Faces in the Crowd

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- hello, everybody. see a lot of new faces in thecrowd tonight, very excited. so this, welcome to svaixd this is a monthly guest lecture that wedo on different topics around interactiondesign, and the goal is to expand the definitionof interaction design and what it could be. so i'm beyond excited tohave daniel burka join us this evening, just to set the scene,

we wanted to have a talk that's around the intersection of design and vc, vcs venture capital firms. vcs in recent times havebeen building up their design presence some of you might have met albert lee at nea andkleiner perkins has been having a design fellowshipfor a few years now. but gv, google ventures,was the first to do so with braden kowitz joiningas a design partner in 2010

and is one of the most prominent design partner teams today. we have, daniel burka,is one of five partners at gv with a designbackground and gv has been in the news a lot recently because of their launch of the sprint book, which details theirdesign sprint methodology. and anyone who's seen the invision movie will be pretty familiarwith daniel's face by now.

just a little bit of introduction, although daniel's gonnago further into it. daniel's spent more than a decade helping startups with productdesign, highlights include his work with mozillawhere he helped design the firefox brand, five yearswith the social network digg, and early involvement with gaming startup that morphed into speck,he also co-founded a startup that was acquired by google.

so without further adolet's welcome daniel to ixd. (audience applauds) so the way we're gonnado it tonight is more like a free form q and a. i've submitted some questions to daniel, but if you guys have any questionsdefinitely start thinking and pose it to daniel anytimesoon, all right, thanks. - so i'm gonna try to talk without a mic, i think i talk fairly loudly.

can you hear me in the back? all right, back corner can hear. so just tell me if i'mnot talking loudly enough. ideally, i think it'sgonna be more fun for me and probably for you guys if we do this more like seminar style,so if you have questions in the middle of whilei'm talking or want me to clarify about somethingi'm not too worried if we don't get through all the questions,

so i'd be happy to go down tangents or get into details on some shit, so just feel free to put up your hand or yell out at me ifi'm not looking at you. so, kohzy sent me somequestions and i thought the most interesting way to go about this would just be go through them, in the order that he sent them to me. i'm daniel burka the first question he had

was what was your path to here? so i've been designing probablylonger than any of you. i started a design agencywhen i was about 16 with my twin brother and somefriends in eastern canada. so i grew up in prettyrural canada in a place called prince edwardisland, if you ever have blue mussels it mightbe from where i'm from. but it's not like a tech center, right? so there were a bunch of us in high school

and we were interested in nerd shit, and we kind of glommedtogether and decided to form, we were youngenough, and stupid enough, or arrogant enough dependingon which way you look at it that we thought we couldstart a company together. we just started hackingon design, and at the time i was actually acopywriter for the company so i was mostly doingwriting and i was also going to school full-time.

so a few of us were going to university while we started the company. so i did an eight yearundergrad in history, (audience laughs) so eventually when i was inlike second and third year we started getting biggercontracts with companies. and i'd have to go tellmy professors and be like, "yeah so it was reallyfun starting that class, "i know we're a monthin but i'm gonna drop

"out of all my classed and i'm gonna go do "like a two month contract in maryland." and i'd fly down to the usand go work on a project. and so i started as awriter and then one day we were working on aproject and my brother was designing it and i waslike we didn't have enough resources and i was like, "oh you know, "i'll take a stab at that." and i was interested in graphic design

and getting critique from my friends i was really lucky to kindof learn a lot of design. and so that was, i'm probablysaying this 'cause i think it was really beneficial for me, i think most youngerdesigners benefit from having some people around themwho are both passionate about the things that they're doing, that's one of the benefitsof coming to a program like you guys are in is findingsome like-minded people,

but the other thing isthat my friends were the kind of people whowould call me on my shit. if things weren't aligned,if things weren't done right, if i wasn't taking theright strategy at something they weren't too niceto met they'd tell me what was wrong and how i could do better. we really, being thatfar out, and that early on the internet, this was the early 2000s, formed the company in '99.

it might be the oldest web design company in canada it's still in business. the way we really learned was both about reading stuff online, lookingat people's source code, being able to look at howpeople like jeffrey zeldman these people who are in newyork, now i get to hangout with, which is still crazy to me, kind of how they were all doing things,and we just learned by hacking and trying and looking atwhat other people were doing

and critiquing each other a lot. that was really beneficial to my career. and then we ended up kind of building up you know it was a chicken and egg problem when you're starting offdoing a design agency is that nobody will hire youuntil you do bigger projects. we figured out some hacksof how to get kind of big projects and the firstone was that we really wanted to do e-commerce work andthis is early in the days

when people were still afraid to put their credit cards online. sorry i was about to askhow hold everybody is but maybe i shouldn't do that. does anybody even knowwhat a block dock gif is? no, all right, so none of you have been designing nearly as long as me. so we wanted to work onbig e-commerce projects but nobody would hire us to do it, right?

so we actually, andthis was my mom's idea, we worked out of mymom's attic for a while. my mom suggested that we go and talk to a local e-commercecompany that was doing like a big catalog company that marketed all over canada, a big gardening company. and go and offer to doa free website for them based on commission,and so no money up front but we'd make like a 6%commission on online sales,

and their site at the time totally sucked. and so when they ran thenumbers they were like, oh great, we're gonna get a new website for x thousand dollars, thatdoesn't seem like much money. and something like sixx or eight x our sales in the first year, it worked out to be a really good business for us and also let us kind of, gave us the inroads to get work on more projects like that.

and then the second inflectionpoint for the business was a similar thing but very different is back when firefox was the very nascent, so it had just rolled out,i don't know if any of you guys remember the history of firefox. but basically there was netscape. netscape got acquired by aol. some engineers inside of aol were like this is fucking dumb this is like a big,

heavy piece of software and they decided to make this, roll it out,as mozilla on it's own and make a light pieceof just browser software, which was revolutionary at the time. this was ben goodger and the other guy. they launched it and one of our designers was using it and he thought it was great, but the interface looked terrible. you know it looked like amateur hour.

he wrote an open letter on his blog, which people blogged back then, and said like, "hey guysthis is great software "but i think the visualsand the overall fit "and finish are reallyletting the product down "and you won't succeed." and this guy from mozilla wrote back, and this is like, to us at the time, this is some guy fromcalifornia wrote us back.

like it was crazy. we kind of had this smalltown mentality a little bit it was still wild to hearfrom somebody in california. he goes, "i read your letterwe passed it around the office "we all agree with you,you guys should fix it." and we're like fuck it'san open-source project we could fix it. and so we got permissionto put together this group called the mozilla visual identity team,

it was me and steven and john hicks who's an illustrator in theuk, really talented guy, and a few other people and we ended up developing the firefox brand at the time, it was just fucking fun. we did this thing it waslike the first large scale community project that i ever worked on. the brand went out and then we had i was in charge of redesigningthe website as well.

it was kind of my first lesson in people coming out with pitchforksin the community because we changed it a lot. it went from being a really,kind of russian constructivist kind of look to morefriendly and consumery and developers were very upset about this. anyway, that's a whole nother tangent. but we found these kind of two hooks, there are two of thesemajor hooks in our business

to be able to work on bigger things. and doing the mozilla work led to this guy named kevin rose contactedus he had made a website called digg.com and itwas about two months into after he launched the site he contacted us and asked if we'd help him redesign it. he'd seen the mozilla workand that was the first big bay area startup thatwe had ever worked for, and a few months later i decided to move

down to california to bethe head of design there. so, yeah that's the nextchapter is about 12, 11 years ago i moved to the united states. i moved to san franciscoand was the lead designer and then creative director at this fairly big at the time startup. and from there kevin andi started another company called pownce that we sold to six apart it was like a social network back in 2008.

