it was really fun to see that. Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. you know what i can't stop thinking about cursor but for designers and that's why i'm all in on dessin it's not another zero to one tool for prototypes or side projects it's a visual interface that gives you access to your company's existing
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Okay, now on to the episode. Take us down your personal experiment journey a little bit more because this really kicked off a whole series that I find so inspiring. Yeah, no, thank you. It basically clicked in my head that if you could think of something and imagine it, then there's likely an AI tool that will help you make it.
And that's kind of the way we were writing at that time, right? Chat GPT, people were prompting books, people were prompting essays and all sorts of things. Schools were freaking out, right? And then video generators came out and then suddenly you could...
visualize your ideas in motion image generators got better so for me it was a massive creative outlet because like i was saying it goes back to the whole like dream thing i was like well now i can finally tell the stories i've been wanting to tell and this can patch the skills that I honestly just wasn't good at acquiring and it kind of leveled me up.
And that's how I view it today. Still, it's an augmentation of your skills and really takes your ideas to the next level. So for me, it was like, okay, what are all the fun other creative projects that are... experiments like i would want to do and that was
I wanted to see what it was like, you know, that question you always get, if you could have dinner with someone dead or alive, who would it be? And I was like, what if I could just make a podcast with someone from the past? And are there tools that allow me to bring their voice to life? Q11 Labs, right? So that was that one. And then I'd studied computer science, but it was so theoretical that I never felt like I had the practical skills to actually build an app from zero to one.
And then, you know, coding got so much better, GPT-4. And I remember that... the task I gave myself with that one. And that was with GPT-4. It was excruciating. It was, but ignorance is bliss, honestly. And so I was, there was this video game I used to play as a kid, this DOS game called Skyroads. And I was like, what if I could recreate that with GBT4 and make it 3D, which honestly with GBT4, I would just never do again. But I just went at it a whole weekend.
you know, two OpenAI accounts, like paying for that subscription limit until it happened. And I made the game and it worked. And that for me was just like even more. affirmation of this anything is possible if you just like push and i think it's really important don't look at it from like the tool perspective just go for like what do you want to make
And then start looking for like, are there things that can make that happen? Are there ways to generate images? Is there a way to code a video game or pull models from a video game? And I think, and then also I always tell people this, like if it did.
work this time save that idea because it's going to work in two or three months or six months from now and that's been the case since these models have gotten so much better uh yeah i was kind of laughing myself because you said the word excruciating about gpt4 which probably felt like
magic at the time. And it's like, we're going to look back at the current state of the world today and be like, man, that was excruciating. But it feels like magic today, though. No, it's so true. GPT-4 was... unreal like when it came out this was like finally i'll be able to fully code and uh yeah no and so i think for me the the feedback loop that kept me going was uh i kept sharing my ideas on twitter completely unfiltered not like
engagement baiting or anything like that purely just like here's what i did here's how i did it and there was such a great like loop of either people remixing the idea or people wanting to know how i did it or you know showing me something they made and that just kept me going because i loved the excitement i loved sharing the knowledge and then just kind of feeding into that and going and going i want to talk about the twitter piece actually really quickly because that is
like why we're even having this conversation that's how i found your book in the beginning like how much were you even doing on twitter before this because At least from my outside perspective, it's been quite the ascent, and really all it has been is just you continually showing up and sharing your experiments. Yeah, it's a great point. I actually was not that active on Twitter prior. I would follow around and just lurk.
but never really post. And a friend of mine, when I made the book, I was just so... blown away by the experience i remember posting it on my instagram and sharing with my friends and i said like hey if anyone wants a copy i'll send it to you i was so excited lost a ton of money on this book shipping it everywhere one of my friends was like you must post about this on Twitter like this is such a cool process and I wrote the thread exactly how I did it and in the first like 24 hours it got like
12 hours ago, I had like 100-ish likes. And that for me was like the most I'd ever had. And so I was like, this is amazing. Like, wow, tech Twitter loves this. And then I remember waking up at 4 or 5 a.m. and my phone is just like buzzing away, like off the... And I was like, what's going on? Did I set an alarm by accident for 5 a.m.? And I look, and it's just.
endless like and that that's where it got really mixed it was it was the fear from artists from writer this tweet had crossed from a hundred like um i think it was like 50k views to at that point two million views eventually 11 million And then you're waking up to like Time magazine and NBC and Washington Post and they're like, what do you think about AI and art?
