Metamuse

By Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghanTechnology

Metamuse episodes

January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think that the lack of interoperability or
standardization between digital tools today really it means that all
work created within a tool is confined to that tool, and to me that
seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the
collaborative aspect of creativity.
00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about
Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here
with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Molly Milky.
00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey there.
00:00:45 - Speaker 2: And how was your spring break, Molly?
00:00:47 - Speaker 1: It’s pretty good, not long enough, but it was a
lovely little escape in Berkeley, and I worked on a final project for my
producing class, which was a pitch on a feature film on the Whole Earth
Catalog, which didn’t go over as well as I had hoped, but I’m still
fingers crossed that it’ll become something.
00:01:10 - Speaker 2: And the whole Earth Catalog here being the Stewart
brand work from what was the 70s or 80s.
00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Confirmed, yes, it was basically a biopic on him
and the era of the whole Earth Catalog, and it was very dramatic.
00:01:23 - Speaker 2: Oh, I love that. First of all, I just love
biopics. I’m a big fan of like abstract. Act on Netflix or that sort of
like kind of maker documentary, but when you throw in like the weird
history, I feel like the whole Earth that catalog was sort of, I don’t
know, psychedelic culture meets rebel computing or something like that.
00:01:41 - Speaker 1: 100% agree, yes. In a very interesting way that I
think would translate really well to film, but we’ll see.
00:01:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, let me know where I can
sign up to screen that I guess.
00:01:53 - Speaker 1: Amazing, yes, you’ll be the first to know.
00:01:55 - Speaker 3: Wasn’t there actually another film about Stewart
Brand in general that came out recently?
00:02:00 - Speaker 1: Yep, Stripe is on it. They made a documentary
that’s coming out very soon, actually, I think, and it’s as part of
the SF Film Festival currently, and it was more of like looking at his
whole life and his impact legacy and also the more recent like
environmental stuff he’s been doing, which is much more comprehensive
and honestly a much better idea. But I started this project my freshman
year, so I’m pretty committed at this point.
00:02:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it just shows that
there’s a lot of interest in his work.
00:02:30 - Speaker 1: It’s really interesting, like, the deeper you
dig, the more you find, and the more like of a web you discover,
especially on Wikipedia, in the best way, so.
00:02:39 - Speaker 2: You seem to enjoy some unearthing the history of
weird characters here, your collection of computing history, folks.
I’ll link that in the show notes here as well. But before we get on to
that, I think the folks would love to hear your background. You’re
quite early in your career and yet already have a very impressive CV
here. You’ve worked at Figma, you’re now at Notion, and you just
finished a thesis at UCLA, so I think we all just want to know. What’s
your productivity hack? How can we all be as uh as productive as you so
early on?
00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Oh God, that’s not. First of all, my little
background blurb. My name is Molly. I’m currently a student at UCLA. I
studied digital media, and I’m in my last year. I only have a couple
more weeks left, which I’m very excited about.
00:03:26 - Speaker 2: Wow, congratulations.
00:03:27 - Speaker 1: I know, so close, yet so far.
00:03:31 - Speaker 2: The senioritis kicked in already?
00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Oh man, yes, it has been very, very present in my
life ever since like September of last year. Every single week is like
counting down the days, but we’re getting there.
And I’m currently designing a notion, and I will be returning to Sigma
at the end of the year.
And I come from more of a background in visual design and storytelling,
specifically filmmaking, and I got my start leading design at a startup
in the Bay Area while I was transferring schools, and through that I
found product design specifically, and I found that it was like this
very unique fusion of the creative and the analytical at the same time,
that just really clicked for me.
And ever since then I basically was just exploring kind of different
industries and company sizes and problem spaces more broadly, and
through that and working at startups and Sigma and most recently notion,
I found that creative tools were what I was the most like just
completely pulled towards and really wanted to just dig deeper and
explore what impact they could have.
I think that there’s something about making something that enables
other people to make other things that is just like incredibly
gratifying for me in a way that no other product design projects really
touch.
And I think more broadly, I’m really interested in the combined power
of like design and tech to foster creativity and community across the
board, and that was definitely like the inspiration behind this thesis
and also like a through line to just things that interest me across the
board and in terms of like doing school and work at the same time, I
think it’s really just about The space that the pandemic has provided
for free time, sadly, I definitely have profited.
00:05:30 - Speaker 2: Uh, so that’s your productivity hack is be doing
this all during a massive lockdown that prevents other kinds of fun
things that.
00:05:38 - Speaker 1: Exactly, it’s the best one. I highly recommend.
No, it’s kind of the worst, and I feel honestly a little bit guilty to
have like done so well during such a terrible time, but then at the same
time, I’m very grateful. So there we have it.
00:05:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of that hits on things that speak very
much to me, and I think others that I feel like are in our field,
however you want to define that, they’re making tools to help others
create, which I think is in many ways a harder or more interesting
product design problem.
It’s one that maybe historically has not been seen as very sexy when
you think of, I don’t know, productivity tools, whether it’s a word
processor or a video editing tool or something like that. They don’t
have the same kind of sleek attention to detail that often more consumer
products do.
Maybe that’s starting to change now and at least I hope a little bit
this concept of a tools for thought field which we talked about with all
the way back in our podcast episode with Andy Matuschek about kind of
transforming. From the stodgy idea of, I don’t know, word processors
have been the same for 25 years and very utilitarian and just the word
design doesn’t get associated with them. Maybe that’s starting to
change now, which I’m very excited about.
00:06:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely agree. And also it’s
interesting because I think I’m young enough to have grown up with
those tools and like been in Photoshop from a very young age, and
there’s something. Definitely about them that is just so intimidating
and so difficult to comprehend from somebody who is not like acclimated
to the environment and doesn’t understand the principles that they
operate on, and I think that that’s slowly changing, but it’s
definitely like, it’s still happening, we’re still figuring out the
best way to do it cause it is complicated, and they’re offering a lot
of different things in the same place.
00:07:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one thing about computing in general and
creative tools in particular is they’re just so new on a relative time
scale. We’re still figuring it all out. There’s some established
practices, but when you compare it to a lot of other fields where I
don’t know if you’re a woodworker, the best tools for doing
woodworking have been slowly refined over the course of hundreds of
years, and here in computing we’re still kind of just banging two rocks
together to figure out how to make things, so.
00:07:52 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, we’re definitely still figuring
things out.
00:07:56 - Speaker 2: Have you found there’s any particular, I don’t
know, skills or approaches that came from this kind of film visual
design background that you talked about that translate well and give you
unique insights that maybe some of your colleagues don’t have doing
digital product design?
00:08:10 - Speaker 1: Hm, that’s an interesting question. I mean,
inherently audio and video software is.
Incredibly hard to understand, and I think that it takes a preexisting
like knowledge and investment and really being able to go into these
tools that are just like an incredibly blank slate, and they offer so
much possibility, but where it is is like up to you to really figure out
and even understand what you’re looking for.
And so I think Having that background in feeling comfortable just
tackling these like interfaces that are very unfriendly, honestly, it
does help, and I think it also helps me to understand a lot of the
principles that some of the other creative tools are just beginning to
adopt, and there’s a lot of like efficiency and abstraction work that
has been developed and cultivated in Video and audio tools that is just
beginning to kind of pop up its head in just more simple, more like
consumer everyday creative tools.
And I also think that fundamentally having a background in like video is
also just like a Background in storytelling, which is applicable
everywhere, and I think it’s becoming even more applicable in tools
like design tools and writing tools and being able to help foster those
stories and also to kind of weave in the story of the tool is kind of an
underrated thing. And it’s not the primary concern, but it definitely
is a piece of the broader puzzle of getting people to feel comfortable
enough to create in the tools. So there’s something interesting there,
but it’s definitely still in its nascent form.
00:09:52 - Speaker 3: Molly, it’s interesting that you mentioned
growing up with complex tools like Photoshop and that being a help in
using other tools in the future.
I didn’t grow up on Photoshop, I grew up on Kipics. I remember when I
first tried to learn programming, the tools were so foreign and
unapproachable that I almost completely bounced off the field.
It was like VI, which is an incredible maze and like all the Java server
side stuff. It was just completely wild. And it was only because of Ruby
on Rails that I found something that I could basically get working and
running end to end. And once you go through it a few times, you kind of
calibrate on like how terrible things should be when you’re first
learning something. But I do think a lot of people just bounce off these
complex Pro Tools for a reason like that.
00:10:32 - Speaker 1: 100%. I feel very lucky to have become comfortable
in them at a very young age, and that was through like pirating
Photoshop and getting gifted a Wacom tablet and just really starting by
making really, really rudimentary like digital art and things like
that.
But it definitely was like the type of thing that I would try to teach
my friends and things like that and kind of bring it into other areas,
and it was just not adopted.
It was like my understanding and knowledge of the tool was something
that I definitely took for granted for a very long time.
And it definitely has made me think differently too about creative tools
across the board of like, wow, if you really invest in like getting
people in these tools at a young age and really acclimated and
understanding how they work, like there’s a lot of potential there, but
it’s not scalable. So like there has to be other approaches other than
that, so interesting problem that we’re only beginning to run up into.
00:11:31 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is computers and creativity,
which is not at all coincidentally, the name of your thesis which you
published recently, and of course I’ll link that in the show notes
here, and I recommend everyone go read it. Not only is it great content,
but a beautiful presentation that really takes good advantage of sort of
the web as an article format. So naturally folks can go read it, but
maybe for those that haven’t yet, just to prime the discussion here,
maybe you want to give us a brief summary of its contents.
00:12:01 - Speaker 1: Most definitely, yeah, so my thesis is really
about how can digital creative tools best augment human creativity and
collaboration.
And it’s really looking at the potential of creative tools as
co-creators with human beings and examining kind of returning to the
original vision of creative tools and how we can extract some of the
things that were realized and some of them that weren’t and kind of
analyze that for the present of creative tools and to kind of
contextualize that with an observation, from my vantage point, I really
think that the power of tools lies in their ability to Amplify human
action or thought versus the power of human beings is really about our
ability to think creatively. And so if that’s true, then why do
computers often ask us to act as almost execution machines ourselves to
create something when that’s like very uniquely the computer’s strong
suit. So the paper delves into a lot of different areas and kind of the
history and analyzing the present, but The main point here and like the
TLDR that I kind of reach is that to foster optimal human innovation,
digital creative tools really need to be interoperable or basically talk
to each other. They need to be moldable or customizable to different
phases of the creative process. They need to be efficient abstracted,
which is similar to moldable. They basically just need to Accommodate
more or less complexity at different stages, and lastly, they just need
to be community driven so that people can be inspired and get help when
they’re creating. So that is the very abbreviated version of my very
long blog post, but I’d love to dig deeper into all of that.
00:13:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, all of that resonates very much with stuff
we’d love to talk about here and things Mark and I spent a lot of time
talking about.
Yeah, I guess maybe to dig in a little bit on, for example, that first
section where you look back at what you called the original vision or or
sort of the history.
And folks who’ve been banging around in the tool space for some time
will certainly recognize a lot of this, Engelbart and K and Hypercard
and Flash, and Dynabook and so on, but I think it’s one of the nicer
collections of summarizing all that, that isn’t, I don’t know, a super
long book, so it’s a nice way to get up to speed on that. Now, it is
interesting with Sort of look at this history, which I think is often
presented as kind of yeah, there was these amazing visionaries who saw
the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision
way back in what seems like just the Stone Ages to us, the 1960s, the
1970s, and then in some ways we lost our way and we ended up with, I
don’t know, social media and Kind of lock down appliance like
smartphones and in fact there’s this glorious world of I don’t know,
small talk and dying a book and mother of all demos style stuff that we
still need to build or we haven’t built or something like that. Do you
see it as like that’s an unfulfilled vision or the flip side could be,
OK, well, they had some cool ideas, some of those worked out, practiced,
some of them didn’t. The reason. We don’t have everything there is
that maybe some of it wasn’t practical, and I’m never fully sure how
to think about the kind of lionization that we do some of these past
figures.
00:15:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel the same way.
I think that there’s a lot of tension and just basically more analysis
that needs to be done there.
I think that it’s very easy to put these people on a pedestal and just
say, wow, look at this incredible vision that they outlined, and we do
that, and I think that they do present some really compelling ideas and
their way of framing computers as being a tool to almost augment human
intelligence is something that I particularly am pretty compelled by,
but obviously a lot of their ideas did fail and there’s reasons for
that. Um, and I also think that they were operating in an environment
that was largely kind of independent from the actual business
environment and like the technology sector as we see it today. So, like,
will those ideas actually thrive in reality and especially in the
consumer preferences and like relationship we have with tech today.
Maybe not, but I think that they Still present some really interesting
kind of principles and ways of looking at computers that we can
definitely take some inspiration from. And I also think that like we
rely on a lot of the principles that they established. And I think it’s
just really important to like recognize that and kind of piece apart
what we took and what we didn’t, and maybe what we can take more of or
what we should reconsider. I just think that fundamentally This is great
of history, especially in a field like tech, which is kind of in some
ways pretty disconnected from its own history. And there’s almost kind
of like a pride in that of moving so quickly that we don’t even look to
the past.
00:17:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, or I’d almost listed as a sort of willful
disregard of history because I think there’s the classic, I don’t
know, why combinator or startup founder.
Out of school, it’s actually their naivety that allows them to
reinvent, you know, they’re not dragged down by the legacy baggage of
how we do things today. They can just think about it in kind of a green
field way and dream up a new idea and maybe technology has changed
enough that there’s new parameters and they can really do something
new, but that comes at the expense of, well, actual naivete and
reinventing everything. And not using scholarship of the past to learn
what’s worked and what hasn’t in order to kind of stand on the
shoulders of giants or build the way that any other field would.
Of course, you learn from the past and then you use that to inform what
you should do going forward into the future. And yeah, the young naive
startup founder or other types that we hold up as our role models
sometimes in technology are not into scholarship of the past, let’s
say.
00:18:11 - Speaker 1: Very well put. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I’m
very curious though to hear what both of you think of, as you put it
like the lionization of Engelbart and Kay and all of those people, cause
it seems to be a pretty disputed topic.
00:18:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this opens a quite an interesting door for
me. My sense is that a lot of people look at what these early pioneers
did, and intuitively they feel like that is good, it should have
succeeded. Why don’t we have this? They had it 50 years ago, what’s
going on? And at the same time, the current reality, like you were
saying, is not exactly that. And I think it’s really important to
understand why that is, and I think you were alluding to what’s
happening where a lot of this study and analysis has been at the level
of the tools.
So it’s like what’s on the screen, how do you program it? What’s the
user interface even, but there’s an entire complex system around how
software is developed and used.
And like you were saying, I think the reason that the vision for the
software and the reality of the software don’t line up is because we
haven’t understood or Accounted for how that ecosystem works.
So sometimes I call this the political economy of software development.
There’s weird path dependence, there’s economic incentives. You got to
understand all of that if you are going to understand how we came to
where we are now. And on the flip side, if you want to predict and guide
the future in that direction, you need to become a sort of political
economist of software and get in not only the interfaces in the code,
but also the funding and the incentives and legal stuff and all that.
00:19:39 - Speaker 1: Hm, yeah, that’s very well put too. I definitely
agree. I think there’s so much complexity and also just like context
that’s missing from so many of the analysis of these past tools, and
they’re very like independent floating ideas versus actually tangible
grounded concepts that could be turned into something real.
00:19:58 - Speaker 2: I think a lot of what you both said to me kind of
just describes that these folks were visionaries in the sense of also
being sort of ivory tower academics or whether or not they were an
academic, they were purposefully somewhat disconnected from, for
example, commercial realities and that is part of what allowed them to
have big dreams.
And those dreams are still inspiring to this day, but then if those
dreams are to become reality, at some point they do have to be connected
to the real world, and this is a huge problem in research generally,
which is there’s a technology transfer, how does something go from the
lab or From that more idea space that science excels at into something
practical that you can use and there isn’t a good path.
This is something that the I can switch research lab where Mark and I
are both participants is trying to improve upon, but yeah, it’s a
really hard problem because a lot of times the same people, it’s a very
different kind of person that can have the big dreams versus that can
kind of make it into reality.
And when you think of one of the most famous examples, Xerox Park, and
some of the ideas they had there, and Steve Jobs basically got a glimpse
of it. He was a guy that was good at actualizing things. He got a
glimpse of it and then basically stole it and then went and made a
practical thing. And of course, often the visionaries feel, no, you left
out important parts, but leaving out parts is actually part of how you
make something come to reality.
So I don’t want to dismiss these historic folks as The academics that
don’t know how to bring their ideas to reality.
In many cases they did make great working software or even hardware that
in some cases went on to turn into underpinnings of tools we have today,
right? Small talk turned into Objective C and that, you know, fed into
Ruby and. SWF and other languages that, for example, we use heavily on
the Muse team, you know, these are very much things that are in the real
world. But maybe there is an acknowledgement that the big dreams aren’t
enough, you need to do something to connect it to reality. Yeah.
00:21:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I also think there are two separate axes
here.
So there’s the axis of What are you looking at? So it could be pure
software, or it could be called the software ecosystem, and then
there’s the axis of visionary and idealist versus in the weeds
pragmatist.
And I think in our discussion that we might have been kind of conflating
those two things, but in fact, I think you can have, and I think we need
more visionary idealists on the political economy side of software.
Probably the closest thing we’ve seen to that is the original free
software movement and that obviously got some traction and made some
progress, but I think we need to re-date that for the world of cloud and
mobile, where the original free software vision basically broke down, I
would say.
Just as an aside, this is one of my favorite creativity techniques where
you identify the axes, you know, the rows and the columns of the
spreadsheet, and you label each row in each column, and you see often
you know what the entries in certain of those boxes are, but you can
perhaps intuit that one of the boxes hasn’t been filled. yet or given a
name or explored and just by sort of drawing the map like that, you can
identify new quadrants. There’s a cool research paper that I read on
this about data structures where they kind of identified all the
different ways you can build data structures and then found the blank
spots in the maps and went and synthesized those new data structures
just on the basis of this cell in the spreadsheet should exist.
00:23:24 - Speaker 1: So fascinating. That is awesome. I can like
visually imagine that in my brain. It’s great.
00:23:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if it sounds like I have a critique for some
of these historic visionaries, let me bring the positive side, which is
I do totally agree that they did lay out a vision for computing that is
grounding in a world where we do seem stuck in, yeah, social media,
consumer, I’m not.
Exactly sure what everything is oriented around commerce and again,
things that are all good commerce, entertainment, these things are fine.
I consume these, but the reason I got interested in computers at a very
young age is seeing their potential for creativity and unlocking the
noblest parts of the human spirit.
And it’s a good reminder to go back and look at some of this history,
maybe especially because these folks didn’t have any of that prior
stuff.
Computers were still so new, particularly personal computing was
essentially, you know, they were in the process of inventing it,
thinking what could people do if they had access to computers with
graphics and networking and all the things that nowadays we take for
granted, but they dreamed of something very different from the world we
have today, and that can be very grounding to look back at that and take
a bit of a blank slate from where we are today. So yeah, I personally
take a lot of inspiration from all their work as well.
00:24:44 - Speaker 1: Totally agree. I think there’s something too very
compelling about.
At least for me when I was reading these texts, how they kind of frame
computers as partners with human beings, and I kind of integrate that as
like a co-creation relationship, which is definitely a very squishy one
that I think we’re still defining, but there’s something that feels
very like a breath of fresh air to think about the computer as like a
counterpart instead of something that is Potentially replacing us or
stealing our attention or something of that sort, even just asking so
much of us.
It’s more like, oh, the computer is here to help. And I think that that
in particular is something that I hope we optimize more for in creative
tools specifically, and there’s a lot of potential there.
00:25:26 - Speaker 2: Very well said. I do feel like more often than not
in the modern world you’re stealing your attention as one example.
You’re sort of fighting against the computer and perhaps it’s not the
computer itself, it’s the whole world of computing, the internet, or
email inboxes, notifications, the way that the web works, and so on that
you’re often either fighting.
Again this thing trying to make you do things you don’t want to do or
take away your attention or distract you, or it wants you to do its
chores, you know, click this, update this, do this, fill out this box,
and it should be a tool quietly waiting for what you’re asking of it
and to, as you said, co-create and help you in what you’re trying to
do.
I like this quote from the original Tron movie which is at one point the
bad guy basically says, look, you know, the systems are overloaded
because we don’t have time to handle every little user request, and the
guy he’s speaking to is kind of the wise and old computer sciences,
actually user requests is what computers are for, and I feel like it’s
so often forgotten.
They are here to serve us and sometimes it feels more often the human
has to serve the computer or perhaps the business. Interests and I’m a
capitalist, so don’t get me wrong, but the business needs, the KPI of
whoever designed the product, it’s asking me to do things to serve that
rather than my needs.
00:26:49 - Speaker 1: I love that quote. That is fantastic. I want that
on a bumper sticker.
00:26:54 - Speaker 3: It’s great. Related to this, Molly, one thing I
really appreciate about your thesis was you surface this idea of, I
forget what you call it, but I would call it like vibe, basically, it’s
like emotion, motivation, valence. I think that’s so important because
if you have software that’s giving you a hard time, it’s not just a
tactical or mechanical issue. It’s now you’re in a whole different
mindset of, uh, you know, I’m dealing with the check boxes or whatever,
and you’re much less likely to be creative and to keep doing it going
forward and so I thought maybe you could talk a little bit in your own
words about that aspect of creative software.
00:27:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that this is one that is like just
beginning to form and it’s mainly because we’ve advanced to a point
where there’s enough competition that we can actually focus on vibes or
whatever you want to call it.
And I think when I was writing about this, and it’s something I think
about a lot. I definitely think about software like Figma, which I think
that there’s something to be said for just bringing a more playful
approach and just treating the user with more respect and really trying
to validate them, not get in their way.
It really comes back to establishing the baseline of being like a very
good piece of software that does the job well.
But beyond that, how you can actually differentiate the piece of
software, especially in creative tools, it’s really just about like the
personality and the kind of attitude that the software brings to the
user, and I think you see that reflected in the way that it talks to the
user and the colors and just little visual things and even just like the
ambient environment of their landing page. It’s just very small things,
but they do add up, and it in the increasing A larger landscape of
creative tools, people are going to pick the one that they identify more
with.
And I think that that is incredibly interesting to me personally, from
like a storytelling perspective of like how we can try to create things
that are more inclusive to more people and just try to get more people
in the tool that might not have a background and experience scaling
these tools and really navigating these usually dark gray interfaces.
But yeah, I think vibe is, it’s a nascent field for software. We’re
still figuring it out.
00:29:04 - Speaker 2: So there’s a section in here titled
Standardization, which I think is about file formats and ultimately is
how tools work together and actually something we’ve talked about on
this podcast before, including with Balant from Kraft talking about the
different ways he wanted to try to have essentially toolmaker humility,
which is realizing that the tool you were creating for your users.
One of many that they are using and you should try to as much as
possible, be a good citizen and work together, although in many ways it
seems with the highly sandboxed world that we get in kind of mobile apps
as well as to some degree, maybe the web and cloud, you have these silos
and they just aren’t really designed to work together.
So what do you see as kind of the future going forward from here for, I
don’t know, tools working together?
00:29:51 - Speaker 1: I think honestly, if I had to pick one concept for
this project that I really like strongly stand behind and is like the
hill that I’m willing to die on, it would probably be this one. I think
that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital
tools today really it means that all work created within a tool is
confined to that tool, and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to
creativity.
And specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. I think that
there’s so much to be said for tools amplifying the power of our brains
and really taking over the mechanical aspects of human thought and
limiting creation to a single piece of software’s capabilities is just
kind of crazy if you step back and think about it.
And I just think that standardization and having tools talk to each
other would just fundamentally change the tide of how we use them and
introduce in more collaborators and really just expand the project’s
constraints beyond any One tool.
And this is a really hard one. Like, solving this problem is something
that I feel like is a huge problem that I just don’t even know how to
approach because it is pretty much in direct contradiction to the
current business models of most creative tool companies. But I’d love
to hear both of your thoughts on this because it’s a huge topic and
it’s definitely one ripe with controversy.
00:31:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and just to expand on the motivation here, I
think collaborating across tools can mean several different things. It
can mean, like you were saying, you have a given project and at
different stages of the project, you want to be able to use different
tools.
That’s one case where an open format would help.
You might want to collaborate with other people.
And they might want to use their own tools, which is different from
yours.
It’s another case. And also there’s this element of time where over
time software tools tend to atrophy.
Companies come and go, you know, platforms change, but you at least want
your data and to be able to carry that with you in some sort of archive
at least.
So there are many cases where having such interoperability would be
helpful.
Yes, it’s extremely hard and by the way, I think this is a prime
example of the political economy issue. It’s very easy to say we should
have X, and even if X is relatively easy to do, which is not in this
case, there’s still this huge issue of the.
We should. That’s quite the weasel phrase, right? Really, it’s, if we
were to accomplish this, we would need a bunch of companies or
individual developers to temporarily make more work for themselves,
lower their profitability, make their products worse for the customers
in the short term to get to some other global maximum.
It’s a case where the coordination problem is really important.
00:32:36 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, and it’s definitely like
invisible work that does not really result in much actual profit for the
company, it’s much more of like a long term investment that would
require all the companies getting on the same page and really agreeing
to terms and it’s really a long term relationship with each other too,
which is kind of crazy to even fathom how that could happen.
00:33:00 - Speaker 2: I guess to highlight what I consider a bright spot
or a positive version of this, I do think files on some of these flat
file formats, which includes plaintext.txt, markdown. Image formats,
PNG, JPEG, probably yeah, MP4 movies increasingly audio clips, PDFs.
Now PDFs come with a lot of baggage. They are very complex to render,
but ultimately there are pretty standardized ways to do that. And
importantly, yeah, PDF does not demand. You have, for example, Adobe
Acrobat, maybe it did at one time, but now it’s a tool you can open
with. very standard viewers on any platform you can edit it and so on.
It’s something we strive for in Muse because we kind of have this value
but again where we are subject to the same constraints as others working
with, especially making an app on a platform like iOS.
But for example, we do store most of the raw, you know, when you drag an
image in, we store that as a raw image in one of these standard file
formats and in fact, if you do a bundle. Export you just get a zip
archive that it contains as much as possible formats, you know, the ink
is in SVG and that sort of thing. So we try to do that as much as we
can.
Now in practice, a muse bundle zip archive that has a bunch of loose
media in it and is not sort of you know arranged on this board maybe is
of mixed value. So I guess that does lead into maybe one of the more
standard objections. The standardization, which is essentially that it
is maybe counter to innovation. It creates a lowest common denominator.
If every markdown editor, for example, has to support that format, if
you want to do something interesting like make it really easy to embed
video with captions of particular time clips, and that’s just not part
of the format, so you just can’t do it or you break away and do
something, you basically break the format in order to add that
innovation to your tool.
00:34:51 - Speaker 3: I do remain optimistic that it can, and in fact
will be solved. I think we will get a general purpose data medium
that’s kind of like JSON is for the synchronous single user case.
It natively allows collaboration.
Obviously we’ve been working a little bit towards this with automerge
and so forth in the lab, but I think it’s eventually going to happen,
but it’s gonna take a lot of work and I suspect it’s probably not
gonna happen by a bunch of people getting in a, you know, enormous room
and everyone saying, OK, let’s form the consortium for X and do a two
year study, and blah blah blah.
I think it will be an organic, messy process led by some champions
somewhere, whether they’re individuals or companies, but I do think
it’s possible. And when we get there, it’ll be great. And like you
were saying, we are, I don’t know if you were saying this on the
podcast or if I read this in your thesis, but we’re relatively early in
this world of collaborative software. It seems so obvious to us that you
have Google Docs and Figma, but that’s I don’t know what, 10 years old
or something, so also just gotta give it a little bit of time.
00:35:49 - Speaker 1: Completely, yeah, I think we’re still figuring it
out and really trying to understand like what to prioritize and what is
the most important in the long term and just beginning to think long
term, that this is going to be around and I think we’re still like even
developing the social norms and values that we as like the users and the
makers like care about.
There’s a lot of development still happening. There that is like
incredibly interesting and I think it’ll all shake out OK, but we just
have to like really nail down what’s important and how we’re gonna
like think about this in the long term, because even though things like
standardization are not particularly enticing, like if we want it to be
around for a while and if we want our work to be compounding, then it’s
like you said, increasingly important.
00:36:36 - Speaker 2: And we’ll offer as a counter example to the, you
know, standardization and innovation dilemma, the web, where essentially
there has been a lot of innovation on the web, but no one company owns
that format, and perhaps there’s some complaints you can have about a
particular browser monoculture at any given time, Google Chrome at the
moment. It is truly an open format, you can parse it with a lot of
different tools, and it will have, I think, the longevity that will go
beyond any particular browser.
00:37:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think there’s some, we do a whole
podcast on protocols and stuff, but I do think there are some important
lessons in the web stack, one of which is they’re relatively thin
layers, or at least the layers that work the best are pretty thin.
So whenever you make a layer that’s an abstraction or protocol, you get
the benefit of aligning some decision space, and if it’s a relatively
thick layer, you get the benefit of you’re aligning a lot of decisions
together, so there’s a lot of interoperability, but then you run a sort
of exponential risk of one of those things being wrong and then the
whole game breaks apart.
So the layers for the web are thin enough that, at least in the lower
layers, you could plausibly say there aren’t huge mistakes, such that
people would want to go off and do something totally different, at least
for the original web use case. So here in this case, I think we’re more
likely, for example, to have success with the interoperability standard
that’s more like JSON and less like address book standard format,
right? Something that’s less like the business objects, or if you have
those, they emerge kind of organically out of more general purpose data
medium, so I don’t know, we’ll see.
00:38:03 - Speaker 1: Can’t wait to see.
00:38:04 - Speaker 2: We’ve hinted a few times, I think you’ve
mentioned a few times kind of the the relationship between collaboration
and creativity and the co-creation element, and from my perspective,
this is a relatively new element of computing creativity. You mentioned
using Photoshop, growing up on Photoshop. That was a private activity.
Maybe you could send a file to someone else at very great effort by
putting it on a floppy disk and carrying it over to them.
But you didn’t really do that very often. It was typically a private
activity and furthermore, I think for many creativity is often something
that is a little bit done in private.
It’s sort of this vulnerable act, but then perhaps that’s changing
partially because of collaborative software like Google Docs and FigMA
and Notion and others.
And in fact, we had a whole episode with Nicholas Cline from Sigma, who
I think you might know, basically talking about, he’s also a younger
guy, and I think, you know, for him, there is less of this creativity is
this thing done in private, of course you make stuff together with
friends, with colleagues. That’s just how it’s been. So maybe that’s
culture is changing partially because the tools are changing. But for
the purposes of computers and creativity and how you see it Molly, what
do you see as the relationship between creating together versus a more
private activity?
00:39:25 - Speaker 1: I think this is a really interesting one, and I
think we’re still figuring it out from my perspective. I think creative
tools, ideally should accommodate for both, um, from my perspective, I
think right now they kind of still fall into two buckets of either solo
or collaborative and collaborative in like the Google Docs or FIMA
sense.
And I think there’s immense value in having tools that do both. They
optimize for incredible solo creation and incredible multiplayer
building upon each other’s ideas, and I admittedly, I think I lean more
in the direction of like how Nico thinks about these things of allowing
in more collaborators earlier on and feeling comfortable doing so
because I grew up with these tools in a fully collaborative Google Docs
form. But I do think that what’s interesting here is that these tools
are so new, and we’re still just like as human beings figuring out what
is expected and like what does ownership mean in these environments and
just trying to establish like social norms there, and that is like a
very squishy one that I think will just take time.
But for me, this really just like reinforces the value of moldability
and ideally the tool would just accommodate, like I said, both solo and
collaborative work and provide you like the resources and tools that you
need to create those environments for yourself because I think Tools
being less opinionated about an assumptive about what you need in those
modes is going to be a great thing.
I would love to see for tools to give you the features that you need to
really create your unique creative space, whatever that looks like.
And I think this also comes back to what Niko was talking about when he
was talking about like the flywheel effect of collaboration. And really
creating in the same spaces and building upon each other’s ideas. I
think that that is a very different mode than like the solo creation
kind of brainstorming, but ideally the tool could scale to both. So
that’s like my current thinking. But I think that’s really hard, and I
think that that’s two completely different things and optimizing for
very, very different, almost in some ways audiences like those are
sometimes the same person, but oftentimes they’re not or they’re a
different subset of people and I don’t know, I think news is an
interesting example here too, and I’m curious to hear what both of your
thinking is because obviously that is optimizing more for the generative
like solo environment in a really wonderful way.
00:42:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the challenge of a true thinking tool and
really, you know, we’re trying to cover the very earliest part of the
ideation funnel, let’s call it, or the creation funnel, which is that
early ideation where you normally use a sketchbook or a whiteboard,
something that is not at all intended to be a final artifact, but is
about figuring out what you want to make in the first place or making a
decision or just forming up your vision rather than any deliverable
artifact.
And that is something that does tend to be maybe creativity at its most
private, like something about a sketchbook is just something that you
really feel is truly private.
And in fact, you know, we’ve been looking into things to try to add
some collaborative capabilities, hopefully building on our values around
privacy and sort of a calm sanctuary and all that sort of thing, but it
is a real challenge.
We could easily lose what’s good and we have even heard from Users and
customers, they say no, or they’re worried, right? They say, I don’t
necessarily want you to add that because then it’ll turn into this more
chaotic environment that I associate with these team spaces, for
example. So, I think there is a way to cut that Gordian knot, but it’s
a huge design challenge, obviously.
00:43:16 - Speaker 3: Yeah, the goal is definitely to eventually
accommodate all the different types or topologies of social or
non-social collaboration, and it is my hope that we’re able to
eventually do it in one tool, because as you have a project, you tend
not to want to be jumping around through different tools, or at least to
do so only with very good interoperability, and every time you do do a
jump there’s a bit of an activation energy costs.
And yeah, as we’ve studied the creative process by talking with
creative professionals and in other ways, we have found that there’s
maybe a half dozen different typical topologies.