and then i left digg aroundthe zenith of the site just before the dive and i don't know if any of you remember that. and something i've alwayswanted to do in my career is to keep pushing myselfto learn new stuff. i jumped into a gamingstartup coming out of digg and joined stewartbutterfield and cal henderson so the team from flickr, idon't know if you guys remember flickr was originally agame and a failed game

and then it had a photoscomponent and they made that into flickr andthey decided to go make another game and i thoughtthat seemed interesting. that was a failed game andthey turned it into slack, so. stewart's pretty good at this pattern. i think everybody willinvest in his next game not expecting it to be a game. but i worked there for a while and that was really interesting because game design

is much, much differentthan web application design. you're dealing with motion. you're dealing with the light in a way that you really, you'rejust getting to now in application design,and it was a really nice segue that the next thing i did is kevin the guy from diggand i started a company called milk that was amobile app incubator company. the plan was to spinup a bunch of startups

doing mobile work, but the gaming world and the mobile world areactually more similar. there's a lot more you can do in terms of interaction design in that paradigm. and that company was boughtby google and shortly thereafter i came over to gv. so, what is, what does a design partner in venture capital do, what is gv? so i, in a lot of ways,in most ways in fact

don't work at google. google is our lp soinvesting you have usually you have limited partnersand so these are the people who put the cash into your fund. google is our only lp and so they give us about $450 million ayear, so every year we get $450 million and we take that money and we invest it in startups. so a lot of things you'd expect.

a lot of tech companies, lotof big data kind of stuff. but we do about 40% ofour investing right now in the life sciences area, so we invest in flat iron health here in the city. we invest in quartet which is a, so flat iron's a bigdata oncology company, quartet's a company around inthe mental health care space. we invest in grail whichis they're making a blood diagnostic for cancer,it's a company in california.

so we invest in quite a fewlife sciences companies. and we've built up a designpractice within the venture firm so this is still areally, really rare thing. so there are individualdesigners in venture there's a bunch of them now, but we're the only designteam in venture capital. there are five of us andwe spend most of our time working with portfolio companies. so i actually, if you askme about things at google

i have very little knowledgeof what happens inside google. i almost never got to the office here. they don't really tell mewhat they're working on. i spend most of my time working with the companies that we've invested in. and the basic thesis isthat the normal currency in venture capital so if you think about in california there's aroad called sand hill road that all the big fancyventure capital firms are on.

you know sequoia,greylock, kleiner perkins all the i don't know if you've heard of any venture funds but if you've heard of any they're on that road. and typically if you go andshop your company around on sand hill road andtry to raise investment there are some common things you get. you get cash, you getlots of money injected into your company in exchange for equity.

you choose a partner to work with, or firm to work with that has good connections. so connections are this other thing, 'cause when you're tryingto create partnerships or looking for an acquisition or all kinds of kind of benefits of having connections your vc is often a goodway to get introductions. and then the other one's advice, right? so generally a lot of the venture partners

in the bay area are operators, right? used to run big companies,we have one of the founders of excite.com, we have a bunch of people who've spent time at googleon operational teams. and this is common acrossventure a lot of people can give you advice,but you've seen a trend in the last five or sixyears where venture firms have started also offering services. so there's recruitingservices, marketing, pr,

those kinds of things,and teams have started investing in designersso adding that to the mix is another thing you can offer. and one of the interestingthings to me about venture is it's very close to thegears of capitalism. so when we invest incompanies the intention is to invest in them for profit, right? and so if we're designersand we're working with portfolio companiesthe very explicit intent

is that we are making thosecompanies more valuable. we will be judged in theend on whether or not we generated increasedreturns for the fund. i think there are otherreasons that we invest in and we don't just invest for profit, we also invest because wewant certain things to exist in the world and we're not just investing finding arbitrage opportunitieswe're not a hedge fund. sorry, i shouldn't talk so down

about hedge funds in new york. my older brother works at two sigma which is a big algorithmicallytraded hedge fund. if he was here i'd stillsay the same thing. but so the way we think about design often as an added investment,so we've invested say $10 million into a company,but if we go and spend a week or two weeks doingdesign work with them with the whole team, youknow five senior designers

for two weeks this is asignificant investment. you know this is probably, i don't know if you can extrapolate, but like a $60,000investment from our team. that's real money and wedo this because we think we can create significantly more value in the companies that we invest in. and the ways we do thatare, they're kind of high leveraged things wecan do with the companies.

a lot of it's around product work. so at a fundamental leveland i'll get into this in a bit, design and product management come very, very close to each other. so product managementis generally the people in your business who arechoosing what to build and why to build it and howto measure whether or not you're building the right thing. i think as many designersbecome more senior

and more deeply embedded in business you become closer and closerto that level of things. when i think of product design as a term that's what i think of. so we do a lot of product strategy. working with productleaders on helping them kind of reduce risk andfind bigger opportunities. that's the simplest way to talk about it. we also do things like, the nice thing is,

because we're workingwith them in the intent of creating value we can findall kinds of leverage points. i help teams hire talentthat's another big thing we can do, so meet withthem, talk about where the gaps are in their current talent. where their team, how theirteam's currently structured and work with them onbuilding a healthier, better design environmentwithin their companies and making sure the design team's working

on the right types of things. i work with teams on branding stuff, so i'm helping two ofour big life sciences companies right now go through significant branding projects. and usually when youthink of branding projects it's not just designing a logo for them, it's like we're thinkingabout this as a significant brand system so we make sure we talk

to our customers right. - [woman] sorry. - you guys work on brand stuff? - [woman] we're doing something right now. - yeah, do people thinkbrands just logos-- - [woman] yeah. - yeah it sucks. so we do, we're really flexible. and we all, everybody onour team's fairly senior,

we run kind of independently, like there's nobody in charge of our team. we're five old people (laughs). basically we've all beendesigning stuff for a long time. and so yeah that's what we do in venture. did anybody who askedthis question have more questions about what adesign partner is in vc? yeah, what's up? so what often happens andthis literally happened

to me today, i was doing officehours with a company today where i spend aboutliterally an hour with them. and they're like, "yeah,hey we designed this "new marketing page what do you think?" and i'm like, "okay,who's coming to this page? "and they're like, well we think it's "this type of customer." and then we're like, okay, "how does that personshop for your product?"

like this is a complexproduct something around it's building basically a freelance network of engineers, right? the way the people who needfreelance engineering talent shop is non-trivialit's really hard, right? they're almost certainlynot coming directly to you. they're almost certainlycoming with some baggage. and they've got a certain set of needs that they need to makesure you filled, right?

so when i talk to companies like this i'm helping them think strategically through kind of how do you consider, i would call it a shopping funnel, how do you consider the shopping funnel? this person has probablylooked at five other things. well, let's look at what the five other most popular competitors to you are, so we know kind of what we're up against.

how to both play on thethings that are familiar with but also set you apart and find what your big differentiator isfor making that decision. and then think through how the user's making the decision so usually i'm backing people up because they come to me and want to talk about design. like how do you feel about our colors? and i'm like, "i don't really, whatever.

"let's talk about thelanguage you're using. "let's talk about theprocess that you've got." i can critique colors too i'ma pretty good visual designer but i want to make sure they're actually doing the right thingbefore i make sure that and maybe redesign their marketing sites actually shouldn't be theirtop priority right now. that was the first thing we talked about. and i was like wheredoes this need come from?

so a lot of this is like steering them in the right directionin terms of priorities and in terms of overall execution. but one of the interesting things if i can rant on this a littlebit, is you have to be really careful when you work in venture of not immediately telling,not defaulting to the mode of like, well you mightbe doing the wrong thing. 'cause entrepreneurs ifyou ever work at a startup

this is really important to think about, is nobody got into business by thinking they might be wrong. like you have to have acertain amount of hubris to start a company, because if it was just so easy to obviously start a company and make something thateverybody's going to want and you're gonna make millions of dollars. like, yes, we would all be entrepreneurs

and the world would be wonderful. but it's not, you'retaking massive guesses, and you're trying toguess what's gonna happen and how to be, whetheror not you're right. and you've got all these peopletelling you you're wrong. but these people whohave gotten to this stage we're at with them have basicallyignored all those people and they'd be like, "nah, nah, nah, "i know you think this is stupid.