um and the future of that and you're like okay i guess i have to like think a little hard about what i what you know the implications of what i just did but it was an amazing amazing journey talk to me a little bit about how 11 labs came into the picture so your design
director at brex pretty different space yeah what was that journey like yeah well so on brecks real quick like brecks was an amazing ride too i think it was 2021 uh 2020 is when i joined and that was kind of the fintech boom was taking place around that time and um an amazing team was forming there my former head of design at palantir just joined and i loved working with them and so it felt like a great uh period to join a hypergrowth startup and i'm so glad i did because
I think it really prepared me for what 11 was also going to be. It was hyper growth. Our design team grew from the early four or five of us to, I think, 50 at one point. The company grew from 200 to 50. 1500. And when you see that, it's like focus is so key. Maintaining the quality bar becomes incredibly challenging as every team tries to push forward. But you still... are you're reacting to this growth but you still need to like have a vision and like push ahead and be proactive and so like
but you're scaling really fast and meeting the demands of every engineer. So there's like a huge load balancing challenge there. And so having had that experience and then finally to the point where I was managing quite a few designers and a whole... whole team and org i was really enjoying that challenge it was completely new and different and this ai thing was honestly just a thing i was doing on the side for fun and posting on my weekends but that was for me the creative unlock when
frankly like fintech isn't that sexy and so it's uh you know when you're uh and as someone who just enjoys being creative and storytelling this was like the unlock for that there was a point where brex was kind of worried they were like you know
doing a lot of stuff on the side, um, with your AI projects, like, uh, you know, how's that affecting work? And I actually was like, it's actually helping work because this has been a creative unlock. That's given me way more energy and like design, like creativity that I. come and bring back to work. And, and that's what I would encourage other designers to do too. Like, I think we
We do Figma on the daily, and then you're like, oh, I don't have time for my own things. I don't want to see Figma again on the weekend. You know, if you find something that you can like put your ideas out with and you have that feedback loop, it's such a boost. Even I'm feeling that a little bit, like just like over the weekends, I try to just make a little thing and it's so silly. But like there is an energy about creating that.
I haven't experienced in, in like years actually, where it just, everything's so new and so fresh. And, you know, you feel like a kid again, where you're just like grabbing your laptop and you just run around and show it to everyone. Like, look what I made, you know, I've been having that.
moment for the first time in a long time and i do think it really does trickle back into the the nine to five or however you want to refer to it yeah and to your point like the programming tutorials of like you know just five years ago were here's how you write your first hello world. And like, how many people are you going to show that to? And they're just gonna be like, okay, cool. Such a good point.
you know and now it's like hey i just made uh snake and pong and it's a multiplayer game and put on your vr headset and you'll be the ball like you know it's like it's like it's completely changed what we can
share. And when you get that excitement or feedback loop from your friends, it's a phenomenal boost in wanting you to do more. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. As I was doing Brex and making all these side projects, one of those... was uh first it was a podcast uh it was on president's day so i was like oh i wonder you know if i could chat with the president from the past how would that be and um you know it was a really fun experiment i went for ronald reagan because
It was hard to pick who would be the most polarizing given the current political climate. But I went to Ronald Reagan and I asked Bing Chat to just kind of go through his history. and assume how he would react to a series of questions I'd written down. And then I was like, well, is there anything out there that I could use to recreate his voice? 11 labs, which is not allowed anymore, but very obvious. reasons.
uh but uh but yeah no i i did that experiment and i had this podcast conversation going with him and it was like a full-on conversation and i was uh and a lot of people were like i want a series like can you chat with this person next person next but that's when i started to see 11 labs as like this really
fun storytelling tool from an audio perspective. And soon it was becoming a platform that had audio books that you could, you know, have fully narrated with voices. And then I was like, okay, cool. Well, I love making iVideos and now I can finally voice the camera. characters with all these other voices. And so I just kept making stuff with Eleven Labs.
And then at one point I was spending so much on credits that I reached out to a friend and I was like, do you know anyone I love in labs? And she was like, actually. Let me introduce you to the founder. He'd love to hear about your project. We had a great chat and he was saying, hey, I'm actually, you know.
Project aside, we'll give you the credits. I'm actually looking for someone to kind of lead design and bridge that gap between the engineering side and telling the story of what's possible with the technology. I hadn't considered it because I was still honestly enjoying Brex. And then I met the team and the draw was too good. And Maddie is very good at closing. So I was pumped. And yeah, it's been a wild ride since. So just to even get the full context, like...
What was the state of the team when you joined? And maybe you could even just give a little bit of a rundown for people who have heard Eleven Labs on this show, but don't actually have like an interface in mind or what the software even is making possible for people.