There’s you’re basically ideating alone, there’s call and response
feedback, there’s real time, kind of everyone at the whiteboard
collaboration, there’s a sync building up a corpus together like a
tracker, uh and there’s like presentation and sharing in real time.
And I think it’s possible to get all of those in one tool, but it will
take some time.
The reason we started with the initial ideation phase was a felt like
that was the most underserved, and the one we had the most unique angle
on, and also there’s something to doing the first step first, if you
will, just in terms of building up the full user journey over time.
00:44:25 - Speaker 2: One thing I do imagine with any tool that has both
collaborative capabilities as well as solo capabilities, and by the way,
exactly as Mark said, collaborative actually covers a whole host of
different modalities, even just talking about synchronous versus
asynchronous, for example, I think one of the big things we’ve learned.
From Google Docs, it’s not really about the real-time collaboration.
It’s about having a document you know is up to date and in practice it
probably is asynchronous. You sent it out, you shared it out, and
someone added comments or added something to it while you were asleep,
and then you’re looking at it again later, so it’s asynchronous, but
you know it’s up to date.
But I think if you’re clever or if you’re able to find the right
combination, it shouldn’t be hopefully you’re serving those two
audiences or the whatever all the modalities are, but that each one
needs their own features and then pretty soon you’ve got this
overstuffed product that does too many things that in fact you can find
things that serve many or all of those cases.
One great example to me, which is very much about creative process and
how you work as version control as a developer.
The first really good quality version control system I used was
something called CBS many years ago. It’s kind of a precursor to this
version, and then that was kind of replaced by Git in the world of
decentralized revision control. But in any case, when I discovered
revision control was sort of pitched as well, this is so you can work
with someone else. And so in theory you don’t need it if you’re on a
solo project, but I really quickly found, oh actually this is really
nice. It brings a sense of OK, I’m going to work on something for a
while and then package that up into what I would now call a commit, give
that committed name. I can look back at my own history. I get kind of a
log, you know, an undo, sort of like a large scale undo history, but it
also creates a lot more structure for my own thinking about it.
Obviously that’s made its way into now this collaborative space as
well, which is when you’re writing the commit message, it’s for
yourself, understanding what you’ve done, but also for your colleagues,
so they’ll be able to see what you’re doing. And so it feels like a
lot of the tools of revision control or a lot of the features of it,
including how the discs work and how commits work, and all that sort of
thing, both serve an individual working on a solo basis, maybe
collaborating with themselves through time, you might say, and a small
team or a big team working together on something.
00:46:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. I think it’s also just like
retraining ourselves a little bit to once we acclimate to the standards
of like a collaborative tool or something that’s optimized for that,
usually that actually directly translates to the more solo experience,
not always, but I mean, having different practices in different areas,
that doesn’t seem particularly intuitive either, um, and a lot of
these. Processes for organization are applicable everywhere.
There’s a lot of crossover between the features.
I think it’s just about like establishing where we are and really like,
I think making people more aware of where they are in their creative
process is something that’s going to become increasingly relevant to,
and that’s something that we’re still kind of figuring out in creative
tools is like, which tool is used for what and like how do they, again,
how do they talk to each other? Can they talk to each other? And how are
we going to like use them together, which is like the bigger question
and very difficult today.
00:47:39 - Speaker 2: I’m definitely a fan of the pipeline approach, at
least in my own work, which is, it’s less about that I want to use 3
different tools simultaneously.
At one stage, but more at a particular stage, I’m using a particular
tool, so that’s the case for something like writing, where when I’m
trying to figure out what I want to say, I’m using news or sketchbook
or some other ideation tool for thought thing.
But when I’m writing, that’s actually not the right thing. Now I want
a writing tool, a scrivenner, a craft, a Google Docs. But that’s not my
publishing platform. From there I’m going to go to something that’s
usually on the web, but it might also be in PDF or it’s Lawtech if
it’s an academic format, and sort of at each stage, in a way, the
transition to the new tool, which does involve some labor to translate
it across, even when they’re fairly interoperable. For me, it’s almost
good for my creative process because there’s this little ritual of now
I’m ready to jump over into this next stage, it’s graduated.
00:48:37 - Speaker 1: Totally, yeah, and I think acknowledging that
process and paving the way and making it as seamless, but also I don’t
know, building in the opportunity for you to use that as a point of
reflection and almost editing cause I totally relate to that as well as
like moving from ideation to first draft or something like that. That’s
really like also uh editing and refinement moment as well, and you
don’t want to cut that out completely. So it’s again kind of letting
people choose how they want the tool to behave. I think it’s gonna
become increasingly relevant for creative tools.
00:49:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this idea of acknowledging is really
important. So there is the underlying platonic ideals of multi-step
creative processes of social creative processes, and in fact it’s like
always has been, and we can link to the always has been me here.
But people have always been, you know, taking pictures of their
whiteboard under their phone or like shuttling around USB sticks in the
case of social collaboration.
So I think if you do the careful ethnographic research and take off your
blinders about what software we currently do or don’t have, you’ll see
these underlying patterns and a lot of what we’re doing with Muse and a
lot of what we talked on this podcast is how do you align the software
with those platonic ideals of creative work.
00:49:51 - Speaker 2: All right, Mark, I think you’ve signed yourself
up to create the always has been meme with that content that we can
include in the Twitter thread for this episode.
00:50:00 - Speaker 3: All right, I’ll bust out the meme editor.
00:50:03 - Speaker 1: Cannot wait to see it.
00:50:06 - Speaker 2: Now when I’ve worked on really long pieces,
sometimes 5 or 10,000 word pieces we did for ink and Switch or the
12factor app or other larger pieces, for me it’s the case that you ship
not by finishing writing everything you want to write, but by choosing
to cut out a lot of it. And so I’m curious what things might have ended
up on the cutting room floor that you think are worth telling us about
here.
00:50:29 - Speaker 1: Oh man, so many. I completely relate to, I think
it’s so hard to know when to ship something like this, and my current
rule of thumb is like, if I have way more questions, but I know just how
long it’ll take to investigate them. And it’ll kind of distract from
the focus of the piece. That’s when I’m like, OK, maybe I’m getting
closer than I thought I was.
But in terms of ideas that I’ve cut, this project actually started off
focused on flow state, and I was very interested in how software could
facilitate more flow state in human beings. And that’s a very broad
question. I realized that’s exactly why I cut it, is because it is
actually, the deeper you dig into. flow state, the more you discover
that it’s very subjective and the definition of it is still kind of up
in the air, depending on the discipline that you look at it through. So
while it’s super interesting, that is definitely something I cut, but
not before doing a lot of research on kind of the psychological
conditions and what goes into flow state and how people report to
experience it, which I think is really interesting still. And I would
love to write a whole another thesis on that. But it’s still a tough
topic to nail down.
00:51:46 - Speaker 2: And just to briefly define that one this is
probably one of the most quoted or cited concepts from modern
psychology, which is there’s a state that I think originally they were
looking at athletes maybe when they’re sort of at their peak
performance, but maybe in our own lives we’ve experienced this on
running.
Or doing some kind of sports or something where you’re just in this
well state of flow where everything seems to come effortlessly and it
seems like you’re higher, somehow you’re questioning brain narrator
shuts itself down and you’re just in the moment in a way that’s very
satisfying. And we talk about this a lot in the tech industry because
of, I don’t know, even just a simple thing like making sure you have
big blocks of time to really focus on stuff. We’ve talked about deep
work, for example, that concept here before, but the idea that you want
to optimize for flow state and yet technology and especially The
internet now is so kind of anti-optimized for that that it wants to
offer you information about things that are happening in the world and
messages and notifications about everything that in the right moment can
be connecting, but when you’re in flow state can be distracting.
00:52:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a really rich topic and it is
interesting too something I realized in some feedback that I actually
got when I was focused on flow state specifically was more academics,
but they were like, what is the relevance of this? This seems like
something that you’re just throwing in as like a buzzword to get people
to immediately understand that you’re talking about deep creativity,
but do I actually know what flow state is? Not really.
And I hear that. I think that that’s true. I think we still need to
kind of define what it looks like in different contexts. And that was
kind of the reason that I decided to broaden up the inquiry to just look
at creativity more broadly, because I think it Functions in a lot of
forms, then you don’t have to be completely 100% into your work and
thinking of nothing else and just ideas are flowing. Like there’s other
forms where it’s more generative, or maybe you’re building upon other
people’s ideas, and that’s not encapsulated into flow state, which is
interesting, and I almost think that that calls for a more definition of
like what creativity looks like in human beings, but that’s another
topic entirely.
Another topic that ended up on the cutting room floor was actually just
more closely examining the emergence of more collaborative software and
like what that looks like and actually basically examining the social
conditions and the psychological needs that we have when we’re in
collaborative environments because from my vantage point and I feel like
the collective experience of most people, it’s kind of just been a free
for all, and we’re still figuring it out, and there’s a lot of
potential, obviously, and we’re already benefiting from it, but it’s
interesting to think about kind of returning to Some of the work that’s
already been done in like academia that looks at what people need to
feel comfortable collaborating and almost like in the context of arts
education and creativity research, there’s a lot that can be pulled
from that that is obviously much more squishy.
But it also has a lot of applicability to thinking about plopping people
into creative environments and expecting them just to immediately
generate ideas. I think that that is a common theme in a lot of tools
today, especially collaborative tools, and I’m very curious how we can
try to kind of break down what we know about human beings to address
like their common concerns and possible drawbacks from the current
experience.
00:55:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously when people talk about
collaborative software, it’s very easy for that to quickly get into
design or even very technical things of, you know, is it using
operational transform or CRDTs, and there’s very hard technical
challenges that we’re still working on, but the social side of it, the
social norms as you’ve mentioned, and also people adjusting their own
attitudes about what’s expected of them or what they can feel
comfortable doing.
You need to be comfortable to be creative, and we’re still figuring out
how to do that well.
I’m reminded of Tuckman’s stages of group development, which is sort
of a psychologist looking at just how teams work together, but really
just any group of people, and that there’s kind of this process, these
five stages that that they define, which is this forming, storming,
norming, performing, and mourning, just sort of how the team comes
together, but what I thought was really interesting is once I’ve read
this, I can spot this. Not with just any kind of team loosely defined.
As a company or a subset of a company, but really any combination of
people doing anything, even friends planning an event together or
something like that, and there’s typically these early stages where
everyone’s super polite and they don’t wanna step on any toes, but
actually that stops you from really getting into it and really the true
creativity happening, and then there has to be some level of conflict
and discovering of roles in the group through, yeah, friction and
problems and Even fights or whatever, and then social norms emerge from
that, and then that’s when you really go into sort of the magic time,
they’re performing stage because it’s sort of all figured out how to
do things, and then you can be truly creative.
00:57:05 - Speaker 3: This also reminds me of the satir change model,
which is a similar idea, maybe just generalize a little bit, where when
things change, they don’t get uniformly better.
It’s not all up to the right. You have some foreign element that comes
in and instigates the change, and then you go through a period of chaos
where your performance is worse, people are scared and they’re
reluctant, and then eventually you got to find some transforming idea to
bring you into the period of better performance.
The way this connects back to this collaborative software discussion is.
I think when we first introduced from a technological perspective, the
ability to have real-time collaboration, that was a sort of foreign
element where you have some of the things that you would expect with
collaboration, like you can see what other typing, but you don’t have,
for example, body language on facial expressions, you don’t have vocal
intonation. And and so it feels like weird, like, basically you’re in
the chaos of this Google Doc feels weird or something. But then we have
things like, you know, emojis and so and so is typing and things like
that and avatars that float around to show you where people are in the
document. And so we’re building up the set of practices that will
eventually allow people to have higher performances teams.
00:58:10 - Speaker 2: Even an initial negative reaction to why would you
even want that. I remember when Google Docs came along, I actually used
it when it was right before they were acquired, and that collaborative
element, I said, wow, this is great that I can send a document to
someone they don’t need to have Microsoft Word installed. We always
know there’s the wrong latest version, and I tried to pitch people that
I was working with on using it or saying, look, let’s use this tool
because it seems so obvious to me this is A good way to do things and
very often reaction was like, oh, like I don’t want people to be able
to like see me typing or I don’t want other people to be able to edit
my stuff, you know, I think maybe Figma relative to sketch actually had
some of the same pushback as well. I don’t want people messing with. My
designs that kind of a thing, and I think that’s quite natural, which
is when you have existed in one paradigm in one set of capabilities, you
take for granted that those capabilities or restrictions that that box
is exactly the shape box that you want something new coming along
offering new capabilities, you might even see those as anti-features.
00:59:16 - Speaker 1: 100%, yeah, I think that there’s there’s so much
just push back and discovery we still need to do about people’s
expectations in collaborative environments, and I think that there’s a
delicate balance to be had to where it’s not completely like the
tool’s job to facilitate all of those things and make sure that people
are, you know, having the optimal like creative progression and like
having All the indicators that they need, but it is something that I
feel like we need to keep in mind and kind of identify ways that we can
address or at least enable people to address or giving them best
practices. And I think that it also just comes back to like inspiring
people within a tool and giving them the things that they need is really
important.
And that’s another topic entirely.
But it’s definitely, I feel like the farther we get in collaborative
tools, the more we realize that this is really like a social problem in
many ways, and that’s something that I think we’re beginning to
address, but there’s still a lot of room to work with and to discover
and to really see what people actually want because we’ve gotten used
to these. Environments and paradigms in some way, and I think especially
like my generation has gotten very used to it, but there’s still a lot
of work to be done to make them more human and make them more ripe for
creativity and the collaboration that we all want. I think it just needs
to be much more customizable and open to different types of people as
well.
01:00:47 - Speaker 2: Well, Molly, any final items that made it on the
cutting room floor that you can tantalize us with what might have been?
01:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think one more is looking at the
psychological conditions that people need to foster creativity, and I
think for me, when I think about this, I definitely was looking at it
through a broader lens and looking at not just the people that would
come into these tools with like a unique intent and have comfortability
in the tools.
I’m definitely interested in how can creative tools be more accessible
to different types of people and like how we can Do that using like the
psychology and like an understanding of it, and I think some things that
come to mind for me that I wish I delved more into and hope to do in the
future is really just The value of first impressions and abstraction and
really trying to facilitate a really good first experience in a tool,
and I think some ways of doing that are like providing templates and
inspiration and really just holding their hand through that process and
validating who they are and what they kind of bring in their existing
understanding, and I think that this is something that Again, we’re
still experimenting. We’re not completely sure what works best, but I
think creating safe spaces for people to explore and mess up and
creating kind of like a barrier between them and feeling like they could
actually do real harm to the work, especially when it’s not their own
work, is something that is increasingly important and definitely a big
part of like the psychological safety that people need to be creative is
just feeling like They’re not gonna break anything. They can just
explore, mess around a little bit. They might create something great or
it could be terrible and it’s fine. Yeah, that’s something that I
think could use a lot more exploration in the future.
01:02:41 - Speaker 2: I agree. I think comfort is really important for
being creative.
Being relaxed is important for being creative. Being able to think
divergently and openly and being relaxed is a function of comfort, both
physical comfort, but certainly psychological comfort.
There’s a tendency for the. Tools often going back to what you
mentioned at the beginning, for example, video or audio editing tools,
they look really cool, but they’re also incredibly intimidating, even
to someone who’s pretty comfortable with computers, say like all three
of us, and Something that makes you feel relaxed, at ease, comfortable.
I mean, I even sometimes feel vague anxiety going into shared documents
where I have right access, you know, someone sends me their Google doc.
I just want to read it, but I’m just terrified that I’m going to press
the space bar somewhere and insert a space, unreasonably terrified
because I That’s easily fixable, but the sense that you’ve been
invited into someone’s raw and vulnerable work, they’re sharing it
with you because they value their feedback and you want to respect that
and somehow messing it up is like, I don’t know, messing up someone’s
home or being invited into someone’s private garden and then stomping
all over their tulips.
01:03:53 - Speaker 1: That’s a great visual to imagine, yeah.
And I often think too about even like an analogy like tracing paper or
something that you can overlay over someone’s work that just allows
people to feel more comfortable going in.
And I think tools like Google Docs have done some interesting things to
that end in the form of like suggestions and things of that sort, but
it’s not exactly what we’re looking for, at least from my vantage
point, I think.
Tools have a lot of work to be done to accommodate like the different
types of feedback and collaboration that we do, because not everything
fits in the context of like editing or adding a comment.
Like what if it’s a higher level thing? It’s all treated the same, and
so we end up doing these really weird things like adding a comment to
the title, when it has nothing to do with the title, it’s just a higher
level thought.
And I don’t know, I’m very curious what we can do there to just get
people to kind of foster the type of feedback or collaboration that we
want by making the tool have features and functionality for that, that
aligns with how they think about like the creative process.
And I think that that also comes back to replicating more of like the
physical environment in these tools and really creating that like
instant recognition of like, oh they’re asking me for high level
feedback because it’s in this state. And this is me adding a post-it to
their work, or something of that sort. I think there’s a lot of things
there that we haven’t explored yet.
01:05:17 - Speaker 2: Nice, yeah, let’s bring back skew morphism, not
for the imagery, but for the sense of comfort and the parallel to things
we’re familiar with in the physical world and encouraging the kind of
creativity that often you do have in the physical world, both because in
person, brainstorming is sometimes more fun and higher bandwidth way.
But also just we have all these techniques including post-it notes and
whiteboards and little stickers and desks and making a mess with paper,
and we haven’t necessarily managed to get a lot of that sort of
messiness into the computer world that’s naturally very structured and
sterile by nature.
01:05:57 - Speaker 1: Couldn’t agree more, yeah.
01:06:00 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for
listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at @museapphq or by
email, hello at muapp.com. Help us out by leaving a review on Apple
Podcasts, and Molly, thanks so much for contributing this work to the
world, and I look forward to seeing what you’re going to do next in
your career.
01:06:20 - Speaker 1: Thank you so much. It was my absolute pleasure.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I believe, which is that a product that comes
with the manual implies it has depth, that it fits together with being a
professional tool, where probably the things you want to do with it are
things that require skill and take time to learn, even separately from
the tool itself. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your
iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast
isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the
small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my
colleague, Mark McGranaghan. And Mark, how are things today?
00:00:42 - Speaker 2: Doing all right, thanks, Adam. How are you?
00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Doing well, we just had uh the spring weather
break here in Berlin, so even though we’re still on home lockdown, uh,
going out to enjoy the flowers in bloom and trees, uh, in starting to
turn green and the kids out, uh, families out and taking my dog out for
a walk. It’s uh it’s a nice break after the the long winter. So I’m
very excited about our topic today, and that is manuals. So we just
finished, uh, really should say you and Leonard just finished the Muse
interface handbook. Put a link to that in the show notes. And I think
this is a, a lovely piece of work that sort of shows the command
vocabulary gestures that you can, uh, you can use with the Muse
application.
But the path that we took to get here is maybe an interesting one. I
want to tell that story a little bit. When the team started talking
about whether we needed some kind of manual or handbook or user’s guide
or something like that, it really caused me to go and start reflecting a
lot on what I thought makes a good manual.
One experience for me that really stuck in my mind was this experience
of getting a rocket espresso machine. Do you know these devices?
00:01:49 - Speaker 2: I think I’ve maybe seen it at your place or I
know of it, yeah.
00:01:53 - Speaker 1: I think I got this machine around the same time as
I also got some other kitchen appliances. Maybe there was like um like a
slow cooker, rice cooker thing, and there was a stark contrast where
the, the slow cooker came with this.
Thin black and white tiny print thing that was like in 8 languages and I
had to hunt through to find the English and even then it was. I don’t
know, pages of boilerplate about, you know, plugging it into the right
socket and don’t take it to the bathtub with you and so on, and just
getting to the information I wanted, which was how to use the device to
cook things, uh, was quite difficult.
The rocket machine by comparison, has this lovely, uh, manual that’s
sort of this a full color, it’s bound and the right on the cover it
says something along the lines of how to use your machine and and make
beautiful coffee. And describing what I want to accomplish as a user and
it’s, it’s a quite rich technical manual that covers a lot of, has a
lot of depth and certainly I think it has the safety warnings and
whatever in the back somewhere, but it really was this inspiring thing
that gave me enthusiasm and excitement to uh get using this product
versus such a stark contrast to the basically the very sad, uh, manuals
that come with uh other kinds of kitchen appliances. So that was, that
was a powerful experience for me. What for you Mark makes a good manual?
00:03:16 - Speaker 2: Well, I think your example points to a few things.
One is the sense of like impute that you get from actually first seeing
the manual.
You infer the quality of the product and the experience that you should
expect from what you see in the manual. So it’s a very dull, poorly
designed, uninspired manual. You might expect the same thing in the
product reasonably, whereas if it’s a very, you know, well done, well
designed, uh, well thought out, um, piece of work, you might again
expect the same thing on the product side.
Two products that I have some experience with here. One is go by
example, um, which is.
On the edge of being a manual, it’s kind of a website, you know, this
is the site for learning the Go programming language, uh, but the idea
there was to have a very example-based approach to learning. Uh, the Go
programming language instead of a very abstract word-based approach. So
here you go to the site, it’s basically a series of, of lightly
annotated example programs so you can see just exactly how to do it.
It’s a show don’t tell situation, which I think is by the way similar
to the espresso machine manual you mentioned. You can imagine trying to
work an espresso machine just on the basis of text. It’s like pull this
lever, then depress that knob and put more water in here. It’s like
what does that even mean, right? It’s so much better when you can
actually see it illustrated.
00:04:30 - Speaker 1: So some examples of prior art, I think we
collected we’re thinking about this, um, included uh things that we’ve
worked on, of course. Go by example is a good one. for me, the, um, the
early Hiroku documentation, which I think was just a little static
website that had, I don’t know, a dozen pages on it, each one of which
was describing how to do. Particular thing with the platform, very
simple, but easy to easy to navigate.
Nowadays, uh, the product has this huge dev center that is, you know,
fits the sort of complexity and and quantity of capabilities that exists
in that product.
So sometimes maybe the the earlier products because they can have such
simple manuals, uh, that can be that can be more fun.
When I was looking for prior art on, um, manuals, maybe more currently,
particularly around the iOS and particularly iPad apps, I looked at
Ulysses, a working copy has a pretty nice one that’s sort of embedded
in the, like the, the settings menu, but you can also go to his website.
Uh, Goodotes has some interesting documentation with some nice kind of
animations and and visuals.
Um, and then Procreate was a really interesting one because they have
this really beautifully made, um, so Procreates a sort of a professional
art application. And fitting to that product, they have this really
beautifully made, I think you can get it as an iBook, but it almost
unfolds more like a presentation or something, something like that. So I
think it fits the the visual style and the the beauty that you would
expect from an art product.
00:05:56 - Speaker 2: Uh, another example that that I had thought about
was the stripe API docs. And again, there’s this very example based
practical approach where they give you, they literally give you commands
that if you paste into your terminal, will execute completely the uh API
endpoint in question. And for me, that’s always a huge thing with
documentation. What is the specific series of actions that I need to
undertake to get the result that I want, like enumerate step.
00:06:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, instructions I think are a underrated thing.
Format is huge, and I, I think that almost always you want multiple
formats.
So for example, yeah, the Unix man pages for those that aren’t
familiar, it’s basically the Unix is a command line driven environment
so you type type commands. And you can type man, short for manual space,
a command that you are interested in, and it will basically show you the
documentation for that. So it’s very in line in, in, it’s right in the
environment where you want it.
Um, and I think some of the folks some of the examples we went to look
at, um, had a version of that as well. So I think the, you know, the,
the working copy users’ guide, you can look at it in the app, but you
can also download it as a PDF, but you can also go view it on the web.
00:07:09 - Speaker 2: One other format that was actually an inspiration
for me here was YouTube.
YouTube has become incredibly important for uh transmitting tacit
knowledge on the web.
There’s actually an article we can link to this, uh, in the show notes,
um, but video allows you to Um, understand all the implicit and subtle,
you know, physical movements, um, you know, mental models people have in
their head when they’re telling you how to do something. So for things
like, you know, cooking or woodworking or playing a game, these are
quite hard to explain like in text, even with diagrams, um, and having
the, the video there is super helpful and um I think we’re just gonna
see more and more uh things moving to video and YouTube because it’s
such a powerful medium.
00:07:49 - Speaker 1: How did people figure out how to do like DIY
things around the house before YouTube existed? I mean, YouTube didn’t
exist for a lot of my life, and sometime I figured it, I figured it out,
but I honestly can’t remember what I did back then.
Yeah, it’s an incredible repository for, as you said, tacit knowledge
and things that certainly things that cannot be conveyed well in the
abstract. Nature of just uh written prose.
One thing we talked about when we were thinking about the manual as well
is the, let’s call it the bottom up versus the top down. And I think
the uh the bottom up was more what you see when you view an individual
man page, when you Google something and see a stack overflow, you’re
looking for a solution to some specific problem in the moment, and you
don’t want to see all the documentation, you just want your specific
nugget of information.
But I think another, uh, maybe underappreciated role that manuals can
serve, they or they serve for me is they provide this overview.
So we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what the right table
of contents would be, because there your information hierarchy or your
taxonomy of how you’re sorting things out. Uh, offers a chance to give
an overview of what is this product and what does it do.
So I imagine someone, for example, might go to the Muse handbook and
look at that and get a sense for what actually is this thing, what are
the, what, what are its capabilities in a very practical nuts and bolts
sense.
00:09:16 - Speaker 2: This actually points to two things that I think
are really important in manuals. One is if the manual is well done, it,
it provides that comprehensive. Uh, enumeration of things that the tool
can do.
So you can go to the manual and you can read it and then you know all
the things, which sounds simple or obvious, but so many tools because
there’s so many entry points to the functionality, you know, menus, hot
keys, shortcuts, you kind of don’t know if you actually know everything
yet and you’re always being surprised like, oh, this is a new, you
know, button I didn’t know about before. Um, and I really like the
feeling of I now.
You know, I know Kung Fu, you know, like from the Matrix, uh, but the,
the other thing is this idea of reference versus narrative docs which I
think is similar to what you were describing. Uh, so references like
there’s a, a specific. Thing you want to do, you know, I want to move a
card, but that that often needs to be situated in a broader workflow, a
broader, you know, use case motivation, and so often you see
documentation complement that uh the the reference with a more vertical
slice and narrative of here’s how you do a X in this tool and it kind
of touches many of the specific things that would be covered in more
detail in the reference docs.
Those two types of documentation are potentially especially important
with Muse, because yes, there’s a bunch of specific things that you
need to know how to do, but there’s also this question of what is Muse
for, which isn’t maybe as obvious as other tools like a word processor,
like you know you’re going to go write a document in a word processor,
whereas Muse is kind of a new type of tool, a new category, so we have
some explaining to do on that front.
00:10:43 - Speaker 1: Now, do you think the handbook as it is right now
accomplishes that? I felt like the even calling it the interface
handbook, we really were more focused on the the nuts and bolts part
rather than the broad, like what is this thing and what is it good for?
Right?
00:10:56 - Speaker 2: I think right now it’s mostly reference and I
could see it um expanding to include more narrative or having a
complimentary source of documentation later that covers that.
00:11:06 - Speaker 1: One other memory from my past, uh.
Experience working on manuals is how it feeds into product design.
I think you, you brought this up when we were first brain storing the
the manual. I think of it as almost like a hygiene or it brings a
certain coherence when you’re forced, when you write down, even the
table of contents can do that. Uh, one experience I had was working on
the Hiroku add-on system, and I ended up essentially writing the manual
for that in tandem with designing the way that the technical design for
how the system worked.
And I found it incredibly helpful for sorting through these pretty
abstract concepts and the the real unlocker was writing a glossary.
So I was trying to take down, I’m like, OK, I’m using all these
special words throughout the throughout this documentation.
What does each one mean? And I actually found that taking inventory in
this way.
I realized that I would use one word to mean two different things in two
different places or other places. I had several words that referred to
the same thing or basically the same thing, and so I forced myself to
pare down to a set, a fixed set of con uh concepts, the primitives that
really built up the design, and then went through and made sure I only
ever used that one term. And that was, that was a much harder job than
it it sounded. Um, but I felt like the, the end result was something
simpler and more comprehensible.
00:12:29 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s a super
valuable process, especially to get the, the glossary, the words right,
and relatedly this idea of mental model, often when you’re having
trouble writing clean docs or explaining a product to someone, it’s
because you don’t have or it doesn’t exist a good mental model for how
the product works. Um, and once you can write a really crisp glossary
and a really crisp table of contents indicates that um there’s a,
there’s a clean set of gears, you know, behind the clock face that,
that, um, dictates how this product works.
00:13:00 - Speaker 1: Mental model is, is huge, particularly when
you’re doing something that’s either highly technical product or a
highly sophisticated power tool. Or just something that’s relatively
new, that doesn’t have a clear, you get the mental model somewhat for
free if you go to implement something well known in existing a to do
list a word processor, when you’re doing something a little bit
category breaking and a little bit new, like what we’re trying to do
with Muse, that’s a much we need to develop that mental model fresh.
00:13:29 - Speaker 2: Then also more tactically, just when you go to,
you know, basically test out every single thing that you’ve put in the
manual, you might be surprised how many weird things you find. Like we
found a couple of bugs in the course of doing the muse manual where it
kind of basically works, but there was a little hesitation or you need
to like do it twice, and that’s the sort of thing that you might be
able to gloss over in the course of casual queueing. But once you’re,
you know, filming in this case yourself, it becomes very obvious when
there’s any sort of glitch.
00:13:55 - Speaker 1: Well, the filming side I’m super interested to
hear about because you did some, uh, did some very interesting work on
that. Uh, but before we jump forward to that, maybe we could start at
the beginning of the story. Uh, I always like to hear war stories about
how, uh, product features or product, uh, capabilities get developed. So
maybe we can tell the story a little bit of, uh, why this handbook came
to be.
00:14:18 - Speaker 2: Well, I feel like we’ve had this challenge for a
while of um explaining news to our new users. And we’ve been thinking
about and trying different things, you know, we’ve tried some
onboarding material, which is sort of some example content with some
instructions woven in. We’ve tried giving people advice over email, um.
We’ve, we experimented and we thought about different, you know, more
standard documentation formats like uh text with some diagrams, but we
were having trouble really getting through to people basically, um, and
the, the genesis of the handbook was maybe video is a especially good
format for what we’re trying to show with Muse.
00:14:57 - Speaker 1: I’d previously grappled a bit with the how do you
show an application, a tablet application that has sophisticated
gestures and uses a stylist, more from, I guess like a marketing
perspective. So for example, we have a video up on our website right
now, which is just a screen recording. You can’t see the hands, and
it’s a little, it works OK, but it’s a little confusing because how is
the person doing these things that are happening.
And with a, for example, recording a desktop operating system, you have
the mouse, and there’s other kinds of things built into screen
recording software to help, for example, when you type keys, they can
put basically cues, put annotations for what’s being typed. So it’s
much easier to see that. Uh, and then I think with like phone
applications, for example, you just tend to have a big button and it’s
kind of clear when you tap on the button and that’s sort of it.
But for our chromeless interface where there’s not a lot of buttons and
many of the um ways you do things are these sophisticated gestures,
that’s that’s tough to show. So I had been down that road a little bit
and went around and kind of looked at the way that lots of uh different
uh companies that do have these kinds of applications do it. And
there’s no real gold standard. Um, but it definitely showing the hands
seems to be crucial. So we, we felt like, but, but that’s tough because
we had done some video recordings in the past, both for the Muse design
article, uh, as well as the capstone manuscript had some really bad low
quality videos and I just knew that it was a, a pretty big production
effort to to do that well. And so I kind of had the idea of, well, maybe
we should stick to still images, and I experimented a bit with let’s do
like a 123 that shows the steps of the gesture a little bit uh inspired
actually by the rocket manual, which also has things like this where
it’s, OK, turn the handle to the right and then push this button and
then fill up this reservoir and they they would sort of imply motion or
imply um the passage of time. So I did a version of that with uh what we
called the shadow hands, which were basically um outlines of hands.
Apple does this, of course, beautifully in some of their uh marketing
stuff, uh, where you see some hands, but they’re sort of dark and uh
maybe maybe slightly uh transparent, and the idea is you don’t want
people to be focusing on the hands exactly, but you do need to see what
the hands are, are doing, but you don’t want them to fully obscure the
screen or the content. Um, so I experimented with that a little bit in a
static format. Um, but I think that pretty quickly led to like, OK, this
is OK, but we really just need to see the motion. But the idea of trying
to do full motion animation using, I don’t know what after effects or
something, that seemed like a huge production and sort of out of reach
for our, you know, small team that has a lot we should be working on.
00:17:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we tried basically every way we could to
avoid having to film live action hands. It’s quite hard, but none of
them were quite satisfactory, and I think there are at least two
reasons. Um, one is there’s this feeling you get when you use muse,
like when you touch a card and it moves instant instantly or when you
start pinching and it fluidly zooms in, that is really important, but
it’s really hard to explain without just seeing it. I mean I really
wanted to capture that. I felt like the only way to do it was video.
00:18:12 - Speaker 1: So yeah, you, you were inspired to do that and you
dived in with your uh with your AV gear, which I know you’d already
been kind of experimenting with in the past, partially at at I Switch,
but also you’ve done a little bit with your uh virtual piano lessons
here now and so I think you, you’d had interest in some of that stuff
anyway, so you already had some of the gear. What, what was the final
set up or what is your um hand recording studio now look like?
00:18:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so there are 3 pieces that are key. I
found.
One is something to hold the camera. So we found that the top down shot
is best. We tried other angles like looking at it from the side, looking
at it like kind of over the shoulder, but when you have uh multiple
hands and the screen, the most consistent way we found was just to shoot
it overhead and I just use an iPhone camera works quite well. And so you
have a tripod that’s on the floor and then it kind of booms over and
there’s this little device that clamps onto the camera and it’s
attached to this kind of ball and socket joint so you can move it around
and so that altogether gives you the video recording.
Uh, the second really important piece is the lights, and so I use a
couple uh commercial lights that are usually used by streamers for
lighting themselves, but in this case I use it for lighting the hands
and the desk, uh, and I use either 2 or 3. Um, lights from one from the
left, one from the right, and one from kind of across the table from
me.