"i know you think i'mgonna lose all my money. "and i'm gonna waste two years of my life. "fuck you i'm starting a company "and this is gonna be awesome." and so a lot of thetimes what i'm doing is working with that energy, and i'm assuming they're right as well. we shouldn't have invested in them if we thought it was a bad idea.

and so i'm assuming they'reright, but helping them test their assumptions much more quickly. because what happens is mostcompanies kind of build, take the ship early, ship often method of making products which is fairly risky if you stop and think about it. you spend a few monthsworking on a product, you put it out in the market,you burn all your customers 'cause it turns out you weren'tbuilding the right thing

well shit, it's really hard to back up. now you've got code debtand now your customers are expecting somethingelse so as a design team what i'm helping themdo is kind of make sure they quickly make better decisions, but at the same time find ways to test their assumptions and doquick research to find where those risks and opportunitiesare within their idea. yeah what's up?

yeah that's an excellent question. yes, most companies dowant us to come work with them because we'refree, and we're not bad at what we do, i think. so again, i work fairly closeto the gears of capitalism there's a set of factors we use, criteria we use forchoosing which companies to invest more time in. and you again, like i wassaying, we think of this

as an extra investment into the companies. so we clearly spendmore time with companies that we invested more dollars into, and that we own more equity in. so it's this combination of factors. we might have invested $10 million, but only own 1% of the company. we might have invested two million dollars but we own 40% of the company.

these are the thingsthat affect our returns, so that's a major factor in it. the we've gotten reallyrealistic about this as a design team a couple of years ago we sat down and reallykind of went through all the projects we had workedon in the last six months and we're like, kind of,why did we work on them? and part of it, a big part of it's, that investment decisionand then some of it

is also our own personalpassions about it. i'm luckily in this jobwhere i can somewhat optimize my job for what i wanna be doing. and for me personally, and most other guys on the design team, weremuch more interested in working on things thatare really mission driven. so if you, you know ireally like working on life sciences projects,so here in new york i've spent a lot of time with quartet,

the mental health company,and flat iron health. my mom died of cancer, flatiron's trying to cure cancer, like fuck cancer, i'll go work on that. it's also a huge investment for us, so there's a bunch of these companies that are in the sweet spot. so we work with the entire portfolio in a light way, we'll dooffice hours with everybody. but in terms of the largerinvestments of our time

we it's leverage, yep,that's an excellent question. we do a bit of everything so it's, really again, on a per company basis. some companies the marketingstuff is really important, most of the time we'reworking on product stuff. i'm most (mumbles) moreinterested and the benefit of working on product stuffis a lot more significant. so i would say realistically we probably spend 90% of our timeworking on product stuff.

but marketing stuff can bevery high impact, right? we worked on, with slack for instance, we also invested in slack later. we worked with slack on theout-of-box flow for slack. and that's the first thingyou see is the marketing site and we did significant amount of testing with them on what they were doing. and they were about torun all these tv ads that they've created andso for us we were like

oh you're about to spendx millions of dollars on tv ads, well if thefront door to your website is in a disconnect fromthe message people got from the television ads,because you might be tempted to go type in this urlbut if you don't have this continuum of the user experience and then this easy flow into a fairly complex productthat's wasted money. that's my money that'sbeing wasted, right?

this is actually how we think of it. i think that's not insignificantso you know a design agency they work for hours, i walk into companies acting like i own the place,because i partly own the place. i don't mean that in an arrogant way, i'm not going in there and lecturing them what to do, but i feelownership over the product. i want to work on the thingsthat seem most important because i also want theirproduct to be successful.

so the entrepreneurs andi are very closely aligned they want to be successful as a business. i want them to besuccessful as a business, and sometimes that's marketing stuff. usually it's product stuff, yeah. we invest in a huge range of companies. so we invested in uberat a fairly late stage, so we invested over $200million into uber fairly late. we have had entrepreneurs in residence

at the fund who don't even really have their idea yet,they're experimenting. i've spent a bunch oftime working with our eirs on kind of figuring out are they even fundamentally working on the right thing? and that's also really fun'cause we can help them circumvent major mistakes really quickly. so i've worked across the entire gamut. what's up?

so google, we are not, we do not report anything to google otherthan our basic financial things you would tell your lp. we are an independent venture capital fund so sorry if i'm beingpedantic but this is important is that we're not astrategic fund for google. we're not investing in thingsthat google's interested in. we're investing in things that we think are good investments, sowe're much more similar

to like greylock orkleiner perkins than we are to like intel venturesor steamboat ventures which is disney's venture arm. those are strategic funds. we will invest in things thatare competitive to google. we'll invest in things that are totally unrelated to google. and we're definitely not reporting back to sergey and larry like, "ohthis company's going sideways."

that would be a conflictof interest for us. but i will within our fund,there's 80 of us at the fund, if a company i think is, andthis doesn't happen often. you know i'm not like atattle-tale back to our fund, but if i think a company'sjust fundamentally making bad decisions or they're structured in a bad way or somebody, basically if we're on their board and there's something the board

our member of the boardshould know about sure, i will occasionally go and talk to our general partner and say,"hey i've been inside "this company i think there's this piece "that's dysfunctional and i think you guys "should go work on it." and that's a board's job is to improve the function of a company. i'm not tattletaling onthem they're just like

he's in our gp is often in a position to help make that change happen, yeah. that's a great question, yeah. so general partners arethe partners in a fund who generally write the checks, and make the fundamentalinvestment decisions. so as design partners at gv we have not that strong a rolein the investing side. so sometimes i'm involvedin investing decisions

particularly if a company hasdesign as a differentiator i'm in a bunch of the pitches and stuff. but my design partner, this is actually, i didn't really answer the question. design partner is an amorphous name. there are some designpartners at other funds who primarily invest in design companies. like jeff veen for instance,over, he's in london. has been investing in a bunch of

design companies at true ventures. so sometimes designpartners are more involved in the investing decisions. we're somewhat involved but not deeply involved in the investing side of the house we're mostly working outwards with the portfolio thatwe've already invested in. so one of the big thingswe do is design sprints with them, with portfoliocompanies and this

is how we, this is somethingwe do over and over again. but this is an evolving process that we've kind of come to over a few years of work with a portfolio. so no, it's not that repetitive. there are some thingsthat we kind of learn by rote and if you goto the gv.com library we have a bunch of articleson medium basically. anything that we heard like 20 times,

the same question, like, what kind of designer should i hire? how much should i pay designers? all these kinds of thingswe wrote articles about because it's kind of like our library is almost like an faq with a portfolio. there's a lot of novelty in what i do. everyday i'm meeting withvery strange companies doing very new things, so like today i was

working with two life sciences companies, a company that's doing hardcore security analytics, and a company that's buildingan engineering network with engineers in africa,which is super interesting. but we built this processcalled a design sprint, jake knapp initiated this at google, he's one of my colleagues, andthen brought it over to gv. and we've been kind ofhoning this with startups. we've done something like130 of these to date.

this is, all the time when we're working with portfolio companies we're not so much doing they're design work for them, you know there's only five ofus and 320 companies i think. there's no way we couldjust be their design muscle. the warm bodies ofdesigners in their offices. but what we will do iscome in and teach them a process and the way we teachit is not in the abstract. it's not like, "hey, i'm gonna come in

"and run a workshop withyou guys for a week." 'cause no startup would ever do that. like they just wouldn't stop for a week and do a workshop, andtwo, learning something in the abstract is likesort of fucking useless. i mean i'm sure you guys run into this in your lectures a lot,it seems interesting but you really learn how to do things by getting your hands dirty.

and so, we found this waythat we can go into companies and actually solve real problems with them in the company and at the same time teach them how to kind of repeat this process after we leave. and so a design sprint is basically we'll talk to a company and we'll, the first question we'll ask is, what are the things thatare keeping you up at night?

so basically what areyour okrs, what is it, an objective key resultsfor the next quarter? and it's usually these big objectives. it's like hey we're tryingto enter a new market and do this thing, we'retrying to significantly increase the inboundfrom our marketing page, or the funnel in our sign up is broken and we need to significantlyincrease sign ups. there's a bazillionthings it could be, right?