Can you just give a little context for 11 Labs and then we can kind of drill in from there? Cool, yeah. So 11 Labs is an AI audio platform. And so the... main thing here and the mission of the company is to to make audio completely universally accessible in any language in any voice and so that means we can dub videos while maintaining the authenticity of the original speaker but you can hear
them in a Spanish accent or a German accent or whatever, which means way better dubs. You have audio generation for voices so you can replicate your own voice. And we also have a platform, amazing voice actors who just lend their voice, earn from it. can generate all sorts of text to speech with very realistic sounding voices. And so that's been used for video voiceovers or faceless YouTube channels, or if you're
You know, making a cartoon and you want to voice your character, video game characters. There's a whole range. Even on CNN, the Trump trials were, you know, narrated with 11 labs voices. And so you're getting to see.
a whole range and my favorite one very recently has been there are a lot of people who unfortunately of course suffer from ALS and lose their voice and Eleven Labs has given them their voice back, they've replicated their voice, they've been able to communicate with family, deliver speeches. And so it's been amazing to see the range of stuff.
from just on the voice front and then of course we also do sound effects soon music then you know the whole gamut of audio so that's kind of the rundown of 11 labs and then yeah the state of the team when i joined we were about 30-ish people design contractor at the time and then yeah primarily engineering and research and um yeah it was a very early stage you know i think the
Series B was just about to be announced and the brand was going through a refresh that we were working through. So a lot of foundational stuff. And so, yeah, very, very early on. uh in the mix i want to like learn a bunch more about just what it's like working in this kind of environment and on this type of product so maybe even just starting high level like what's it like
designing the future of something where there's just not as much precedent, you know, like you all are leading the charge in so many ways. What's that like as a designer? It's like a really fun challenge and it's incredibly rewarding because like you said, there's no precedent and you get to see.
You get to see your patterns become patterns that you've copied to. But then you're also like, I don't know if that pattern was right. So you get to test it at scale through that method as well. But I think, and I was chatting with... with Nate Parrott the other day from the browser company. And we were kind of going, and he's just such an incredible, creative designer, design engineer. And we were kind of debating back and forth. I was like, is the prompt box
there's the text field and a generate button really the best we can do. And his opinion was actually that, you know, we're abstracting away a ton of complexity to just chatting. And that is actually like... maybe the design move, like maybe that is actually as simple as it needs to be. But then I think there's also a step forward here, which is
There's a lot of stuff that you can do with these models. You can tweak all sorts of parameters. You can change the model type. You can, and of course, each model has either faster inference or can control the stability more and all these things, but you don't really want people to have to work.
about a lot of those things and so even when I'm thinking about designing music you know you can you can add lyrics you can change the genre you might be able to tweak just parts of the the vibe of the track and the specific piece but what is the most natural way to do that and initially i could have started with just text and you just describe every single aspect and what that needs though it requires is that you need your user to
to need to know all those things to to be able to craft a great prompt to get a good result right and i was starting to think about this more in terms of a almost a dynamic island kind of prompt box where if you need to change lyrics it morphs into
uh prompt box that's basically best designed around like how lyrics need to be edited and the parts of lyrics if you're about to choose genre instead of you thinking about it it populates with pills of all the genres that you actually need to like maybe you want to play with or think about and
you could talk to it and maybe it'll actually point you and grow like the UI will expand and grow based on that. So still expanding on that base idea of chatting and prompting, but teaching you along the way in a way that's very intuitive rather than. tooltip here, click that, try to understand the thing. And I think that's the thing that with designing with AI, you need to still capture the essence and the magic of it.
without putting the burden on the user and i think that's like the the thing we keep going back to like Another debate I was thinking about was it's so easy to fall into the trap of using an existing pattern that's been tried and tested forever because you think that's reliable. And don't get me wrong, there's value to that. So for instance, let's talk about search and search for voices.
for a voice classic design pattern throw a search bar there have some filter tags and hopefully people will find the right voice or like What are you actually coming into that page looking for? You have a project in mind. You're probably telling like a storybook for a kid or you have a horror movie you're making and you want a voice for that horror movie for the villain.