Uh, and the third thing is something to put the iPad on. So an important
difficulty we had back in the Ink & Switch days was we would try to
film, I try to film the iPad on my wooden desk, but the thing is that
then you have the horizontal line from the wood planks, the horizontal
line from the iPad, and then the, you know, the horizontal line from
wherever the camera is. Uh, located and so you need to line up all three
of those things exactly or it looks really weird. And so I ended up
putting the iPad on a leather surface which is sort of like
directionless so you can basically um fix the camera and then line up
the iPad exactly to line up with the camera and it doesn’t need to be
lined up exactly with the desk at that point, um, and that was actually
a pretty big uh unlock for us.
00:20:19 - Speaker 1: Hm. Yeah, that was something I struggled with a
little bit was um even getting the the tablet square with the camera,
which I guess you can, as I say, fix it in post, right, if you have
sufficient video editing software, you can kind of even that out.
So I can see we’re having that many things I have to align would be a
would be a problem.
And then the lights, uh, from all these different angles. I know that
another huge one that we ran into even just giving a workshop, we would
do kind of video chat uh workshops about progress on our research
prototypes and the overhead lights in the room were just absolutely
killer because that turns your, uh, turns your tablet into a little
mirror and you see the person’s face, not to mention that smudges all
over the place, you know, the finger smudges all over the place and
it’s very hard to see what’s actually on the screen.
00:21:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so I’ve only partially solved this. So I
turn off all the the lights in the apartment and I try to do it at
night, and that gives you pretty good cover so you don’t have too much
light coming in from overhead.
But if you actually turn off the iPad, you can see the reflection of the
camera overhead. So currently it only really works when you’re on a
fairly bright screen, which you’ll notice all of our videos have.
Um, I actually tried recording one with my stock, uh totally black iPad
background, and there was a huge camera reflection in the middle of it,
so I had to change it for the video. Um, but I think we could fix that
with basically cutting out more of the external light so there’s less
coming in from overhead.
00:21:42 - Speaker 1: And you say at night, is this about consistency
that you want all the videos to have consistent lighting, or is it more
about um the direction when it comes through the window, you can’t
control the direction of the color temperature or whatever.
00:21:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, just consistency and also the overhead
thing. So if I have a huge window in this apartment, so if I do it
during the day, you have some diffuse light coming in from overhead,
which, which exacerbates that um reflection of the camera problem.
00:22:06 - Speaker 1: Do you imagine kind of going forward that when it
comes time to add a new feature that we need to, um, then add a new kind
of section in this handbook for? Will it be challenging to recreate
these conditions? Do you have like everything’s written down of exactly
where stuff should go or there’s tape on your floor or something like
that, or is it not that important? Is it actually fine to have some
videos that maybe have a slightly different. Feel or the tablets in a
slightly different position in the frame or something.
00:22:36 - Speaker 2: I think there’s some forgiveness here, but I
would like them to be pretty consistent.
Um, so as long as the equipment is sort of out, it’s not too bad.
And then in Muse, where I do the filming, I actually have a little
checklists, you know, right in Muse, of course, um, and there’s quite a
few things you got to get right. Like you got to, you know, make sure
that uh your home screen isn’t weird, make sure that you’ve cleared
out your, um, You know, iMessage contacts, they don’t show up in the
share sheet. There’s a lot of little steps need to take um to actually
do the filming, but once you figured it all out, it doesn’t take that
long to run through the process.
00:23:06 - Speaker 1: Well, there’s the sample content element uh here
as well and we’ve we’ve, there’s another one I’ve grappled with, um,
when I’m often and for example, we want to show a new feature in one of
the email updates and I want to show, uh, as much as possible, I try to
show real boards either mine or other people’s when they, um, consent
to share that and so you get a sense of what Muse is really used for in
the real world rather than.
Something that’s kind of made up. Now, in this case, because I think
this stuff was more, I guess, produced would be the word for it. It was
supposed to be longer, um, it’s the word for it, a little more
timeless. You did create boards that were not necessarily ones that uh
you had in your, I guess your real used to call it that, is that, is
that right?
00:23:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and we did them all around this theme of
gardening, which is the same theme that we use for our onboarding sample
content when you first open the app.
Uh, and we like that because it’s very, it’s very generalizable, it’s
very relaxing, it’s very meditative, and those are, you know,
properties that we want to encourage and use.
And also the I think the content that you would tend to want to film
with is maybe not exactly the same as what you would use day to day and
use, because basically, these videos get compressed down to pretty low
resolutions and so things like bigger images work better for the video
versus, you know, a whole page of handwriting.
It would just basically look like a bunch of scribbles from that far
away. um, so it’s a, you have to kind of um be mindful of the medium.
00:24:28 - Speaker 1: Is it a problem at all that you, you’re filming a
screen? Uh, I’ve seen techniques where you basically use a green
screen, simulate the movements, and then do a screen recording that you
composite in later so that you get the crispness of the pixels, but it
seems like they came out, it seems like they came out pretty nice. That
wasn’t necessarily a problem in the final video quality.
00:24:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems fine. And you know that the
iPhone camera these days are are wild. Like this is a 4K camera with
really high quality. Um, and so when you’re rendering down to something
like 1080p, you have a lot of, uh, resolution to spare there. We have
thought about actually doing the reverse and putting a green screen,
like filming the iPad on top of a green screen so you can compos it in a
different background, um, that’s either, you know, for example, maybe
it’s always exactly the same, or maybe it’s actually transparent, so
it just blends right into the the web page, um, but that’s, that’s
pending, you know, our Amazon green screen order which because of the
virus is.
00:25:24 - Speaker 1: Now, can you tell me a little bit about how, sort
of, you, you and Leonard were the ones that ended up uh working on this
towards the end, and you ended up with, first of all, that this is a web
page as opposed to a PDF or something, so you need to load that browser
separately alongside Muse in a split view or something.
And secondly, that most of the, um, you have all these videos that have,
uh, they’re kind of these little cards that then have text, some
explanatory texts below.
And I know some earlier iterations when I was working on it with you a
little bit more, were much more classic heavy text manual, maybe the
kind of stuff you and I have done in the past, like go by example or the
rogu docs or whatever where it’s mostly text with a few figures. And at
some point here, we realized this is just such a visual thing and
especially if we get the videos, it’s really more Images and more
imagery and just a little bit of text to explain, but I’d be curious to
hear how you landed on this cards expository text attached to a video or
a still.
00:26:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we knew we wanted the video from the
beginning and so we started with something that was more like go by
example or standard manual.
We have 1 or 2 videos per page and then a little bit of text, but then
we found you only need maybe 123 sentences per. Video and so you have
these pages that we mocked up and we did some HTML mockups, and it would
just be very sparse and then you need this whole apparatus around
navigating the documentation because you have multiple pages and then to
get through all the docs and to get an overall sense we have to click
through each of these individual links.
And so it was both more work for us and it was in a way less satisfying
for the user because they didn’t um get everything they were looking
for right away. And there was one site that we saw that was uh an
inspiration. Uh, what was it?
00:27:06 - Speaker 1: Uh, Loom, kind of a new cool indie animation app.
00:27:09 - Speaker 2: Loom, yes, and they have a cool, um, manual page
of sorts, which is in this style, but it’s all text. So I think it has
the kind of two or three things per row and then a series of rows on the
page, um, and we liked that one page idea, but then of course we want to
bring our, our video. And then when we mocked it up, it it worked quite
well, so we ran with it.
00:27:30 - Speaker 1: Another notable point on the cards that are shown,
some of them are clearly news. Here’s how you move a card, here’s how
you delete one, here’s how you navigate and out of boards. But then
there’s also things like how to take a screenshot, which is an iPad or
an iOS feature. Uh, there’s some other things that are, are like that
as well, like search. How did you decide where the boundary between what
you can do with Muse and the full capabilities of the operating system?
What, what caused something to be in or out of that list?
00:28:01 - Speaker 2: Well, we wanted to include all the things that you
might want to do with Muse, broadly defined.
So for example, bringing in a piece of content from another app on iOS
into Muse is something that involves Muse is an important and our
experience with iOS is that There are all these, these important
platform features that people don’t know about. Even very experienced
iOS developers and advanced users are surprised when they see uh some of
these workflows, you know, whatever the magic gesture is for bringing up
search or like sharing between apps or whatever.
Um, and so we thought it was quite important that we gave people those
instructions because without it, they might be missing this key piece of
how you actually use Muse in the context of iOS.
00:28:42 - Speaker 1: This is a good reminder that one of the challenges
here is iPad OS is moving in this direction of becoming more, more, more
capable, more powerful, trying to be a tool for professionals, but it
comes from this, uh, legacy or this foundation of the iPhone. And the
iPhone, of course, was the iPhone you could argue is maybe the most
successful product, certainly the most successful tech product of all
time, and partially that’s because it took the complex world of
computers that was always. Just out of reach for maybe a lot of The
mainstream world, people who weren’t um Sort of computer nerds, so to
speak. The iPhone helped make it so that everything was kind of um
comprehensible without a manual. And in fact, I would say it’s part of
the design ethos in the mobile world. And probably for a good thing that
if you need a manual or you have a manual of some sort, you failed,
right? That the um the classic uh refrain from the computer message
boards, RTFM right? that’s read the fabulous manual, is something that
is a legacy of the desktop operating systems where things were just too
complicated. And that now in this enlightened mobile era where
everyone’s got smartphones and you expect to download and install an
app, and you should be able to figure it out by kind of pawing at the
obvious buttons on the screen within 10 seconds. And in fact, if you
don’t figure it out, you probably delete it pretty quickly. But that’s
not really viable. In fact, that’s not even desirable for professional
tools. You want something, of course, they shouldn’t be specifically
hard to learn, but a learning curve, if it pays off with more power,
more flexibility is worthwhilele.
But now you have this, not only this, um, the whole operating system of
iPad OS and the device and all that sort of thing, but actually a design
ethos, a design um set of um values that comes from something needing a
manual as a bug. Versus what I believe, which is that a product that
comes with the manual implies it has depth, that it fits together with
being a professional tool where probably the things you want to do with
it are things that require skill and take time to learn, even separately
from the tool itself. Whether you’re writing, whether you’re creating
art, whether you’re doing science. These are not things that a person
figures out by pushing a couple buttons, obvious brightly colored
buttons on a screen. There are skills that you learn, and the tools that
go with it are skills as well.
00:31:08 - Speaker 2: Exactly. We want the tool to be as easy to learn
inherently, but no easier. We don’t want to sacrifice uh the power, and
the capabilities on the high end. Um, for the sake of that those initial
2 minutes. That said, we have tried to meet our users, uh, somewhat in
the middle because they often are coming from this mobile world where
this expectation is very strong. So you can open this manual with one
link, it has high production value, it has this kind of YouTube style,
very quick to ingest video, um, so I think that helps a little bit
bridge the gap between the standard mobile world and this world of
professional tools.
00:31:43 - Speaker 1: That also reminds me of something you mentioned
earlier, which is onboarding content, which is sort of the industry term
or um as you likes to call it the out of box, AKA UI experience.
So the onboarding content is what you see the first time you open an
application. Sometimes there’s a little tour, uh, but I think for
creation applications, it’s kind of nice to show content that is in the
format of the application itself. So, for example, I think Bear, uh,
which is a really nicely designed notes app, it just comes with some
default notes that are in there that essentially explain how to use the
app and will show you what its capabilities are.
Notion, I think loads up with some templates, that sort of thing. So we
explored this quite a bit. We, we had a couple of major iterations of
our onboarding content where we tried to include sample boards and some
instructions and we would walk you through all the things.
And I think it, I don’t know if it’s a legacy of that kind of iPhone
world where people just want to try it, they skip all the tutorials,
they just ignore anything you put on the screen.
They just want to start trying stuff out. And and I understand that
because honestly I do the same thing, but what we discovered in some of
these usability tests when we would try out our onboarding content is
that people not only did not read it, they thought of that stuff as
being in their way and they were pushing it out of the way, deleting it,
erasing it, just trying to get past it, but then they would get
frustrated and stuck because they didn’t, you know, the interface had
these different uh approaches that they didn’t necessarily know, and
then they would then they would sort of feel stuck.
And that led us to thinking. OK, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna get
it with the initial content. People just want to play, they want to try
it out. And that led us to this garden themed, um, content we have now,
which explains fairly little. It just gives you a little playground or
it gives you some elements to play with. And then there’s a tips panel
you can go read when you wanna kind of go to the next level.
And now we’ve got this handbook. I doubt that’s all we’ll need, but I
thought it was interesting that we made this journey through trying to
solve the, how does this thing work through onboarding content and
eventually deciding that was a dead end.
00:33:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it’s notable that in most Pro
Tools you get the totally blank page.
So when you first fire up the eye, for example, it’s like the super
intimidating black screen.
It’s actually quite hard to figure out how to do anything at all, um,
and that’s, that’s kind of standard in the Pro Tools world, but that
actually points to a third leg of the stool.
So there’s how is the tool, how easy is the total. on its own kind of
intuitively, there’s the manual and there’s the kind of social element
where with a tool like Photoshop or VI there’s often someone who’s
basically teaching you or encouraging you or giving you pointers, and we
haven’t explored that too much with Muse, but I think that will be an
important uh third leg in terms of how people learn to use the app and
learn to be productive with it in practice.
00:34:30 - Speaker 1: So looking forward to the future here as we add
new capabilities to Muse, uh, we’ll want to document those.
My experience with documentation, one of the challenges there is keeping
it up to date when you have a fast moving, agile team, you’re cranking
stuff out, uh, and it’s easy to overlook that when you’re shipping new
stuff or it feels. Maybe like a costly step or the people who are making
the documentation aren’t totally plugged into what you’re creating.
We’re obviously a small team here, so maybe that helps avoid some of
this, but then we have a new problem I guess which is that as you said,
these have pretty good uh production value that you really invested a
lot in.
How do you have ideas for how we’re going to keep this up to date, or
do you expect there will be periods where they’re, we’re testing new
features and those just aren’t documented, and then when we sort of
decide they’re going to stick around or whatever, then we, then we lock
it in by putting it in the handbook.
00:35:26 - Speaker 2: I certainly hope that the handbook continually
converges to the real state of the app.
It’s tough though, you know, I’m tempted to just say be diligent about
it, uh, but our mutual friend, Peter would say that diligence doesn’t
work. Um, one, One idea I have here is leaning on the handbook for sort
of marketing purposes. And in the same way that uh document, documenting
your product forces you to think through the user experience, I think
the uh the expectation that the material is going to be shared in a
marketing capacity is going to encourage the team to like really think
through the quality of it and make sure it’s complete.
Um, it’s just things like when someone asks, how do IX with Muse, you
send them the anchor link in the handbook to that video. Um, I think
that kind of constant exposure will help maintain the quality.
This, this actually reminds me of another adage about data quality in
here the data quality is like kind of the handbook quality. It’s that
data quality is a function of how often and how thoroughly the content
is read, not how carefully it’s written, um, and so the more exposure
we get on the read side to the handbook, I think the better it will be.
00:36:33 - Speaker 1: Canonical URL for something is an incredibly
powerful thing in my experience, whether it’s internally in a team
because I don’t know, you have someone new joins the team and they say,
wait, how does X work? and you could send them the internal Wikilink or
whatever that describes that. And then externally, yeah, when you’re
doing support for your customers, someone asks on Twitter, whatever it
is, and you can basically just respond with bang. Here’s a, here’s a
URL that explains it all.
Often when you go to do that, you say, oh, this is, this is documented,
it’s in our manual or whatever, but then you realize there isn’t a
good link to it because there isn’t an anchor tag or it’s kind of
spread around a couple of different areas. There isn’t one like single
place to go to get that crisp answer. That’s exactly what they’re,
what they’re looking for and, uh, that’s a chance to potentially go
and prove it. Good. Well is there anything else on the topic of manuals
we should, we should talk about today?
00:37:26 - Speaker 2: I think that covers it.
00:37:28 - Speaker 1: If any of our listeners out there have feedback,
feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at
museApp.com via email. Love to hear your comments and ideas for future
episodes. And Mark, congratulations on your new career as a hand model.
Thank you. It’s great work and uh I’m really glad to have it out in
the world. Thanks Adam. Alright, talk to you next time.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I can really empathize with it because even in my
own sort of maths degree, I really struggled with terminology and
notation. And I think a big problem in kind of maths education generally
is that there’s a lot of focus on notation and terminology, and you
kind of miss the forest for the trees.
00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about
Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined
today by my colleague Mark McGranaghan.
00:00:39 - Speaker 2: Hey, Adam, and our guest Tamir Abdul of Kazul.
00:00:43 - Speaker 1: Hey guys, how’s it going?
00:00:44 - Speaker 2: And tamer, I understand you’re enjoying London
Springs so far.
00:00:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually went outdoors for the first time
in, I don’t know, 6 months or something. Yeah, I I’d forgotten just
how nice it is to sit on the grass in the sun, just chatting with
friends about nothing in particular. Yeah, it was amazing. What an
experience.
00:01:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the ability to go out and enjoy, we’ve had
sort of triple threat here in my household because we’ve had one, the
lockdown, which has been pretty severe, of course, for the last 6 months
or so.
2, we had a pretty serious winter. In fact, it was snowing today, and 3,
I’ve got a, a young child at home, so all of those things mean that I
basically barely leave the house.
Happily I do have a dog, so I have to go out for walks on that. If it
wasn’t for that, I would never see the outside, I think. Yeah, that’s
pretty rough. Well, Tamara, maybe you can tell our audience a little bit
about your background, including your podcast and the product you’re
working on now.
00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Awesome. So I’m Taymor. I’m one of the
co-founders of a company called Causal. We’re building a spreadsheet
just for number crunching. So anything involving numbers, we want causal
to be the way to do that. On the side, I have a podcast with my brother
where we just catch up once a week and chat about whatever’s on our
mind. And my background is mostly in maths, so I studied maths at
university, and specialized in statistics and machine learning and that
kind of stuff.
00:02:06 - Speaker 2: And what sorts of things do people use your
product for? Is this a total replacement for a spreadsheet or just a
subset of that?
00:02:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s really just a subset of that. We
can sort of think of spreadsheets as something like causal, our
products, plus something like Air Table. So Air Table is kind of taking
Over all the non-numerical stuff you might do in a spreadsheet. So
making lists of things, managing processes, you know, internal tools and
that kind of stuff. And we want causal to be used for anything involving
numbers. So any time you need to sort of write formulas that do
calculations or visualize data, that kind of stuff is really what causal
is about.
00:02:42 - Speaker 2: And I certainly think that one of the main uses
for spreadsheets for me in my business life, I guess, as well as helping
others, is this modeling, often financial modeling, where you’re just
trying to understand, cause of course, money is the lifeblood of a
business, but how you earn money because that proves you’re providing
value to people, as well as just not running out the money in the bank
so that your business doesn’t die, and spreadsheets as a what if tool
to understand. Both what might happen in the future, but in many cases
it’s just the viability of your business model.
One example I remember is I had a friend who was starting a retro kind
of 1980s arcade, and they really wanted to run the games off of
quarters, because that gives that authentic 80s feel, and then I’m
saying, well, OK, but if you look at the inflation since the 1980s, a
quarter isn’t what it used to be. This is a US dollar quarter, of
course. So we actually modeled all that out and plugged in a bunch of
what if values and basically figured out that under no reasonable,
we’re just taking guesstimates for how many games an hour someone’s
gonna play, how long they’re going to spend in the arcade, that sort of
thing, but basically nothing we modeled showed that it would be viable
to stay in business with all the costs. And eventually did settle on a
model which was more like a flat rate, you pay $10 or $12 or something
when you come in the front door, which ends up both feeling maybe more
fair, more fun for the patrons, but also is actually viable. And I think
it’s maybe an example of where having ranges, which we were talking
about a little bit earlier, where necessarily know what exactly each
patron is going to spend on drinks or quarters they’re going to put in
or how many games they’re going to play an hour or whatever, but you
can plug in reasonable ranges and from that you can infer maybe it ends
up being like a Drake’s equation kind of thing in that scenario where
you can figure out what’s viable and what isn’t.
00:04:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this idea of ranges is really
powerful.
And I sort of, personally, whenever I’m giving an estimate for
something, I get really anxious that my estimate is gonna be wrong. And
it just gives me a lot of comfort in providing a range, because then I,
I know that it’s probably right, rather than sort of precisely wrong.
And so I find that even when just sort of communicating day to day, if
someone asks me for an estimate of something, if I give a single number,
then for the next 5 minutes, I’ll be like, thinking through it in my
head of like, Oh, maybe that was wrong. Whereas if I I had a range,
like, yeah, I think it’s between 5 and 10, then I sort of have the
peace of mind of knowing that I haven’t sort of been too inaccurate, I
guess.
00:05:06 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s also a way to train yourself
to give estimates. I’ve run into this with a lot of folks who, exactly
as you said, don’t feel comfortable giving an estimate because they
feel like, well, I don’t know, but you can always kind of start with,
OK, you know, can you guess the price of product X in a supermarket, or
can you Guess the weight of this and maybe you can’t do that or you
feel like you don’t, but you can come up with a number that is so low
that it’s clearly outside the bottom of the range. You come up with
another number that’s clearly so high it’s outside of the top of the
range. All right, so now you’re working on it. Now let’s narrow this
window in.
00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite tactics is a
strong word, but one of my favorite things is, if I’m like talking to a
friend, and, yeah, exactly like you described, I think if you ask
someone to try and quantify something that they’re not used to
quantifying, then they’ll probably just say, Oh, I don’t know, I, I
could possibly put a number on that. But then if you ask them, Well, is
it more than 10? Is it less than 500, you know, you can actually get to
a pretty good range. And it is actually helpful to know that range,
rather than just put your hands up and say that it’s unquantifiable.
00:06:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, maybe that brings us to our topic for
today, which is thinking and probabilities, and I thought it was really
interesting that you mentioned this as kind of a founding idea for you
and then maybe in some ways you moved away from it in the product or
maybe just in the marketing. But tell us what it means to think in
probabilities.
00:06:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So the sort of origin story for
causal, it kind of comes from some work I did as a data scientist in a
previous job.
I was working for a property tech company where, essentially, the
company was placing big bets on houses. And so, in typical fashion, we
had a bunch of spreadsheet financial models that would forecast the
company’s cash flow, and some pretty big decisions were made on the
back of these models, like how many deals can we do every month, how
many people can we hire, so on.
And one of the really important things for this company was
understanding the risk that we were taking on in each deal. If we were
placing a big bet on a house, the house might be worth a lot more than
what we thought it’d be worth, or it might be worth a lot less. And
actually understanding how those would affect our bottom line was really
important. And, you know, in spreadsheets, Google Sheets, in this
instance, we had to do a bunch of work around. and hacks to try and get
at this idea of essentially a probability distribution for how much a
house would be worth. And there’s various kinds of ways to try and
approximate that in a spreadsheet. But essentially, trying to sort of
get at this idea of probability added so much complexity to these
spreadsheets that they became unmaintainable. No one really understood
how they worked. It was very hard to actually iterate on them. And so
that was kind of my first exposure to this problem of how do you crunch
numbers when some of them are uncertain? How do you build probabilistic
models to try and understand the world? And our starting point for
causal, and, and sort of our original mission was kind of to bring
probability to the masses, to build a tool that makes it so easy to work
with probability and uncertainty and so on, that it becomes sort of the
standard way that people sort of think numerically. Does that kind of
make sense?
00:07:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, to me it leads into the question of how much
is it a tools gap that the average intelligent educated, let’s say
knowledge worker that has a reason to want to be able to think in
probabilities or model uncertainty numerically, how much is it that the
tools make it tricky like you described with spreadsheets, and how much
is it more a matter of It’s very hard for humans to think this way,
even intelligent, educated people, it doesn’t come naturally unless
you’ve studied math or made this your career or your passion in life
that you’ve sort of struggled to apply this approach.
00:08:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a really good
question and it’s hard to know which side leads to which. An example
that I often think of is this idea of having a line of best fit for some
data set. It’s quite common, even sort of newspapers, magazines, to see
like a 2D chart with a bunch of data points, and there’s some kind of
straight line drawn through these data points to kind of extrapolate
some kind of trend and tell some kind of story. And if we think about
what does that actually mean? I think most people, if they look at a
graph like that, they will understand immediately what the graph is
trying to say. The graph will typically be trying to say that as this
one thing increases, this other thing increases as well, or as this one
thing increases, this other thing decreases, without a particularly
maths-y background, you can read a chart like that and you understand
what’s going on. I think the really cool thing about the line of best
fits that is now just sort of super common and everyone gets it.
Is that very few people, unless you’ve sort of studied maths or maybe
computer science, very few people will be able to tell you how you’d
arrive in that line of best fit.
And the best part is, they don’t need to be able to tell you that. They
don’t need to know that behind the scenes, you have to invert a matrix
in order to, like, figure out this line or anything like that. And I
think in that sense, just visualizing something in the right way is kind
of a powerful tool to unlock intuition that we already had.
And so, in the example of line of best fit, I, I can describe to you
some effects, like, As you get closer to the center of London, property
prices go up. You know, I can describe that to you. You understand what
that means in your head. And if I showed that to you on a chart, you’d
immediately kind of get what I’m trying to communicate. And so, I think
the probability stuff might be similar, where so far, we haven’t had
the line of best fit moment for probability. We haven’t found the sort
of killer tool or killer sort of visualization that anyone can sort of
look at and understand.
I do think probability is just really unintuitive in general as well.
But again, it’s hard to say whether it’s unintuitive because we
haven’t had some really basic tools like just being able to visualize
it, or whether it’s sort of inherently unintuitive for humans.
So I studied a lot of probability and statistics in my degree. And so,
after graduating, I kind of felt like I had a good handle on this stuff.
But it was after actually facing a lot of these problems involving how
do you account for uncertainty in models and things like that. I kind of
realized that studying the theory of probability and, you know, being
able to prove certain theorems and things like that is actually almost a
completely separate task from having the right intuition about these
things. And so, I think there’s a really common example that Naseem
Taleb is a big fan of, which is that you wouldn’t want to cross a river
that is 4 ft deep on average. And, yeah, obviously, if it’s 4 ft deep
on average, it might be 8 ft deep in one particular part and you might
drown.
And so I think he often talks about the dangers of working with
averages.
I think another kind of Illustrative example, sort of to do with a
buffet. If you imagine, you know, you’re putting together a buffet and
there’s 10 dishes in the buffet, and each dish takes on average, about
an hour to prepare, and the whole buffet is ready once all 10 dishes are
ready. So each dish has an average time of 1 hour. And if you were
trying to think about, you know, what is the average time for the whole
buffet to be ready, it’s tempting to think that.
00:11:50 - Speaker 2: Each dish is ready in an hour on average, and so
the whole buffet will be ready in 1 hour on average, but the two, the
two answers you would jump to to there is either 10 hours because it’s
sequential, or 1 hour because it’s all parallel.
00:11:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. So actually, even in the parallel
case, it turns out that the average time for the buffet to be ready is
actually a lot more than 1 hour and.
This is sort of like the most basic example of where average outcomes
don’t always come from sort of average inputs, essentially.
But I think even after studying statistics at a university level, that
would be the kind of thing that I wouldn’t immediately spot.
And now having sort of spent a lot of time thinking about this and kind
of building a product around this concept of probability. Any time I
hear the word average, an alarm bell basically goes off in my head as to
like, OK, what are like the sort of 3 or 4 different traps I can fall
into when thinking about this problem through the lens of averages.
00:12:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. I tend to think there are two big
hurdles people have to overcome.
The first is recognizing that you’re in a probabilistic situation,
which is almost all the time that you can’t use a point estimate, you
can’t use an average, you need to understand the distributions and the
samplings.
And the second is, what is the correct formula basically to use or how
exactly do you mathematically navigate this probabilistic situation? And
in my experience, most people miss the first step. They go to a point
estimate and then it’s already over before it started, you’re not even
wrong, right? You’re in flat land. Your answer has the wrong shape. And
so I think there’s a lot of value in having tools that Help you
navigate the mathematics once you’re over the first step, but perhaps
even more so, tools, stories, experiences, histories that help people be
more likely to raise the probabilistic flag, like warning, we’re
entering probabilistic territory, that alarm bell should be going off
almost all the time. And so I’m very interested in things that will
help people get more acclimated to that idea.
00:13:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I think one sort of common-ish
thing people do with spreadsheets is that, you know, if you do want to
understand the uncertainty of whatever you’re trying to model, you
know, some people might have 3 different scenarios, like a best case
scenario and a worst case scenario, and like a sort of average case
scenario. Yeah. And then you’d kind of run your whole model for the
best case and the worst case and average case. And then you have these
sort of 3 estimates for like, OK, this is what my outcomes could be. So
some people do make an effort to do that in some settings.
And it’s a step in the right direction, but actually, under the hood,
the maths doesn’t really work out there, right? You know, back to our
buffet, we have these 10 dishes, which we can prepare in parallel, so we
can do them all at the same time. If we said that, OK, on average, each
dish takes 1 hour to prepare, and in the worst case, it takes an hour
and a half, and in the best case, it takes half an hour.
If you were then trying to figure out what is the total time for the
buffet, you might be able to get some kind of range based on sort of
assuming they all hit the best case scenario, and that would be like the
best case scenario for the buffet, and then assuming they all hit the
worst case scenario, and that would be the worst case scenario for the
buffet. But the math doesn’t quite work out there. And it’s mostly
because our definition for best case and worst case changes from the
start to the finish.
So, by best case scenario for a single dish, in our heads, we probably
don’t mean the absolute best case scenario. We probably mean that like,
this is, uh, 95% of the time it’ll be slower than this or quicker than
this or whatever. And same for the worst case, you know, the worst case
scenario is the dish doesn’t get ready for 3 years or something, right?
And so you don’t actually think about the best case. And the worst
case, you are thinking about this sort of plausible range. But the issue
is when you start to think about this plausible range, and you’re doing
this lots of times, so we’re doing this 10 times in this case, because
we have 10 dishes, the equivalent plausible range for the total buffet.
It is not when every dish hits the bottom of the range or every dish
hits the top of the range, because every dish hitting the top of the
range or the bottom of the range is actually extremely unlikely. It’s
like very implausible.
00:15:42 - Speaker 2: I think that scenario you just described is how
engineers estimate their time in a sprint, which is that every single
thing they’re going to implement is going to be the best possible
scenario.
00:15:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think this is why it’s
so hard to plan projects, because if you just do it on the basis of
averages, then, you know, there’s a decent chance at least one of your
tasks is not going to be delivered on time.
And if you do want to get some kind of bounds on, like, best case and
worst case scenario, if you have like 10 tasks or whatever, you can’t
actually just take the best case for each and sum them up, or take the
worst case for each and sum them up. And so the only sort of rigorous
way to do this is by running lots and lots of simulations for possible
scenarios that could happen. And so, you know, in one simulation of the
buffet, you know, 3 dishes might take less than an hour, and 7 dishes
might take more than 1 hour or something. And another simulation, they
could all take less than an hour, and so on. And if you ran a few 1000
simulations, you could get an idea of, like, you know, 95% of the time,
how long does the buffet take. And so, actually running these
simulations is actually the only general and rigorous way to understand
the range of possible outcomes for your buffet. Does that kind of make
sense?
00:16:51 - Speaker 2: And what you’re talking about here is a Monte
Carlo simulation, is that right?
00:16:55 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah, yeah. So in maths, this would be
called a Monte Carlo simulation.
And actually, you know, running thousands of Monte Carlo simulations for
a basic calculation that you might be doing, it’s usually pretty
tricky.
The only way to really do it is to write, you know, a script that can
loop through some calculation 10,000 times and then show you, you know,
95% of the time your buffet takes between this time and this time. And a
big part of what we’re trying to do with causal is sort of abstract
away all of this stuff around simulation and probability distributions,
and let people just say, Hey, you know, each of my dishes takes between
45 and 90 minutes to cook. And now, can you just tell me, like, what is
the equivalent range for the total buffet?
00:17:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can see how simulation does cover it, but
there is something fun about the Monte Carlo name a little bit, and when
I first learned about that, I don’t, unlike, I think both of you, I
don’t have any kind of solid educational background in mathematics, but
I later learned about it when I was kind of digging into the data
science world of things, particularly with working with the R
programming language, and they had essentially some exercises that
involved doing these simulations, some very visual ones that I quite
liked where essentially Allowed you, they said, OK, you can calculate
the area of a circle with the formula, or you can run a simulation where
you essentially, you know, draw a circle on the wall and then throw
darts that land in random XY locations and if you do that 1000 times and
count how many darts are on the inside of the circle and how many on the
outside of the circle, you can close in on the value of pi, essentially,
which I found somehow very amusing and fun way of going about things.
00:18:35 - Speaker 1: I love that example. Yeah, I think simulation is a
surprisingly powerful tool where if you can reframe any problem as
almost like a probability question where you can run simulations, it’s
surprisingly generally applicable.
And so in the example you gave, you’re sort of reframing the question
of the area of the circle in terms of.
The probability of a dart landing in the circle versus outside the
circle, and as soon as you reframe it in terms of probabilities, then
you can just like run a bunch of simulations, and it takes a while, but
you don’t have to be particularly smart about it.
I think most complex problems in maths, they’re often intractable. You
know, it’s very hard to express them as a clean equation that you have
to solve.
And even if you can express it as a clean equation, there’s often no
general way to solve this equation. And so reframing things in terms of
like, how can we just do this really dumb thing a million times to get
like a really good approximation to the answer is surprisingly generally
applicable.
00:19:28 - Speaker 3: Yeah, very powerful technique and especially
useful for situations where you have multiple steps or branches, even
just a few of those, they can be very simple to describe in human terms,
if this then that some chance and so forth, but Once you have any
complexity and situation, it often becomes impossible to get a so-called
closed form solution, which is what you were alluding to where you have
basically some formula you can write down, you plug in numbers and you
get the result. Mathematicians always like such closed form solutions to
the point where I think initially they kind of pooh poohed the Monte
Carlo world, but I think now it’s shown its power and folks are more
open to the numerical approaches.
The study of probability is so interesting because it pops up in so many
domains. Once you know to be looking for probabilistic situations, you
see them everywhere.