and so we talk to them about these high critical things thatthey're trying to solve. and what you find incompanies around these things is there's often a ton ofdisagreement in the company. so people are sitting in meeting rooms, bunch of you guys have workedat companies before, right? like before coming here? yeah, so you've all been in meeting rooms where everyone is talking really quickly

and really loudly and passionately about what users are going to do. and if you really backit up and look at it none of them fucking know, right? and that's where a lotof the heat comes from, a lot of the tension comes from. is because like, "no, areusers are going to do x." and someone else says, "no,are users are going to do y." and you're like, "okay, everybody just

"calm down for a second and just "write that down as a question." we just don't know this, it's fine. you don't have to be right. you just kind of come backto the entrepreneurs thing where like entrepreneurs are expected to be right all the time. if you ever worked ata company you look at the ceo and you're like,"what should we do next?"

and they're like, "ithink we should do that." and they're like, they're not sure that's the right thing to do, right? but everyone's looking at them. and so what we're trying todo with the design sprint is take it from that mode of like, here's the thing we think we should do but go and test it in just a week. 'cause the normal mode ofoperation in a startup,

i'm sorry if this is alittle like rambling. but the normal ship early, ship often mode of making products thatalmost every startup we invest in is in the process of doing is you come up with an idea, and it's usually theproblem is here is that you've got six ideas and youargue about them verbally, you choose one of them. you take that idea, youengineer as quickly as you can,

and quickly as you can isusually three or four weeks at the minimum, right,there's a lot of time in a startup you're burning your own way and you're burning your cash. and then by the time you've made it, now you've kind of fallen in love with it, even if you're having second guesses, you know you're having doubts. you decide to launch it anyway.

launching things has a lot of risk in it, because you can piss off your customers, you can have a bad press cycle, there's all kinds of badthings that can happen. and then you try to measure the results. do you guys remember the quote, i think it was einstein said, there are "lies, damnlies, and statistics." so if you've ever triedto look at analytics

even with a really good researcher there's a lot of ambiguity in the results. and sometimes you'll knowif something's working or you know it's notworking, but it's very hard to know why it's workingor it's not working, right? and then the problem is, is normally, everybody talks about thisas the iterative cycle but teams almost never actuallygo back around the loop and iterate and improve on the thing,

because they've alreadybuilt out a road map and now they're workingon other stuff, right? so that's another really common problem and now you end up even if the idea sucks and everyone agrees it sucks, it's really hard to pullfeatures out of products. 'cause you'll piss off your customers, you'll create code debt, leave tendrils of code in your site,

and then you're buildingoff a rat's nest of code. so we looked at thatproblem and we're like, well hang on a second why are we launching things this way anyway? and the biggest reasonpeople do this is because they want to create some certainty around the guesses they're making. so everyone was sittingin that conference room arguing vociferously and they're like,

crap the only way we'llknow this is to launch it. well it turns out that'snot, obviously not, the only way to know something. and so we've created this design sprint where you're basically creatinga prototype in four days and on the fifth day youbring in five customers who are very typicalcustomers of your product, and testing the prototype against them. so this is an extremely lightweight way

to kind of fake this shipearly, ship often method. but you didn't waste any time engineering, you only pissed off fivecustomers if it went wrong, and you didn't create any code debt. the other way i thinkabout it is you're kind of measuring your trajectory and (laughs) you talk to tons ofstartups and they think they're going really, really fast, but they really have their foot on the gas

and they're driving from oneditch into the other ditch. and the car's making lotsof noise and the smoke going everywhere likeyou're going through gas, like it seems reallyquick and if you step back a little bit and you look at them you're like, oh my god, it's crazy town. and so if you measure a little bit it doesn't createperfect certainty talking to five customers or if youdo two sprints in a row,

even talking to 10 customers that doesn't give you perfect certainty, no doubt. but it gives you a considerable amount of directional feedback and you make sure you're at least generally facing the road when you put your foot on the gas and you can build a lot moreconfidently and actually get where you're going a lot more quickly. so the design sprint is five days.

on the first day we get everybody in, we get a group together,a design sprint group. really importantly it'snot just designers. it's usually two or three designers, an engineer, a productmanager, and other people in the company who've got unique insights. sometimes that's sales people. sometimes it's customer service people. sometimes it's roboticists depending on

who you're working worth, or oncologists if you're working withan oncology company, so these kind of other experts. so you've got a team ofabout seven or eight people together in a room for an entire week. you know kind of stepping back and trying to take that trajectoryview, the first day kind of we get all theinformation on the table. the second day we createa bunch of sketches

of possible concepts that might work. we vote on those conceptsto kind of figure out which ones have the most potential. and then on the next day,wednesday and thursday, we kind of build a prototype. and on friday we test it with customers. i won't go into the whole details of it. you can go to gv.com/sprint if you wanna, there's a bunch of free articles about it.

and if you want to buy a bookthere's a book on amazon. i'm not here to sellbooks, it's not a big deal. but that's the generalthesis of why we do sprints and the overall goalis, hey now we've given the company great, betterdirectional feedback on major product decisions and ideally, if i ran a startup again, and this is why i encourage the ceos and product people in our companies to dois to stop every quarter

or every four months anddo something like this. a directional exercise to make sure that where you're reallythrowing all your resources is the right way to go. it's not like the constant way of working, but it's a good way, youknow a few times a year, to set strong directional. so we've got a few little exercises we do some of this feels like alittle, i remember when i first

joined the team i was like, "oh this is some consultancy bullshit." but it turns out a few of the exercises were really effective. what we're doing when we're voting, so we put all thesesketches up on the walls, and we vote on them silently. we do almost nothing in biggroups of people talking. you know brainstormingis not nearly as valuable

as people think it isand a bunch of people sitting around a conferencetable debating stuff is almost entirely useless. the room that we're in, youknow there's eight of us in the room usually, youknow eight to ten people. and it's almost always kindof a library atmosphere it's everyone working on their own. so on the sketches forinstance, it's not collaborative you're sitting on your owndeveloping your own sketches

in quite high detail youknow they're not pretty but there are lots ofreal text and real detail. and then when we vote onthem everyone's going around silently evaluating eachone on its own merits. the person who made it does not defend it, it has to stand on itsown and their voting with these little stickers on it. and so we kind of look at, then we'll go around the room and say,

oh okay, where are the most stickers let's talk about why peoplegravitated towards that idea. and that's a very, very effective way to make smart group decisions. but it's also not a democracy. in the end usually the product manager or the ceo will put a staron their big stickers. i know it sounds goofy,but ideally they're really making the decisions,because in a business

that's how it really works and we're not creating some fake process of like, "oh here's some eutopia." we want to be fairly reflectiveof how they do business. because or else the products don't ship that we make and we don'tjudge this experience based on "hey did everybody feel goodat the end of the week?" it's more, we really are measuringdid we launch the product and did the product like actually succeed

at the things we hoped it did? you know like three months later when they actually develop it. and so, it's that kind of semi-democratic but realistic kind ofgroup decision making is very, very effective, doesthat answer your question? - [woman] yeah, thank you. - okay, hey what's up? yeah that's a great question.

there are a couple of things. one is that we one ofthe first exercises we do is drawing out a fairlysophisticated storyboard of kind of who are all the actors? who are all the users? whatever you want to call them, customers, who are involved in the process? and kind of all their stepstowards getting towards what we consider to bea success point, right?

and so, the onboardingflow for slack for instance is like, "oh i heardabout it in the news," or, "a friend told me fromanother company," or, "i was googling it," or whatever. you know it's this startingpoint and then maybe i come to the home pageand then maybe i do some things and then i try to sign up but slacks not a one player game. so there's this reallytricky part where one person

signs up but we needto get a second person in the room with them, eithera second person or a robot that can talk to them, issomething we're trying. so this combination youfigure out these things and then based on the data that they had, we know what a healthy user looks like. so how do we get somebody basically from just barely have heard of slack to being a healthy user we'll sketch that all out.