So that's all you should be really needing to describe. And we should figure out the tags that you are actually mean behind the scenes and the filters you should apply and the accents we think are best. uh to give you that and i think that's the that's the push think about those existing patterns but why did we invent them in the first place it was because we had some intent that we distilled down into knobs and search fields and stuff and actually now with llms
contextual understanding, we can completely rewrite those patterns. I like that a lot. I was having a similar conversation a few days ago with a startup called Dessen and talking about similar things where having... Very small contained dialogues that are dynamically generated based off of like the context in a prompt, for instance, that starts to get a little bit more interesting to me because as a piece of software, you could intuit what a user is trying to.
achieve based off of just like the initial things that they're typing and maybe there are some more tailored affordances that you can then generate to control that based off of what you know it feels like that's like a really interesting entry point for a dynamic interface is
building on top of the chat UI even. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, to your point, like why did we end up making all these buttons and search fields and knobs in the beginning? That was our take on how people might approach. the broad goal that they come into a product with it's like okay i want to i mean it goes back to just the foundations of like graphical user interfaces right it's like
We were typing things in terminal and then Xerox and Apple decided actually you should just be able to click on the thing that you're like wanting to go to. And similarly, like, why can't you just say what you want to do? And then the UI reacts and tells you where you need to go and like.
serves it up to you i think there's it's not just pure voice but there's also a bit of that you still need that control that tack tactile like behavior but we can guide you in a way that we just couldn't do before um which i think is like very very exciting
Can we double click on the voice as an interface? I'm sure you're thinking about this as much as anyone. What are the futures that you're imagining in that world? You know, I think it's interesting because there are a bunch of cool products that have come out recently that... a bunch of initial hype and then kind of tanked and or are still going you know i still have one on my desk like the rabbit um and i i love it i think it's such a cool like piece of uh of tech but it didn't really
gain the momentum yet and I think that's because we're still early in the social norm side of it. It's still weird for a lot of people to just out in the world talk to a device. when everyone's around them, right? And that's where Humane, I also thought, did some really interesting novel things with the experience in that projector. But again, I still don't feel comfortable just being in a crowd and being like, hey, play this or send a reminder for that.
Right. So I think once that becomes more of a social norm, and I think it will happen when Apple leans into it more with AirPods. And more of the devices that are mainstream start adopting that kind of interface. We'll have more AR glasses at some point that we'll be able to just like say commands to and talk to that.
voice will become more and more the interface that we get used to because it's just about seeing what's ahead of you talking about the thing that you just want to do and everyone around you most importantly is also doing it and it doesn't feel weird anymore that's when i think it actually becomes uh the thing and it needs a mainstream player probably like an apple to
make that happen but I remember that scene from her where like in the very beginning like everyone's kind of on these devices and scrolling and then at some point they're kind of just walking by each other but they're talking to the thing in their ear and that
For a 2013 film to predict, I think it's totally going to happen. Like, we're just going to have this assistant that's telling me my reminders or maybe it's seen something I've seen and observed that to something I'd put in my journal and reminding me about it. Like, yeah, I think that's... coming for sure.
I was joking with my friend the other day about how the way I want to be designing in the future is with some kind of like a wearable glass. And then I can just like send my agents off to like make some software and some flows and then review them on my wearable.
like in the park and like give some direction and they just go off and keep working on it. And I just come out of that focus state and let, you know, catch the football that my kid throws at me or something like that. Most productive dad ever. I love it.
That's still Minority Report, right? I know. I'm there. I'm there. I'm ready for it. Me too. On that note, what's it like collaborating with a research team where you have... almost kind of two sets of inputs where it's not just hey here are all of the user problems and needs but it's also like whoa we just unearthed this totally new thing what do you want to make possible with it what's that like
They're honestly, it's like, it's like you're working with a set of like magicians who are like, you know, in our secret lab, we've come up with the ability to generate a sound effect by describing it. Like what? And so. I think it's really exciting because going back to previous points, you don't have patterns for a lot of these things, but you do want to solve the problem. So the problem of...
I spend an endless amount of time browsing for the right sound effect for my thing, but I know what I want, right? I'm searching with the intent of what I already know I want. So what if I could just describe it? And so this amazing research team, they just spend their time pushing the models forward. we've generated speech can we generate any form of audio music sound effects can and then also if you can generate can you also clean and identify which stems to remove and which ones to like
you know, take forward even with dictation. If we can generate speech, can we also understand speech and then create like an even better dictation model? And so they'll come to us with, hey, we've had this kind of research breakthrough.
how should we go about deploying it and i love that they approach it that way how should we go about deploying it right because that gives the designers the engineers and the kind of product folks to really think about how would people use this thing this incredibly technical model that we've now made like what's the best application of it and i think often how we start sometimes even internally is by just making fun demos of stuff before we even design so it's like
Oh, I just took this model. Like when we had conversational AI, it's like, I just took this model and I made an onboarding bot that could tell every new employee, everything in the wiki and even the wifi password of the office.