I can give two examples from my experience. The first was in college, I
worked on this thing called RoboCup. RoboCup is where you have toy
robotic dogs play soccer. And these are dogs that can do basic seeing,
and then you use video processing algorithms to extract information and
you program the dogs to play soccer autonomously on this sort of toy
soccer field. And anyways, one of the big advantages that our team had
was the ability for the dogs to locate themselves on the field, which
is, as you can imagine, is a sort of fundamental thing for programming
dogs to play soccer.
And the reason that this was so hard was because these are like really
bad cameras basically so you’re getting really choppy visual
information. Really the only way to deal with that is probabilistically,
because the data that’s coming in is so noisy, you can’t do anything
on it if this and that basis. You basically have to say, OK, given all
of these observations I’m making about the different landmarks I know
about on the field, what is probabilistically the most likely location
for me to be in? And furthermore, what is my sort of probability cloud
of where I plausibly am on the field, and if I have enough certainty
about this probability cloud, then I can undertake certain actions like
kick the ball towards the goal and so on.
And then to give a very different example in the world of engineering
management, I think it’s very fundamental to understand that
engineering is a risky endeavor, especially when you’re like developing
new products. This is the area where I think a lot of people think too
deterministically. So one example that I like to give is, imagine you
have a multi-step software development process you need to do A and B
and C, and this is actually kind of similar to the buffet example. Each
one takes an engineer, one unit of work, and an engineer can do 1 unit
of work at any given time. Now you might think you should just assign
one engineer to A, one engineer to B, and one engineer C. and in a
totally deterministic world, that works perfectly. The gears, they all
mesh everything turns in unison, it’s perfect, but you have to
recognize that there’s inherent variability in how long these tasks
take. And so what can happen is if you’re running the entire team at
So-called maximum capacity, then if anyone experiences a task that’s
slightly harder than you anticipated, you basically grind the gears for
the entire thing because A is holding up B is holding up C, and then you
go from this world of everyone is fully optimally working to everyone is
basically stuck waiting for someone else and everything is kind of
ground. up. And that’s where this idea of slack comes from, where if
you’re in a situation where you have uncertainty about how long things
are going to take and you have dependencies, counterintuitively, the
correct thing to do is to spend some of your time twiddling your thumbs,
basically. Because if you try to be doing stuff all the time, you’re
inevitably going to be getting in the situation where you’re grinding
the gears out.
00:22:50 - Speaker 2: And I think there by Slack you’re referring to
the concept of slack, not the product, and perhaps there is a book that
was influential to me, recommended by one of our mutual colleagues at
Hiroku, that’s essentially a management book that’s titled Slack and
makes that very argument. It’s sort of a. theory thing a little bit and
there’s some things about creativity as well, but ultimately, even if
you just want to think of everyone on the team as being a worker
automaton that needs to provide end units of productivity, it actually
turns out you have a more efficient system when there’s space in the
system, there’s slack in the system.
00:23:25 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and along these lines for people who enjoy
thinking in probabilistic terms, I would also highly recommend
principles of product development flow. This is basically a mathematical
cutheoretic treatment of product development, and when I first heard
that, I’m like, how can you possibly write interesting equations about
product development, but if you just approach it with this lens of
probability or alternatively risk, all kinds of interesting things fall
out. So for folks who have a mathematical inclination, I suggest that
book.
00:23:54 - Speaker 2: Hm. Yeah, I guess a risk and probability the same
thing in what we’re talking about here? It seems like one is sort of
just like the inverse of the other, at least in my kind of layperson’s
understanding, but I don’t know if that’s correct.
00:24:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s my intuition. So you could think of
risk in engineering delivery time means that there’s a probability
distribution.
And in fact, it’s probably long-tailed, where there’s some chance it
goes on time, there’s, uh, frankly small chance it happens before you
expect it to happen. And then there’s the real possibility it takes 23
times as long, it never gets done, right? That’s what I mean by risk
and Similarly, there’s probability distribution around how customers
are likely to value or not a given feature, and that’s another thing
that’s important to consider. So you can’t say customers are
definitely like that. And in fact, there’s some chance they like it,
some chance they don’t like it, some chance they really like it.
And in the same way that you need to correctly consider distributions
when you’re planning your buffet preparation, you need to consider
these distributions when you’re doing product development.
00:24:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think just to add to that, when I think
about sort of risk and probability and kind of how are these concepts
related, I think risk also kind of captures, I guess, kind of the
magnitude of what could result from something. So, for example, if you
knew that there was a 1% chance that you’d die by driving a car, yeah,
that would be a much higher risk than if there was a 20% chance of
getting wet, you know, from walking outside. So I think risk also sort
of captures the actual impact of some low probability event. Right.
00:25:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s some good discussion of this, the
80,000 hours group which I follow, they spend a lot of time talking
about these kind of tail risk events, pandemics, which they were big on
before we had one that captured the Western consciousness.
But also things like meteor strikes and other events that obviously
things that are climate related and in many cases it is an
acknowledgement of, yeah, the chance of this happening, the probability
of this happening is small, but maybe this is sort of the expected value
of something is the likelihood of it happening times the result.
And so if the result is this huge, huge event like a species ending
extinction event, even a very small chance of it is something that maybe
it’s worth investing some resources protecting against.
00:26:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is an area where even if you do take
that first jump of thinking probabilistically, you can still fall short,
in particular, if the cases that end up mattering in the expected value
calculation are outside of the intuitive probable range.
So you can think of things like meteor strikes and nuclear war and so
on, but one that’s very familiar to us, Adam, is earthquakes in.
So the chance of a very serious earthquake in California is on the order
of 1 every 100 years.
So if you just take that, you know, it’s basically outside the 95%
confidence interval. So we could say, if we weren’t being too careful
that basically we’re not going to have an earthquake, don’t worry
about it. But in fact, the expected damage from such an earthquake is
enormous. So therefore, any year the EV on earthquakes in California is
actually non-trivial and therefore you should do some amount of
preparation.
00:26:49 - Speaker 2: That also highlights another challenge or fallacy
or just a way that this whole thing is nonintuitive for the way that
humans think, which is you often hear folks in California speaking in
terms of quote unquote, we’re due for a big one because you hear that
we talk about it that way, we should. one every 100 years and that
actually masks or does not correctly capture the probability that we’re
trying to express. And so people convert that to more of a cyclical time
thing like that we expect the sun to rise once a day.
In fact, that is not at all what it is. So working on casual and working
with your users and customers who of course are again smart people
educated, need to think in terms of probabilities or risks for their
work and yet maybe don’t have the same mathematics background that both
of you have.
I mean, there’s countless, I don’t know, well known fallacies, I
don’t know, expecting a string of coin flips to have fewer.
Long runs of heads and tails, for example, than it does in actuality.
But what are some of the things where either one you see folks have
their intuition not matching what reality is, and then two, what are
some things you found in the product or maybe it’s even more of a
almost like a marketing thing, and explaining thing to help folks bridge
that gap without necessarily getting the mathematics degree.
00:28:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think we’ve had a ton of
learnings on the more sort of marketing and positioning side of this
kind of product.
In the very early days, you know, our mission was to really focus on
this probability stuff. And so when we, you know, on our landing page,
we would literally describe causal as a probabilistic modeling tool.
That means something to us.
But I think what we didn’t realize is that for people without a maths
background, words like probabilistic and words like Monte Carlo
simulation, They’re just quite scary. I, I initially found this a
little bit frustrating because, you know, the term probabilistic model
to me, it means like a very specific thing and it was really hard to try
and describe this concept to folks with less mathematical backgrounds.
But actually, I can really empathize with it because even in my own sort
of maths degree. I really struggled with terminology and notation and
things like that.
And I think a big problem in kind of maths education generally is that
there’s a lot of focus on notation and terminology, and you kind of
miss the forest for the trees.
And so, you know, even when I was in my 2nd or 3rd year of university.
Anytime I would see a capital sigma, you know, the big sort of sum
symbol, which is basically everywhere in every branch of maths, you’re
going to be summing things up.
Any time I’d see like the sum of like some expression, I’d immediately
think, oh man, this is so hard. This looks really complicated. There’s
all these symbols going on. And so I’ve definitely felt that pain of.
Being intimidated by terminology and notation. And I think that was part
of the problem initially when we were using words like probabilistic,
when we were using words like Monte Carlo, you know, it took me sort of,
yeah, I’d say, in my 4th year of my maths degree, I didn’t have
notation anxiety anymore. But it took me a long time to get over that.
And I think a lot of people who didn’t like maths in school or feel
like they were bad at maths, I think a lot of it just comes down to
notation. You know, once you’re introduced to algebra, you start seeing
all these symbols like X and Y and so on. And it takes a while to get
comfortable with that. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking,
Oh man, I find the notation confusing. Therefore, I am bad at maths.
Therefore, you know, I shouldn’t tell you this thing.
But I think getting past the language, getting past the notation is
actually a big hurdle. And so, for causal specifically, you know, it
took us a few months to figure this out, but we stopped using words like
probabilistic. We stopped. Using words like Monte Carlo. I think
generally, people understand the idea of uncertainty. And so, in terms
of how we position, I guess, the probabilistic aspect of causal, is that
we usually describe it in terms of, you know, hey, if you’re uncertain
about a particular number, so writing a single number, you can say, Hey,
I think it’s between 3 and 5, or I think it’s between 5 and 10. And
people, you know, pretty intuitively understand ranges. They can
probably come up with a range for. Any quantity in their day to day life
that they might want to model. And saying, like, I think something is
between 5 and 10 doesn’t require any sort of technical knowledge, it’s
sort of pure intuition.
And so, in causal, people just need to apply their intuition at the
point where they can do it well. So at the point where they can estimate
a range for a particular quantity, where the intuition breaks down is,
you know, you now have this model with a bunch of formulas, a bunch of
calculations, where you’re taking all of these 5 to 10s and 10 to 20s.
and so on, and combining them in some weird way to get a final result,
that’s where intuition really breaks down. It’s actually very hard to
punch those numbers in your head.
And that’s where Corle handles it for you. It runs, you know, 10,000
simulations, and then just shows you the sort of 10 to 20 results,
rather than you having to worry about that side of things. So I think,
yeah, lots of learnings on the sort of positioning and kind of the
marketing side of things.
In terms of actually getting people to think more probabilistically. I
think most of the folks that use causal previously used spreadsheets and
if you’ve had to build a financial model in the spreadsheets, you’re
probably somewhat familiar with the idea of best case and worst case
scenarios, but I think most people just don’t do them because it’s
just very fitly, it requires a bunch of formulas and things like that.
And so.
Actually, getting people to start thinking in terms of ranges has been
pretty easy because people have wanted to do that anyway. It’s just so
much of a pain to set that up in a spreadsheet that they haven’t ended
up doing it. And so being able to just write in an expression, like 5 to
10 in causal comes very naturally to people, and they do tend to do that
quite a lot because causal handles the complexity of all of that.
00:32:16 - Speaker 2: In terms of the output, they see, you mentioned
just seeing, you put in a range or a series of ranges, and you get out a
single range, but there’s also maybe you found ways to represent that
visually in plots or Yeah, so representing it visually is trickier.
00:32:28 - Speaker 1: I mean, so cos all under the hood, you know,
running all these simulations and so.
It has a lot more information than just the range of your possible
outcome. It also has the sort of precise distribution of your possible
outcome.
And you know, the range might be 5 to 10, but it might be more likely to
be closer to 10 than closer to 5, and so on, where it might have this
sort of bimodal thing where it’s really likely to be close to 5 or 10,
but not likely to be anywhere in the middle.
And so there’s lots of different distribution shapes that might
underlie a range, like 5 to 10.
We found that.
Most folks don’t have too much familiarity with reading probability
distribution charts. It is a featuring causal.
You can actually see it, like a bell curve if it happens to be like
that, or other equivalent charts.
Most people aren’t too familiar with those, and so most people don’t
end up using them.
What people are fairly familiar with is sort of like fan charts. So if
you’re projecting something over time, you know, you might have like a
single line or something. And then instead of a single line, you might
have like a sort of fanning out range where there’s kind of visible
upper bound to this range and invisible lower bound. And most people
really intuitively understand what a fan chart looks like. And so those
are really common, but unfortunately, it does kind of hide the
underlying distribution, and we haven’t yet figured out a really
intuitive way to show people the actual distribution in a way that
they’ll understand.
00:33:44 - Speaker 3: I do feel like those fan charts, which now I know
the name for, that’s useful, are perhaps the closest thing we have to
the line through a dots in terms of comprehensibility and universality.
I’ve seen those a lot in the financial domain where you have a balance
or a bankroll or similar investment balance and you run a 100
simulations, and you can kind of get a sense of the probability
distribution if you have the right amount of lines in your fan chart
because you see that there’s kind of more lines in the middle and fewer
lines. And the scraggly edges, not perfect, but it’s pretty intuitive.
I also like those because they do show the dynamism. So if you’re
looking at a bankroll, for example, you see that some of these lines,
they really dip close to zero and some go way up but then come back down
and a lot of them just kind of chunk along, so you get some sense for
the randomness.
00:34:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ve had to put a lot of thought into how
much detail we want to show in these kinds of visualizations.
So when it comes to fan charts, for example, causal does have all 10,000
of their simulations, and we could draw on, you know, each of those
10,000, maybe with like a sort of 1% opacity or something. And so then
you can actually get an idea of the distribution.
But it just adds a lot more complexity to the visualization. And so
we’ve had to sort of try and find the balance between sort of
complexity and comprehensibility, where if we try and be super rigorous
and show every single simulation on the charts, chances are most people
will look at it, get a bit confused, and not be able to make any sense
of it. Whereas if we kind of show the sort of 90% range or the 95%
range, it’s much more understandable. And at least People will have an
idea of a range of possible outcomes, and then maybe if they want, they
can kind of double click and zoom into the distribution itself. But it
is very challenging to actually visually represent uncertainty. There’s
a few research departments and a few universities that are doing a lot
of work into figuring out the best ways to visually represent
uncertainty. But, yeah, it’s all about the balance between sort of
complexity and comprehensibility.
00:35:35 - Speaker 3: Now we’ve talked mostly about modeling in the
sense of going forward, so you were about to begin preparation of the
buffet, what should you expect in terms of the completion times
approximately one hour from now. I also think there’s this very
interesting world of probability, which is basically going backwards.
You’ve observed that everything completed in 1 hour and 15 minutes.
What does that mean about the underlying tendency for us to complete
individual sections of the buffet? And there are all kinds of other
examples that we could talk about. I’m curious if you see those sort of
use cases in causal or if you have other thoughts on that space.
00:36:07 - Speaker 1: We definitely see less of those use cases. The one
time it does come up is if you have a bunch of historical data about a
particular quantity, maybe you have a bunch of historical exchange rates
between the dollar and US start or something. If you then want to kind
of use that exchange rate to project something forwards, it is helpful
to kind of look at, you know, what has been the distribution of this
exchange rate historically.
And then let’s just assume it’ll probably have a similar distribution
going forwards. And so, in that way, instead of just sort of plucking a
range out of thin air of like, oh, I think the exchange rates between
0.9 and 0.99 or something like that, you can actually infer the
distribution from historical data.
And that is a feature that we do have, where if you have a A bunch of
historical data for something, we can sort of try and fit an empirical
probability distribution, is what it would technically be called, onto
that, so that you don’t have to put your finger in the air and come up
with a range. We see a lot less of that, and the more useful thing does
seem to be being able to apply ranges based on your own assumptions
rather than figuring out ranges or distributions from historical data.
00:37:09 - Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe we can just talk about some examples
from our own experience of this type of probability.
One example that I think is really cool, and this one’s due to Sammo
Beria, I hope I’m pronouncing his name correctly. This is Sammo of
Bismarck analytics, we can link to him in the show notes, but he’s made
this point that with how we’ve historically thought about
archaeological discoveries, our timelines only go backwards.
So say for example, we’d find the first cave painting and we date it to
5000 years ago, and we say cave painting has been around for 5000 years.
And then we find another cave painting, and it’s 8000 years old, and
then we say, I guess cave painting has been around for 8000 years. Now,
the first observation is that if you take this naive approach, our
timelines are only ever going to go backwards, cause anytime we discover
a newer one, OK, we’ve known about that, anytime we discover an older
one, our timelines for when humans were doing certain things are going
backwards. And perhaps Then the correct way to think about this
probabilistically would be to say that when we discover the 8000 year
old cave painting, there’s some underlying distribution of cave
paintings, some of which are probably older than 8000 years old. So
therefore, the correct estimate is probably older than that. And if we
were in fact doing that correctly, we wouldn’t always be getting older.
We would be kind of getting more and more refined around the true date
on either side. It’s just one example of how if you don’t think about
things in careful probabilistic terms, especially when you’re doing
this sort of backwards projection onto the underlying distribution, you
can very easily make mistakes.
00:38:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a really interesting example. I
think this actually came up during some of the stats courses that I did
at the university. We did a course on Bayesian inference, so using kind
of Bayesian theory of probability.
And I think this is one of the few areas where people have actually been
applying sort of Bayesian ideas of probability in practice in real life.
And I think we actually had a bunch of examples in our sort of lecture
notes specifically around archaeological digs. And if you dig up
something that’s 50 layers of, I don’t know, sand deep or something,
and you think that that’s dated from a certain period, how should you
actually think about your new best estimate for how long we’ve been
doing the cave paintings? And so there’s a bunch of maths that can
actually sort of help you with that. And from my understanding, people
are using that maths in archaeological stuff.
Nice. I’m curious as to how you guys personally think about how much to
trust numbers, how much to trust data and statistics. I found that for
myself, I’m just very skeptical of any numbers that anyone tries to
throw at me. And I’m, I’m usually much more convinced by a theory or
an argument that I find highly plausible than by someone trying to
convince me of something. Using data, where do you guys fall that
spectrum and like, in what context do you trust numbers that people
throw at you and in what context do you not?
00:39:56 - Speaker 3: Oh man, so this gets us into the conversation of
what you should believe when you read in the newspaper according to a
study.
And so for me that’s very little, basically nothing. And so I have a
lot of trust in statistics and numbers and experiments, but you gotta
consider the whole ecosystem.
And when you’re looking, for example, at the ecosystem of publicly
described science, there are many, many steps where Where the data gets
systematically corrupted. And so what you’re likely to read at the end
is just not that useful.
So just to give some examples here, when a newspaper reports on a
scientific study, they’re very likely to report incorrectly because of
probabilistic illiteracy.
And then, even among the studies that they choose to report on that,
they’re sampling from the universe of studies, and they might have
biases or reasons to only. Report on a subset of them.
And then furthermore, the stuff that gets published, that is
systematically corrupted because only certain types of results they get
published.
And then in terms of the data that goes into both the published and
unpublished studies, there’s a lot of fraud and other issues with it.
And so by the time you get out to the end, it’s just not that useful.
And if you want to have a chance, you basically need to do a meta review
or a meta study. I forget what the exact term is, maybe you know. But
Basically, where you round up all of the studies that have ever existed,
both published and unpublished, and try to synthesize all the data to
say something useful. So because these universes tend to be so complex
and because of all the principal agent problems involved, I tend not to
trust them that much. But when I have my hand on a specific experiment
that I understand end to end, and ideally was pre-registered, then I’m
quite likely to trust it.
00:41:29 - Speaker 2: And pre-registered here means they didn’t extract
a meaning or find meaning post hoc once they looked at the data, but
rather that they were using it to test or falsify or prove or falsify a
particular hypothesis.
00:41:43 - Speaker 3: Right, so this is one of the areas where
historically scientific publishing has gone very wrong. So say you have
a new drug, for example, or you have 100 new drugs.
And you privately conduct tests on 1 hundreds of the drugs using the
standard 95% confidence interval. Well, you would expect that 5 of those
will falsely return, even if all the drugs are placebos, they do
nothing. You would expect that 5 of those placebos return, given you’re
95% confident intervals by definition, that they are helpful. And so if
you have the opportunity to publish or not. Publish whatever studies you
want, you can just publish those 5 and say, hey, look, well, we have 5
drugs that are magic. And in fact, you’re attempting to fool the public
by randomness. Whereas if you pre-register all 100 studies, then you
can’t do that. People can see that, you know, wait, 95% of the stuff
that you think might be useful is actually not useful. So therefore,
you’re just not a very good development company.
00:42:33 - Speaker 2: That makes me think of a related concept in terms
of like, yeah, 95% sort of effectiveness, which is essentially medical
tests. And that there’s a pretty strong argument against sort of
testing. You would think that the best thing to do, whether you’re
talking about a disease or early cancer screening or anything like that
is just test as much and as often as possible.
But the challenge with a lot of these things is that you get this
asymmetry between the false positives and the false negatives, which is
essentially if the test is even 99% accurate. But the disease only
appears in 1 out of every 50,000 people. The number of people who get
the false positive, that is to say, saying that they have the disease
when they don’t, vastly outweighs the people that actually get correct
positives on it, and then they spend a bunch of time with stressed out
people.
Thinking they have a terrible disease and in fact they want the doctors
to make the judgment call if there’s some reason, some symptom we see
here that makes us want to do the test rather than kind of a proactive
test, which I thought was very interesting and again to me was a
surprising result. I think coming back to that.
Intuitively, you don’t think of a test that has, for example, 99%
effectiveness as being something that would produce such kind of
skewedly wrong or just misleading results, but without knowing that
other number, which what’s the incidence of this particular disease in
the population that you’re running the test against, you actually
don’t know what the balance of false positives to true positives is.
For me, the question of whether I’m convinced by data. Certainly, I
think for me it does come down to putting numbers on things, quantifying
things, brings a I don’t know if rigor is quite the right word, but
perhaps a concreteness.
When you say something is really, really big versus saying it is 50 m
tall, those two have very different qualities to it, and I feel when
people either do bring numbers in either from their own volition or
because they’re forced to by scientific practices or something like
that. That that actually sharpens the thinking.
Now that doesn’t mean that numbers are a magic wand and by quantifying
things and turning that into data sets, whether it’s a spreadsheet or
something else or the new favorite magic wand which is data science,
that just because you bring those things in that now your results are
unimpeachable, but rather that I in general that is gonna probably do
better than more kind of broad abstract kind of reasoning by analogy or
something like that.
But yeah, I guess, certainly the specific case marked names of studies
as reported on in the news is something to be very suspect of, but
looking at a data set and using that to draw some conclusions, I think
can be a very powerful way to understand the world. Tim or I might also
turn the question back to you on product development, and say to what
degree, being a, certainly a very numerically literate person, to what
degree do you use some kind of data or quantification in Making product
decisions or business decisions, or do you really guide that, especially
maybe in the early days, where just the end in terms of number of users,
number of customers, total time elapsed, just isn’t big enough, you
need to just kind of go with building what’s in your heart, as I said
earlier, or following your product intuition and not getting hung up on
trying to make sense out of a small data set.
00:46:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think, ironically, we very much err on
the side of our intuition and conviction on things. I think,
particularly when it comes to big product things, like, you’re just not
going to find the answers in any data set. And so one a really big thing
that we kind of grappled with from day one was, we’re building this
tool for working with numbers, it’s very general, and so on.
What should the UI for this thing actually be? And, you know, we were
always kind of aware that, well, maybe we could make it look a bit like
a spreadsheet, cause that’ll be more familiar to people, and so on.
But, you know, maybe we want to move people away from that and get them
to stop thinking in those terms and maybe don’t, don’t do that. We
actually kind of had our own proprietary UI until about 4 months ago.
And maybe about 6 months ago, we decided, actually, you know what, a lot
of people are having trouble getting onboarded. You know, no one is
explicitly telling us that, look, give me a spreadsheet interface. No
one was explicitly telling us that, but You know, there was a lot of
like friction. There were a lot of things which just quite weren’t
working out. And so we had to, you know, in the absence of data, we had
to ourselves, come up with an analytical model of the world of like,
hey, you know, we’re having these problems because our interface is too
hard to use for new people. It’s too confusing. And so we should build
the spreadsheet. And I can’t imagine, you know, maybe we could have run
some survey asking people, like, hey, you know, would you prefer a
spreadsheet interface or another interface? Like, you know, but again, I
think like designing a survey in a way that I would actually trust it
would be really tricky, and I don’t know how much I would trust the
results of that kind of survey. So I think big product stuff generally
does not come from any kind of data. It’s more around our own
intuitions. I’m very happy to trust data. To sort of tune an existing
thing that we have created. I think data is very good for tuning
something that you’ve come up with. Uh, so I think like, an onboarding
flow is an example of this. So, you know, yeah, I think you guys had
like a previous episode just about onboarding or something like that in
the early days of the podcast. Onboarding is a big challenge for causal,
and we have like a guided onboarding. Once you make an account, we then
show, like, little dots on different parts of the UI saying, oh, click
here, now type this thing in, now press enter, and so on to guide people
through kind of the main flows. Uh, of the product. And that’s the kind
of thing where we can come up with the structure of like, OK, we think
these are the five steps, and this is what we should tell people. And
then we can look at the data to kind of optimize this structure that
we’ve come up with. And so we can see that, OK, you know, loads of
people are falling off after step 3, so there’s probably a problem
there, we should probably change that. Data wouldn’t tell us what the
steps should be. We have to come up with that structure ourselves. And
then once you have the structure, then data is good for refining it and
tuning it. And so that’s really how I see data as like, you know, it’s
up to us and our own conviction to build the main structure, and then we
can use data to kind of refine it a little bit.
00:48:42 - Speaker 2: That reminds me of something a product manager
from Pinterest told me that they did there, at least at the time, which
was to use split tests automatically just to check that there isn’t a
regression in whatever their core metrics are, which might include, you
know, monetary things, people converting to purchase or Whatever was
there, but also things having to do with, yeah, basically check their
core metrics and make sure this exciting new feature they rolled out
didn’t just cause something important to tank. It’s kind of a safety
check, so it’s almost more of a regression test rather than something
that was intended to decide product direction.
00:49:20 - Speaker 3: This conversation reminds me of a couple of
things. One is so-called AA tests, where you test your AB testing
framework and analysis by making the two sides of the test exactly the
same.
And so that’s a good way to see if you are likely to fool yourself by
randomness, because if you come back with the result that A is bigger
than A, well, something’s probably wrong with your probabilistic
reasoning.
When you mentioned the idea of a spreadsheet interface, that’s
something you see in a lot of tools for thought and productivity apps,
for example, notion and air table will have this idea of a sort of
spreadsheet like thing that you can put in.
It reminds me of the phenomenon of carsonization, which is the tendency
of crustaceans to evolve into crab-like things. Spreadsheets are sort of
the crab of the productivity tool world. It’s like everyone kind of
wants to be a crab slash spreadsheet, depending on where you are.
00:50:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s really funny. We had similar things.
So one of our sort of investors slash advisors is a chap who’s kind of
been in the financial modeling game for a very long time. He sort of has
a business selling Excel financial model templates. And so he’s tried
every sort of number crunching tool under the sun, really. And early on,
you know, he basically predicts this, and he, he sort of told us that,
look, every tool that I’ve ever seen would be created for this,
eventually ends up looking like a spreadsheet. That’s all I’m saying,
you know, do whatever you want with that information. Um, but he called
it about a year and a half ago.
00:50:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, sometimes the process of being a
product creator, especially when you’re trying to do something truly
novel, is to try all your weird and exciting ideas, and unfortunately,
most of them will probably turn out to be not effective, and then you
realize why it is that the boring standard thing that everyone uses is
boring and standard, is because it really works. But hopefully you find
those few weird ideas that, in fact, are breakthrough and can make a
difference in the world.
00:51:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we almost sort of had to figure out from
first principles that a 2D grid is a good way of displaying two
dimensional data.
00:51:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I like a little bit that approach of
throwing out assumptions and throwing out kind of a sense of, well
we’re doing it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it.
I think it’s very easy to build products that way to say, OK, well,
obviously you start with the login page because everyone has a login
page and then you have a page that’s like this and a screen that’s
like this. And you’re just going based on assumptions of following
established patterns and throwing those out and saying, OK, now what are
we trying to accomplish here and what if we design something truly new?
And more often than not, you do end up back at those established
patterns because they’re good for a reason or they work well for a
reason, but I feel like it’s a truer and more pure way to arrive at
those, kind of building it up yourself, as opposed to kind of just
imitating without knowing the underlying reasons.
00:52:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.
00:52:06 - Speaker 3: This is actually reminding me of the importance to
my mind of studying combinatorics and probability as a predecessor to
statistics. So a lot of folks I see these days, they study statistics
and so they just get the formulas for like how do you do a two-tailed
tea test or whatever. And I don’t have the underlying intuition,
whereas I think it’s much more useful to have the underlying intuition
of especially combinatorics, which is the study of counting and
therefore gives you probability. So yeah, if folks are interested in
this space, I would suggest starting with how to count things in
combinatorics.
00:52:39 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for
listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MuseAppHQ or via
email, hello at museApp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on
Apple Podcasts. And Tamar, I’m glad you’re building a tool for
thinking and probabilities because I think we all need it.
00:52:59 - Speaker 1: Cool, thanks a lot for having me. This has been a
lot of fun.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I actually say mostly seriously that games in the
world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from kind of pro
games to mainstream games to consumer software to software for startups
to software for enterprises.
00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. U is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about
Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here
today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. How are things in Seattle,
Mark?
00:00:37 - Speaker 1: Going all right. We got the cherry blossoms this
week in Seattle, which is exciting, and it’s a sign that we’re turning
into the strong half of the Seattle weather calendar in the summer here.
00:00:47 - Speaker 2: Very nice, yeah, we’re seeing just a little bit
of flowers starting to peek out on the trees. Here in Berlin, although
it’s always an experience where you see the first flowers kind of try
to come out when it seems like it might be warm enough on those first
sunny days in March, and then inevitably it turns really cold again and
they all die. Yeah. So you see this thing where there’s the pioneers
that are trying to break through, and then eventually the weather turns
and it comes into full bloom, which is absolutely excellent for those
that like colorful flower rich environment, like me, probably pretty bad
for those with allergies, I’m imagining.
00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. All right, so I’m excited to do
an episode, Adam, about learning from games. Now, games, gaming, the
gaming ecosystem, something that’s come up on a lot of previous
podcasts. We’ve mentioned it here and there, but I thought it would be
a good time to do a proper episode, collecting all of the things that
we’ve learned and gleaned from that industry.
00:01:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we mentioned in passing lots of times.
I think we talked about it last time with Rasmus Anderson. It was a big
part of our conversation with Andy Works, and he’s since published a
great article essentially on exactly this topic called Serious Play.
I’ll link in the show notes, of course, talking about his journey of
playing a lot of games when he was younger, then eventually becoming, I
don’t know, an adult with responsibilities and, you know, you don’t
have As much time for that sort of thing anymore, and then rediscovering
really rich uh world of of games that exist now, both the big budget
stuff and the indie games, and also what we can learn from that, why
these are important as artistic, as cultural, and certainly as
inspiration for design.
So Mark, when you’ve been inclined to reference games in connection
with news, productivity, software tools for thought, it seems like they
don’t have much in common, right? The productivity world is very
focused on, well, being productive, which is almost the opposite of what
you think of games are for, which is entertainment. So why is there a
connection? Why are these two things so relevant to each other?
00:02:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s kind of the question of the
podcast, isn’t it? Maybe we can start by motivating a little bit
because I think we’re kind of sleeping on games as an industry. It’s
something that in the typical world of Silicon Valley kind of flies
under the radar for a variety of reasons, but in fact, games are a huge
deal. It’s an enormous industry. They’re extremely influential in
terms of the amount of time that people spend on them and the culture,
and as we’ll see, I think there’s a lot of technology, products,
social things that games have figured out. I think there’s a lot to
learn there.
00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one comparison you can make there is
Hollywood, right? Films, TV, and I think it’s well understood, or most
people would say, yeah, of course, Hollywood and films broadly have this
huge impact on our culture.
It’s this really big industry. The celebrities from that movie stars
are lionized in our world and in our culture, and everything from
patterns of speech to social change has happened often through seeing
things like, I don’t know, gay couples on TV and movies. I think that
helped pave the way for a broader acceptance and legal change of that.
And so, that seems fairly clear, but games maybe, as you say, we’re
sleeping on them, they fly under the radar, they’re seen for some
reason as less influential or less important, but of course, if you look
at something like just the dollars or the total kind of money that goes
into the industry, it’s actually larger than Hollywood, much larger
than films, um, and maybe on par with maybe something like professional
sports. So, this is something that is ongoing, already has had huge
cultural impacts, and I think that’s even more so as new generations
rise up.
00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the professional sports analogy is
really interesting and apt.
For me personally, I kind of grew up watching sports. That was one of
the things that I did.
You watched American football and baseball primarily, but when I was an
adult, it basically became illegal to do so. It’s actually very hard to
watch American football if you don’t have like the satellite dish, you
have to buy the package and, you know, I have. Apartment or how do you
even get a dish, you know, it’s a whole mess. And likewise with
baseball, it was actually quite hard to buy a subscription to watch
baseball. I tried, it was not fruitful. So one of the reasons that I
ended up getting more into this community of games is that it’s
actually just much more accessible. So Adam, I’m curious to hear a
little bit about your story and how you ended up there too.
00:05:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think mine is typical in some senses that
I played games as a kid and they had a really big impact on my life, and
this was particularly true when for a while we lived in a pretty rural
area and basically there was not a lot of other kids around and I’d go
like get up to trouble at the river behind our house or whatever, but at
some point, did manage to get access to a computer and that was
certainly when I learned to program, but that was actually largely
motivated by thinking I want to make my own games because I played these
games and I had these really powerful and mind expanding experiences and
I thought I want to do this too.
And I dreamed of growing up to go into the game industry.
In fact, I did exactly that, basically dropped out of college to work in
my first game company, and went from there to working at some other
relatively high profile companies, and after a few years, I got
disillusioned.
And essentially that was because sort of the tools and practices were so
bad.
This is post hoc. At the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but
I saw these really talented people working these crazy long hours, 60
and 80 hour weeks, and death marches to ship products and what have you,
and maybe somewhat. Ironically, or maybe that’s not quite the right
word for it, but there’s an interesting thing here where that’s part
of what got me interested in tools, creative process, and I thought, OK,
I love the output of this. I love games, or at least games as an
artistic medium, I think can be really excellent, but that at some point
the big budgets and the complex technology that went into it. And some
dynamics of the industry just meant that the process of making them was
kind of terrible.
