Dive Club 🤿

Ben Blumenrose was one of the earliest designers at Facebook and has spent the last 12 years as a co-founder and Managing Partner of Designer Fund . That’s allowed him to invest in many of the design founders that you’ve heard from on this shown (like Jorn from Framer or Colin from Visual Electric ). So the goal of this conversation is to tap into Ben’s perspective as a designer turned investor. T...

Imagine leading the design of an AI product that skyrockets to a billion+ dollar valuation in under two years… That’s the story of Perplexity and today we get to hear from their founding designer and current Head of Design, Henry Modisett . Some of the highlights from this conversation: What it takes to thrive as a founding designer Why Henry likes hiring designers who can code The challenges of d...

This week's episode is with Ryan Scott who was an early designer at Doordash and then spent years as a design lead at Airbnb. Nowadays Ryan teaches hundreds of designers ranging from seniors to VPs how to make a bigger impact at your company. This episode is jam-packed with insights about: What it’s like presenting at Airbnb CRIT Ways to unlock your credibility as a designer How to mitigate risk w...

Investing in my personal brand has been the best investment I’ve ever made in my career. So I wanted to find the perfect designer to give a personal branding masterclass and I think it’s Oliur . He’s built a massive audience across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. and he shares his hard-earned knowledge in this episode: Oliur’s keys to growing on social media Different ways to create leverage in...

This week’s episode is with Maheen Sohail who is a senior staff designer working on generative at Meta. She joined as one of the earliest designers on both the VR and AI teams, so a big part of this discussion is about navigating ambiguity when there’s no clear playbook to follow. We go deep into: New types of interface patterns for AI The unique ways she thinks about prototyping Ethical considera...

After 8 years designing at Meta, George Kedenburg III pulled a 180 and joined Humane as a design lead. So this conversation is a deep dive into designing AI products and how the role of product designer evolves in an AI-native company: How to become a creative problem solver How George navigates ambiguity at Humane Why there’s no such thing as an edge case with AI What George learned while using A...

Visual Electric has quickly become my go-to product for image generation and in this week’s episode we get to learn from the founder and designer, Colin Dunn . The whole discussion is an excellent look at the design founder journey as well as a deep dive into AI-native creative tools. We get into the weeds about: Visual Electric’s big bet to take on Canva The hidden challenges with designing AI pr...

The Arc browser is one of the best products I’ve downloaded in the last few years which is why I’m so excited about this interview with their founding designer, Nate Parrott . This conversation, we get an inside look at what makes design at the Browser Company so unique. We discuss: How Nate went from engineer at Snap to the Browser Co. Why design at Arc prioritizes fingerprints > consistency H...

This week’s episode is with Dan LaCivita who is a co-founder of Play —a new way to design mobile apps using native iOS materials. As soon as I saw this app clip I knew it was a big deal and that I had to interview him to learn more. So in this conversation we go deep into: How to unlock the skill of interaction design What Apple’s sandbox unlocks for designers Why they decided to launch Play as a...

Gavin Nelson is currently designing the Linear mobile app in addition to the best app icons on the internet. So this episode is a deep dive into prototyping and interaction design: Gavin’s journey learning SwiftUI How Gavin got into designing app icons How to design physics-based interactions What it’s like designing for power users at Linear Why interaction design is so important for mobile apps...

If you watched last week’s episode , then you heard Jordan Singer say how visual search was actually the “killer feature” (not generative AI). What’s interesting is that this feature was actually a mid-project pivot . So in this episode we get the full behind-the-scenes of visual search from design engineer Vincent van der Meulen : Why they decided to pivot How Vincent went cowboy mode A look at t...

Live from Config, this episode with Jordan Singer follows his journey from the Diagram acquisition all the way to Figma’s 2024 AI release. We go deep into: What didn’t ship at Config and why How they navigated the early idea maze How the role of designer will be impacted by AI What it will be like designing dynamic interfaces What makes Jordan’s new role at Figma so unique Why renaming layers was...