and then you start to see oh that's a really cool application how would people go about making one of their own and then you can start the design like exercise of like making it happen but this hacking away culture is like very core to us at 11 labs where almost everyone messes around with the apis now because you can with cursor and other tools right to where even the comms and the growth people are building
amazing demos themselves for fun and they're like hey i just made this thing where i'm chatting with paint and remember ms paint now you can just like draw like stuff and i was like that is an unbelievable demo and again a reminder that creative ideas can come from anywhere when people have the right tools, right? So I think that hacking culture plus seeing what people are making and then that allows us to really think about what's the best way to design.
to enable anyone to go and make those things. Is there an example of like a project or a feature that you released that we could kind of trace the idea from inception all the way to actually shipping something to the prod just to get a sense of like how you all work and what it's like being a designer at 11 labs yeah one of the really fun ones was when we were working on the mobile app and we had seen the notebook
LM stuff. But for us, the form factor, the one that made the most sense was mobile. You have a lot of your reading and content on the phone, on the go. And we wanted to turn that into podcasts with our voices. And I remember... The way it started was we basically were like, look, this is a really fun way to engage with content. And our readership is growing really well. We're seeing tons of people importing all sorts of stuff.
how do we go about this and the beauty of the mobile team is it really starts with a problem like that like how do we go about like giving people a new way to engage with their content and it feeling incredibly seamless you shouldn't have to think about I'm picking voices or I'm doing this, like, let's really turn it into this, like, we're magically going to add two AI co-hosts that will take any topic you have and make it a fun story, a different narrative. And, and then.
The team kind of just hands off to design at that point. And they're like, hey, go and just kind of go crazy with ideas. Like, share what you think we should do. And I remember I had initially made this mock of our voice orbs kind of... like slowly glowing and then like splitting into two to show like now you have two co-hosts and they're like dancing around each other and and the reason i started thinking about that was i knew that whatever we were generating would take at least
30 to 40 seconds to make and so you can even inject delight into a boring loading state where you have your co-host coming to life and it's got like showtime music like playing so you're getting ready for like a little mini show to start and i remember showing that to the team and they were so excited about it
that we then started thinking about what are cool names for our co-hosts and should we have different co-hosts for different topics and that kind of showed how the idea just kept growing into all the different creative ways we could make that feature come to life but then once we were
happy with, okay, we want a few different co-hosts because some topics need a serious one and some topics need like a really fun one. We had that spec and yeah i'll go ahead and design i love showing the engineers very early on like the early explorations they'll go back and forth and like build prototypes so we can like test out how it's working and it's very much especially with models that are this early it's very
much an experimentation game where you try it, you see how it feels in real life, you tune it and you go back and forth and change the design. So design is very dynamic and not static at all. It's not like I made this handoff. It's like.
Oh, interesting. Like that part of the experience might need a tweak here. It might need a tweak there to eventually getting to when we feel like we have a good final product. And then we'll share that internally and have people generate all sorts of podcasts and things like that. And all sorts of fun bugs. show up that the models do at that point too. Like I remember one of the funniest ones was our podcasts.
for some reason, kept introducing Dr. Sarah Chen to comment on things. We have no idea who Dr. Sarah Chen is to this day. but now whenever there's like a feature or like a hard technical problem that we don't have the answer to we're like let's go ask dr sarah chanis like the meme of the team now but but yeah so it's really the cycle of
Start with the problem. Design goes and explores stuff. It's very experimental. It's very much like a back and forth of prototyping. I prototype a ton in Figma too, just to see how ideas will feel and people get a feel for.
how it'll feel on the phone and translate to desktop. I'll even use our product to generate the voices and then kind of record that prototype and like edit it with the voices in which sounds like a lot of work for prototypes but I think it makes people really feel it it's like yeah it's tangible because they're like oh so this is what a conversation could sound like
And then once they have that, then we kind of have a very good spec for what we need to do. We don't actually write PRDs or anything. It's very much this like back and forth, like a creative process until. we feel really good about the build that we have. And then we just kind of go with it. Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, it just sounds like a real culture of experimentation, just listening to you describe the way that you work. Yeah, yeah, very much. We're all tinkerers, which is fun.
My assumption is that you probably have a pretty wide spectrum of users. Some people that maybe are like me, there's just like a dad that just wants to tinker with storytelling where other people probably are using this professionally. So can you talk a little bit about... how you think about the right level of abstraction for this technology? It's a great question. And sometimes it's more that...
you create interfaces for each of those personas. And so, for instance, we believe that there always should be a playground to mess around with the models because that allows you to just see all the ways people are going to use it in a freeform way. And so that's why...
text-to-speech is still very much an open playground. Sound effects is an open playground. When we do music, we'll very much treat it the same way. But then you can build on top of that. So we knew, okay, there are a lot of... creators and other folks who just want to generate a voice and have it say something fun and that's it.