Now, this was the late 90s, I think a lot has changed since then,
including the indie game revolution, but interestingly enough, that was
my path.
One way you could put it, or I could postdoc describe it is that the
developer experience for game developers in the late 90s was terrible,
and that’s one of the things that got me interested in developer tools,
but also the creative process generally. So, Roku was about developing.
Experience and great tools and a smooth process and of course Muse is a
tool for thought and on that dimension, but they all kind of feed into
that. So the bad experience I had in the game industry pursuing what was
my childhood dream in fact led into what turned out to be the uniting
theme for my career.
00:07:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, interesting. So you originally sort of came
at it from the developer experience as well as the user experience side,
and I came at it more from the user experience side and I’ve since been
learning more about the engineering side as I’ve explored the world of
technology.
00:07:45 - Speaker 2: Interesting. You came in from a perspective of
eSports as a replacement for sports, sort of. What were some of your
first experiences or first games or first things you, I’m not even sure
what you call a tournament, an e-sports tournament. What was it that was
the seminal thing that opened you to this world?
00:08:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s funny. The beginning is sort of the
present.
So one of the games that I had played when I was much younger, like 20
years ago, it’s called Age of Empires 2. This is a real-time strategy
game where you have a little civilization that you collect resources for
and you use it to build armies and take over the world and so forth.
And this is something I had played when I was a kid in the 90s, as one
does, and had kind of forgotten about it.
But then a few years ago, I saw that the game had basically been revived
by this new sort of social technology around games that includes things
like YouTube, Discord, pro tournaments, Twitch, all. These things to
make it more like a professional sports ecosystem or community.
And I sort of dialed back into that, it was such a fun game. And sure
enough, there was this incredible vibrant community and ecosystem around
it.
And based on that, I started poking around more in the world of gaming
and e-sports in general.
And I saw more of that pattern. And then I looked into some of these
more popular games.
That’s kind of a really niche game. There’s very popular games like
Counter Strike, which is another one that I played when I was a kid, and
that is now a huge eSport. That’s a game where you have like a million
people watching the big tournaments. It’s the real deal.
There’s many professional players and teams, people do it basically for
a living, and there’s an incredible amount of social energy around it
as well as people just playing it for fun, of course.
00:09:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the competitive aspect is super interesting
because I personally much prefer weird indie games that are more
exploratory or puzzle games. You take it at your own pace, something
like, I don’t know, Fez or Papers Please or recently been playing a lot
of Babas you.
So these really competitive games, particularly. I guess I can
appreciate them, but maybe I’m just not a very competitive person, but
I agree that the social aspect that comes with it, which includes these
huge tournaments, which I have some insight into, there’s a great
YouTube channel, Kora Gaming. Basically is by an insider of this
competitive world of, I don’t know, Street Fighter and StarCraft and
all these kinds of tournaments.
And I also read a great book called Playing to Win by David Serlin,
where I think he was a pretty high ranking maybe Street Fighter player,
if I’m not mistaken, and he kind of goes and breaks down the elements
that competitive games have their own special flavor because in the end,
the thing that’s interesting about it is The other players and they can
forever evolve, and that’s why games like chess and poker, for example,
to take two, even though the rules haven’t changed in, I don’t know,
decades or even hundreds of years, the game remains interesting and
evolves because I think the meta game they call it, Playin talks about
this, and Sirlin puts games like StarCraft which are still played
professionally in these tournaments 20 years later, maybe like the Age
of Empires you mentioned.
Some of these Street Fighter games and so on, and that in fact is a sign
of a truly good competitive game, that the game doesn’t need updates,
it doesn’t need new content to stay interesting because what keeps it
interesting is the other players.
00:11:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think that’s a big part of it. Games
that are competitive in the classic sense where like you’re a
competitor and you’re competing against someone that can be interesting
for a long time, as you were saying, as the meta evolves. There’s also
this whole other layer which gets to the sort of professional sports
analogy where the reason these games have become really huge isn’t
because people personally want to compete competitively.
In the same way that American football isn’t huge because you want to
be a world class football player, is because you want to be cheering for
a team or a personality that you believe in, you want to kind of get
into the play calling, you know, and understand that it’s basically a
substrate for having a social dynamic. And people, they just like the
competitiveness, not necessarily in all cases to compete themselves,
although there are some people do.
00:11:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s fair. And I think there’s a few
elements there again, looking at the sports.
Example, which, while that was never a big part of my family life
growing up, sounds like the way that it was for you, I’ve actually
gotten more into European football since living in Germany because it is
such a huge thing, particularly when the World Cup came around a few
years ago. I mean, when a World Cup game is on, particularly when
Germany is playing in, the streets are silent. There is nobody out, but
you actually hear everyone’s TVs on or kind of Like in sync, but with
like slight delays from the speed of sound, travel, and even like
convenience stores will set up a TV they’ll just basically drag a TV
out onto their front stoop essentially and set it up so you can walk by.
So it’s this very unifying experience and actually a lot of fun, even
though this particular sport of these teams are not something I follow a
lot. That social element, that unifying element is, let’s say something
I appreciate more now. Yeah. I feel also with sports, and this goes for
e-sports as well, there is something about maybe something like the
Olympics, which is maybe less directly competitive in terms of a lot of
the sports they show, but it’s something about seeing humans kind of
performing at their very best, like the very best at doing a kind of
impressive thing. And people who have trained their whole life, and
we’ve chosen the very best people in the world and put them on the
spotlight to do this, and I think there’s something similar and it’s a
different thing when you watch these, I don’t know, amazing StarCraft
players do what they do and you watch them sitting there. It doesn’t
look like much, right? They’re barely moving their wrist. to flick the
mouse around, but if you know how the game works and you’re drawn in
intellectually and you see what’s happening on the screen, and then of
course you have the announcer voiceovers that help you understand the
significance of what they’re doing and why this is interesting and the
cheering of the crowd and yeah it’s quite interesting.
00:13:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned that. I
think one of the reasons the Olympics works so well is that there are
very universal athletic acts, running, jumping, swimming. It’s
something that anyone can relate to. And so when you see someone doing
it at a very high level, you can say, oh, I kind of understand what that
would take and why it’s so impressive. And yeah, if you’re watching a
game that you’ve never played before, it’s probably not going to be
super interesting. But the reality is people are growing up on games
now, and it’s becoming a huge part of people’s lives, and so a lot
more people are in a position to appreciate and engage with these
communities.
00:14:06 - Speaker 2: Now when it comes to the things that the
productivity software world or the tools for thought world can draw from
games, certainly there’s social elements which I think are interesting,
but there’s also at a more I don’t know, pragmatic level there’s
technology. The technology that has gone into games, I guess they’ve
really driven a lot of computer hardware advances from the beginning,
essentially, but especially in recent years, I feel like it’s pretty
unbelievable how games are sort of pushing the envelope in terms of what
computers can do.
00:14:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, GPUs, displays, input devices,
latency reduction is something that’s all been driven basically by
games again, cause there’s a huge amount of dollar demand for high
quality hardware.
So there’s a lot of incentive on the part of hardware developers to
improve it. I do think probably the biggest category for me from games
is performance.
Yeah. I make this joke that I can load up a game on my other computer,
it’s like 300 FPS photo realistic 3D world, walk around, do whatever
you want, and then I’m over here scrolling on whatever this web page
and it’s like choppy choppy at 60 FPS. It’s just a kind of a whole
another level of performance and focus on that, and something you
probably have understood from the day you started working in games.
00:15:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the culture there on
performance. is both inside the game companies. I mean, first of all,
there’s probably like you said, a lot of financial incentive that
drives these companies like Nvidia and so forth to just be continuously
pushing the envelope on what can be done with graphics, for example.
But then within companies it’s just, for example, very, very standard
to have frame rate counters and all kinds of performance metrics really
built straight into the app and That’s something we’ve tried to
duplicate on the Muse team a little bit.
We had a frame rate counter right from the beginning, and it was part of
our vision to be, you know, the iPad Pro is 120 frames per second or can
update at that speed, and we wanted to see if we could keep that full
frame rate throughout, and that’s a huge difference compared to, you
wrote about this in your slow software article, you go to load up Google
Drive or Ocean or some other thing.
It’s not measured in frames per second. It’s multi-second delays to do
just a very simple operation like just listing out your current
documents, which by the way you looked at that same list 5 minutes ago.
It’s probably in the cache somewhere, but it’s just there just isn’t
that same culture of performance.
And yet when you worked at a game company, it was just really standard.
You had all these on-screen displays about frame rate counters and all
this tooling, and of course you make it fast. You have to make it fast.
It won’t feel good. If it’s not smooth, and that just doesn’t exist
as much on the productivity tool side, and I’d furthermore say it’s
also driven by users.
Users care about frame rate, they pay attention to that, they are
thinking about particularly people that I don’t know, build these PC
gaming rigs. I’m probably the definition of a casual gamer. I’ve got
my Nintendo Switch and I play games on my iPad and I don’t want to have
to do anything. I want an appliance that makes it really easy.
But people who are into pushing the envelope and getting the best
graphics they can, they enjoy the process of assembling this hardware
and then even running these benchmarks themselves and being able to say,
OK, I can run the, I don’t know what it is, the latest Doom or some
other high demanding graphics game, turn on all the settings and then be
able to get this many. Frames per second, so users’ care and then the
developer’s care and the hardware manufacturer’s care and together all
of this culture of really deeply caring about performance over the
course of decades just means that games now can do incredible things and
yet by comparison, most of the software we use for work is kind of sad
in comparison.
00:17:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s been going on for so long that
they’re now almost completely bifurcated engineering cultures. Games is
C, C++ programming the GPU mostly, whereas a lot of our productivity
software is now it’s like JavaScript, electron apps, Ruby back. And
stuff like that. It is a kind of totally different way of thinking about
engineering stuff. But notably, I think that divergence is starting to
collapse because people are realizing the power of this more game style
programming model, where you have an efficient language and you’re
programming against the hardware more directly. And I think we’re
starting to see more of this. I will be some examples of that.
00:18:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, Rick Aaron’s work on MakePad comes to mind
immediately, so this workshop hit switch for us sometime back, but
there’s basically a code editor that uses rust and maybe web assembly,
I’m not sure. It is built on the web stack, but he gets rid of the DOM,
and he’s essentially just trying to render straight to GPUs. For
example, when the code folds or unfolds, you can get some really nice
smooth animations of that happening, which is not the sort of thing
you’re used to in a programming editor.
Yeah, exactly. Now I will give ourselves ourselves here being folks
making uh productivity tools a little bit of leeway on this, because one
thing about games is that you do get this very much just blank canvas,
build everything up from scratch.
So for example, like a great way to make a game is you write it in C,
use something like SDL, which is essentially just lets you draw pixels
and polygons onto the screen. It’s this and take input from the mouse
and keyboard and game control or whatever else, and it’s just this
very, very simple stack, and the interfaces are very simple, and
productivity tools you really need to integrate extremely well to the
platform you’re on if your web app, or for example, for us where we’re
on iOS with Muse. You know, we need to integrate to drag and drop and
various kinds of ways you can size the window and what happens with with
the sharesheet, bringing things in, bringing things out, and copy paste,
and all these sorts of things, and these are expected and desirable. You
can do things like, I don’t know, change various settings on the
device, including language and all sorts of other things, and that
cascades down through the application. And I think all that’s good and
necessary, because when you’re working with applications, you often
have several side by side, you’re sharing data between them, this sort
of thing, they need to play together. A game can just take over the
screen completely, it’s got this just draw pixels or draw polygons
thing. It does not need to interoperate with anything else. It can be a
world into itself, and that’s just, I don’t wanna say it’s easier,
but you can have this more streamlined thing. You don’t need to play
what next with others quite the same way.
00:20:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s fair. Speaking of developing these
apps, I’ve always felt like there was something here with games, like
with movies where they do seem to be able to plan and execute on very
complex projects successfully.
There’s kind of this meme in the world of typical called enterprise
software development, where you have to do things super incrementally
and, you know, and nothing is predictable.
You can’t estimate anything. Basically, who knows? This is kind of a
meme in Silicon Valley engineering, whereas if you look at things like
Movies or games, they say things like, yes, we’re going to invest $200
million in this, and it’s going to be a massive creative high risk
enterprise and it’s going to involve many disciplines and we’re gonna
ship it, it’s gonna be awesome. Done. And I feel like we could use a
little bit of that attitude in the world of enterprise software as well.
00:21:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, now there are many famous. Big attempts at
big projects. I think a recent one that comes to mind is this game
Cyberpunk, which was hugely anticipated, as you said, like a huge
breakthrough in terms of sort of the depth and richness of the game, or
at least the game world that was promised, and in fact they did deliver
something very impressive, but it was full of bugs and all kinds of
problems. It didn’t work right on different platforms. There was
lawsuits and You know, lots of broken marriages and fired people, and I
think at some point they may have even written about it in our favorite
financial newsletter money stuff about essentially like becoming
securities fraud, that the game was bad because of all the money that
was on the line for it.
Maybe that one was pretty large in scale just because of the amount of
time and money that went into it. They’re similar, called boondoggles
or just struggles.
Duke Newcom Forever was a really famous one on that from years back, or
maybe a more indie one was this game, No Man’s Sky, where again, they
set up expectation for it, which may be part of it is just the game
industry is so incredibly good at hyping games that have not been
released yet, which Find kind of crazy how emotionally invested the
audience gets, and then if it doesn’t quite deliver, then there’s a
lot of broken hearts, I guess. So it’s hard and they don’t always
achieve it, but to your point, there’s also many, many cases of and
probably more cases of really grand and ambitious things like for
example the Mass Effect games or one really ambitious one that I played
recently that I liked a lot is Horizon Zero Dawn.
And yeah, it’s just amazing the amount of stuff in it, the richness of
the universe and the story and the characters and the voice acting, and
all the skill trees you can traverse and the modeling on the creatures,
and yeah, it’s really, really astonishing what goes with these games.
And that’s the technology side of things. Do you feel there’s things
we can learn on product or design side, kind of as any works has talked
about a little bit?
00:23:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I feel like there’s some things
that have been so discussed that they’re almost cliche. This is like
gamifying stuff. But I do think there’s some stuff there around, for
example, games have very carefully designed incremental onboarding
processes where you get introduced to more and more techniques and
skills and moves as you become more familiar with the antecedent ones.
00:23:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ll link in the show notes to our
podcast episode on onboarding with our colleague Julia, who led that
up.
So Muse went through several attempted kinds of onboardings, and none of
them quite clicked, and eventually we did take this game inspired one
that essentially, well, there’s a few games that take this approach,
but the one that was top of mind for me at the time was Untitled Goose
Game, where it essentially gives you a to do list of stuff to mark off,
and you don’t have to do it, but it gives you some direction while also
giving you freedom, and that’s what the muse on boarding uses, and that
was Yuli’s good work, and she talks about it in depth in this episode.
00:24:24 - Speaker 1: Nice, yeah, but I think perhaps the most
interesting aspects of products are things you don’t jump to when you
think of games.
You think of games, you think of like, you know, 3D immersive worlds and
noises and stuff like that, too, that I would call out our end user
programming and monetization.
Mm. These are both huge challenges for the world of computing and
especially kind of indie enterprise type software, but I think games
actually do very well, so there’s an incredibly rich ecosystem around
games that allow it of end user programming of various forms like
scripting, modding, skinning, different variations, but people are so
motivated to create their own experiences in these game frameworks that
if you give them anything at all to control their world, they’ll go
wild on it.
00:25:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the modding thing is pretty impressive,
including the whole new genres have been invented by people taking a
game that you can kind of chop up and customize a little bit. Tower
Defense, I think one was famously originally a mod of an existing game
and is now its own dedicated genre.
00:25:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, another example there would be
Counter-Strike, which is one of these games that I mentioned earlier,
that’s now one of the biggest e-sport games in the world, and it was
originally like some guy in the basement doing a half-Life mod, and he
shared it with his friends on the internet, and then 20 years later
it’s a huge deal, right?
00:25:43 - Speaker 2: And that’s some of the argument we make with end
user programming is to say that if you create a smoother on-ramp for
more people to be able to get in there and make smaller pieces of
software, that some, not all, but some may blossom into something that
maybe would never have existed before if that large hurdle to sort of
full professional, quote unquote real programming was the only option.
00:26:08 - Speaker 1: And I do think this world shows.
The incredible importance of access and motivation versus the
programming environment per se.
I think when computer people talk about end user programming, they talk
about things like languages and IDEs and things like that, whereas my
sense is that what really drives end user programming access is people
really, really wanting to do something in that environment and having
some ability, even if it’s honestly it’s a mess, to do something with
it. And at least with that, you can get the types of ecosystems you see
with games where it’s not like everyone is doing.
End user programming of their game environment. It’s more like there’s
out of the tens of millions of people who are part of the community,
maybe 10 are really into it, and they jump through all the hoops to
figure out whatever the end user programming situation is for this game,
and they’re able to create 5 mods, one of which becomes a huge deal its
own whole game.
00:27:00 - Speaker 2: Funny little story on that as well.
So many folks who followed me in my work on Hiroku might know that I’ve
written about end user programming and in particular that I was inspired
by this book, A Small Matter of Programming, which is an academic work
from the early 90s, that essentially made a lot of the arguments that we
now repeat in this kind of what we’re seeking in the end user
programming utopia, driven by an academic named Bonnie Nardi.
I actually Managed to get her on a video call some years back, and she
was quite amused because, you know, she had written this book 20 years
ago or something at the time, and I think it was even out of print and
was vaguely surprised that anyone was still interested.
But as I asked her what she was doing now, and it turns out she actually
went on to anthropological work within multiplayer online games. And the
book, I think she had just written at the time is called My Life is
Night elf priest. She spent several years doing anthropological studies
of World of Warcraft, which at the time was sort of the biggest
multiplayer online game and really one of the biggest gaming phenomenons
ever again. I think this was kind of the mid 2000s, late 2000s,
something like that. And when I asked her about end user programming,
actually the first thing that came to mind for her was the modding that
happens in the World of Warcraft world.
00:28:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s great that you mentioned World of
Warcraft, because I think that’s a very important piece of the story
around monetization and social. So with monetization, back in the before
times, you would have boxes that had, you know, CDs in them and you
would buy it once and that would be the game, and that would be the way
that you got the game, and that would be the way that the publisher made
money.
And then I think it was World of Warcraft, maybe there was someone else
who pioneered the subscription model, which we know from Enterprise Sass
is an incredibly powerful economic model and also great for the users in
many ways.
And likewise, World of Warcraft, which had a subscription model, brought
that to the world of games and like you said, it was a huge success, and
there still existed a world of games you sort of bought once and there
still are, but it’s sort of adding another layer or area of
opportunity.
But then there’s been this sort of 3rd wave of games where it’s not
even monetized necessarily by a subscription, it might even be free to
play, but it’s monetized by the broader community, or some other way in
the game, so this could be cosmetic items in the game, it could be.
Tournaments, it could be other things like that.
And there, it becomes important for the creator of the game to invest in
basically building a really big community and enthusiasm around the
game, and they find other ways to monetize it that aren’t initial
purchases and that aren’t subscriptions. And this kind of leads into
the social thing which we can talk about next, but to my mind, those are
the most advanced forms of game communities right now because there’s
so many things going on that are combining to build a very rich
ecosystem.
00:29:45 - Speaker 2: I’m not mistaken, one of the pioneers on the free
to play with purchase cosmetic items was Team Fortress.
Essentially, you could play it and you could buy stuff that I don’t
think it made you stronger, just made you look cooler, get a cool hat
for your guy.
That game’s made by Valve, and Valve is one of the most, definitely a,
I don’t know if I’d call them a small giant at this point, they
probably are just a giant, but they are an incredible creative
powerhouse that has done many, many great games over the years. You
mentioned Half-Life and There’s Steam Fortress and there’s Left for
Dead and many others, and then, of course, they made Steam, and Steam
has been a total revolution in kind of the economic model, particularly
for indie developers. We’ve talked here multiple times before about
sort of the Steam early access program and how we see folks that bought
subscriptions early on from you and Today as being in some ways similar
to Steam early access, you know, supporting what the app can be rather
than what it is today. So Valve is a really great one to study and look
at if you like to see an innovative company. And by the way, their
employee handbook is absolutely fantastic. I’ll like that in the show
notes as well.
00:30:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, classic for sure. And this type of
monetization, by the way, that is not initial purchase and not
subscription, for example, in a cosmetic items, it really surprised me.
Like when I first heard that there were big game ecosystems funded by
this, and honestly didn’t make sense. Like, why are people gonna spend
a lot of money to like get a cool whatever nice skin or something. But
in fact, it’s a really, really, really huge deal. The games are able to
bring in tons of funding with this stuff. So it’s an example of where
you really need to follow the empirical reality and see how things are
actually working.
00:31:26 - Speaker 2: Now how do you fit that in with this category of
games like thinking of maybe Candy Crush or, for example, Boga, which is
a pretty big employer here in Berlin, actually our colleague Julia
started her career there. And they tend to make these games that are
free to play, they kind of draw you in. Oh, maybe Farmville was one of
the classics on this and can easily turn into a maybe a slippery slope
of spending, I don’t know, hundreds of bucks a month. You sort of like
accelerate the game play with special tokens or something. That whole
category I always feel vaguely uneasy about the model on that.
00:32:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I felt very uneasy about it, and I think
it’s actually quite disjoint from this world of more professional
games, which often have this attribute that for either the initial
purchase price only or perhaps nothing, you can play at a professional
level forever. Like you don’t need to buy anything to be able to play
it, unlike the games where you buy like power-ups or coins to keep
playing or whatever.
So I’m much more interested in these games that are more, maybe you
call them skill-based. And they have communities of practice around
that, versus games that are more, like, honestly kind of more like
gambling oriented. So I can consider them quite differently.
It’s a shame because I think the Candy Crush style game taints the
world of gaming on the surface, maybe it looks similar, but
00:32:44 - Speaker 2: yeah, to your mind really is not. And yeah, I
think I agree with that as well.
00:32:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so speaking of communities, this brings us
to the social aspect of the games, which to my mind is the most
interesting part, and it’s kind of hard to explain what’s going on
there on a podcast, but we can try.
00:33:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned Twitch earlier, and I do think
that’s a great starting place because, well, it can be honestly
mystifying, I think it was for me when I first encountered it, and
seeing that there’s this whole giant platform that is almost
exclusively watching other people play games. And again, maybe this
comes back to the sports thing, but in many cases you’re not
necessarily watching people who are great at playing games. Maybe it’s
just someone you like that is playing games. I don’t know, it’s a very
interesting phenomenon there.
00:33:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think the sports analogy with Twitch is
a good place to start. So some groundwork here, Twitch is a streaming
platform and was basically created for people to stream their gameplay,
playing games on their computer. Now does a lot more stuff.
00:33:44 - Speaker 2: Fun bit of history there, if I’m not mistaken,
Twitch was a pivot from Justin.tv.
00:33:48 - Speaker 1: It was, I was actually there. This was in the,
what was it called, the YC startup school is when they rented out an
auditorium in Palo Alto, and Justin Khan walked down onto the stage with
his camera, which is like filming his entire life 24/7. And so I saw the
very beginnings of that, and eventually that would pivot into Twitch,
yeah.
00:34:06 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the startup idea was one guy
filming his life around the clock with the idea that that might lead to
others, and I think they ended up building a pretty robust. Video
platform at the time, this might have even been before or roughly
coincident with YouTube.
00:34:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so from those humble beginnings, you get
this platform for streaming gameplay and then having a lot of social
interaction around that you can think about this kind of the main
window, which is the streamer, and then there’s a sidebar, which is
people chatting and stuff. And it’s like your situation in Berlin where
people are around the family room or around the convenience store
watching a game and they’re sort of cheering on you, as well as
watching the game, you’re watching your friends basically and seeing
how they react and enjoying that. And yeah, I would say it’s mostly
kind of pro players or strong players, but there’s also people who cast
like normies or whatever, just for fun.
00:34:55 - Speaker 2: One of the ones that blew my mind is this guy CGP
Gray that makes these educational YouTube videos that are pretty
popular, I think.
He’s done some Twitch streaming and he mostly plays games like, I
don’t even know the name of it, but you’re just a truck driver, and
it’s a real-time sim of driving a truck.
And so it’s just him on like an open highway, you know, the simulator
of a highway. And it’s precisely as boring as it sounds, that’s kind
of part of the point is that it’s kind of this meditative experience,
and then I think the reason in that case, it’s not that he’s a pro
player. I don’t know, maybe he’s good at it, maybe you’re not, but
it’s more that you like him and his personality, and it’s fun to kind
of interact in this real-time way around this casual activity.
00:35:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so there’s Twitch now.
One of the things that’s really important here with the social
ecosystem around the games is that they’re open source, let’s call it.
So if you are broadcasting the NFL. You need to be the one broadcaster
that’s licensed by the NFL and you gotta go to the one channel that’s
displaying at the time.
And in fact, there’s only one caster, whereas in the world of games,
it’s usually a much more distributed and open access. So a given
tournament, for example, will be running, and anyone can jump in and
cast the game and you get as much audience as you can. And you people
can watch multiple casters at once. People can come and go. And so it’s
this world in the same way that with open source software, people can
kind of jump in or leave or and mix and match versus commercial software
which is very closed and controlled. Typically in these game ecosystems,
it’s very open access for the participants to come in and make a career
as a caster or commentator or a pro player or what have you.
00:36:36 - Speaker 2: Do you feel the, maybe I’ve read something about
there’s actually a legal gray area with the Twitch live streaming of
games where essentially that’s copyrighted content and kind of in a way
the game companies actually would have legal grounds to sue them to take
that down, but of course it’s it’s incredible marketing for them.
I think it was something like Among Us, which is this indie game that
blew up last year, we’ve played it at our. summits where you kind of
hunt down this imposter on your ship, and apparently that was a game
that didn’t do that well when it came out, but it blew up essentially
because, you know, a big streamer started playing it.
Now everyone, including like US senators are are playing it in public
places. But yeah, it’s this interesting thing where they just choose
not to enforce copyright or the DMCA or whatever it is because it’s
such great marketing for them.
00:37:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. My understanding is that companies,
if they wanted to, can exert varying levels of control over this.
So they could say that I think they could say you can’t stream this,
they could definitely say we’re going to control the officially
sanctioned tournaments, and I think there are some games that especially
for the latter are trying to do that, but you have this classic
trade-off between Exerting that control and therefore extracting more of
the consumer surplus out of the ecosystem into your company versus
creating a vibrant open ecosystem where you generate a bunch more
consumer surplus and even if you take a small percentage of it via say,
cosmetic item sales, it ends up being a bigger deal for you.
And my intuition here is that the social dynamics around these games are
so powerful when they’re firing on all cylinders that it’s really hard
to compete with that.
00:38:20 - Speaker 2: Another thing that comes to mind for me here as we
talk about tournaments and Twitch and so on is there are actually tools
that have come out of the game world that I think are what I would call
productivity tools. In fact, we may even use them in our work, so
Discord is one that’s become quite huge, kind of group chat, that’s
very, I mean, their, their logo is a game controller, right? You think
of them as a slack competitor, in fact, they’re very similar in terms
of what they provide, but their culture is all comes from Gamer world,
right? That was what it was made for originally.
00:38:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Discord is actually one of the other really
big pieces in the ecosystem, so it’s worth drilling in a little bit.
So you have Twitch, which is for live streaming, like the live
broadcast. Typically you have recorded content on YouTube, and then for
your communities, primarily those are in Discord these days. There’s
some activity on Reddit, but Discord is the main one.
And again, these are very granular, focused, unique, quirky, weird
things happen all over the internet. So for any given game, you
typically have one Discord for each personality, like each pro player,
each major caster, they have their own Discord where they have like
basically have their own channels and doing a bunch of random stuff,
their own weird community. And so when you become interested in the
game, you might join one or two of these Discords corresponding to the
casters or the pro players that you follow. And there you would hear
about their upcoming games and their discussion of the games and various
social commentary and stuff like that.
00:39:48 - Speaker 2: Hm, I wouldn’t have guessed you would have
Discord servers around a person, that almost makes it sound more like
Twitter or something, you’re like following someone whose career you
want to follow along with, but then I suppose the point is now you can
also talk to the other people that are there who are interested in that
same thing.
00:40:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is a very important point. The job
of these pro players and these casters, because it’s such a big deal,
it’s going way beyond just doing that single job. I think of it more as
their social entrepreneurs. They’re creating communities of content, of
people, of forums, of ways of interacting that are something that people
want to participate in. And in fact, It’s kind of cool as an
entrepreneur to watch these people because they’re basically running
their own business. They’re hiring full-time staff, they’re hiring
video editors, tournament coordinators, content moderators, map
scriptors, they’re hiring whole teams and turning into this whole
social enterprise to create a place where people want to come in and
enjoy themselves.
00:40:47 - Speaker 2: What are some examples of folks you think are
doing this well?
00:40:51 - Speaker 1: I’ll give you one, it’s kind of a niche example,
but there’s this guy T90 official, he’s one of the casters for Age of
Empires too, he’s probably now the biggest caster, and I think it was
actually largely because of his work as initially a very small time
streamer and caster to help bring this game out of obscurity. Again,
it’s a very old game and at one point it had quite a modest number of
players, but because he worked so hard over the course of, I think it
was like 5 years to build up this community of players, of audience
members, of tournament organizers, and so on, it brought a lot of
vitality to the game.
00:41:27 - Speaker 2: YouTube is one that’s interesting to me as well,
because there seems to be a pretty substantial number of what I call
game critics, which maybe is a little bit different category than what
you’re talking about, but to me it does have a similar kind of sense of
not just community building, but it’s something that’s around the
games, it’s not the games themselves.
Right. Yeah, some critics are more just almost for fun. They do funny
reviews, things like zero punctuation. or girlfriend reviews. The one
that I love, who’s kind of a critic meets design school, is Mark
Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit. I can highly recommend this series.
He does these sort of like 20 minute long documentaries, sort of mini
documentaries where he will take a particular game or a set of games and
break down essentially design elements within it.
And coming back to how this connects to muse and tools for thought and
productivity tools, I’ve seen a number of things in there, including
how you ramp up difficulty and how you make complex controls
comprehensible, and so on that I find, if not directly applicable at a
minimum inspiring for doing my own work, because, of course, games are
this mix of Obviously they’re artistic, and they are entertainment, and
they’re expressing something, but they also have these practical, lots
of practical elements.
You have this complete world that needs to all hang together, and trolls
have to work well, and there’s physics, and there’s how the player
learns it and all these elements. So diving in on that game design, in
many cases for games that I have never played and probably never will,
but it’s still very interesting to watch a 20 minute breakdown with
lots of footage from the game about exactly what the design choices they
made were.
00:43:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and in general, I think learning socially
and learning via video are extremely powerful, and this is now the main
way that people are learning games. Like 20 years ago, when we were
playing games as kids, I think you mostly just kind of figured it out by
yourself, or maybe you had some friends who could give you some pointers
or maybe there were magazines back then, I guess.
00:43:32 - Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no, I remember playing Metroid.
Just one of these great but essentially defined a genre in many ways,
this kind of discovery oriented game, and I think the only way that my
friend and I got through it is I had this issue of it was probably
Nintendo Power that essentially had maps.
You kind of look at it and figure out where you needed to go and that
sort of thing, yeah.
I don’t know if that’s cause I was just a kid that I couldn’t figure
out, or maybe I would have been able to figure out if I hadn’t, but
yeah, the knowledge you could get out of something like a magazine or
that one kid in the neighborhood who was a really good player, it was
just like gold, yeah, the fact that I don’t know what it’s like for a
kid playing nowadays or the solution to anything you could find by
Googling.
00:44:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think it’s much more high powered
now, because you have this high resolution video and you have a ton of
it, and you have the social connectivity that makes you more
incentivized, like you’re a better listener, you can find content
that’s a better fit for your interest and your skill level. So people
are learning how to play games much faster and much better. I haven’t
seen a study on this, but I would guess.
Between that social video factor and the new matchmaking capabilities,
which match you online to play players of an appropriate skill level,
that people actually play the same games at a much, much, much higher
level now than they used to.
That’s certainly my experience. Like if you look at even casual players
today at some of these games, they’re actually quite good, because
basically, they’ve been watching people on YouTube a lot.
And as you were alluding to, I think that’s something that’s going to
bleed over from the world of games. I actually say mostly seriously that
games in the world of gaming predicts a lot of trends. So it goes from
kind of pro games to mainstream games to consumer software to software
for startups to software for enterprises. And you’ve seen that with a
lot of stuff. And so therefore I predict that. In 10 years, you know,
we’re gonna be basically doing our enterprise work on Discord or
something like it. Actually, I kind of believe that.
00:45:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think a lot of
technologies, I wanna say maybe something like haptic feedback, for
example, you know, tends to come first for games and gets adapted later
on for more, call them practical uses.
That actually reminds me of a just small tangent. We took some
inspiration from a game called Batman Arkham Asylum for one of the you
can switch projects. I don’t know if you remember this, but this game
has something called detective mode. This is essentially a button you
push that essentially changes your vision. It kind of inverts everything
and lets you see things like power lines and maybe hidden entrances and
the game’s very good at making you basically feel like Batman. That’s
the point of it. And so having this special mode is part of that,
that’s visually interesting and distinctive. We use that for when you
can switch projects where you could hit a key and it was kind of like a
developer inspection mode, but it would invert all the colors and it was
very inspired by that game.
Nice. Following up on your point about, basically people are better at
games, I just finished reading an article about Tetris, which
apparently, again, this is another one of these games that its code base
hasn’t changed in decades, but people keep getting better at it. And
partially this is because of being able to share this knowledge
socially, and I can’t remember the exact details, but I think it
started with no one thought you could get max score. Someone did it
once, recorded it on VHS tape. That tape circulated. People could watch
the tape and see how they did it. You start to have this analysis and
then this analysis starts to reveal that things that were believed to be
a good choice or a good strategy in the game, eventually they figure out
actually are. Essentially they evolved the strategies and now these are
all very standard. Someone new coming in can go watch a bunch of these
YouTube videos and essentially it’s within reach of anyone that wants
to put the work in to get a max score on Tetris, where once upon a time
that was assumed to be unachievable. It’s a good example of how a
whole, I’m not even sure what the word is for it, it’s not a field or
an industry, just a community can advance the state of the art through
simply sharing knowledge with each other.