that's probably a littlebit too much scope for the whole prototype andso what we're doing from then is kind of listing wellwhat are the biggest disagreements on the team? so all those stupid hot, theheated meetings that people had had, what are the biggest unknowns? and so we think of these things as risks, risk management, and opportunity. where can we find thebiggest opportunities?

so it's not just aboutnot making mistakes. we do want to avoid making mistakes when we make these products. but also we want to make big enough leaps that we're potentially setting up for like exponential success, right? and this is a great environment. if you're doing normal development mode, you know the ship early, ship often thing,

it's really hard to take massive leaps. because you can easily fall on your face. everybody might think anidea is really, really dumb. but like oh, if it wasgood, if our assumptions are wrong and it's actually a good idea it would mean great success for us, right? what if we priced ourproduct twice as much? like i think that's a bad idea, but i don't know how ourcustomer's going to react to that.

you can test those typesof big ass assumptions in a sprint and only, you'reonly talking to five customers, it's not a big deal. so we set out those big questions, you know what are the thingseither risks or benefits that we could potentially tackle, and then look at the storyboard and find kind of where theopportunities are within that, and then scope usually a chunk of it,

a chunk of that storyboard and we'll sketch across thatpiece of the storyboard. i can see this all in my head i hope this makes generallymakes sense to people. the other thing, sorryi'll get to you in one sec. the other thing i didn't mention is when we're prototyping, we'reprototyping in very high fidelity so i thinkof this as medium fidelity. so the goldilocks level of fidelity is how

i described it in the book. teams are often prototypeas paper prototyping you know i know a lot of design schools like paper prototyping'cause it looks cool and it seems like a good idea. the problem is you put a paper prototype in front of a customer and the customer will respond to it. they'll be like, "oh ilike your prototype."

and then they'll talk about like, "oh if that was a real product i'd like "this part and that part," and that sounds like good feedback. but it's actually really colored by their biases of seeing it half finished. and if you think offidelity as a graph, right. i'm just gonna run offcamera for a second. you know there's fidelityso kind of how detailed

something looks and time,hold on did i do this, i did it in the wrong order. time, fidelity, fidelitylooks something like this. is it paper prototyping's like here, like hey we did some sketches and i can get really quickly toget a paper prototype in front of customers. but, designers once youlearn some design tools like if you're pretty good in sketch

or photoshop, whateverfucking tool you use, you can get this basicallythis is invision or marvel or something, or whateverprototyping tool you use. you can make something,i can make something look incredibly realistic as a mobile app or as a desktop app in a day. like multiple screens, just last friday we did, we're building a prototype with a startup here called managed by q.

it's one of the startups we invest in. we built a maybe 20 stepprototype in a single day. and like granted, like, we'reall pretty good designers we've been around for awhile, but i think teams should aspire to be able to do that. and you put that in front of customers they just think it's softwareand so instead of responding to your prototype theyactually just react to it. it may not all work.

i just created a dashboard for them where there's like 25 links on the screen and three of them work but you can kind of create the slight of handwhile you're doing research if you push the users kindof in the right direction. where they just feellike this is software. you might be like, "oh we haven't finished "making that piece of the software yet." but like as far as they think, software.

and that way they're reactingto it like it's real. and that's much, much morevaluable and it hardly takes more time thandoing paper prototyping. sorry you had a question. - [man] yeah i'm curious about what kinds of stakeholders fromthe portfolio companies in the room with you whenyou run a design sprint does it just purely designers or you've run design sprints forlike different functions?

- it's definitely not just designers. i would never do a designsprint with just designers. designers in dysfunctional companies and i've worked with a bunchof dysfunctional companies. some big ones, i've evenseen teams at google that work this way, theythink that designers can just learn about the problem and then retreat into their design den with their eames furniture,(audience laughs)

and solve the problemand it's such bullshit. like designers have this ego problem where they think that we have some we're the only peoplewith like the knowledge to solve your problems and we'll go off and solve them and then we'll come back and you'll build them, like fuck off. designers are not that, nosmarter than anyone else, we just have some tools available to us

that are they're very effective. so i go off on a rant.(audience laughs) so, we're pulling togethera very diverse team in the sprint it's always we need someone who actually has clout,so if you know my team's in this advantageous position where like basically if you don'tput the time in with us we don't charge the money but we charge the companies with their time.

if the ceo or the headof product isn't gonna make the time to spend aweek with us, it's fine. i've got 319 other companies to work with, we'll just go work with another company. so, you need a serious decision maker in the room or else you're gonna make a prototype and if the decision maker has a different idea like well fuck it. he or she's gonna go do that idea anyway

with or without you, sohaving the decision maker in the room, having engineers in the room, is almost always the case and having some of these other peoplewho bring unique knowledge. so when we're doing we workedwith blue bottle coffee on their subscriptionprogram having the customer service person in the room with us the whole week was immensely valuable. they know where all the holes are in their

current e-commerce platform, working with i was working with a company that makes a wearable defibrillator and we had somebody who knows everything about medical device sales,like i don't know anything about medical device sales it's a really, really hard problem and if we're designing the system for selling this thing yeah we need them in the room with us.

so this kind of diverse group of experts. - [man] so it sounds like there's some kind of prep work that happens before you go into the sprints where you identify the right people to be there and-- - sure, sure, i meanwe schedule it somewhat ahead of time, make surewe've got the right people in the room and then if you really want to kick ass at this kind of the advanced

class is to do pre-research. so usually there'sthese big open questions about what our customers are doing, and our researchermichael will often times pre-sprint go and talk to abunch of existing customers. and then on the mondayof the sprint he'll give us like a 30 minute report on, hey, all right, here's whereeveryone's blind spot is on this product, here's all the other ways

that your customers, all these other tools that your customers are usingin conjunction with your tool. like you don't exist in a silo to them, these types of things thatare the types of insights that very few companiesare doing effectively. i mean honestly, i don'tknow how much research you guys do as part of theinteraction design program but like research is oursecret weapon for everything. like almost every timei'm talking to a company

i'm like, "hey, it turnsout you just don't know "a lot of things and that's fine, "but let's go and find that out "and then you can make better decisions," and will work with michaelon what type of research to do and go and createthose insights for them. and doing a designsprint without research, so michael we have aresearcher or somebody on the team who can doresearch in every sprint.

this is one of the most common problems i see with sprints isteams that they feel like they're in, these teamswith their foot on the gas, and they think that they can't invest an entire week into planning a project and so they're like, "ohwhere can we cut this? "we won't do the research. "we'll create this prototype and we'll "just know if it's good or not."

and you're like yeah i'vebeen designing for 20 years and all i've learned in 20years is how to be wrong faster. i'm still not very goodat anticipating user needs you certainly learn somepatterns and see some things that work and don't work. but a lot of the time whatyou're doing is trying to make these big guessesand test them really fast. and user research is fundamental to that. and at its basic michael'san excellent researcher

i'm not suggesting you canlearn research super quickly, but you can learn thefundamentals of doing a user study and go and try it. he does a video online that he published called quick and dirty userresearch with michael margolis. it's on youtube for free and in an hour he'll at least teach you the fundamentals of how to do a studyand like everything else in design the best way to get good at it

is to do it a lot, so read some books, watch that video, run some studies. it's a very, verypowerful and very valuable skill for designers to have. that's an excellent question. it's interesting, sothere are obviously some things are harder to prototypethan other things, right? and so hardware's one of those things that you have to really havea prototyping mindset

if you're gonna be able todo prototyping like that. the, there's a few tricks. so one is that go back to thinking about what it was like inindustrial design school and a lot of the timeyou are taping together like toilet paper tubes and stuff, kind of finding ways to hack your way into industrial design,and so if you stop thinking about a prototype if you start thinking

about a prototype assomething that's disposable, which is very much howi think of prototypes whether it's software or hardware. you start getting more scrappy about how you make something. so if you're prototypinghardware for instance, you think about what are the questions we're trying to answer, some of it's like how do consumers perceivethis piece of hardware?

with this medical device company, can someone put this on or not? put it on themselves, soit's a set of instructions but also like the device. but you can hack that pretty quickly. we were talking to acompany like a year ago that came up after a talk at a conference, this guy came up and he's like, "yeah, we started usingsprints at our industrial