So we should make that as easy as possible. But then there are a ton of people who have very specific voices and projects with voices that they're like really working through. And so we knew we needed to give them a full-fledged editor for that where they could assign. multiple speaker voices tune like the exact parameters and that's used by authors by enterprise companies that are making like episodes and stuff and podcasts podcasters and so it's really like
Let the playground show you the range of personas that are working with your product. And then talk to some of them and ask them, like, what are the things that they would really love? And you don't want to bring... all of that and complicate your very simple playground because that is what made the playground work so well you actually want to take that and potentially just spin up a new interface for that existing model for that persona and that's where
our studio version of the app came through. That's where the dubbing studio, where it was just about precision editing of those dubs to make sure the language uh that was translated and dub was like perfectly accurate because you now have video editing teams that are just dubbing content and they just need to focus on that and nothing else right so yeah it's about taking that very broad
and then just making very like niche slices for everyone. Hey, it's Rid. I'm constantly asked about my favorite product. So I'm gonna take just one minute and give you a quick rundown of my stack. Destin is how I ship design changes without having to code. Framer is how I build my websites. Genway is how I do research. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Play is how I design and prototype mobile apps.
is how I generate all of my imagery and Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now I've hand selected these companies to partner with me so that I can do these episodes full time. So the best way by far. To support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at dive.club slash partners. Okay, now on to the rest of the episode. I want to return to some of the things that you were talking about around Brex and...
You know, you've now been Plantier, Brex, and Eleven Labs. So three different hyperscale startups. Based off of that experience, what do you think it takes to thrive as a designer in that type of environment? Each environment. tested me and taught me a lot of different things, but probably the one thread that was the most true in all of them and rang throughout was designers shouldn't shy away from getting close to the business.
I think it's incredibly important to actually understand who the customers are, why we're working with them, which contracts have more potential, how do we want to position the company, whether it's small businesses or enterprise or so on. Because that...
just allows you to make stronger arguments for why you're doing the thing that you're doing. There's so many designers, I think, that give up because they're like, oh, like I proposed this idea, it didn't really work and like engineering overran or whatever. The reality is like a lot of these ideas.
get past because they have some inherent business value and of course there's also the other tricky thing with design which is like it's also pretty qualitative right but i think you get to the qualitative side through also building credibility on the quant side and and the business side because once there's trust you can then you just have more free reign to do the thing that you really wanted to do right and so i think
at Palantir, it was very much encouraged, spend time with the customers and go there no matter what role you had. And so very often as a designer, I would actually just go and fly out to customers in like France and Oman and like spend like a week with them, just like understanding their workflow and like really designing for what they needed that way. Cause you become an expert for them and then you have such a great life.
feedback loop with them as you're building through things at brex you have to spend time with with founders and finance teams and you realize okay you're not just making some flashy fintech app that you know needs to be it's like
The reality is founders have no time to think about finances like their corporate card or whatever. And so actually... the experience needs to be as invisible as possible for them and it you know the standard metrics of time spent in breaks or whatever like you actually don't want that like you actually want them to be able to just get the job done really fast without being in there at all
Similarly with Eleven Labs, it was like, you have these incredible models and you have a whole set of people who just want to make all these creative things happen. It's very tempting to expose every single knob and say like, you know, everyone should do everything. But the vast majority of people actually just want, they have an idea and they want to generate that. And you should make that as easy as possible. And of course you'll have power users too, but you need.
to stay close to the business and close to those users and designers should also not shy away from engineering remember that debate we've had forever about should designers code or not and it's like it's such a bullshit debate it's like the reality is for designers
It is so easy for everyone to comment on your work because it's the most approachable thing. It's the thing everyone can just look at and say, hey, you should tweak that button. You should do this, whatever. But for you to have that credibility and to have the deep understanding, you need to know you actually.
have to spend the time with engineering because that allows you to build credibility and respect with them because then they know that you understand what they're going through as well. The business side understands that you're not just dreaming right there. And then you have the agent. I think to really go ahead and execute. So I would say for designers, the job really is
There's so much more than just your design execution job. And I would view no non-technical job as beneath you. It's a storytelling job. You have to tie the threads together between marketing with brand, with engineering, with product, with strategy. And that I think has been a thread that's been true through those experiences.