00:47:34 - Speaker 1: Nice, it’s like the 4 minute mile phenomenon for
speed runs and high scores.
00:47:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Well, in speed running, there’s a
whole other door we could open, right? But yeah, without going too deep
into it, just type speed run space, name of your favorite game, I don’t
know, Super Mario Brothers or something in the YouTube and watch the a
whole rich genre unfold in front of you. All right, so we got Discord,
we got YouTube, we got Twitch. What are some other examples of social
technologies that are coming out of games that perhaps we’ll see
migrate their way to other parts of the software ecosystem?
00:48:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so those are all big foundational platforms
for these communities. Let me give you an example of a smaller, more
specific pattern that I see, which I think is illustrative of the type
of thing that happens in these communities. So that is emojis in Twitch.
Now, one view of emojis is that they’re kind of a goofy, unimportant
thing. My view of emojis is that they’re actually incredibly expressive
and personal and interesting.
00:48:37 - Speaker 2: I think you’ve said on the podcast before that
notions embracing of signing an emoji to a page as kind of the visual
indicator for you, that was the killer feature that tipped you over from
Google Docs.
00:48:50 - Speaker 1: It was a big deal, yeah, I really like my emojis.
And Twitch actually takes it to the next level, where again it’s open
access, it’s open source.
So the deal is as a Twitch streamer, you get some amount of emoji spaces
for your channel, maybe it’s 15 spaces, and for each of these spaces
you come up with a little keyword that corresponds to the emoji, and you
upload your little graphic for that emoji. And then typically the way
that it works is that anyone can use some subset of the emojis, and then
people who are basically patrons of the channel at increasing levels can
use some of the rare and elite emojis on that channel. And this thing is
fascinating because, again, these are all kind of unique flowers of
ecosystems and So you get their own like language and memes all
encapsulated into these, into these tiny little emojis. And so you have
whole discussions that happen over these emojis that are unique to the
channel. And it’s actually a fairly big motivation to be able to access
the rare and elite emojis for a given channel. But the most interesting
thing to my mind is that these aren’t silos, they’re networks of
communities and. And while the emojis are specific to a given streamer,
it might be prefixed by like Mark Smiley, and then whatever my unique
smiley emoji is, shows up. You can use that emoji if you have access to
it anywhere on the platform. So what happens is, say you get a channel
around a specific game and it’s for streamer A, but streamer B is also
A member of that game community, and his folks come into the channel and
they start using streamer B’s emojis. And that way the emojis and
therefore the streamer spreads virally. So you see, oh yeah, that’s a
cool emoji. So you hover over it and it says, oh, streamer B, and then
you go follow them on to their stream. And so it’s incredibly like
networked, social, dynamic, fun, very Vibrant thing. And then
economically, like this is a whole economy. There are like full time
Twitch emoji artists, that’s all they do. And they accept commissions,
and you have the entry level Twitch artists and the like elite Twitch
artists who charge a lot for their emojis. You know, it’s the whole
thing. So, again, I think it’s an example of something that seems very
small, but it’s actually very big socially and economically.
00:51:01 - Speaker 2: ties together a lot of things. There’s the unique
economic model, as you’ve said, there’s the social technology side of
things and some of these things that are only possible in software sort
of internet era media, some of the virality and of course emojis
themselves are very internet or computer age form of communication and
so all of those together make for something. Well, let’s say it’s the
sort of thing that would have been hard to imagine. Even 20 years ago,
let alone further back than that, but this is how internet culture is
evolving and something that, as you said at the beginning, games are on
the forefront.
00:51:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I do think we’re gonna see it
transition over into the world of enterprise and productivity software.
Like you have a notion, there’s a fixed set of emojis that you can use
and Slack, there’s emojis and they’re a pretty big part of the
product. You can even customize some of your emoji set for your
enterprise, right? But again, it’s very siloed and you don’t really
have a lot of control as a user. I think you need to be like an
administrator it’s like upload emojis or whatever. I can imagine a
world, in fact, I expect a world where eventually products like Notion
or Slack or whatever supersedes them, adopt more of this model of open
networked emojis.
00:52:14 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before we wrap up, I bet folks would
like to know what’s an example of your favorite games.
00:52:21 - Speaker 1: I got 2. So the first I’ll give is in the classic
boxed genre, and that’s missed. I still have very fond memories of
playing this game, and I think for a long time it was the best selling
video game ever for quite a while, and actually I replayed it not too
long ago, some years ago, and it’s still great, so got to give that a
spot. And then for the more modern pro style or social style game, I
would go with Age of Empires 2, which is a total classic and what I’m
still a big fan of.
00:52:50 - Speaker 2: And if I’m not mistaken, a nice little bit of
background on missed, I think it was built in Hypercard originally.
00:52:57 - Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah, it ties us back to the end user
programming, right, again, something that may be a specific game and a
very influential game for a lot of people, and even maybe kind of a
genre that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for this kind of more
accessible programming tool.
00:53:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I feel like that also might be an
example of driving consumer hardware, because if I remember correctly,
that was one of the first things that used a CD because it was kind of
unique in having all this graphics content, and so you needed at least a
CD to fit it. You couldn’t put it on floppy disk, which is how you used
to get games, and so people were like, well, I better get a C drive
cause I want to be able to play MT.
00:53:33 - Speaker 2: That’s right, that’s right, yeah, I remember
that now.
For me, I could name so many, going back to my childhood, arcade games
like Strider, for a while, I was into Angban, which is one of these
roguelikes that, you know, sucks up a crazy amount of time, but in more
recent times, where I’ve really been enjoying a lot of these indie
games, I think I mentioned Baba as you earlier, the doll name is a
favorite here, Papers Please by Lucas Pope.
So this is a game where you are working as a border agent, and your job
is to check people’s passports, and that’s the whole game. Yeah, they
present their documentation, you look it over, and you stamp it either
proved or denied. And to me it’s just a great example of how games are
such a unique medium for artistic expression, so in the same way that a
film or a book can transport you to this other world, show you a new
perspective, maybe that you had not encountered before, but something
where you are making choices actively, which obviously is what games are
about, can actually show you something different. You can express
something different artistically and without spoiling too much, the
nature of this game is you start out just kind of like stamping these
passports and deciding who to let through the border, it seems very
prosaic and kind of boring, but very quickly it turns into something
where you’re approached by members of resistance or someone comes
through and says, please, my mother is dying. And yes, my passport
expired two days ago, but can’t you just let me through so I can go see
her and someone who’s smuggling, you know, some kind of contraband, but
they offer to slip you a little money and as it turns out, you also have
to pay the bills for your family and your child needs medicine and so
on, and pretty soon you get all these complex moral choices. That are
very powerful, and you can see how you get, depending on the choices you
made, you, for example, can easily go down this path of corruption, but
you see how you got there through active choices you were making. So
it’s a really, really impressive indie game, and also just a lot of
fun. And in general, I can recommend everything by Lucas Pope, his newer
one is Return of the Oberin, and he just has a unique style and every
game expresses some unique take on the world. Well, let’s wrap it
there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on
Twitter at museAppHQ or via email, hello and museapp.com. You can help
us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Mark, we’ve been
having fun with some collaborative games in our recent team summits. I
think I’ve got a new one for next time, so it be interesting to dive
into the game with the team with everything we talked about here on our
minds.
00:56:09 - Speaker 1: Nice, I look forward to that, Adam.
00:56:11 - Speaker 2: right, till next time, Mark. See you.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I think happened was that you got people who
knew how to bend and to mold computers and software in the same place as
people who were very efficient and effective and curious and playful
around things like design and getting things done, and had real needs,
right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I think is what drove Mac
OS to become such a successful platform.
00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about
Muse’s company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here
with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Rasmus Anderson.
00:00:45 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello.
00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And Rasmus, I understand you’re an amateur
gardener.
00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that wouldn’t be very far from a lie. I do
have a little front yard, tiny tiny one, and a tiny backyard, and it is
a constant fight with nature, but, you know, it’s kind of fun.
00:01:07 - Speaker 2: And I always find it funny, weeds are not
particularly a thing that there’s no like clear definition other than
just a plant that you don’t want to be growing there. So one man’s
weed is another person’s desired plant, is that about right?
00:01:22 - Speaker 1: I think that’s right, yeah. I mean, I grew up in
Sweden and I remember my parents playing this like really smart game on
me and my brother, where we would have these, they’re called mscruso,
which are kind of pretty, but they’re definitely weed. There’s these
beautiful kind of yellow flowers, and they can break through asphalt.
They’re like really strong growers. You know, and as a kid, you know,
parents would be like, hey, let’s do like an adventure thing, and like
you find all these in the yard, and like for each of them, we line them
up and count them and we would just like, Wow, this is cool. And we
would go and pick them and light them up.
And our parents would be like, you know, behind the corner, that would
be like, we totally fooled them.
So yeah, they’ weeding as a kid without really knowing that I was doing
that.
00:02:07 - Speaker 2: Nice one. We lived on a farm just for a little
while, while my dad was stationed at a naval station that was kind of in
the boonies, you might say, and my mom was a pretty serious gardener
growing her own vegetables and fruits, and we had fruit trees and stuff
like that.
But I certainly remember that some things, the tomato plants grew fast
and easy. There was the watermelon plants that we got one summer with me
and my brother just ate watermelon and spit the seeds into a nearby
garden bed, and then there were some others that were endless
frustration for my mom trying to coax out of the ground.
So yeah, I think my strategy if I’m ever in the position of being a
yard owner, will be to just identify all of the hardiest plants that
grow, even if you don’t want them to, and just say these are what I’m
specifically cultivating.
00:02:51 - Speaker 1: I like this strategy. This someone once said this.
I’m sure that there are like children books and stuff written around
this. I’m not sure, but someone said this and I thought it was kind of
interesting that there’s a gardening approach to like steering a
system, right? And there’s sort of like more of the plan and design
approach to steering a system, meaning that if you have this sort of
like organic type of system, like a garden, right? Or maybe software.
It’s going to just keep changing, and the gardener’s approach is that
by doing something like Adam, what you were saying, you kind of identify
the things that you want to cultivate, and you give them a better
opportunities. And then you look at things like weed or things that you
want to move, and you sort of like give them worse opportunities, right?
You sort of steer the system like that and see where it goes, whereas
the I don’t know if there’s a better word for it, but the planning and
the signing of the system from scratch, you’re like constantly trying
to hope that it evolves in the direction you want to, which is, I think,
never really the case, right?
00:03:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that is I use gardening as a
metaphor often for those kinds of organic growth things for something
like a community where you just can’t directly direct what’s going to
happen, what you can do is encourage and nurture and create
opportunities, as you said, for the kinds of things you want to see and
and discourage the kinds of things you don’t want to see.
But that’s part of the joy maybe is you don’t know exactly how it’s
going to turn out. If you come at it from a kind of a builder, engineer,
architect perspective that I’m gonna plan down to every last little
detail in the blueprint, and then I’ll make reality match that exactly,
you’re likely to be frustrated and disappointed.
00:04:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s right. I think this somehow we just
kind of slipped into this, and that’s interesting in itself, but this
is kind of what I’m trying to do with my project Playbit.
See, we can get into it a little bit more in detail in a few minutes,
but I think that there’s this opportunity to encourage, sort of like a
different way of building software, not like radically different, but
sort of like somewhere in between big scale and tiny tiny scale
software, kind of like personal software.
But anyhow, I think that a cultural change, right? Sort of like creating
this garden where interesting like plants and stuff can grow to kind of
spin off this metaphor. It’s a really interesting idea, and that’s
sort of like the core of playbit. That is the idea around it. That’s
what I’m trying to do with it, rather than to build on a specific type
of technology. Now, software is like part of, you know, my strategy to
make the change happen, or at least I hope I can. But the goal of play
but this is sort of like cultural change or really like offering and,
you know, a different or a slightly different at least culture to
software building.
00:05:39 - Speaker 2: Culture is so important, certainly for programming
communities, but more broadly just creation of any end artifact comes
not just from the tools and the materials and the intentions of the
creators, but also this ineffable thing we call culture.
Yeah, well, I’m really excited to hear more about Playbit, which is a
brand new project you’re working on, just for the listener’s sake. It
would be great to briefly touch on your background.
You’ve got a very impressive resume fresh off of working at FIMA.
Before that you did Dropbox. You were early at Spotify, and just looking
down that list, you know, I find myself thinking, well, if you were an
investor, that would be pretty impressive, and I would assume you’re
just sort of leaving the things out that were misses. But as someone
that goes to work for companies, you don’t have the ability to do such
a portfolio strategy. I’m wondering if you feel like you have a
particular knack for spotting high potential companies early on, or is
it more a spot of luck or some combination?
00:06:35 - Speaker 1: That’s a good question. I think it’s probably
the latter. It’s a little bit of a combination.
Really, it’s this kind of idea of intuition, right? You have a lot of
experience. I do have quite a lot of experience at this point, and I
think that has put up these neurons in such a way that I have some sense
at least, at least within this particular kind of industry that I’m
in.
Someone was asking me this the other day actually, this little Twitter
like texting back and forth, but I think that there’s a couple of
things you can do that don’t require experience to build up intuition.
And one thing is just to like really understand what you like to do,
right? And so this is not specifically around, you know, successful
technology companies, but I think it’s like a foundational sort of like
a cornerstone.
To being successful with like, really anything, is to understand like
what you really want, right? Not what your parents told you that you
should want, or not what like your peers tell you that you should want,
but what you really want. No, no, that’s really hard, and maybe that’s
the hardest thing in life actually to know what you really want.
00:07:37 - Speaker 2: I’ll echo that as well, which is for me, I had
this experience of growing up with video games and that being my
passion, and I was just convinced I would go into the game industry, and
that was my path, and I actually did that and then I was miserable and I
didn’t like it and I what on paper you might say, or hypothetically, I
thought I wanted to do in practice didn’t actually work for me. And
then when I had an opportunity to join a company. Making basically from
my perspective, pretty boring business software. I jumped into that and
discovered I loved it and I was much better at a thing that I loved to
do or fit with my natural passion somehow.
So I think it’s also a maybe coming back to our gardening metaphor, a
bit of a discovery and looking for opportunities and noticing what’s
growing, what’s sprouting really naturally, and then encouraging. that
rather than having some preconceived notion of what you think you should
do, which might come from parents, certainly could come from, you know,
the tech industry, which lionizes certain kinds of companies or certain
kinds of people and instead kind of paying attention to your own
internal compass for this is a thing that I could really see myself
spending every minute thinking about for the next 5 years, 10 years, or
career.
00:08:47 - Speaker 1: That’s just so interesting to hear you say that,
but you had that experience, which I think a lot of us have, right? If
we had this idea, maybe we want to be a chef or an astronaut, or, you
know, a fire person or whatever when we’re kids, right? And like most
of us end up not doing that, right? We end up doing something else. And
I think that happens a few times in life where, like you, you know, We
see this thing, it’s like very exciting, we pursue it, and then we
stumble upon something else, and that just, you know, we stumble upon
probably 100 different things, right? But one of those things where
like, whoa, damn, this is really fun, and this is really interesting.
Yeah, so getting back to your question a few minutes ago, I think that
if you have that sort of like cornerstone idea of the learning about
myself, it’s just something that I should always work on. Then on top
of that, I think what you can do is To try to learn about the people
that are working at various different companies or like looking for
passion in people, like finding out what incentives are driving them to
make a change. And with a change, I mean like a technology startup,
right, usually exists for one of two reasons, and the first reason is
that people want to make a change or want to see a change in the world,
right? It can be a very small scale, a very big scale.
And the second thing, I think that often you have these ulterior
motives, you have power, fortune, you know, impressing other people,
like all those things. There’s nothing bad about those things, right?
But they are usually then hidden away that there’s this facade of like,
no, we’re really trying to make a machine here with this YouTube for
cats or whatever. And really like someone just wanted to like build a
really cool thing so they can sell it and get rich, right? And again,
there’s no judgment here if that’s your thing, that’s cool, but
that’s not what I’m interested in.
So that’s one of the things that I tried to see and figure out and
really spend time on understanding when speaking with a company or a few
people who want to make a change, right? Like, are they driven by
passion for this change? Like, can they see this world and like, you
know, in 3 years, if we have this thing, and people are using it, like,
this is how their lives are different. This is how they can like do
things that they can’t do before. Like that’s the sort of thing. To me
it’s like, kind of rare. It might be surprisingly rare, actually, which
is kind of weird. And to find that out, I think the easiest way is just
to spend a little bit of time with a lot of different people. So if
you’re interviewing for a company, ask if you can spend a few hours
with 1 or 2 people on the team, rather than, can I spend half an hour
with like 10 different people.
00:11:20 - Speaker 2: Interesting. So it sounds like you’re, you know,
come back to that investor kind of analogy I made before where going to
work for a company, you’re investing your time rather than your money,
which in many ways is even a more scarce and valuable resource. You
think of it as less in terms of let me a value. I don’t know, the
market opportunity here, whether I think this has the potential to be
something good or big or what have you, and instead more is kind of
looking into the souls of the people who are working on it to understand
their motivation and their drive and their passion.
00:11:52 - Speaker 1: For sure, yeah. This is probably a cliche at this
point, but If you have a group of good people that you’re working on,
it’s not that important what you’re working on. Right, I think that’s
a very extreme way of looking at it. I think in reality it’s not as
clear cut as that. It’s not as true as that.
But I do think that it does hold true to some extent, right, that if you
flip it around, right, if you do some sort of kind of Greek philosophy
approach then, you know, you say sort of like, what if everything is
good, right? So you start out in like ideal scenario. So it’s every
person is amazing on the team. The business is doing great. The mission
is something that is so close to my heart, like, I’m just thinking
about it day and night, right? And so on.
And now you start like taking things away, right? You have this kind of
little thing in front of you, and now you start thinking that, OK,
let’s see if I take away the mission, right? And I have all the other
things still, like, does this feel like something I want to do for 4
years, right? Not in day, right? It’s like, oh maybe, you know, you
start taking things away, and I think If you start out in the ideal
case, right, you play these different stories out, and you take away the
group of people, right? So you replace that with like, people who you
would consider, like, not being good, right? Like, maybe they had a bad
influence on you, maybe they create a lot of stress for you, maybe
they’re just not good at the craft and so on, whatever that means to
you.
I think for most people, like, it stops pretty early in terms of like,
yeah, I would still do this. Like you would be like, well, you know.
With making such a big change, and I’m really involved emotionally in
this mission and everything, but like the people I work with are paying,
it’s like, I don’t wanna do that, right? Life is so tiny, it’s so
short, and you look back in the past and the things you remember, it’s
not the bugs you squashed in code or like the pixels you made. It’s
gonna be the people and like. The change that the company is trying to
make and the group of people are trying to make, I think it is very
important, right? And this is where it really loops back the first thing
that I was talking about a few minutes ago about like learning about
yourself and knowing yourself. I have a few friends who are very
concerned about the environment of Earth and stuff like that, and choose
to leave their traditional tech jobs to go work for, you know, uh
renewable energy companies and stuff like that. And for them, you know,
the mission is very important, right? And the people are very important.
So, I think you want to really like look at all of these different
things, like, a group of people who are amazing, who are very
unsuccessful at doing what they do, is not gonna be a fun experience
anyways, right? So yeah, I don’t think there’s a magic bullet,
there’s no sort of golden arrow or whatever metaphor here, but I think
one really good thing to look for is this sort of like passionate
people, and what drives them to make that change.
00:14:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m a fan of that. Seeking opportunities in
my own career and when I’m in the position of giving career advice to
others, I usually say something like optimize for the people, find the
team that you have that collaboration magic with, and that will be just
far greater return than the exact perfect mission. Um, I do think, you
know, those things related, probably because if you share values and you
share passions around a particular mission, that’s likely to be a team
that you work really well with. But yeah, given the choice between a
thing that’s slightly off from what I might actually be my ideal, the
perfect team, and the other way around, I always go for the team.
00:15:16 - Speaker 1: I’m curious here, Adam and Mark, how you’re
looking at this as well. You’re both experienced in the software
industry, yes I am, like, kind of flipping the question back to you.
What are some of the things you might do or look for in order to
understand if this, you know, company group of people are gonna be
successful. It’s just gonna be like a fun ride for me, so to speak.
00:15:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’d love to hear from Mark on that since
he’s actually, now that I think of it, picked some pretty good ones,
including for Muse, he was at Stripe. And so, yeah, I guess I never
asked, did you see that as, oh, these guys are gonna be huge, I really
want to be on board early. My stock will be worth a lot, or was it more,
this is an interesting domain, and I want to work with these people who
knows the company will be successful, or that wasn’t part of your
calculation.
00:16:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s tough for me to give an answer to
that, because to my mind, there’s a lot of, you know, it, when you see
it, and to your point about having experience and neurons and pattern
matching.
I feel like I’ve been lucky enough to work in the industry for a while,
so I now I’m able to have perhaps some judgment of that.
I do think as a tactical matter, if people actually want to have a
better chance of working at a high potential company in the classic
sense, you can get a lot of information by asking people whose job it is
to know these things.
So, Investors and hiring managers will often have a lot of data about
companies that will do well. And then it kind of becomes like investors
will always say, oh, it’s, it’s actually not hard to pick the company,
it’s hard to get the deals. I think there’s a similar dynamic with
joining companies where often a big part of it is actually getting
hired.
But yeah, I think it’s a tactical matter, if you do ask around, you can
get a lot of good data points.
But I also have similar sentiment in terms of, at a more personal level,
what I look for in a company, and I would also say it’s about the
people and the mission.
And I always go back to this idea of You know, we don’t have a whole
lot of mortal life, and it would be a shame to spend the next 2 to 4
years of it working with people you didn’t care for. And when you say
it like that, oh wow, you know, really should, uh, make sure that the
people that you trust and look up to and want to become more alike,
because as you spend 124 years with this team, you are going to
basically become more like them. So is that something that you would be
proud and excited to do, or that you would be afraid and ashamed of?
00:17:18 - Speaker 2: There’s a great patio. I think it’s even in an
article writing about the culture at Stripe. He says, when you’re
choosing your colleagues, these are people you’re essentially giving
right access in your consciousness to. We don’t realize it, but just
the people you’re around all the time, you become like them, whether
you like it or not. So surround yourself with people you admire and you
want to become more like, and that will come true.
00:17:42 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, I really like that.
00:17:44 - Speaker 3: This also might connect a little bit to our topic
of playful software, because to my mind, one aspect of playfulness is
sort of undertaking the process and the work for its own sake, without a
lot of accountability to the end result and just kind of enjoying the
process, you know, doing it for the memes, if you will. And I feel like
you can only do that well if you actually really love what you’re
working on and the discipline, but I’m curious to hear Rasmus, what
your perspective on playful software is.
00:18:11 - Speaker 1: Well, I think for most people playful software,
the first that comes to mind is probably games, right? And games,
they’re sort of like almost the purest type of playful software. That
is their primary and often only goal, right? To just be playful, to just
entertain.
And so I think playful software that is not games have some amount of
that sort of like entertainment that, you know, a privy guest of yours
that Jason was saying sort of like fidget ability, you know, the idea
that There’s some quality to the software that makes you want to just
like, kind of toy around and play around with the software itself, not
to produce something necessarily, although that might be the main reason
for the software to exist. So I think if we’re looking for a definition
of playful software, it’s probably something in the realms of game like
entertainment like qualities that are kind of intertwined with some sort
of utility.
00:19:09 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is really interesting, this nexus of
entertainment versus playfulness versus utility.
So I feel like actually there’s some relations certainly between
entertainment and playfulness, but I feel like they’re also somewhat
separable.
Like you can have a game where it’s sort of a mindless game where you
just plan to get really good at it, like a competitive game. And the
flip side, you can have playfulness that is more just about exploring
and seeing what you can do and what you can make and perhaps the stuff
in the middle, like Minecraft is kind of in the middle there, it’s both
entertaining and it’s playful, and I do think people tend to go towards
games, but I think there’s another important element around what we’re
calling playfulness that’s really important.
00:19:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s good points.
00:19:44 - Speaker 2: I’m suddenly reminded of a book by one of my
favorite authors, Virginia Postrell.
And in there is a chapter where it asks the question of what actually is
the difference between work and play. And it’s one of those things
where you go, oh well, it’s obvious, and then when you try to come up
with a definition like, well, you get paid to work and you don’t get
paid to play, and really quickly, especially if you’re someone that’s,
you know, in the tech industry, a designer, a developer, whatever, you
find yourself doing things that look very, very similar, maybe in your
free time that you do at your work, but it’s hard to pin down really
what the difference is and She ends up defining it exactly as you said
there, Mark, which is play is something that’s open ended, you don’t
have a specific goal in mind, you can start out with, I’m gonna paint
the painting of the sunset, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve
decided instead to fold the canvas into an origami. Swan and, you know,
you could do that if you want, whereas work you have this specific end
goal that you need to get to, often in a particular time frame, and even
if you find some interesting detour along the way, you kind of have to
ignore that because you have made this commitment to deliver some
specific result.
00:20:54 - Speaker 1: And I’d say that as a designer, like playing is
often a very important part of the understanding part of design, which I
think is like a really big chunk of design work, right? You know, you
have this opportunity or this kind of problem, like there’s something
you’re pursuing, right, with your design project and Before you can
make any decisions and any changes, right, in terms of like getting
closer to solving it or changing it, you have to understand it, right?
And so you take things apart, you put them back together, right? You’ll
learn about things as you take things apart, you’ll find new parts so
you didn’t see before, right? You’ll find new constraints of the
project, you’re like, oh shoot, oh I guess this material is different,
right? And so, I think, as you were saying, Adam, if you take a step
back and you think about like, well, this kind of looks like play,
doesn’t it? And I think in many ways it is straight up play. But it is
sort of a semi open ended, closed ended play, right? It’s sort of like
play for the purpose of learning. And I think this is where most of us
in the tech industry, like, Can relate to playfulness in like the way we
use software. So maybe on a weekend you’re like, oh, I’ve heard about
this new like rust thing. Maybe I should like take the first bit, right?
And you put together a whole world thing and you find a rust compiler
and you write some code and you’re like, oh, what is, why can’t I
borrow this thing, right, whatever. And the goal here, right, is play.
You might not call it play, but unless your goal is to actually like get
an output in the end or make a change or something like that, really
what you’re doing, right, is learning. And I think that is often the
reward, so to speak, the outcome. The product of play is to learn
something.
00:22:35 - Speaker 3: Absolutely. I think it’s a great point. And just
to reiterate, I think it’s really important to have this play access be
separate from work versus entertainment. So that is, you can play in a
domain that we typically think of as work, whether that’s design,
engineering. Another example that I might throw in there is Elon Musk
sending the roadster to space. It’s like, why are you doing that? I
don’t know, it’d be fun, I guess. That’s also in a very serious
domain where he is in fact learning a lot by undertaking that activity.
00:23:02 - Speaker 2: Also connects a bit to just our humanity, which
is, of course, we’re trying to achieve things, be productive in the
broad sense of the word, in our pursuits in our work life, but at the
same time, we’re all people, we like stuff that’s fun, we like stuff
that’s playful, and if you can find ways to do that, that fit in with
the work and fit in with accomplishing your ends, I think it makes it
more fun and engaging and enjoyable for everyone who’s involved.
00:23:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s something naturally even about play
for sure. We can’t imagine our like ancestors running around naked in
the woods with clubs, you know, kind of finding a pine cone or something
on the ground or a stick and be like, oh, this kind of looks like a
goat, you know, and you start playing with those things, and there’s
something I think is very interesting, like when I was a kid, so I grew
up in the countryside and Me and, you know, the other like 5 neighbors
or whatever, and the kids, we would, you know, go into the woods and
that’s how we would play, we, you know, build a little like imaginary
little airplanes out of a pine cone and stick through it and stuff like
that, right? And as a kid, you see a stick, and the stick is like
anything. It can be anything you want, it can be an airplane, it can be
a rocket, right? It can be a person, right? And as an adult we lose
that, and I don’t know why, but I see a stick today and I’m like, oh,
that’s a stick, right? And I’m like, damn it. You know, I wanna see
the stick and I wanna feel like, whoa, this could be a weird sort of
creature, you know, from a different planet that has like multiple
heads, that kind of looks like a stick, but it’s not a stick. At some
point I listened to someone who was trying to make a point of the
educational system, at least in sort of like most of the world. Takes in
one end of a machine, right? Imagine people walking in one end of the
machine and they come out in the other end and like, in the end you walk
in, there’s all these color and difference and, you know, different
voices and stuff. And the other end is like this marching uniformed
people, right? School kind of prints this pattern onto us, right? This
is real, that is not real. This is play, that is not play, this is
serious, right? And I’m not sure that’s like good for us, especially
not for people in sort of the creative industry. Which I think is like a
growing industry generally.
00:25:15 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Another way
to articulate this might be as we get older and as we go through
institutional education, we tend to get annealed, that is kind of
solidified, optimized, focused, structured, and play in addition to a
way to learn, is a way to kind of foam roll your mind, you know, get
some plasticity, break up some connective tissue so you can think of
some new stuff. And so now that you make that point, I see that as a
second key outcome. You know, you learn some stuff and you have some
more flexibility in your head.
00:25:46 - Speaker 2: It also occurs to me that that means that play and
imagination have a strong relationship and maybe this, as you said
earlier, Erasmus, that like, when you talk about in design, play is very
important. You might even say, this isn’t quite solved yet, let me play
with it and try some stuff. And that’s connected to a little bit of an
open-ended divergent thinking, imagination, out of the box, you know,
looking at the stick and seeing the person of the rocket ship, and that
actually is what could potentially lead you to the more practical
breakthrough in doing your work.
00:26:17 - Speaker 1: It’s so true, so true, I think. If you think
about cool stuff that people have made, right, like art or tools or
anything, what have you, that you think it’s like, wow, this is
brilliant, you know, this is so fun, or this is really smart, whatever.
And you start digging into like the history of that in pretty much every
single case, you’ll find that it’s a remix of other things, right? And
so I think imagination and playfulness. is sort of like at least
partially a practice of just exploring things, right? It’s maybe
that’s a play part, right? You explore stuff, you see new things,
right? And then here comes the imagination part, which is like, oh, out
of all these different things, there’s like a new thing that can
emerge, right? Like the iPod is a remix of this like brawn handheld
radio, right? And then the iPhone is a remix of the iPod. You know,
those things are very obviously remixes, because they’re, you know,
visually very similar, but I think that there’s also conceptual
remixes, and there’s like straight up like the word I’m using a remix,
right, like from audio, there’s like, that is a very common practice.
00:27:24 - Speaker 3: This is also reminding me that there’s an
important element of intellectual humility in play.
So we said perhaps play is when you don’t have accountability for the
end work product, but wait a second, we’re in creative fields, our
entire purpose is to come up with novel ideas by definition.
You don’t know how to get to that work product yet. If you did, you
just go right there. So really it’s taking away some of your
constraints and preconceptions about what it takes to create a novel
work product and and exploring for a bit and saying, you know, press on
the other side, it’ll be clear that what you were calling play was in
fact work or fed into work, but you don’t know what that path is yet,
so who are you to say what is or isn’t gonna have a good result
eventually.
00:28:01 - Speaker 1: That is really interesting.
So Mark, what level of constraints, or what level of sort of like
boundaries do you think you need to define in order for that to not be
like this totally open ended sort of quick detour of what I’m talking
about is to make sure this makes sense.
So like, I’ve seen this happening a couple of times in tech companies
where you have a couple of interesting smart people who are playful, and
the company recognizes that, and it recognizes the value and innovation
and stuff, right? So they say, hey, you know, Lisa and Robin. Would you
be interested in sitting in this corner just coming up with crazy shit,
right? Maybe we’ll ship it. And I think in most cases that is like a
failure, right? That will come up with all these incredible stuff, but
there’s never any sort of traction around it. Maybe the constraints are
way too vague, similarly to an art class, you know, if you ask someone
to just paint anything they want, there’s just this paralysis, right,
of like where they even start. So within that framework, like looping
back to my question to you, Mark, what and how do you think about like
setting up the right amount of constraints to be able to play around
within there?
00:29:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question. I I don’t think
there’s an easy answer, but One strategy that I like a lot is to follow
the energy. So if you’re undertaking this project, let’s say we’re
going to relax the constraint about classically measured business
output, but we’re gonna maintain the constraint around there needs to
be some energy here, which could be, you’re able to get other people
excited about it, you’re able to get customers excited about it,
you’re able to create something that’s aesthetically interesting. That
to me is an important Source of energy.
And so we’re not gonna kind of constantly inorganically add energy to
the system. We’re gonna give you a little bit of spark and some initial
fuel, but then you need to build it up from there and kind of find your
own path.
But you’re free to not go directly to this end destination. It could be
that you go through basically an art project, or a recruiting project or
a publication project, and then you go from there.
That helps a lot with kind of the mechanics of keeping the project going
but again people are living their short moral lives and not gonna want
to work on something that doesn’t have a lot of energy on it. So as you
have more success, you tend to attract more people and it goes from
there.
00:29:59 - Speaker 1: So energy that makes a lot of sense, kind of sense
of urgency in different words, the sort of like things are happening. Do
you think that Results or milestones, or even just celebrating like
discrete moments of success or progress are important as well.
00:30:15 - Speaker 3: So this is a classic atomism back from the Hiroki
days to make it real. We can link to the full list of atomisms. But
it’s this idea of, even if it’s just a prototype or even a CLI session
mockup, something that makes it real and makes it concrete for people,
really helps people understand what it is and again build that energy. I
also, I mentioned it briefly, but I think this idea of aesthetics is
really important. There are good threads to pull when you have an idea
that’s aesthetically exciting or appealing. That’s the way that I
often draw energy on projects, even like programming type projects.
00:30:45 - Speaker 1: There’s this thing I’m thinking about now, which
is And this varies in different parts of the world, but I think the same
thing is sort of the financial thing is true.