"pump manufacturer," and we're like what? like that's cool. or somebody at boeing was talking to us about doing sprints, and we're like what are you talking about, you're building at boeing it was a turbine group. so they're building likemassive turbines, right? and this other companywas building pumps for industrial facilities like you're talking

like an eight foot tall pump, like the output is eight foot tall. like these are serious pumps, right? we're like i don't know howyou prototype that, man. but he's like "no, nothe question was we're "gonna build this new pump withall this new functionality," like it had a better system for airflow within the pump, or something like that. or better maintainabilityand what they did

is they were wondering if customers were basically willing topay more for these features. and the investment theywould have had to put into this pump was massive,you're basically setting up retooling of a factoryto make this stuff. and what they did isthey 3d printed a pump that looked just like theone they were gonna make and you know certainlyspent more than a day on it but probably spent about aweek prototyping that pump.

and then they created a specsheet like you would use to market something andthey just printed it off on a eight and a half by11 sheet that just said these are the features of the pump. and then they went to fiveof their existing customers and said, "hey you know you bought pumps "from us in the pastwe made this new pump. "do you want to buy one?" and they're like, "let'ssee," and they read

the spec sheet and it helped a lot to have the actual pump there 'cause it seemed real to them, you know, even though it's a scaled down model of it. and they read through it and they're like, "well i don't know, wecouldn't invest in it "because we had maintainability problems "with the gaskets in our old pump and this "sounds like the same thing,"

and they're like takingnotes and that's important. and they learned all thesethings from their customers about what was important to them. about kind of thefunctionality of this pump before they investedany time in even looking at the viability of making the thing. so excellent use of their time. so i wouldn't say thateverything is prototypable in this way, but if you think of things as

you think of prototypingas a potential solution to answering questions thenyou can like in a sprint we'll write down allthe questions we've got and usually about two thirds of them are the kinds of thingsyou can answer in a sprint. some of them you really dohave to launch a product and see it at scale andget quantitative evidence of whether or not it's a good idea. there's a bunch of thingsyou can only learn by

oh i don't know, technical viability. it's hard to know ifsomething's technically possible by doing a sprint, but we can go and run some technical experiments against it. and you'll run intothis in hardware a lot, can we build this thing at the price point that we need the (mumbles) to do it at? i don't know, you'llhave to go and kind of sketch that out and go talkto a bunch of factories

in china and figure out if you can get the components at the right prices. it's not a sprint problemthat's just a technical problem. but sprints are a good way to answer a bunch of those questions, yeah. is that, i danced aroundyour question a little bit. hey, what's up? sure, okay, so the big ones for us, and these are things like i'm probing for

when we meet with companies the first when we're first meeting with them to discuss doing a sprint isone is not an urgent problem. a lot of teams will cometo us with user interface problem for instance, and your like, "oh, i can help you solve that. "and we can go and test it with customers "but that's not like anurgent, big issue for you." if teams don't feelcommitted to the problem

like great you did a sprint and it sits on the shelf for the next eight months because it was never prioritizedby the engineering teams. i don't want to work on those problems it's not a good investmentof my time at gv we won't work on it, buta good way to ask that is what are the okrs, orthe kpis for the next, sorry we're full of acronyms in venture, what are the bigobjectives for the company

for the next three to six months? like a shortish timeframe, or if you ask a ceo what keeps you up at night? that's another great wayto ask that question. we'll do that a lot. so, working on the wrongproblem, big problem, big issue. not gathering a diverseteam, another problem. you know designers often think of a sprint as something just designersdo and it's everything

falls on the floor ifyou do that, and you also just don't end up with a great solution, because all of those otherinputs are are really valuable. working at too low afidelity in the prototypes is a big one, and some teams narrow in too quickly on just one idea. something we do commonly in sprints is to compete ideas against each other. so like when we're working with slack

on the out-of-box flow we actually had two competing concepts,both seemingly good, but very, very different from each other. and we mocked them bothup and put them both under different brandslike not didn't call either one slack we justmade up fake brands for them. and then we had the customers shop. we said, "hey, here's anew york times article "about two new messaging apps.

"let's have a look at them." and they'd be like, "oh okay." they'd click on thefirst one and they kinda okay, try to sign up forthis and they go through it. and then they'd sign up for the second one and then we could askthem questions at the end about like, well how wouldyou describe the first one? how would you describe the second one? what is the first one,could they understand

where they were once theygot to the end of the flow? and in that case with slackone was clearly the winner. often times we'll cherry pick good ideas from multiple ideas, 'cause that's, if you don't do multipleideas when there are good ideas on the table often times the decision maker willhave this nagging feeling in the back of their head like (groans), we didn't test that other idea,

that was my favorite and like shit. maybe that's the way to go. and then they'll sometimesleave the research to the side and just go off and do that other idea. yeah those are the big ones, yeah. so at the end of the five days, so at the end of the friday, we've run five user studiesacross the prototype. and what we do is wevery, very quickly collate

the data so we're doing live note-taking while the research is happening and we're all watching the research. this is another mistakethat teams make is they like, "oh go do the researchand give us a report." this is the one timethat companies really get to watch their customers use software, their software, or their ideas. we try to hold their feet to the fire

to actually show up for the research. builds so much empathyin people in the team to be able to watchcustomers use their software. so we are taking notes during the day and on the friday evening,we're pulling down, oh these are the patternswe saw and recording those. so immediately taking those lessons, if we happen to nail it out of the park, and like, "wow, all ofour ideas were great,"

and which happens occasionally. we worked with a roboticscompany last year and like totally nailedwhat they wanted to do and the team the next weekjust started building. i mean they went backinto their traditional development process,this is not a replacement for shipping early, and shipping often, it's a better way to start that process. so they went into theirdevelopment thing right away.

a lot of the time the some things worked, and some things didn't work. and the ideal process here is to do a five day sprint andthen take those learnings and immediately turn aroundand improve the prototype. so the next week you canspend about three days on okay, here's thethings that didn't work we're gonna do moreideation on those things an then we'll prototype them the next day,

and then we'll do anotheruser study the next day. that's where we see real success. is teams that like,okay, general direction, a little adjustment,okay now we're gonna do a healthy development process. make sense? okay, yeah? um, brainstorming. teams sit around a lot and brainstorm

and they come up with,i know a team at google came up with gamestorming,makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit. oh this is getting recorded isn't it? don't tell them i said that. brainstorming is this thingthat seems really creative. it's like, "hey, we're allgonna come up with ideas." but it's really oftentimes a form of groupthink. so what we try to do is get people to do

individual work you knoweven if i was working with the team, i was working with a team on a branding exercise the other day, and it's like if you normallydid a branding exercise one of the steps is like let'stalk with the company values. and a normal, i've seen lots of agencies even excellent agencies,do this kind of thing. and they're like, "okay,everybody let's talk "about values," and peoplestart shouting out things,

and someone's writing itdown on the white board. and immediately you see people gravitating towards ideas that were either expressed really eloquently, or really passionately, or that came from somebodywith a lot of power within the organization, right? and this happens inbrainstorming all the time. people will immediatelygravitate toward things. so in that valuesexercise what i do instead

is get people to, everybodyspend the next five minutes and write down all thevalues in the company that they see in their own company. now, choose the five most important ones, and then we put them all up on a board. and we've got 20 of them, and then, i ask them, "okay, everybodyspend a couple minutes "looking at those andchoosing the five from there "that you think are the best."

and then i'll go up and put dots next to the ones that people got votes on. and now we've got like this combination of everybody collaborating together but everybody using their own brains to make good decisions, andthat's much, much better than this like kind of faux collaboration that we get from sitting around in a room like spitballing together.