How do those beliefs shape the way that you approach the hiring process then and the types of people that you surrounded yourself, basically given a blank slate of a design org? I think it's very much, I love people who just show and don't tell. You know, I think we've gotten used to portfolio reviews and interview processes where we encourage the dramatic storytelling.
that hides the substance like there's so like i do not want to see a wall of sticky notes again and that you study and then you study three personas like I get it. That's the job. That's the job. But what I do want to see is how maybe there was a cross-functional gap between teams and you helped patch that through because that's the real shit that's going on in a company on a day-to-day basis.
help two teams see and understand where the platform maybe should have come together or where they needed to make a compromise. Or you just build your ideas and you show them and you're just constantly experimenting. I love people who like hack and experiment because that's the culture we have.
I think that's net positive to what we also want. We want other people to bring into that creative mix. And also I love people who've just come from a variety of like wearing many hats because they've built an appreciation for doing the many things required at this kind of stage where you don't shy away from biasing towards action don't look for permission you just see something that you can improve and do like do it so a lot of the designers that i've
I've been looking at and looking for have been people who have either just had to stretch across their orgs because that's just what the job demanded them to do. They show their ideas and they don't mind sharing it. And there's nothing like that. There's like a lot of like.
experimentation with their own creativity, because this is a field that requires that experimentation and creativity. And then ex-founder backgrounds are also amazing because they've gone through the pain of like figuring out like the hard, hard.
stuff of what it takes to like really build something from the ground up. I think that's kind of the initial view. And then self-awareness too, right? I think it's always like, again, I don't want the like... uh the bullshit answer of like oh i do too much or whatever it's like yeah okay cool like like we all do but i think it's like i love it when people tell me their hot takes on design like i've heard i've had people tell me like i actually don't think we should talk to this many users
front because it really skews the perspective. And I'm like, great. I love that this profile of a person actually believes in their intuition a lot more, but it's also open to feedback, right? And that's the right ingredient of intuition, but it has feedback. So it will course correct. amazing like we want tastemakers right we don't want just people who are like can't rely on or only rely on data because like you said this is an ambiguous space with no patterns like you have to figure it out
What about the way that you all work as a team? Because you're also given a blank slate in terms of processes and rituals and anything that collaboration looks like as well. Was there anything specific that you were pulling from your time either at Plantier or Brex that has influenced the way that you've designed the org itself? Yeah, great question. Plantier was a huge influence in that it had...
basically giving people complete empowerment very early on to go and just do the thing that they thought was really important or would help a team. I remember as a new grad, Very early on, we were working for some intelligence agency and I was like two weeks in and they were like, hey, can you go and design that dashboard for them? And it'll be presented to the director of this agency. And I was like. The hell? It was insane. But the confidence boost after you deliver that just...
gives you a whole set of like, like the energy you're going to bring to work is like next level after that because you feel fully empowered. And so with this design team as well, the approach is very much you see something that a story we need to tell or part of the experience that needs to be better or whatever just go do it there's no design system police there's no someone who's going to be like oh no don't do that and that consistency just go try the thing we can always tweak it
everything is changeable at this point and like no decision it feels irreversible at this stage and so very much like open to seeing like how people operate and then having this team of like ragtag especially Again, I think this wouldn't work once we scale to a point of maybe three, 400 people where you need a bit more process. But we're at the stage where our engineering teams and our design teams are lean enough where I think it's high trust.
People have great ideas, let them do the thing. We can always course correct and polish at the end, but you hired them because you wanted to empower them to do the thing. So that I think is a big part of the Palantir side of things, which I think is really important. The Breck side of things I really enjoyed.
was Brex was one of the first times I fully experienced a remote company because it was 2020 and the pandemic happened and Brex pivoted to being fully remote. And they did an incredible job of keeping everyone up to date, async, no matter what was happening.
Yes, you have empowered people, but always have them loop back with decisions being made in a central place. And so whether that is a quick loom to show like their thinking and like how they approach the thing and then just running with it or maintaining office. hours with engineering teams because there are going to be many requests that you won't get to field on a full-time basis and you have like a decision doc of things. That paper trail has been an amazing way to track things like
features we said we would do but we didn't have the time to do and then we've come back and polished or any new hire that joins we just send them a series of loom videos to watch and we're like here's kind of the provenance of like how we ended up here and that's been a great way to catch people up on
onboarding because you just kind of need them to hit the ground running and give them as much context. And that's the best way for them to just see it rather than like go through Figma files and wonder like what the hell went through your mind when you made that one. It's just a very fun visual way to kind of help people do that. And then I'd say the byproduct of that is...