Like, you look at a particular industry, like hairdressers, right, or
pizza joints, and you look at like the topography and the colors and
sort of like styling they put on their storefronts.
And there seems to be these sort of like pretty tight clusters of style,
right? You’re like, why are all the pizza joints in this town using
hobo for the typeface, right? It will be so much more interesting if
like someone used copper Gothic, you know, or comic sense or any of the
other sort of, you know, funky typefaces or something, you know, stern
like Helvetica.
And I think what’s going on is this recognition or this thing to like
make it real, right? Imagine that we were starting a pizza joint, right?
And we have ambition, right? We want this to be like the freaking best
pizza in our town, right? So, you know, we look at other pizza places,
and we have this intuition that we talked about before, right? Of what
is like a real pizza place, right? We have our heroes, right? And
chances are that they use hobo, right? We might not be aware of this,
this might be unconscious.
So we go to, you know, our local printing press who make a sign for us,
and they show us, you know, a bunch of different typefaces, they have an
option, and we see the hobo one and we’re like, oh, that just feels
right, you know. So you go with that and you reinforce this idea at a
real pizza place to use hobo for a typeface.
And so I think this connects directly to what we’re talking about with
a static being important and to make it real and a good atimus, which
I’m gonna start saying now, by the way, so you’re all kind of wow, is
that same thing, right? Let’s say you’re building like a MacOS app.
And you have this idea for it.
If you create a design, just a picture, that’s like a fake screenshot
that looks real, I think that there is a similar quality to that pizza
you want.
People are gonna look at it and they’re gonna feel like, oh damn, this
can be real, you know, we can make this happen. That looks like a real
thing. I didn’t think of that, right? So yeah, I think aesthetics and
presentation, and that mapping that to like your heroes and your
ambitions, I think it’s super important for people to feel that this is
possible, you know, and to drive the energy you were talking about,
Mark.
00:32:58 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of another quick story here of
kind of aesthetic and emotionally driven play session.
A long time ago at Hiroku, we had an issue with the command line client
being very slow, and I was very frustrated with it, and I wanted to have
a faster client.
So I undertook this playful project of just trying to make a very fast
Hoku client that kind of only does Hello World, like it just lists your
apps, but does it fast.
And that ended up not really going anywhere, but by undertaking that
project, I discovered Go, and then eventually will go by example, and
now we use Go for some of our server stuff, and that’s a whole world
that I never would have been introduced to if I hadn’t just kind of
followed my nose up. It would be cool if even with relaxing the
constraint that eventually needs to shift to production.
00:33:36 - Speaker 1: Wait, are you behind Gobi sample? Oh yeah, man, I
love that. Oh, that’s funny. Oh, that’s brilliant. Yeah. Oh, that’s
fantastic, yeah.
00:33:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, we actually use this as a bit of, I think of
it as the mark publishing style, which is static HTML, maybe a little
bit of, I don’t know, did you even have some kind of like template or
build script for the basic site, but otherwise it’s this very almost I
call brutalist HTML but a very effective design in the sense that it has
the side by side code and description, if I’m remembering correctly.
And yeah, it’s this very kind of sleek, it loads fast because it’s a
static site, it probably still works fine now with zero maintenance, and
we were certainly inspired by that, both for the you can switch articles
and later all the muse stuff. I’m just basically seeing the way that
Mark does kind of HTML publishing of these essentially kind of a mini
book on the web, was very influential for me and everything I’ve done
subsequently.
00:34:35 - Speaker 1: Hm. In an interesting way, I think go by example
is playful, right? It seems to be very uniform, right? And I think that
uniformity creates this, rather than create, I think it removes some
anxiety around navigation.
A lot of the web, I think, has this problem of creating anxiety around
like, The user interface because everything is different, right? It’s
like you you jumping between different planets. Anyhow, I think what
makes go by example playful is that I’m guessing here and I’m
extrapolating mostly from my own experience with using it. Like, when
you’re in the mode of using it or visiting it, you are exploring,
right? Otherwise you probably wouldn’t be visiting it, or you are there
for entertainment, right, which is kind of playful too, as we talked
about. So I think that there’s this category of things that They look
and smell like pure utilities. They’re very uniform, they might seem
boring, but they really are these like enablers or pieces of a puzzle
for playfulness.
00:35:29 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I also think that’s often an origin
story, so maybe we can use this as a way to learn more about your
project where, you know, one lens on these projects is, you know, it’s
a way to learn a programming language.
That doesn’t sound very interesting. But the other lens is it’s the
result of a path that someone walked down around the change they wanted
to see in the world.
So likewise for your project Playbi, you could describe it as someone’s
building a new operating system, another one of those, right? But
there’s much more to it in terms of where you’re coming from and why
you’re building this and how you’re approaching it. So maybe you can
tell us a little bit about Playbit.
00:35:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this, like many things, there was no
eureka moments, which is interesting, I think you guys have talked about
that on the show previously.
The slow hunch, the slow hunch, yeah, exactly.
So this very much is what happened with Playbit. So for years and years,
probably over 10 years, you know, I’ve been interested in operating
systems and systems. This is one of these things that I’ve learned
about myself that what I find really fun and exciting to work on in
terms of software are things that enable a lot of people to make things
with them, right? So tools, in other words, I mean, you guys are there
with me. And so I started thinking about MacO 9, it’s so tight, you
know, it’s so nice. Windows 2000 came around, I was like, wow, it’s so
snappy. Anyhow, fast forwarding a little bit.
MacOS 10, I think is just like this wonderful amazing operating system.
And this very interesting point in time in 2001 or 2002 or so, when Mac
was 10.1 or so is the first kind of usable version of it, started
getting some traction.
I think what happened was that this is probably mostly accidental, but
You got these people who were really interested in kind of moldable,
malleable software and like poking at things, hacking at things, and
they were using BSD and Linux and stuff, right? And they had to give up
a good user experience and sure people have different opinions about
this, but this is my opinion.
00:37:19 - Speaker 2: I was a Linux on the desktop user for many years
and Many things I really loved about it, but I do not miss fighting with
getting the Wi Fi chip working or wake from sleep or editing. I spent so
many hours of my life editing XOg.com trying to get the resolution to
match the refresh rate of my monitor or whatever. And that’s the kind
of pain you’re willing to go through for this hackable interface. And
yet, my experience was the same. I landed on Mac OS eventually because
it gave me so much of that Unix underpinning that’s very kind of
powerful and moldable uh with also good hardware integration.
00:37:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right, that Linux
traditionally and still today at least the Linux kernel is most
distributions, right, is configuration over convention, whereas Mark,
you were talking about Go briefly and Go is sort of like the opposite of
that.
I’m, I’m a huge fan of Go, like the way it’s designed as a
programming language too, but in particular the way it went about the
design, where it’s convention over configuration, and we can talk more
about that later. But I think what happened was that you have that one
part, right, of people who are really interested like you had um of the
moldability of software and like the ability to fully customize your
computing experience. And then on the other hand, you have people who
want to use a computer and be efficient as users of a computer, right?
And before MacOS 10, I think you had to make a choice. You had to say,
I’m gonna use Windows or Mac OS 9. I’m not gonna be able to do this
like multiple hackable stuff. I can do some basic programming or
whatever, or I’m gonna do that stuff, but I’m gonna live with all this
pain, right? And that quiz 10 came around and it’s like, hey, you know
what, you can have both, right? And so, what I think happened was that
you got people who knew how to bend and to mold computers and software
in the same place as people who were very efficient and effective, and
curious and playful around things like design and getting things done,
and had real needs, right? And sort of that’s some biases there, I
think is what drove Mac OS to become such a successful platform in terms
of application quality, right? You just go and look at evidence of this,
right? You go and look at a lot of web apps that are trying to mimic
desktop apps. In most cases you will find them using metaphors and
sometimes even a statics from Macan. It’s pretty rare that you find
these things that are in the absence of a native host to mimic Windows,
right? Anyhow, so that happened. I think that was very interesting.
It’s clear to me now that that is a slowly dying thing, right? Macco is
10:15, you can’t use the VM Nets thing unless you have a special signed
certificate from Apple that you can. To get if you’re like become a
partner with them, right? You actually cannot run it, even as the owner
of the computer, you cannot use it, right? Sure, you can be roots,
right? You can pseudo and use it, whatever, but you can’t make any apps
using it. And Mac OS 11, takes that to the next step, right? And that’s
fine. Anyhow.
So, in the context of all of these things, I think that there is going
to be a need, right, in terms of like allowing people to keep being
playful and exploring. Software at this sort of like more, I own a
desktop computer. I want to be able to like do crazy shit with it, even
if that means breaking it, right? And so I started thinking a few years
ago, I was saying to myself that I’m gonna put a bet that in the next
10 years, there’s not gonna be a Mac OS 10 more, and Apple is just
gonna be about iOS. And I think that’s, I’m still believing that. And
what then, right? Is there gonna be sort of a Linux based desktop thing
that emerges? Is Windows kind of like, finally. Start like a skunkworks
team somewhere. They’re just like, let’s throw out like 95% of all the
crap and build that. I don’t know. So I was like, should I try to do
something about this? It’s really hard to build a business, I think,
around the idea of an operating system, especially replacing Windows
MacOs, which are just so good, right? They’re just so good and asking
someone to just replace that with something is a big ask.
00:41:24 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe the way I would characterize it
actually is less about good or not and more just the amount of stuff
that needs to go into what people would consider a modern operating
system today ranging from hardware support to networking to languages
and various kinds of input devices and so on and APIs and the ability to
run software and browse the web. and so on is just so huge that it is
not something that an individual or even a startup can easily
undertake.
Hence, it’s only within reach of these incumbents that have these large
existing platforms and the rare case of maybe something like Google and
ChromoS being able to come in and throw quite a lot of resources and
quite a lot of time at the problem.
00:42:09 - Speaker 1: But I think even in the case of Chromois, you
would end up in the same place, I think, right? You would have business
and money driving the main incentives, right, of like, well, if we make
this work for everyone and anyone, we can just make a ton of money and
then You have these competing incentives, and more importantly,
competing sort of like constraints on those, right? You’re gonna need
sandboxing, you’re gonna need all of these safety features, right?
You’re not gonna allow people to like mess around with the OS because
then most people are not gonna like know what they’re doing, right? And
so I think the only way to go about this is to not trying to build an
operating system or computing environment that fulfills all the
expectations we have.
But rather to just change our expectations or offer sort of like a,
imagine like a picture on the wall, right? It’s a big picture is very
complicated. And you’re very familiar with this picture, and now
you’re putting a smaller picture, a much simpler picture next to it on
the wall. And you say, you know, you can walk around, you can look at
the simple picture, still have this big picture. And I think like,
offering this idea of like, what if we shift our expectations a little
bit, right? Maybe we do that just in the mode of playful software.
So where Playbit started out was as more of an ambitious idea of an
actual operating system.
And ideas of, you know, I have like a GPU and stuff like that on a
remote computer and people has time shared this because GPUs, there’s a
kind of, I think a very important slightly concerning environmental
impact. And right now we’ve seen this with all the foundry issues,
right? And, you know, TSM and stuff like that, right? Like having issues
creating ships, right? Because rare earth’s limitations, and this is
mostly, you know, impacted by COVID and stuff like that, to my
understanding, but still, you buy like an Nvidia high-end GPU today, and
it’s very possible that a year from now, you’re gonna have to replace
it with a new one, right? Because that industry has moved so quickly.
And how often are you gonna use all that power, right? Probably not all
the time, right? You’re gonna use that in virt a little here and there.
So there’s this crazy shirt on hardware, especially if you’re in the
PC world, right? Macs tend to have a longer lifetime, I think.
And now I’m talking about like high end kind of high-end hardware. So
this is kind of where I started and I got a lot of feedback from a lot
of people who I was speaking with to try to understand, you know, and
try to navigate what this would mean, and if this was crazy, and I think
it was kind of like, it’s probably a little too early, and I think the
approach to making this kind of change needs to happen differently. And
so, through a pretty slow boil and slow process of just doing a lot of
iteration, what is playbit sort of like just came out of this. So the
very concretely, I think that Playbit is probably more similar to a web
browser or Flash, technologically speaking. And, you know, jump in here
if I’m taking this too far or there’s any curiosities to it, but I
think the web is successful for a couple of different reasons, right?
But one of the reasons is this uniform programming environment, this
uniform runtime environment. You know, if I make this little like web
program, right, and I tossed it over to you, you can use pretty much any
OS, any web browser, and I have a pretty good idea that C is gonna run
the same way for you. And this wasn’t always true. I think in the last
10 years this is kind of solidified to be like pretty much true. And I
think that’s really remarkable, right?
00:45:32 - Speaker 2: I’ll add on to that, that, yeah, not only does it
fulfill the right ones run anywhere, it was a dream of a lot of platform
technologies including Flash and Java and so on, but it does it in a way
that is sort of instantaneous to download and run.
And then, by far the most important part of it, I think, is the
sandboxing. It really gets that right. I can completely trust my program
to download a program from a website. A website is a program now, a very
sophisticated one potentially with all the JavaScript can do. And I can
trust that I can just point my browser to URL that I don’t know who’s
on the other side of that, and it will download and run that because the
sandboxing is essentially perfect within that tab. It can’t go out and
access the rest of my computing device. As far as I know, no other
computing environment has achieved that.
00:46:23 - Speaker 1: Well, I’d say the Flash did achieve that, and I
think that Flash was really brilliant in many different ways. The demise
of Flash, I think, has reasons that are really unrelated to its user
experience or development experience is mostly, you know, kind of a
monolith owned by a single corporation, right? But the model, yeah,
think about Flash or think about the web, I think it’s kind of the same
thing. That model is really interesting to me and I think the one. Piece
of the foundation for creating a culture where you feel empowered to
play around with software and to make little fun programs is some sort
of safety. And I think that’s what the sandbox does.
The good part of a sandbox that you’re talking about Adam is I’m never
writing perfect code, right? I’m gonna do something and I’m gonna run
it and maybe like delete all the things, right? If I run it on a
sandbox, it’s just gonna delete all the things in the sandbox, not, you
know, my passport from a Dropbox or something like that. So, I think
that’s the good part of the sandbox. The bad part, of course, is like,
when you want to do something interesting, like, let’s say you have a
photo sensor or something connected to a USB and you want to access
that, you can’t, and you’re be damn it. And that’s why you have to
jump out of if you’re like a web developer, you have to just be, well,
I can’t use web for, right? And then usually you’re outside of a
sandbox and there’s no sandbox.
And in the last couple of years, there’s been this kind of advancement
with virtualization, and virtualization sometimes is Mixed up or messed
up with like emulation or the idea of like a virtual machine, right?
It’s a virtual machine I would think of as a super set of emulation and
virtualization. So emulation, when you run a program like let’s say
like a Nintendo emulator, right? You have this program that appears to
have the original Nest CPU and did they have a co-processor, I can’t
remember. And DSP and all these like actual hardware things, right? So
the program inside that you load it up things that is running on this
hardware and stuff right there. Whereas virtualization is this idea of
running the program in a way so that it’s environment, not necessarily
it’s hardware, but it’s environment, appears to be that of a unique
computer, right? And this is kind of how AWS and Google Cloud and all
these things do it, right. And this has been around for quite a long
time, probably about 20 years or so as a concept, and probably in the
last 15 years it’s been increasingly like common to develop software
doing this. Docker is like a popular kind of virtualization environment,
right? And now you have these features built into Mac OS since 10.10.
You have built into in Windows 10 with Hyper-V, you have it built in in
Linux with KVM. And there’s similar things for a couple of other
operating systems, right? And this has happened in the last few years.
And so I was thinking that why not just make that the sandbox, right? So
like, instead of making the sandbox be this, you know, there’s a DOM,
right? And you have a JavaScript API and you have a fetch function, you
have an array type, and so on, right? That’s sort of like the uniform
runtime environment then, you know, you run that in Firefox or Chrome or
Safari, that’s just kind of called completely different code, right?
Implemented totally different ways, right? That’s sort of like the
uniformity. Like what if that’s just like Linux and then, you know. So
like when you run a program, instead of running it as JavaScript or
something like that, you just run it as whatever programming language
you want, you know, Mark can write in Go. And Adam, you can write in
Ruby, and it’s like totally fine, you can interoperate.
00:50:01 - Speaker 2: Part of the appeal there is something like Flash.
You have to use a very specific programming language and APIs through
for the web as well. JavaScript is not a language a lot of people love
and yet because you want to be on the web, you need to write things in
JavaScript and using the web APIs. And so it sounds like this
virtualization method lets you use more of the standard world of desktop
computing or server computing tools, uh, but with some of those same
benefits of the flash or web style sandbox.
00:50:32 - Speaker 1: Exactly. So you have the ability to think about it
as this portable little box, right? As a zip file or whatever kind of
metaphor you want to use. This little thing that you can copy, you can
send to a friend, you can put it on a server, then you can suspend, and
you can resume later.
That I think is a very powerful concept. Like the idea that I can open a
FIMA file or a notion document or something. And I can make some changes
to it, and I just close it, right? I toss it away. I evicted from my
computer, right? I clean up my work desk, and a week later I go back and
it’s retains most of its state, right? I can pick up where I left off.
Like, why can’t I have that on a lower level, like, in my experience on
the computer? Why can’t that be like below where the windows are? Why
is it just taps, right? Why is it not just entire apps or in my entire
desktop? What if I had like, you know, 4 buttons on the side of my
screen, right? And each button was like one of my different, this is not
what I’m built, by the way, but I think this would be fun to have. What
if, like, yeah, each button was mapped to one kind of VM in your
computer. When you push the button, it’s instantly, like a millisecond
swapped your entire computer to another one, then you have 4 computers
at the reach of like a thumb, right? Yeah, so I think there now is a
really good time to take this idea for a spin, and this is kind of like
the technical approach to Playbit, what it is as a piece of software.
And again, the goal of Playbit is not to build this piece of software.
The goal of Playbit is to create and encourage like the development of
small scale personal software. Maybe we can get into that more a little
bit later. So like, when I’m building it right now and what I’m trying
to get out in the next couple of months is kind of a Macintosh
application, and I’m sure I can make a Windows app and Linux up and
stuff.
So Macintosh application, you start it up, and what it does is that it
uses the the hypervisor of Mac OS and it boots up a Playbit OS which is
this kind of based on the Linux kernel. It takes like 2 seconds or so to
start it, and once it’s started inside there. You have this feature of
Linux called namespaces, which you can use to create these kind of
little isolated processes, right? So you can run a program and the
program thinks that it’s like ha ha, I’m the operating system, I have
all the power, and it kind of appears as that and it doesn’t have to be
bothered about it and stuff like that. And those would be the little
products that you would build and you would kind of play around with.
They can crash, they can write stuff to disk, they can mess with the
network. None of that is like leaking out to your real computer and not
even to like the playbi OS. So the manifestation of it in the first
attempt to creating a piece of software that encourages this playful
thing, is this very resumable, very sort of like, Kind of stop and go,
pick it up, leave it off type of software that you can play around with
like today, like on your computer. And the runtime environment that you
have is not the web platform, but it’s the Linux OS. So if you want to
write things in in JavaScript, you can do that, right? If you want to
write things and see, you can do that too. If you want interoperate
between these two different things, you can just like write shit to the
file system, right? You can use it as a database or you can build around
an actual database if you want to.
00:53:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the reasons I was intrigued by
Playbit is it seems to share this aesthetic I have around kind of
collapsing the stack down.
So I think it’s easiest to explain this in terms of its contrast. I
feel like there’s this pathology with modern software systems where we
keep adding layers and layers and layers, and that’s a few things.
First of all, it tends to make it slower cause you’re going through a
bunch of calls.
It also tends to reduce your ability to do things because in order to
have access to a feature as a programmer, that feature needs to thread
through all the layers. So if any layer happens to drop or corrupt a
feature, you’ve lost it.
This happens a lot with graphics APIs because the original middle layers
were designed for bitmaps, and then we changed it out to GPUs
underneath. But then the middle layers haven’t kind of fully caught up,
so you get this weird like impedance mismatch that means you don’t have
access to the full power of the GPU. Anyways.
And there’s also this element of you don’t understand what’s going
on, because you’re kind of just casting the stone into 19 layers.
Of libraries and, you know, who knows what it does, and that to me
really interferes with my ability to play because I don’t kind of know
what’s happening. I don’t have control over my environment.
And I like these platforms, these operating system ideas where you
squash that way down, you kind of start from scratch again.
OK, we got name spaces and we got the GPU. What can you do now? Well, it
turns out it’s a lot if you have a clean slate like that. I’m curious
if that aesthetic sense resonates with what you’re trying to do with
Playbit.
00:55:07 - Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. It’s so fun to hear you talk
about this, Mark. Yeah, I think that this is very, very real, and it’s
something that I care a lot about. I was really early on working and
using like no JS and I thought that was very exciting.
And I think what ended up happening with MPM I think it’s still like
fantastic, you know, both a fantastic group of people and culture and
all of that stuff.
But by making it really easy to pile stuff on top of stuff, people are
gonna do that, path of least resistance, right? That’s why you have
like someone who says, oh, look at my web server, it’s just 12 lines of
code, wink wink, and the wink is like this package adjacent file that
says dependencies, long freaking list, and each of those have a long
freaking list of dependencies.
And it’s a quick deter to the sandbox thing that we were talking about,
like, isn’t it kind of bonkers that like, we don’t dare installing
this program on our computer and just run it because, you know, it might
just go and delete our hard drive, right? But we’re totally fine.
We’re just pulling in some like random ass like MPM packages, right?
One of those can just go and like delete your whole hard drive or upload
all of your contacts to some remote server, you wouldn’t know, right?
00:56:17 - Speaker 3: This reminds me of a funny, so I gotta mention
this, so an acquaintance back in San Francisco has the Ruby jam, I think
it’s called bundle, because there’s the jam for the actual package
manage for Ruby is called Bundler, or it’s 3 verse. It kind of doesn’t
matter. But he got the corresponding shortened or lengthened name by one
character, Bundle versus Bundler, and he very helpfully made the jam
redraft, download the proper package, but there’s nothing that would
have prevented someone like that from just saying, you know, I don’t
know, zip up your entire hard drive and send it to the cloud. And to
your point, there’s many such cases where we’re only one step away
from a disaster.
00:56:48 - Speaker 1: For sure, and in some way, it’s good that people
are so open with this and just be, you know, fuck it. I mean, I just
wanna get some stuff done, and I think that that is one of my drives for
wanting to make this change in the first place. I think software today
has just become so very complex.
00:57:03 - Speaker 3: And it’s also not clear what you would do with
the sandboxing. Like, I think the sandboxing problem is actually a huge
open problem.
We have pretty good technical solutions for sandboxing at the resources.
Hardware virtualization level. It’s not perfect, but you can kind of
control how much, you know, I owe and network and disk space the process
is used.
But if you think at the application layer, so say for example, you have
an application that needs to reach out to a few different domains for
network requests, how do you enforce a sandbox that’s like reach out to
the good domains, but don’t send my data to a bad domain. And what if
the data gets proxyed through a good domain to a bad domain? Like, it’s
very hard in practice to control these things. And so we’ve done a
combination of onerous review processes and punting it slash ignoring
it, and it’s not even clear there’s a better option. I think it’s
again, it’s an open research question.
00:57:50 - Speaker 1: See, the way I think about that is from the
operator’s perspective, the person’s perspective, right? So like
you’re sitting in front of a computer and I want you to be in full
control. I want you to be educated about the opportunities and dangers,
right, but I want you to be able to do anything. If you want to like,
put your computer on fire, you should be able to do that. I mean, you
pay your hard earned money for this computer, right? So why would it
like not like to do shit with it.
Now, if you start with that perspective, and you have some idea of
grouping, right, you know, a folder inside a folder kind of thing. If
you can say that like this subfolder has these little doors in it, has
this little openings in it, right? To the outside world. Yeah, then
you’re in control of saying this thing can do that thing, right? And
maybe for some people it’s gotta be like, you know, I’m gonna do
asterisk or Amir is gonna do Wildcard is it can do whatever he wants,
right? And it’s gonna go for it, right? And for some projects, that’s
what probably what you want.
With other things maybe you intend to share it with a couple of family
members who are not tech savvy. Maybe then you want to say this thing
should really only be able to connect to LOLcat.com or whatnot. Yeah. So
I think that they’re probably like. No solution that works in all
domains, but if you narrow down your domain, I think that there are some
viable solutions. This is the approach I’m taking. I can bring up an
example of what you can imagine. I have a little drawing in front of me
here as we’re kind of recording this. They are sort of played around
with. So imagine that you want to make a program that you collect all
your bookmarks together, right? Mhm. So you might create then a little
sandbox called my bookmarks, right? And now you create a second sandbox
called Safari Bookmarkscraper. In this sandbox, you just put this
program, it’s a really simple like, think of it as it’s rather than a
sandbox is a program, you call it Safari Bookmarkscraper. What it does
is it goes to Safari, like on your host file system. It reads the eS
file, it parses that, it removes duplicates, and then it just stores
those in a local file as local file system, right? And so in the
sandbox, you’re gonna say this is access to read this file on my host
computer, right? from the outside.
So imagine this little box, and you can zoom into the box, you’re
writing the code for your safari bookmark scraper, and you zoom out and
now you look at the box and you can now give it little connections,
right? So you draw a little thread to your safari bookmarks file on your
computer and say it’s got access to this. And the next thing you do is
you say this kind of exports, or I’m gonna mount this, again, this is
kind of termin but I’m going to mount this safari bookmark scraper. In
my play that environment and so my global thing as the safari bookmark
scraper. Now I do a similar thing. I build a similar thing for Twitter
bookmark scraper, you know, write a little program that goes to Twitter,
sets up a little API thing, it puts stuff on a disk. Again, I zoom out
and I say give this access to the Twitter website or API thing, mount
this at safari Bookmarkscraper. So what we have now, right, is these two
files, right? One is called Twitter bookmarks, the other one is called
Safari bookmarks. If we read from either of these two files, we get this
like really nice list of bookmarks, right? And these lists are really
created by these programs, right? At this point, we have this, we have
made this kind of abstraction, um, that chooses to use the file system.
And now we make a third sandbox and we call this my bookmarks, right?
And this program is gonna be really simple. This program just opens
those two files. It opens the Twitter bookmarks file, and it opens the
Safari bookmarks file, and it just sorts them together, and it draws a
simple little UI, right? And now, this is the one we use, and now, on a
day to day basis, we just look at this thing and we have a list of all
our different bookmarks from all our different places, right? I think if
you take this kind of nested approach where you can zoom out and you can
zoom in, and when you zoom out, you have the ability to say allow or
deny sort of thing, or and map names that make sense, right? So when you
zoom in, there’s gonna be some names that make sense within that
specific domain, right? If you’re working on this Twitter bookmark
scraper, there’s gonna be API key has a specific meaning in that
context, right? It’s the API key for Twitter, right? It’s not the API
key for this course or Facebook, right? It’s for Twitter. Well, when
you zoom out, you don’t care about the API key for Twitter, right? Now
you just care about the fact that you have these Twitter bookmarks.
01:02:27 - Speaker 3: It’s sort of like the practice of encapsulation
and programming, but for personal data instead of functions.
01:02:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, another way to think of it is the two
big Kind of abstractions we have for managing the system resources and
all the things that are on your computer, including programs you want to
run and storage you want to access is classic desktop, Mac, Windows,
Linux, those that came before, which is essentially just totally open
access to any program you ever run. There’s the root user concept, but
that’s basically irrelevant because it’s just some system things that
don’t personally matter to me, and then everything else has total
access to everything. And then you have the mobile sandboxing
environments, which is a very strict sandboxing per app. Each little
tile on your home screen comes with its own storage, but except for some
extremely limited things, it can’t really reach outside of that very
easily. And so this seems like sort of a third model that gets some of
the benefits of that sandboxing, but also gets you some of the benefits
of the desktop ability, moldability, programming environments,
PlaySpace.
01:03:35 - Speaker 1: Hopefully, we’ll see, it’s still a work in
progress.
01:03:39 - Speaker 2: Erasmus earlier you mentioned sandboxing in the
context of a play space where I could feel comfortable just doing stuff
and I don’t need to worry about messing up the other programs and
within that space I can write a little program and I can just do
whatever.
And we were also talking a bit about things like the node ecosystem or
that sort of thing, and there you’re running software or libraries
written by other people and In that context, sandboxing has this
security protect you from bad actors sort of context, but it seems to me
that the goal of sandboxing as you’re talking about it within the
context of the playbit vision is really about this personal software and
about writing things for yourself rather than something that’s big
scale for, I don’t know, tens of thousands or millions of other people.
01:04:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s right. No matter how you
turn and twist on it, like what we’re talking about is like trust,
right, and safety, but it’s trust and safety for very different
purposes, right? And from and two very different types of actors. Like
if you’re building software like very large scale, and you do that in
such a way that you enable people to essentially run their own arbitrary
like programs in your thing, right? So when we worked the Sigma, for
instance, we built this plug-in feature where people can just write some
plug-ins that we just do things, right? And it would be shared with
other people, so we were like, well. We can’t just make this just run
straight into the app, right? If someone writes a bad for a loop
likeigMO will crash for everyone who visits this phone, right, runs the
fuck. So that type of sandboxing and that type of trust and security, I
think that’s lack of trust, right? You’re like, we cannot trust the
things coming in, and it’s a lot about safety and security. It’s like,
we’re gonna assume that the things coming in because we don’t trust it
are bad, right? So the sandboxing here is really the safety net to make
sure that shit outside is not gonna be affected. Whereas the type of
sandbox that we’ve been talking about mostly today is that it creates a
safety for yourself, like an emotional safety for you, right? That like,
well, I know I’m gonna screw up, right? I trust myself, but I also know
that I screw up sometimes, right? So, when you look at it that way, it
is indeed very different, I think.
01:05:54 - Speaker 2: And I think this, you know, smaller scale software
is also of great interest to me.
There’s sort of the end user programming angle that is writing stuff
for yourself, but even writing for a few people, friends and family, or
just a really niche piece of software, I think baked into the assumption
about almost all software development is big scale, and in fact it’s
almost when people talk about the economics of software, it’s the cost
of developing it, you can assume is zero, because that’s true when you
get to enough.
Users and customers, if you have many millions or tens of millions or
hundreds of millions of customers, the upfront developer time, which is
relatively fixed, you can think of as approaching zero, but that’s
quite different when you’re talking about 5 users because it’s
everyone in your family, or 1 user because it’s just you or 100 users
because it’s everyone in your company, and I’m really interested in
anything that kind of takes us in this direction of As Robin Sloan
writes in his article that I’ll link in the show notes, which is the
idea of apps as a home cooked meal and seeing a difference between the
kind of large scale food production versus just making something at home
for yourself or for a small circle.
01:07:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that is a really insightful and fun
article and idea that Robin is writing about.
And he actually touches a little bit on this, which is the writing
software today like has this really steep cliff, right? Meaning that you
have to make all these different choices if you’re gonna make something
today. If you, let’s say that you want to make this fun little thing
over a Sunday, you have a couple of hours, right? And I think that today
most people who don’t do this regularly, and I think that the people
who do it regularly will like stop doing it for these reasons, is that
you’ll be like, OK, you can stretch your knuckles a little bit, you’ll
be like, nice cup of tea or coffee, and you’re like, OK, I gotta make
this thing and I got several hours, so you start out and you’re gonna
be like, OK, should I make this like a web thing or should I like make
this a coke app or, you know, um a windows up or whatever, you’re sort
of like, hm, you do a little research and take a little while and
you’re like, well, maybe I should make this as like web app. And then
you’re like, OK, should I write this in, you know, JavaScript, or
should I maybe like write this in like this rust thing to web assembly?
Should I use like this typescript thing? OK, which like bundler should I
use? Roll up or this thing, which plug-in should I use? How to make
these MFs work, you know, like, before you know it, you’ve spent hours
just making these like choices that actually are not part of the essence
of what your Sunday project is about, right? And then you’re gonna be
like, well, which of these 100 different databases or ways to store data
am I gonna use? And they all have very compelling kind of marketing like
idea and like things like, when you read about these things, you’re
like, wow, every single project has these brilliant people behind them,
right? Every single project like has good reasons to exist, right? And
this does not make it easier, it just makes it harder to make a choice.
And I think what happens is that you end up spending most of your Sunday
you just like poking at different technologies. You just read about all
these different things, and you gain knowledge about, like, oh, I now
know that there’s CopaScript, JavaScript, TypeScript, and like, X
script, white script, and so on, right? And I know that there are these
different databases and my SQL is called Maria DB these days and stuff
like that. But you didn’t make your thing, right? If you want to learn
about those things, maybe you would have gone about it in a different
way. And I think there was a point in time when the choices were a lot
fewer, right? I’m not saying that’s better, it’s just different, but
for this scenario, it’s better. Like, you just end up making much fewer
choices, you get started earlier.
01:09:35 - Speaker 2: I’ve noticed that in many learned programming
type things, short term boot camps or online resources, they often end
up telling you to use.
What’s basically just a command line program written in something like
Python or Ruby and your interface is read and write, so you can type
stuff in on the keyboard and you print stuff out to a text console
that’s essentially identical to what I learned when I was doing
programming 30 years ago.
And maybe you’ve got some more sophisticated ways to execute that, like
repel it or something like that lets you run, essentially. This Python
kind of CLI type thing in your browser, but I think it’s for precisely
that reason that all those choices and options and infrastructure that
probably do make sense for large scale software just make no sense for
someone who wants to just quickly learn what is this programming thing
and how can I get to a satisfying result of writing my own program that
does something interesting.
01:10:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s kind of recapitulate.
I think there’s several things that conspire against the informal
novice personal programmer.
There’s all of the choices, there’s the complexity of the platforms,
and increasingly there’s the kind of forced hurdles of the platforms,
especially on mobile, where if you want to build an iOS app, for
example, I think you need like a developer account and you got to get
basically permission from Apple to run the stuff on your own devices,
and you got to use their language and their SDK and everything. And this
also relates to the idea of ideally having a gradual ramp. So I think
the Unix ecosystem for all its challenges is actually a really good
example of this. So you can start by just having a series of commands
that you kind of remember and you string together on the command line to
do whatever, you know, cat pipe, filter, you know, whatever you’re
trying to do. And then you can anneal that as a little script that you
save and give an execute a little bit to, and then you can eventually
perhaps it becomes more sophisticated and you rewrite it in Ruby, and
then later you want it to be fast, so you write it and see, and later it
becomes a bigger deal, so you want to put it in the package manager and
eventually gets promoted to the OS and enshrined in the standard, right?