yeah i haven't done like a brainstorming session like four years now,it's really not that helpful. other things that people waste time on? - [woman] like user personas? - yes, i mean user personaswe don't do much of it. i think coming up withreally detailed user personas is like it's a pretty good waste of time. i think thinking aboutwho your customers are like especially understandingwho the actors are

who use your product and howthey interact with each other, are super important, butthis whole thing like tracy and she's like, works at a cafe. and she people do these personas, we do very little of this. i don't think it's veryvaluable and in fact it causes you to kind ofhave this tunnel vision, on tracy specifically ratherthan a broader group of people. i'm trying to think of what other things

people i wish designersspent less time on. working at the right levelof fidelity in a mock-up. i think designers lovemaking perfect buttons and lining things to grids perfectly. all these kinds ofthings, you know the craft of design, i think whenyou're in a prototyping mindset though, there's a good reason we prototype in a single day. it causes you to focus onthe things that really matter

and it's where things are on the screen, what things are on thescreen fundamentally, the general positioning of things, and most of all the text. designers underplay howimportant copywriting is. i think it's not somethingdefinitely having a copywriter on staff was wonderful, but i think designersshould push themselves to do copywriting i think any time i see

a designer putting loremipsum into something or just drawing lines ona mock-up, i think they're abdicating theirresponsibility as a designer. i think you should tryharder to write copy because it's hard, it's really hard. and if you when we run these studies, it's totally hilarious like the more you do these things the more you realize. we'll do three prototypesagainst each other

and like i'm a better visual designer than the other guys on my team, and like my mock ups look better. my prototype if we'redoing, we're just kind of dividing and conqueringand i'll just do one of the mock-ups, it might look better, it makes no differencein terms of winning. it's almost always the what you wrote and what you put on the screen at all.

so, yeah, i would really focus on writing? - [man] i'm interested inyour time as an early employee and also founding a company. i was wondering what doyou think about the design skill set does it translateto founding a company? what do you think aboutthe designer co-founder what kinds of skill setsdo you have to align with to make a good starting team? - so, i'm gonna say it depends,

but that's an annoying answer. i think designers needto be careful of having the hubris of thinking that just because you've got a designer on the founding team that somehow a company'sgonna magically be super successful, thereare lots of businesses where fundamentallylike your business model matters a lot more than whether or not you can design something well.

and like airbnb's an example for instance. they have a good designand that contributed to their success, theyfundamentally unlocked massive untapped capital in people's kind of unused rooms andapartments, you know? you can't design yourway out of not having a good business, sodesign's not this gloss. and there's also a lotof fucking hard parts of running a business thathave nothing to do with design.

and i think i've seen a bunch of designers who started companies andthey're really good at design and so they use design alot, hiring great talent, coming up with a goodcoming up with term sheets, coming up with a goodcap table these things are really important to thesuccess of your business, great business relationships,having great engineering. so things are alsoreally, really, important designers have to learna bunch of these things

in order to be great atdoing business stuff. so i would be i thinkdesigners can be excellent founders of things theybring great empathy towards customers, great perspective, especially things that areobviously consumer facing products i think those orwhere the user experience matters a great deal to thesuccess of the business. i think those companiesshould bring on a design co-founder, i'm very bullish on that.

but designers need tomake sure they're working on the right things andthat they care enough about the fundamental business. i think, yeah, so this if you don't mind me jumping into one ofthe questions you gave me. so one of the questions that was sent, was like, how do i think aboutproduct design as a term? unfortunately, in designas you guys have probably started noticing already designers create

all kinds of terms, you know interaction. i had some guy arguing with me online a few months ago about whether or not he's an information architect,an interaction designer, or an interaction architect. and i'm like, "oh god,you would not believe "how little i give a shit." but product design is this term that's in the digital world sothere's industrial design,

product design, means it's its own thing. i don't mean, i'm not talkingabout industrial design. but in digital designproduct design has become this kind of term for somebody who thinks really holistically about design, right? so the way i think ofit and they have nicely let me define this in thatinvision movie that they made, is that there's visualdesign at the surface, there's interaction design below that,

you know like what does it look like, are all the bits in the right place? there's user experience design which is how does this fit into everybody's lives? it's not just about the interface that we're building it'sabout what my customers are doing generally, andthen fundamentally i think any great product designer is thinking fundamentally about the business as well.

like, i know i can, ifyou give me the task i can make the right thing,but is it even the right task? and that's the thing ithink very few people are doing very well, thisis something i've been getting more and more interested in after working with so many startups. a few, a couple years ago, westarted investing in europe and one of my colleaguesand i, braden kowitz and i, went over to london and wemet with like 30 entrepreneurs

in a week and the conversation every time, we intentionally structured it this way. is the first two questions we'd ask, the first question was,when you think of design what do you think of? these are all very goodentrepreneurs, right? and they'd get nervous and they'd sit up and they'd do that thingwhere you put your arms across your chest or you lean back a bit,

because you're in a defensive posture. and we see this in user research a lot. so we're very cognizant of it. so they'd look defensiveand then the things they'd talk about were, weneed to have a great brand, that's really common in london. there's a deep history ofbrand design in london. they'd talk about we have tohave a great look and feel. so they'd talk about the surface.

and then they might talk aboutit has to be easy to use. so we need good usabilityor intuitive interface, is the phrase they use, andthat's as deep as they got into design, and whatyou notice with a lot of entrepreneurs isthey've heard that there's this pixie dust called design. and apple obviously hadit and were successful. airbnb talks about itand they were successful. and they've heard thesecompanies are building

design teams and it'sreally important to be successful is to have designers. they don't really know what it is, right? and that's just really common. and then, the next question we'd ask them was what keeps you up at night? and you'd see them visibly relax and then they'd talk about, nowwe're in their wheelhouse this business and they talkabout all these other things.

they talk about recruiting andretaining engineering talent. they talk about moving into new markets, especially moving to theunited states from britain. they talk about raising capital. so going out they'll raisea b round our a c round what's the investing environment like? how are they pitched to to vcs? and they talk about all thesethings that aren't design. and braden and i immediately afterwards

were like, "oh, really interesting. "okay let's talk about howdesign solves those problems." i think honestly very, very few designers, even design leaders, evenvery senior design leaders, very few designers think this way. designers go into the decisionmaking rooms in companies, they go into the c-suiteand they talk about fucking design all the time. they're like, "yeah, wereally need to make sure

"we've got a more consistent design. "we need to have a better, framework, "for our systems design. "we need to improve ourtypography and our marketing." they talk about all these things that are definitely in a designer'swheelhouse don't get me wrong designers should be doing these things, but designers need to morefrequently stop and listen to the concerns from everybody else,

everybody else in theirbusiness and figure out what things are stressing everyone out, and then go and help themsolve those problems. and it's usually aroundthese areas of uncertainty. so one of the ways i look at this is that there are ideas all over the company, they're coming from peoplein the leadership positions it's coming from engineers,they're coming from a lot of times from pms and a lot of the

friction within companies happens because when someone expresses an idea verbally, it's not even really an ideait's kind of malformed, right? and so when they describe it to you what you see listening tothem and what the person next to you see's listening to them, are actually fairlydifferent from each other. and so we're arguing around each other because we don't havea thing to talk about.

one of the great powers of design is that it can make something appear real, right? and so that kind of prototyping framework is that you can take thisidea that you just heard and go and mock it up and say, "okay now we're alltalking about this thing." and not only can we talk about it but we can go and test it, right? and so it's a veryeffective way for designers

to be fundamentallyimportant to a business. if you came to me as a ceo and said, "my biggest concern rightnow is hiring and retaining "engineering talent," myquestions are going to be "okay do we understand whatengineers perceive us as?" an engineer as we've grown our company now we're 80-100 people, we're recruiting up against google now, and allthese other largish startups in our area which meansthat we have a harder time

competing on, "hey, we'rethe scrappy startup." you go off and figureout okay when someone approaches us how arethey gauging us against kind of all the othercompanies in our marketplace? and then you can go out and say, look at system designstuff, like how are we actually making the approach to engineers? where are we finding engineers? how are we talking to them?

how does our recruiter bring them in? what does the interview process look like? is it efficient? are we asking the rightkinds of questions? are we pissing people off because we're kind of asking questionsthat are irrelevant? and then how are we closingcompared to our competitors? these are all things thatdesigners can work on you know it's systemsdesign, and then we can look

at stuff like our careerspage and our marketing stuff and look at how engineers perceive us when they come to those screens. you know do something like a design sprint against that bring infive potential engineers that we would considerhiring and have them talk through kind of how theyperceive us as a company. this is all design, but very few designers think that that's their challenge.

