Full Stack Whatever

Geoff is a designer, design leader and was one of the founders and partners at Teehan+Lax. We talked about his early career, got a glimpse into the founding of Teehan+Lax, and the rationale behind entertaining an acquisition. We spoke about design leadership and the lessons he learned while leading various teams at Facebook, and we sprinkled in many small tangents.

For over a decade, Bryn and Sarah have been entrepreneurs and in creative or operating roles. However, the place where they truly feel at home is around food and building community. In this conversation we talk about their paths, and we get a candid, personal account of the challenges they’ve faced. We end by learning more about how things are going with their latest endeavor: Cult Flav.

Michelle and Madelin have enjoyed a long creative friendship. They overlapped at various different companies and collaborated on an equal amount of creative ventures. In this conversation, we talked about their creative connection, we shared our thoughts on strong collaborative relationships and remote work, and we got to hear some interesting stories from their times at Square, Facebook and Dropb...

Cameron is the founder and CEO of Fictive Kin, and co-creator of Brooklyn Beta and Kinference. Cameron has had a significant impact on a pocket of the technology and design industry. We talked about the state of technology, the state of design within those technology businesses, and many more other things.

Maya is a digital product designer and design leader. She is currently the VP of Design at Riverside. We discussed her career path and dug into the lessons she learned from her time at Facebook and Twitter. We spoke about her attraction to the audio medium and how it is to work remotely across ten timezones.

Josh is a digital product designer and prototyper, currently working at Humane. We talked about a ton of things. We went in depth about his extended periods of time spent at Apple and Instagram. Weaved into this, he shared how he thinks about prototyping, and how he draws the relationship between his acting education and design.

Hans Peter is a serial entrepreneur, technologist and photographer. Most recently, he led Everyday Robots at Alphabet. We talked about the experiences he gained from the companies he founded, his time at Nokia during the rise of the iPhone, and his reflections on leading robotics at Alphabet. Towards the end of our conversation, we talked about our mutual love for photography and got a little nerd...

Kim is a designer and leader with a very colorful track record including past roles at well-known companies like The New York Times, Etsy, and Dropbox. She is currently part of the Experience Design leadership team at Netflix. We covered a lot of topics, including burn-out, management styles, values alignment with your team and your employer, our shared thoughts on research, as well as her deep in...

Aaron is one of those great individuals who is both a great designer, as well as a fabulous leader. He recently joined eBay as their VP of Design, where he continues his quest to bring re-commerce to the masses. We talked about his path into design, from his days in service design to realizing he wanted to go in-house, and eventually ending up having a long stint at Facebook, where he most notably...

Didier studied to be an economist before making a pivot into design. Since then, he has been a design lead at Flipboard and led a large part of the Uber design team. Most recently, he co-founded a fintech company in Paris called Bloks. We spoke about the genesis of his career path and the big lessons that he’s learned along the way. Some of the notable topics we dug in to were: working on mobile a...

Mia Blume is an entrepreneur, design leader, and leadership coach. She is the founder and CEO of learning & development company DesignDept, and the founder and host of the design leadership conference Within. We discussed her career and how she went from service design to in-house to starting her companies. We spoke about how she guides and supports design leaders through her workshops and coachin...

Jessica is a lettering artist and author who has created custom lettering artwork for established brands, films, classic books, postage stamps, and so much more. She’s traveled the world speaking at creative conferences and colleges and has befriended innumerable internet strangers while navigating the depths of social media. Most recently, she wrote and illustrated her latest children’s book: “Wh...

Michael is an entrepreneur, investor, and product person. He is currently the co-founder and CEO at Taika, making beverages that fuel creativity. He was Facebook's first mobile product hire and subsequently led their mobile product development and strategy—including the company's pivot to mobile—for more than five years. We talked about his path from South Africa to the US, his career-defining rol...

Matthew is a designer, entrepreneur and a co-founder of Letterboxd, a social media site for film discussion and discovery. We talked about his path, how he bootstrapped and incubated Letterboxd, and how he has approached leading the company, and evolving the product, in the decade-plus that it has been around.

I’m excited to bring you a conversation with Haraldur Thorleifsson, or Halli, for short. I met up with Halli at Kinference in Brooklyn, and he was gracious enough to give me some of his time. We recorded this in the venue during the conference happy hour, so please bear with us as there’s going to be a lot of noise. Halli is an entrepreneur, creative design leader, and musician from Reykjavik, Ice...

Hazel is a writer and designer who works on design systems and product architecture. Right now, she’s building the design systems practice at Duolingo. She was the founding member of Instagram’s first content design team, and later, their first design systems team. Our conversation covers where her career started, and how she found her passion in a life-defining role starting Instagram’s design sy...

Andrea is a designer, leader, and executive coach working with unconventional leaders and teams. She has a compelling story about her winding career, from various startup roles, to finding her way to Interaction Design and executive leadership. Throughout our conversation we reflect on the industry, and the relationship between design and coaching.

Dan is a designer, creative director and photographer based in London. He has had a fascinating story so far, from the early days of the world wide web, to being part of the early blogging scene, to becoming a prolific photographer. We talked about his path towards design and the creative field, how he found his way onto the internet, and how he always gravitates towards writing and teaching as a...

Everett is a multi-talented creative who is currently on the publishing team at Stripe as the executive producer of films and brand content for Stripe Press and Works in Progress. We talked about his path from East LA to the Bay Area and spoke about some of our shared formative experiences from reflections on our time at Facebook in the early 2010s. We dug into his perspectives as a generalist vs....

Linda is a designer, creative director, and as her website says: 'Your friend in design.' Her story starts in small-town Georgia, and since she has had an illustrious career, from being a designer at companies like Mailchimp and Dropbox, to her time as an Art Director at UENO, and most recently leadership roles at Help Scout and Mux. Linda shared some of her most meaningful lessons, and how they h...

Vika is a designer and co-founder of Super. In our conversation, we discussed the challenges and lessons from her early career and some of the values and wisdom she likes to share with others now. Most notably, we covered her experience as one of the foundational Product Designers in Facebook's New York office and how she and her co-founder Lindsay approach building, growing, and leading Super.

Pete is a software engineer, startup founder, and one of the creators of React. We talked through his career, from Facebook, to Instagram, to starting his company Smyte, to their acquisition by Twitter, and now his new role at Elementl. You'll find a ton of never previously shared stories and tidbits in this one.

Michelle is a design leader who currently leads Airbnb’s Trust & Safety, Tooling, and Support design teams and one of my absolute favourite humans. In our episode, we talked about how she found her way into the field of design, some of the important people and moments on her path, her fascination with human connection, and how she coaches herself and others.

Rasmus is a designer, an engineer and a person who expresses their creativity through software. He was on the founding team at Spotify, created the typeface Inter, and had stints at well known companies like Facebook, Dropbox and Figma. We talked about a plethora of things and went on a few tangents, ranging from stories about his career, the differences between building software now versus the pa...

Dan is a husband, dad, teacher, creative director, designer, founder, and entrepreneur from Philadelphia. During the start of his career, Dan found himself amongst the people at the forefront of the web standards movement. In our conversation we talked about his career, the people who influenced him, the various eras of his design firm SuperFriendly, and his personal mission to create better oppor...