This week’s episode is with Kathy Zheng who is currently the Head of design at a Web3 protocol called Optimism . But before that she was the first designer at Patreon and went on to spend over 6 years at Github. So the goal of this conversation is to look at how Kathy grew as a designer while at Github and identify the specific milestones on her journey to reaching senior and eventually staff desi...

When you think about storytelling in design... Alex Cornell is often the person that comes to mind. And that's a big reason why he's one of the most requested guests on the show. So this episode is a deep dive into the finer details of communication. We talk about: The story behind his startup Cocoon How Alex leverages his background in video Alex’s precision and obsession with language Why Alex l...

This week’s episode with Maggie Appleton is a deep dive into designing for AI products and LLMs. Maggie shares about her experience as the first designer at Elicit (an AI assistant for research papers) and all of the unique challenges surrounding helping users interface with LLMs. We also go deep into: How Maggie’s grown as a frontend developer Why Maggie feels like she’s in a short-run limbo Stra...

Remember how Michael Wandelmeier told us Metalab hired a storytelling coach ? Well that coach is Ian Wharton. He’s an Apple Design Award winner, CEO of Aide Health, and he teaches storytelling techniques to teams like Dyson, BBC, Huge, etc. So this episode breaks down the key storytelling concepts that he shares in his course Sell the Idea . We talk about the importance of the inciting incident, h...

~6 months ago Amy Lima was laid off and has been preparing for this episode ever since. So in this interview she gives us an inside look at her process for landing a dream role at Duolingo. If you’re looking for your next role then this conversation is quite the playbook. She has the job hunt process down to a science. Some topics covered: Avoiding burnout amidst the chaos How Amy negotiated her D...

Julius Tarng is the ultimate generalist designer. He started the design tools team at Facebook where he made a massive impact on products like Origami. He then freelanced as a design engineer for companies like Felt, Anthropic, and even prototyped some of the early AI features for the Arc browser. Now he’s in his first-ever engineering role at Linear. So this conversation is a deep dive into what...

When it comes to design founder stories, Raphael Schaad ’s is one of the best. So this episode is the first-ever telling of how Raphael designed and built Cron (which became Notion Calendar). We talk about: Sketching on paper vs. sketching in code Why shipping quality software is like camping How Raphael identified the MVP of the problem What it was like building Cron in YC during COVID Why you sh...

Alex Schleifer was the long-time Chief Design Officer at Airbnb where he grew the team from ~35 to over 600 people. So this conversation is an inside look at what makes design at Airbnb so special. We discuss: How to create a culture of decisiveness Why great design leaders are like chefs How to succeed in executive CRITs at Airbnb How designers should prepare for an AI future What it means to ope...

Noam Segal has led research at companies like Meta, Airbnb, Wealthfront, Twitter, and most recently Upwork. He also teaches the #1 user research course on Maven . So this episode is a masterclass in user research. We discuss: How to conduct better interviews The keys to an effective research plan How to become a masterful research storyteller How AI is creating a new wave of research tools When to...

Helen Tran was an early designer at Shopify and is now leading product design at AngelList. But in between those two roles she also ran her own startup for three years. So the goal of this conversation is to figure out how that period of time impacted her design practice so we can all learn how to design with a founder’s mindset. In this episode we discuss: - How Helen is approaching design leader...

Today we're talking with designer and entrepreneur, Hunter Hammonds, who has grown 5 different agencies to millions in revenue in less than a year. So in this episode we walk through the different stages of building an independent design business—starting from positioning yourself as a solopreneur all the way to scaling operations to 7 figures. We get into the weeds about: - Hunter’s framework for...

Ready for a masterclass in positioning? Nick Pattison has been working for himself for well over 10 years... but recently he's laser-focused on running 1-week brand sprints (and it's working). So this episode is a deep dive into his new freelance playbook: - The automations that allow him to focus on sales and creative direction - Lessons learned from running 25+ brand sprints at $15k each - How N...

This episode is the ultimate design founder story. Dennis shares all of the ups and downs along his journey to build Amie—a new productivity tool that captures your emails, calendar, and to-dos in a single beautiful product. Some of the highlights: - Where Dennis draws inspiration - The traits Dennis looked for in early hires - What Dennis looks for in design candidates - The backstory behind Amie...