and so, i'm partly ranting about this because i want to encourage you guys to think about this ifyou go into the type of design where this is applicable. doing product design atcompanies i'd encourage you to start thinking in this mode. right, so it's about increasingthe levels of fidelity. so if somebody in a meetingcomes up with an idea, say an engineer is like,

"hey what if we did x with the product?" instead of keeping on talking about it i'll go back to my deskand either sketch it out on paper or i would, ifi could quickly do it, i would jump into sketch or something and mock it up in fairly high fidelity. then i go to the engineers desk and say, "hey, that thing you were talking about. "is this what you're talking about?"

now, i may not have got it right. that person, i probablymisunderstood some of it, but now we've got a thingwe can work on together. and so that engineer, she andi, would work on it together and come up with kind of closer, and then we'd kind of talk to other people in our group about it,especially the decision makers. and now maybe there arelike, "oh i don't know, "i've got too muchuncertainty around something,

"but what about this other thing?" well now i'm going tomock up both of them. and now i'm gonna go and do user research against both of them so wecan get out of our own heads instead of us evaluatingit go and actually get some data around it sowe can make a decision. does that make sense? because i think that alot of the times designers can be, the designers i know who have been

really effective withinorganizations are kind of that person who helpsbring everyone together. they're not necessarily the person who's making all the greatestideas in the world. but they're helping otherpeople foster their ideas within a group to makesure that those good ideas don't get left on the cutting room floor, and making sure thateverybody feels involved in the process in a way thatdraws on everyone's strengths.

so the first thing isdesigners should not be an independent group,designers in an ideal situation and i'm speaking very generally here, i think it depends on what typeof thing you're working on. a flat iron is very different from like a social networking startup. they might structure things differently. but speaking in very broad terms designers should do critique with each other,

get together as a group to make sure they're working cohesively. but day-to-day they should be sitting with their product teams, and so designers most frequently but wecommonly see in good startups, really functional startups,is that product engineering and design are a tripodof a product group. and they're all drawingfrom interacting with people like oncologists and researchers

and like analysts, sosomeone like flat iron, these kind of hardcore math people. but as you work on thecustomer facing product what you really wantto be doing is sitting with the engineers who are gonna make it, sitting with the pms whoare helping you decide and measure kind of whetheror not you're successful, and then the designersworking hand-in-hand with those groups on the work.

and usually the bestones have user research built-in as well, but userresearch is usually more of a cross functional setup. until you get really bigand then you usually have researchers embedded inteams like designers are. and copywriting is the same way, copywriting is by the timeyou get a full-time copywriter usually they start aslike an umbrella role and then later on become embedded in teams

as you get really big. it's a really broadswathes, but the idea of i was working with somedesigners when i was at digg and they were complaining that engineers because they're embedded in their teams they're like, "it's reallyannoying the engineers "keep looking over myshoulder and bugging me." and i'm like, "shut up,what's wrong with you? "this is like your real opportunity to get

"the engineers' feedbackon what you're doing, "and also to make them feelreally involved in the process. "like take off your fucking headphones "and have a conversation with them." it's a really nice benefitof being a designer is like you've got this big screen usually and someone can look over your shoulder and like see what's going on. i think great designerssee that as an opportunity

rather than as an annoyance. yeah, that's a great question. i think about this a lot. 'cause i'm in this role where i mean to be kind of open about it, i'm in this role wherei can kind of shape this to be, to do what i want, to what i think is most valuable and if this wasn't, i wasn't getting enough out of this job

i can go work in a lot of places. i have a lot of opportunities. i don't mean that arrogantly, i just mean realistically. and so, to me, the interestingthings in my career have been learning new things. it's not that much fun tokind of just do the same thing keep repeating it, soi got to work on some much larger brandingprojects than i'd ever done

while i was at gv, i'vedone some interior design, and i get to work on a wholebunch of weird challenges like oncology and stuff that i wasn't otherwise that familiar with. so that's really gratifying about my job, so i want to do that nomatter what i was doing. you know if gv closed up tomorrow, i'd go find something that'soutside my comfort zone that would make me feel uncomfortable.

i'm interested in thingswhere the dough isn't set yet. we've got some flour,we've got some water, we might have some yeast, but we're like not quite sure what we're making yet. that also i get a lot of in this job. a lot of the times companies aren't sure what they're doing andhelping them shape that is really interesting, especiallythe early stage companies. you can fundamentallyalter their trajectory.

i always found that really gratifying. and then doing missiondriven work is the other big thing that motivates me and so getting to work on cancerresearch, getting to work on some really ambitious shit. i got to work withcalico a couple years ago which is like art levinson,who's the chairman of apple, and used to run genentech. google invested a hugeamount of money into him

to start a company andpursue human longevity. i got to work on thata bit, some crazy shit. it's really epic. i mean they're trying tofundamentally alter human genetics. yeah those are the kindsof things that motivate me. if i was working on new stuff. and there are some people,it's kind of interesting, actually i have some friendswho are really interested in design management for instance.

i'm much less interestedin going to a company and running a 100 person design team, than i am in joining, ifgv shut down shop tomorrow i would be interested in going to like stanford's biomedicine program and finding a couple people to workon something fucking epic than go and help them buildit from the ground up. that's just definitely,that's very personal to me what i'm into.

one more question, yeah? definitely a generalist,a proud generalist. it's really interesting, i've heard, sorry do you have a follow-up to that? - [man] i was just gonna be like what is your favorite type of design? - oh, just putting it all together. but it's interesting italk to a lot of students and i have heard ashocking number of students

whose profs have told them like, "oh don't be a jack of all trades, "you'll master of none," kind of thing. fuck that shit. i mean if what you want to do is focused on one type of designand go really deep on it knock yourself out everybodyshould find their own path. i'm speaking very specifically to me. but i do a bunch of productdesign, some mobile design,

some visual design, you knowi can design icons and logos huge range of stuff, it's worked out okay. it's satisfied my curiosity. i think there is something,especially earlier in your career, to be kind of t-shaped. you know go deep in one areabut have a broad set of skills. i think that's generally okay advice. there's nothing wrong withbeing a generalist either. some of the designers i knowwho've been really successful

like supa, sorry adammikayla or wilson miner. great writing, greatcode, great visual design, strong product design, knock yourself out. i'm always shocked how many people talk down about generalists. i don't get it. even one of my colleagues,i was talking to him, he was like, "oh i don't knowi'm not a visual designer, "you should just do that thing."

and i was like looking at himand i literally said to him i was like, "dude you'llnever be a visual designer "if you don't do visual design." like it just sucks to beable to look at something and be like, "oh that's not me." he's now quite a good visual designer, it's only two years later,that's fucking great. now he's much moredangerous when he's doing working with an early stage company

because he can do abroader spectrum of stuff. i see all these designersthey come to a google or a facebook or somethingand one of the risks of going to a big company,earlier in your career, not that again, follow your own path. but one of the risks ofgoing to a big company is that design is reallybalkanized to big companies. you've got on every project you've got a visual designer, aninteraction designer,

and a front-end developer,and then your real development team, and a researcher. and you're really notgonna learn to do research, you're not gonna learnto make your own icons, you're not gonna learn,you'll never make a brand. if you come work at google,good luck ever making a brand. unless you're reallysenior, that's punted over to a different team thatdoes that kind of thing. one of the benefits ofworking at small companies

and being scrappy is towork on a whole bunch of these things and learn how they work and i know i said thisa few times tonight, but the best way tolearn anything in design is by doing more of it. one of my colleagues his analogy is like design's like playing the piano. you can read the theory,you can talk to experts, great pianists, you can takeclasses and go and listen

to great pianists playing. the best way to become a great pianist is to play a lot, and ideallyhave someone around you who can tell you whenyou sound like shit, so. - [man] great. - anyway, thanks so much for having me.