People become natural storytellers and become better storytellers because you're constantly explaining your decisions and you're pitching that to teams and you're selling that across the org. And that is another big thing, I think. I want everyone to be a great storyteller because this is...
really high-tech stuff that we should make approachable to everyone. This idea of like the async video sharing has come up quite a few times and it's still kind of like a skill that everyone's learning going through sometimes.
for the first time yeah what do you think makes for like really great storytelling in one of those videos like what do you look for or maybe even just a a little tidbit of advice or a tactic that someone listening could apply the next time that they do a share out for their own team.
yeah one of the first things i always tell people is don't overthink it i think when when you see yourself on video for the first time and you trip up on a word and stuff and you're like oh crap i'm gonna re-record the whole thing like don't actually keep going even if you have to save yourself like
take two and then continue it's good because you can always cut that out and you might have said something initially that you really for you would have forgotten about the second time if you had to restart so i think don't overthink it at all it's like definitely number one always start with the why the problem
you're solving like why did you go down this path give people the context as if they were in your head and were your brain like what did you kind of do to get you here because then you're opening yourself yourself up to other perspectives on your way of thinking which i think is also really important if you just show people the thing but you don't explain the why then
I don't know how you got there and I don't know if you made the right assumptions or you made the right trade-offs or the compromise that maybe I'm seeing, right? Or you've seen something that I haven't and that's given me new perspective. So I always think that's like really important, like share.
that upfront thinking. And then I always like to tell the story with the framing of as if I was about to demo it to someone or sell it to someone could I get them excited about it and so even with the podcast one for instance I was like
cool, so you've got this article you really love, but what if you could have another perspective on it? And so you've kind of, instead of saying, you got this article, now you can generate podcasts with two AI codes. That's not the why, but the why is... here's how you get another perspective and like do we like that thread and that way of framing this feature and then that allows the team to also align behind the messaging
and the way we would talk about it publicly and so try to put yourself in that like you're trying to sell the thing how would you pitch it because that forces you to see is there a worth to this like can i get excited about this is there an audience that would actually buy this I think that framing really helped. And then I love seeing people's random experiments, like show me the final flow and then just show me every branch off crazy idea.
Right. I always tell people, like, I don't care how messy your Figma is. And even in interviews now, like, they're like, oh, I prepared a presentation, but my Figma is kind of like, let's just look at Figma. Like, I love to see like what you did. And there's no judgment on the messiness. We all have our mad scientist's way of thinking. I just want to see the craft, the thinking. That's all I care about.
Before I let you go, for people who are maybe interested in your mad scientist plans for 2025, are there any future experiments or things that you're working on or things that you're thinking for this year that people can kind of use to follow along? Yeah, no, for sure. Pietro and I on Twitter, we love sharing the AI apps that we make and all the stuff that we're putting out. We tend to also always share why we went and made, I think, for instance, recently I made a perplexity clone.
powered by Gemini's search API, because I wanted to see if Google still had what it took, and it turns out they do. And it's a really fun kind of... personal search app that I made for myself. But what we are going to do is probably, we don't want to necessarily teach like a whole course. I think there are many great ones out there, but for the people who are tinkerers like us and just want the source code, just want to see.
every prompt literally unfiltered every prompt even the times where we shouted at Claude and how we got there we'll probably start something there where yeah you can like follow us and you'll have
prompt all the source code so you can turn and remix it into your own ideas and hopefully we end up making a small community of hackers who who are also sharing within there and kind of putting their ideas out there inspiring each other so yeah i'm really excited about getting more yeah i'm excited about that too
There's a rawness from collaborating with AI that is so important to capture. So even just hearing about how you're thinking about pulling back that curtain really aligns with how I personally want to learn as well. No, I love it. And to your point.
the rawness like it's easy to craft a course where every prompt seems perfect but there's so many pitfalls that come along the way where you're battling with it and and people can give up right there and we want to show people like no there's a little bit more of prompting magic and you can get past that and make something great yeah even like
I'm just going to underline that for someone who is listening, who's kind of on the fence and is curious, but maybe hasn't built something yet. The goal is not to one-shot something with... clawed right it almost never works that way like you know like you always have to refine and massage and shoot i mean if you are one-shotting something maybe my prompt would just be
Push yourself a little bit more and do something more complex. Well, Amar, this has been super fun. Absolutely flew by. Thanks for coming on today and sharing. giving us a little bit of a behind the scenes of the things that you're thinking about and what you're working on. Red, absolute pleasure. I've been following your podcast and work for so long. And so I'm honored to be here.