And those are all on the same path and there’s a, there’s a clear step
from one to the other. Whereas in a lot of our systems, either there’s
a huge jump to get started or you hit a wall at some point and you have
to Kind of change the way you’re doing it. So there’s no gradual ramp.
And I think that’s important, not only because of the accessibility
element of perhaps you want to just get started programming or you want
to do some personal programming, but also because, again, this
intellectual humility element of it can’t be the case that all of the
good software ideas come from the programmer priest class, right? You
know, the people who know all the incantations for setting up weback or
whatever. It needs to be the case that you can write a mod and it
eventually becomes a huge game and the equivalent for other domains.
01:12:10 - Speaker 1: With the video games, I think this ramp you’re
talking about is pretty crucial to the experience, you experience,
right? If a game is incredibly hard on the first level, you just gonna
give up, right? And it’s not gonna be fun. If a game is like super
easy, right? Then similarly it’s gonna be in a place where, like, why
am I doing this, right? Like the perfect sort of like game has this like
flight of stairs where level one, you take a small step off the first
flight of the first stair, right, and you kind of feel, oh, I took a
step, right? And you know, there’s there’s so much art and magic to
like making a game that works well, right? But like, ideally you would
take these small small steps over and over and some steps are a little
higher, right? and some steps are a little lower. But the experience you
have there, and I think this kind of like compliments the way you’re
talking about Mark, which is, you were saying you pipe some stuff
together, you put it in a shell script, right? You make a Ruby file, you
make a C program, you make a real and so on. That is kind of utility and
that’s the ability to grow.
And I think to complement that, there’s also this user experience that
is important of like feeling that you’re making progress as you’re
building things, right? Because a big reason for why a lot of us are
making these things is because we enjoy it. And I don’t know about you,
but I don’t enjoy spending 3 hours picking like a JavaScript bundler
that can do the things I want and trying to like choose one of the 184
different services that AWS alone provides, right? Now, Google Cloud has
a similar number, right?
01:13:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and it’s also. Reminds me, and it’s one of
the reasons why I’m so excited about projects like yours, and I think
they’re so important.
Suppose we want to have new and different and better computing
platforms. Well, the reality is that if you want to build them outright,
it’s going to cost, I don’t know, at least $100 million and probably
a billion dollars plus, like just to get all of the engineer years, you
need to actually build everything up from scratch. It’s As an empirical
matter, it’s just a huge investment and unless you’re one of a small
handful of companies, you can’t do that outright. So you need a trick.
And I think the trick is making the programming game, you know, making
the programmers actually want to build up the pieces around the platform
over time. So you start with something that’s like a raspberry pie or a
playbi. It seems like a toy, it seems like something you just play with,
and perhaps over time you can build up more pieces and get a new
computing platform. That’s my hope that someday we’re able to get
there.
01:14:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. It’s sort of like Dream, I
think it’s called for PlayStation 4, where you kind of build these
things, you share them with a shutter.
The web is very much like that, right? People kind of like building
things and remixing stuff.
There’s an article, it’s kind of old, it’s titled The Cathedral and
the Bazaar by this guy called Eric Raymond. Classic, and it’s kind of
like a a long piece, but I’m sure Adam, you can add it in the notes
link to it, but it kind of like reflects a little bit how the Linux
project. So this very unique approach to software development, where you
have essentially this guy in a bathrobe, you’re sort of like
coordinating some emails here and there, and then you have like 1000
people around the world, just building stuff, and this is the bizarre
metaphor. You have this babbling bazaar of just like, all these
different little vendors, right, all these different ideas, all these
little like things people are building for the Linux kernel. And somehow
you look at this and you’re like, this is never gonna work, right? This
is total chaos. The quality is gonna be shit, like it’s gonna be
incohesive, the cathedral model is much better, which is the kind of the
monolith the, the team with the leader and the sprints and all of that
stuff. Right? But somehow Linux is like by far, far, far, right? The
most high quality, most stable operating system in terms of global use,
right? It is easily the most deployed OS, right? Like every Android
phone, every server pretty much it’s all Linux. So I think it’s
interesting when you think about like, if you can create a culture that
is like a bazaar, that is a bazaar with like a theme, you know, like
people, the vendors in this bazaar, the people who go there to shop
around. To explore things, they’re they’re under this kind of shared
umbrella of like, you know, we’re gonna make software for each other,
you know, we’re gonna make this little program for me and my family,
right? Like Robin did. Or I just want to automate this thing that I do
all the time. I’m gonna make my own little note taking app, right?
Like, this is the sort of play the bazaarre that I hope can exist one
day, you know.
01:16:28 - Speaker 2: Well, we’ve been going a while. Before we wrap it
up, I thought it would be fun to hear from each of you what is an
example of software that exists today or that you’ve used in the past
that you find playful or exemplifying the spirit of play.
01:16:43 - Speaker 1: For me, I think there’s a lot, it’s it’s tough
to name one, but Macromedia director, or it’s called um oh gosh, I
forgot now. It was called something else before it was acquired by
Micromedia, but Micromedia director, I’m gonna call it that now. To me
that was just this incredible software that offered me to build
something that felt real.
It had a very narrow set of constraints. You had to write in this like,
actually pretty bad program language called Lingo. But it had all these
primitives and stuff for like making things that felt like real desktop
apps, and it didn’t in a pretty approachable way at the time. And so
for me, Macromedia director like it was a very interesting blend between
utility and playfulness that also really inspired me.
01:17:26 - Speaker 2: Nice one. Yeah, for me, I was recently thinking
about some of my youthful time with computers, and I’m kind of an 80s,
90s kid. And there’s lots of cool stuff going on then with the
demoscene and BBS culture and that sort of thing, but I spent a good bit
of time in these mod trackers, which are basically once computers could
play back samples and could play multiple samples at a time, you could
finally do something that resembled sort of real time music creation,
but it was still very limited.
But these things were kind of divided into 16 sections and kind of like
a drum machine, a little bit, but a little more, it created this
particular aesthetic of music, which also probably connected also to the
aesthetic of that time, yeah, again, like demoscene and and BBS World,
but I spent far too much time playing with them. on one hand, yeah, you
say it’s a tool for creating something, but on the other hand, it had a
not very serious sense to it because it was this specific computer scene
art. No one thought you were going to be composing an orchestral piece
that people took, let’s say seriously. It was clearly for fun.
01:18:37 - Speaker 1: When I lived this stuff called Mobilities. Clubs
that had all these nerds like myself perform these kind of mod music,
usually on like a modified Game Boy, and it would go on stage, and it
will make some little like cool like in air quotes kind of demo thing,
and it would kind of play on the Game Boy, you know, this kind of like
mud like bit like music and yeah, you’re totally right. I think like no
one there thought there was gonna be like, you know, the next Madonna or
Childish Gambino, whatever. Yeah, it was just like out of pure fun, you
know.
01:19:07 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and for me, I’m a huge fan of the raspberry
Pi project. I actually kind of surprised myself. I got one because
basically everyone else was getting them I’m like, Mark, you should get
one of these. I’m like, OK, and you know, they’re cheap, so they’re
accessible and didn’t expect you to be the type to bend a peer pressure
mark.
01:19:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I got it, and it, the amount of kind
of polish and accessibility was so impressive. You know, just having
this physical device that you can just start. Plugging stuff into and it
does things in the real world. That sounds so simple, but in all other
computing platforms that’s become so harder and indeed in many cases
impossible. And having this device you have full control over, you can
do whatever you want, you can reformat it, you can plug in all these
wild peripherals. That was very accessible yet empowering, and it gave
me a glimpse of what I think if you play it out a half dozen steps, that
type of platform could become.
01:19:54 - Speaker 1: I want to share this, by the way, I was playing
around with these flipped out this place. Oh yeah, yeah, I’ve seen
these. So, there’s a couple of Swedish friends of mine, they have this
small company called Teenage Engineering that it is really cool, like
audio equipment and stuff. And there’s some kind of contracting work
too. They did this like really huge display with these, they built
together hundreds of these into a massive display at a hotel in
Stockholm, and I got a couple of these things that I hook it up to a pie
and a real little, I had to reverse engineer protocol. So I bought these
from the company, it’s like a Polish company called Alpha Sea and the
Protocol was like really simple, but it’s kind of like serial port
thing.
But this is really fun, and I listened to what you say, Mark, about how
like physical it is, like the flipped out display is like in all senses,
terrible compared to anything else. It’s loud, it’s expensive, it’s
low rest, blah blah blah.
01:20:49 - Speaker 3: The loud is a feature though, the flippy sound,
it’s all about that.
01:20:55 - Speaker 2: Yeah, my experience with Raspberry Pi was similar.
Even the hello world, which is essentially just plugging in an LED and
getting it to light up.
Why is it that getting an LED you plugged in yourself to light up is
more satisfying than, for example, lighting up a pixel on a screen? I
don’t know, perhaps it’s that we spend so much time in the virtual
environments that being somehow out in the physical environment, but
then being able to access that through the power of computing and
programming is something quite magical to that. Well, let’s wrap it
there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on
Twitter at museAppHQ or via email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us
out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and I’m really looking
forward to playing with Playbi. Thanks for coming on, Rasmus. Thank you.
See you both later.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So I think there’s space and the good thing is
that niches are powerful now because niches are big enough. So if you
only solve a smaller problem, but you solve that really well, you have a
shot at that.
00:00:17 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s
about Muse the company and the small team behind it.
My name is Adam Wiggins, joined today by my colleague Mark McGranaghan.
Hey, Adam, and our guest today, Valan Oros of Kraft.
Hey, Adam. And B, you live in Budapest, which is a city I had the
opportunity to visit for about a week some time back, did all the things
I suppose a tourist normally does, got a bike, rode around, looked at
the big beautiful bridges, observed the main government building, which
is really a stunning piece of architecture.
Power limits, yeah, looks even better in real life than in the pictures,
I would say. But of course, that’s probably the tourists perspective.
What do you like about living in the city as more of a native.
00:01:07 - Speaker 1: So for me, living in the city is really about
being close to my friends and family. So I’ve been born in Budapest. I
think Budapest is a very livable city in the sense it has walkable
areas, it has greener areas, you can use cars.
And really interesting part about Budapest is I always think, you know,
we’re so small in Central Europe and nobody will know anything about
Budapest. But typically, this is what happens when I talk to people,
hey, I’ve been beat up and they say, yeah, I’ve been there, you know,
I’ve been there for 1 week or 2 days as a tourist and I love the city.
So it’s nice, it’s actually more widely visited than I would have
assumed earlier.
00:01:44 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, Berlin is also a city that has a lot
of tourism, of course, but uh it’s had a different feel in this last
year when travel restrictions and the normally areas that are full of
tourists are pretty quiet. Not, I don’t necessarily see that as good or
bad, it just changes the energy is Budapest got a different feel in this
last year.
00:02:05 - Speaker 1: Yes, it got a very different feeling and I
actually have to say I loved it.
So we have areas like the castle in Budapest, which usually, you know,
us locals do not visit because it’s very full with tourists, and in
these days it’s been quite empty, so I have a small girl and we went
out there a lot and, you know, play on the cannons and in the old
streets.
So it’s funny how a little bit it felt like you can get back very loved
part of your city for locals, and it has a very, very different picture.
So at least there are some things that aren’t totally negative in the
sense of, we did actually rediscover a big chunk of our city. And I like
that a lot.
00:02:54 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, obviously
there’s a big economic impact for a place that is a big part of the
economy is tourism, but yeah, good to find that silver lining, I guess.
And before we get into our topic here, I’d love to hear about your
journey that led you to creating craft, and of course maybe you should
tell the audience also what craft is.
I’m a user customer. I’ve used it to write any of the recent news
newsletters. I also wrote a pretty long essay called Making Computers
Better that was entirely written using craft, so it’s my go to writing
tool these days, but I’d love to hear your description of how you pitch
the product to folks and your journey in coming here.
00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s very interesting. So for me, Cry at
Kraft is a product that helps me think, and I like to think a lot
through writing, and it was really inspired by the fact that I’m a very
mobile person.
My job has been in the last 10 years of I ran a company which built
mobile apps and then I ran mobile for Skyscanner, which is a flight meta
search engine, so it helps you find flights, and I’ve been overseeing
the mobile product.
And I always had this frustration that it’s so hard to think on our
devices, so hard to capture notes, so hard to structure our thoughts,
and really this was the real inspiration for me of how could I use these
beautiful touch devices and it’s not just the iPhone, it’s also the
iPad.
And when I started in 2016, we didn’t have the pencil or the pencil
probably we had, but the first generation, and it wasn’t the iPad Pros,
but you could just feel that this device is so much easier to move
around, you know, you can pick it up, it’s battery life, it’s
superior, so it was the tool I wanted to use for my work every day, but
just the lack of software because essentially at that time, And even
today, frankly, most iPad products are blown up iPhone products.
They’re not really optimized for that form factor, and I think that
drive of just willing to use that beautiful product every day, and being
able to use it productively was one of the core factors of me starting
craft, because on the web, on desktop browsers, there are many, many
products that are actually really good. But when it came to working on
non markdown stuff, because I don’t really like markdown in the way of,
I don’t like to see the syntax, and it’s too techy in a way for me,
there just wasn’t anything between the complexity of Microsoft Word and
plain text editors, and I just felt I need something there to be
productive, and this is what led to where we are today with Kraft.
00:05:36 - Speaker 2: That certainly speaks to me personally, but also
in terms of some of the motivation for Muse, even though we started in
this research background.
One of the things that happened there was in looking for sort of tablet
platforms as a potential place to explore power tools and then realizing
just how good the iPad, and particularly with the pencil once that came
along, what an opportunity that represents and how exactly as you said,
how woefully underutilized that opportunity is because yeah, the apps
just aren’t built for it.
So another notable thing here is, I think you built the iPad version
first and you have a Mac app now, but that’s built on this catalyst
technology and essentially allows you to start with the iPad, do the
advanced gestures and that sort of thing. What motivated you to do that
and what was the experience like to put it across.
00:06:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so we’ve been iPad first, and then actually
went to iPhone, and after iPhone did a tour on the Mac. And really,
Catalyst was extremely challenging. It is still is extremely
challenging, and the reason we did it was, we figured if it’s for free,
because we can just use the same code base, why not do it. And at the
start, it seemed very easy because it’s just going to work. But then as
we realized that for, you know, a Mac product, we need to do completely
different UIs interaction models. It did turn out to be quite an
investment, and it is still an investment, but we do see that it’s
being used by a lot of users and having access to their notes and
writings across platform is extremely important for them. So we would
have eventually probably built it. I think we’ve been a little bit
overly optimistic on how hard this is going to be, and that turned out
for now quite well, but honestly, we are still struggling with
performance, especially on the non-Apple silicon chip Mac. So on the new
Macs, it’s amazing. I mean, the worst Mac for performance, you
wouldn’t imagine, is the 2019, 16-inch MacBook Pro. So what you would
think is the fastest because If it’s not plugged into the battery, it
uses a much weaker graphics card for that retina display and it makes
everything very slow. So it’s very unintuitive, but it’s interesting.
00:08:01 - Speaker 3: Yeah, we had a similar issue with Muse on the iPad
and the iPad Pro, where the iPad Pro, large version was that 12.7
inches, 12.9, yeah. Yeah, there’s just so many pixels and so if you
have any inefficiency, even the recent models, you get frame rate loss,
whereas the older iPads that were 9 or 10 inches, it’s not nearly as
many pixels, it’s much more forgiving.
00:08:23 - Speaker 1: And especially, and then if you go back to the old
old iPads, which have only the simple, the non retina pixel density, and
your product just flies, and you’re like, 00.
00:08:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there is a little bit of this treadmill
sometimes that hardware gets better and faster, chips get more powerful
and everything, but then we want to do more with it, and retin is a
perfect example where that essentially just doubled the resolution on
both dimensions, but of course that’s multiplying the fact of
essentially 4. Tracks load on all your graphics cards and memory and
storage and bandwidth and everything else.
So it seems we’re always in this home stasis of computers get faster,
but our software doesn’t get faster because we use it to do more
impressive things. And I’ll parenthetically note here you have a great
guide to using catalyst that I’ll link in the show notes for more
technically minded listeners. But if you put aside just the engineering
effort, even the design side, as you said, the Mac is just a totally or
desktop computers is just a totally different platform mouse or
trackpad, keyboard that’s very different from Touch from Stylus, and
this is something that’s kind of a point we harp on with Muse that we
really do think that for a lot of creatives. So these 3 devices in your
life, the tablet, the computer and the computer workstation, let’s call
it, and the phone, and they all serve different purposes and they’re
all important and exactly as you said, it’s important to be on all of
them, which is why Muse will probably have a Mac app here in the future
at some point. But if you just take one from the other, you take from
the desktop and import to the tablet or from the tablet to the phone, or
phone to the tablet, as you pointed out, is more common, you get this.
The transliteration problem of you’re bringing an interface that is not
native there and then it just feels bad, it doesn’t work well. So I
would imagine that that process of adapting your sophisticated gestures
and your sort of very modern writing tool to also be consistent with the
tool that you already had on the tablet, but also be consistent with
what people expect on the desktop, that seems like a big job and one
that doesn’t end as you add new features, right?
00:10:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s very challenging. Like you mentioned 3
different device classes like the phone, the touchscreen tablet, and the
workstation computer.
And I think really the challenging is that these are merging, right? So
when you think about the new iPad Pro with Trackpad and the keyboard,
and it’s when you sit in front of it and you interact with it, you want
to interact as if you were on a laptop.
And then when you look at, you know, some of the new Mac OS releases and
how those shift visually towards more favor in iOS.
So really what’s very challenging for us is the iPad actually, because
the iPad is this very hybrid device which a lot of people use as their
laptops, especially students, and the same interactions, fully keyboard,
you know, very rarely touch the screen, and then you have the other half
of people who use it with touch or stylus, and it’s not even that
segmentation because the same individual within a minute difference
might, you know, take it out and use it completely differently.
And it’s very interesting, for instance, we have a section in search
like on Mac OS we show the search previews.
So when you get a list of results, you get a hover or with the keyboard
you can move up and down and see the previews of actually different
results.
And the real challenge for us is when you have a keyboard attached, we
want to do this, but when you don’t have a keyboard attached, with
touch you don’t really move focus.
Between UI elements, right? You just touch on something and then it
opens. So then we have to hide the preview area, and there’s no really
strong API which helps you to understand if the user is actually using
the keyboard at the moment or not.
So I still don’t think we fully understand, despite starting on the
iPad of are we going to base the Mac app based on the iPad, or are we
gonna move the iPad towards being similar to the Mac, or is the Mac a
completely different story? So it’s extremely interesting because this
whole ecosystem is a moving and shifting target. So by the time you
think you understand it, there will be a new accessory or, you know, who
knows, maybe in March or May we’re gonna get a touchscreen Mac and then
we’re gonna go completely bonkers. But it’s extremely interesting.
It’s one of the biggest challenges I’ve had in my career, and it still
is, of just figuring out how pieces come together.
00:12:51 - Speaker 2: I’m a big fan of multimodal input and being able
to convert modes a little bit. I use my iPad that way.
I basically haven’t had a laptop in a couple of years, and I use my
iPad as my travel device, and I’ve got a full-size workstation that’s
stationary and plugged into the wall in my home office.
And yeah, the iPad’s convertibility between Flipping out the keyboard
versus more classic tablet mode, landscape versus portraits, leaning
back in a chair, sitting at a desk, pulling up the stylus, touch versus
mouse or trackpad.
I really like that and even something like voice input. I really like
having a lot of options being able to switch around.
I agree that right now both the design conventions have not yet evolved
to cover, I think even a tiny fraction of what’s going to make truly
fluid multimodal inputs work well, and then some of it is also technical
as you said, there are cases where for example we needed to detect
whether the virtual keyboard was on screen versus a hardware keyboard
because you do different things.
There’s actually no API. For that, I think we did some hack that was
around just checking the viewport. If the viewport suddenly cuts in
half, that means that the virtual keyboard has split up and now you
might want to do something in response to that. But I think it’s a good
illustration of the deficiencies there reflect that what you are doing,
what I hope we are doing as well, are really on the cutting edge of this
kind of new world of multimodal input and devices.
00:14:17 - Speaker 1: And, and when you say multi-modal, you know, one
person might think 2 or 3 input sources, but we really have touch. You
have pencil, which is a very different type of touch. You have keyboard,
and then you have mouse, and you can never know which of these the user
has or does not have. So designing interfaces and workflows, which can
adapt to these. Or as you mentioned, we’re just not there in terms of
design patterns and evolutions, and I think even Apple’s own products
often are subpar compared to what could be achieved.
00:14:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, but that also makes it an exciting area to
work in, right?
00:14:52 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. I like to be on the frontier, so,
exactly.
00:14:55 - Speaker 1: If you like to throw away stuff and experiment and
you know, figure out how it could be better, it’s an extremely exciting
domain to be in.
00:15:03 - Speaker 2: Well, maybe that naturally brings us to our topic
today, which is software which is focused on interfaces.
So the contrast here I think is that Kraft and Muse and a few others I
might mention are really about offering you and selling you, right? You
pay money for software that will give you a really great interface for
doing the thing you want to do in the case of craft, that’s writing, in
the case of news, that’s thinking.
And the way that most software I think is kind of built these days or
the value comes often from the data, right? So the fact that with Gmail
or Notion or something like that, it’s that all of your company’s
data, your emails or your documents are there, and you know, maybe the
interface is good.
Gmail is a good example of something that I think originally was really
breakthrough when that interface came out 15 years ago or whatever. But
now the reason people use it, I think is more that, well, they already
have their data there, their email address there, not quite lock in, but
maybe more there’s a gravity to that data.
And in fact, as a result, when you look to the way that companies
structure their business models and things like that, they’re really
oriented around how do we get people’s data and hang on to it, and that
creates a kind of stickiness in the product and I think Speaking with
you, you almost have an opposite view of this and in fact you just
released a feature called Kraft Connect, which is more about giving
people options about where they store their data, I think because it
seems you want to be competing on the quality of your interface rather
than owning the user’s data. Is that a fair way to describe your
position?
00:16:39 - Speaker 1: It is a fair way, but I look at this at a much
less strategic way, right? So, I might not be a strategic mastermind,
but the way I think about this is I mean, our software’s goal is to
help people, and believing that people only use our product, I think is
extremely arrogant, and it’s untrue. Because we are all part of a
workflow, especially in today’s world where there are just so many SA
tools. I mean, you have data analytics, you have emails, you have
GitHub, you have Slack, all of your data scattered across everywhere.
And the reality is, if you want to think, if you wanna work, you wanna
work with all of this data. And you know, we hope craft becomes part of
that workflow. But we by no means want to be your single point of
workflow because we will never be able to cover all of that innovation
and all of those features that others do so well.
So our motivation is purity of We want to acknowledge that we are not
the only one in your workflow, and we want to help you be productive
with your workflow. And this consists, I think, many things, but one of
the things we want to do is to all similar apps which provide markdown
input or APIs, we want to tailor our export, so people can move across.
Because some people might say Ulyses is a competing product, but the way
I look at it is Ulysus is an amazing markdown editor, and so many people
love it. And if you just look from the export capabilities, it has very
different export capabilities than Kraft does. So why shouldn’t you be
able to move your data across without friction? So really for us, that
is the motivation on this of we don’t see software as an end state of
your data.
We look at data as it being part of your workflow, and you use one
specific tool to modify that specific data or to create that data, and
then you move to another one. And the more frictionless we can make it,
the more value we provide to users.
So at the end of the day, I think it is very much related to what you
said in a way of providing a better interface and that’s why they
choose us for specific tasks, but it’s from a plain simple way.
I cannot just live in craft. I mean, I love the product, I build the
product, I use it a lot, but I use a lot of other tools, and I
appreciate if I can really easily move my data between those tools. And
I, this was a lot how it used to be in the file system where products
wrote out files on your disk or even before in the Linux and Unix
systems where every product produced text output and could input text
input. And that has very strong attributes of how you can then own your
data or use your data in creative ways. And I think data should be used
in creative ways. It should be yours, and you should be able to hack it,
play with it, tweak it to what you like to do versus us trying to use it
as you said, as a moat or as an aspect of why you shouldn’t leave our
service and keep paying us.
00:19:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this IO thing is really important and it’s
something that we would definitely agree with. Adam had this observation
when we were in the lab and then starting to use. It’s very common for
product developers to look at personal information workflows and see,
oh, there’s all these apps and all this data is scattered all over the
place. It would be great if it was all in one place. Which is true as
far as it goes, but it never happens. And in fact, if you try to make
the everything box, which many people have tried to do, just make the
problem worse, because then you have one more thing that has some but
not all of your data inevitably. So I really like this idea of embracing
good IO that is import outport, maybe they call it import export to get
data in and out of the app.
00:20:29 - Speaker 1: And doing that is extremely hard because most of
us have very limited resources, right? We’re a small team, we’re a
small team. And you have to figure out if you’re gonna work on making
it easier for the users to export, which by the way, today is not a
really a requirement or you’re gonna work on all the features, I guess
you also get from users, I will buy your product if you support this.
You know, I will do this if you have that. You don’t have this feature,
so I will not use you. And I think that’s a very challenging aspect of
it.
Typically, you don’t need these export or these IO tools that much, but
when you need it, you really need it.
So it’s not really a selling point, and I think it will become more
important as people get more conscious about this and there are more
examples that people can use.
But because of that, it’s extremely challenging to schedule in terms of
work and development and resource allocation, because first of all, you
need to do a lot in order to be able to claim that you have a good
import export. And second, it’s not gonna in the short term directly
influence your revenues or your growth rate or anything like that,
because it’s not a viral feature.
At the same time, that’s why I believe, you know, fundamental values
are important, because that’s the only way you can make time for these
type of features.
00:21:43 - Speaker 2: Um, yeah, definitely speaking our language there.
Well, I think in terms of why I was attracted to the product initially,
and I liked the iPad first interface and the powerful gestures and
things like image support is first class, which it isn’t in a lot of
these more marked down oriented editors.
But the thing that I think actually did sell. was your support for the
text bundle format, which I hadn’t previously come across, but it’s
essentially just like a zip file with a markdown and then a bunch of
assets.
So markdown’s great in terms of being pretty universal, but bringing
your images across is often kind of ad hoc, doesn’t work that well,
very manual.
Mark and I talk a lot on this podcast about sort of the multimedia world
we live in now. It’s not really just text or just images or just video,
you want all those things together. So for me, if I write an article
that’s interspersed with these figures, images and video, of course,
that’s part of the article. And so I was pleased to both see your
support for this, but then I was able to write a little Ruby script that
essentially parses the text bundle format and then outputs HTML which is
ultimately, of course, where I published to.
You know, you could have made your own proprietary format, but this is
actually something that makes it easy to move back and forth between
things like Ulysses and many other writing and kind of markdown oriented
editors, both on iOS and otherwise. So, I would argue you got one sale
from sticking to your principles there.
00:23:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but you did use it before, right? So you did
have a feeling that it could be nice if And it’s really interesting
because I did not know about text one as I mentioned, I’m not a big fan
of the markdown world from a user perspective. I, I’m a big admirer of
what it enables, but I myself, I do not use markdown.
And it’s been actually users who’ve been, you know, pushing us this
direction. So I, I very much remember there has been a number of users
pointing us towards text bundle until we finally understood it and
finally said, yeah, well, we should actually do it because if it helps
users, it will be good. And that’s my belief that in especially in long
term, these principles, they pay back at an extreme level.
At the same time in today’s startup world, where you want to create
these minimum valuable products and you want to go fast and you wanna
focus on growth the next month and the next week, they are often hard to
validate or really just, you know, reason why you should be doing this.
For instance, in our case, tables, I mean, Every day we get 50 to 100
requests on where are our tables, and we’re still fussing with export
import improvements instead of building tables. Because I feel tables we
can add later on on the foundation, but if we screw up export import, we
add tables in a way where we don’t understand how we should implement
for it to be able to support both mark down, both CSV formats. We are
never gonna be able to retrospectively fit that in a functional or in a
productive way.
00:24:41 - Speaker 2: Mark, your mention of the everything box earlier
reminded me a little bit also of this is a differentiating point between
professional tools or serious tools.
I don’t call that exactly, but the category of the muse and craft both
fall into versus what I would call consumer apps, and I think in the
consumer world you do want that all in one easy to use.
I don’t need to integrate anything. I don’t need to have any ownership
over any data, whereas the more you go to professional creative flow.
The more you want a mix and match of sometimes the industry jargon is
best of breed, that is basically the idea that you can get a bunch of
different tools and you have a flow, a workflow, exactly as you were
describing earlier B where your work goes through this series of points
in the authoring process. So I think of something like photography as
being a good example where on the consumer side you want Instagram, your
phone has a camera in it, you’ve got an all in one app, it takes the
photo, it applies the filter. It maybe does a couple of other things and
it actually posts it on a social network and that’s what you want.
It’s nice and easy. You don’t need to, uh, you know, you don’t need
to put any pieces together. But professional photographers, of course,
they want their DSLR camera, they’ve got a bunch of different lenses
they’re choosing between, they capture photos in raw formats, they take
that into some kind of processing tool, you know, lightroom or something
like that, do some things on it, maybe shift from there to and then
maybe your public. The format is going to be a different place, so
there’s this progression of their work through these different tools
and while it’s not inconceivable to build a single everything tool that
did everything a professional photographer wants to do, that would be a
lot for one company to do and then especially as the world changes,
yeah, just being able to mix and match the pieces is extremely valuable
and so most professional tools and professional workflows do have some
kind of standardized formats or ways to interoperate data.
00:26:33 - Speaker 1: So I’m not sure I agree with professional versus
non-professional separation.
I think both with Muse and with craft, what I like about these tools is,
you know, I can give my wife these tools. I mean, sure, she needs to
learn some gestures, which might take 2 minutes to fully understand, but
she’s a non-technical person, a very non-technical person.
She’s an HR and she can perfectly use these tools.
And then I assume you have a lot of very, very deep thinkers who gain
exponential value of your tools, just as with craft a lot of people
create backlinking and knowledge bases which are extreme in some cases.
And I think that is an attribute of a really good tool.
I usually say Microsoft Excel is my role model in this case, where, you
know, people use Microsoft Excel instead of a calculator or just basic
personal finance, yet data scientists can use it. So I think there’s
this belief that great software and there’s this understanding of how
professional software looks, right? And it should be ugly, it should be,
you know, like a terminal.
00:27:38 - Speaker 2: A little bit intimidating, maybe.
00:27:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, because it’s like a terminal it should be
able to do data import export. And I mean, you guys have been, you know,
working a lot on really professional back and focus, you know, services
and software. But I think we should just end this of, you know, saying
serious software should be complex and unapproachable, and that’s why
it’s a workflow. So this is very interesting for me of how We can
build, I believe, software that works from the start for very simple use
cases, but grows with you in a specific domain.
00:28:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think, I think there’s something to
that. I think there’s a way to sort of reconcile these two perspectives
where there’s a spectrum of ambition or complexity or sophistication of
what you’re trying to do, which tends to correlate with whether you’re
a professional user or not, but it’s not 1 to 1 correlation, right? And
we want to have software that has a low floor, it’s easy to get into,
it has a high ceiling.
To my mind, I would agree that Excel is probably the best example of
this. You can get started really easily, but then people can build
almost everything in Excel.
But I think there’s also this like product design humility piece where
as the users. Goal gets more sophisticated, the probability that any
single piece of software will accomplish that goal approaches 0 as a
robust empirical observation. And so you need to have the humility as a
product designer to facilitate the IO to facilitate the workflow somehow
as you’re dealing with these more sophisticated workflows.
00:29:04 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. You also mentioned Unix, which is
certainly one of our go to’s for, first of all, just a software system
that has a good founding set of principles, but also in this case
specifically, the everything is the file, small sharp tools, text inputs
and outputs that flow together and essentially it’s the whole design of
the system is that things be composable and you don’t make the
everything Unix command, you make a command that does one simple useful
thing. And then you pass the data forward to the next thing as well. But
I would argue that I think the app’s world, we are swimming upstream.
We’ve run into this a lot with Muse, as well as other small iOS
products I’ve worked on where really it’s built around this app model
where the data is very much locked up in the app, it’s not even
introspectable by the users without a great amount of effort, and there
are some standard ways to pass data, for example, the share sheet, but
often there that can be Confusing, it’s a kind of a narrow aperture.
It’s hard to do all the things you want to do by comparison to the file
system model, and I think there’s a huge number of benefits to that
model. It makes computing much more accessible and understandable to
many people and certainly the mobility. Of this hardware and that sort
of stuff is great, but then trying to live in a data interoperability,
you own your data world and play along with the best practices, let’s
call it, or platform conventions of iOS there’s some pretty serious
friction there, I would say.
00:30:34 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s something very interesting
going on with a data layer here, and it’s worth double clicking on
what’s happening.
So back in the classic Unix world, you have typically text files and
text applications, and there are many nice properties of that.
For example, you have separation of the data storage layer completely
from the application layer. You have this property that everything is a
self-contained single stream of bytes. You have this property that you
can just cat the file and you can read it and You have the property
that’s easy to share.
There are all these nice things you get, but it starts to break down
when you add the features that we’ve come to expect from modern apps.
So, for example, if you want enrich multimedia, OK, then you probably
need like a directory pointing to some assets and maybe you zip it up.
You can kind of do that, but it’s getting a little bit sketchy.
But then if you want real time collaboration and backup and sync, the
classic flat file model starts to really struggle.
I’m not saying it’s totally impossible, but I think application
developers have typically found it easier to just basically completely
abandon that and go to something that’s more native to the real-time
collaboration model. But my hope is that we can kind of go back and get
some of those.
Benefits of the old world.
And one of the things that I’m really interested in with Kraft is
they’ve tried to separate the sort of storage from the application
layer, so you can use more standard storage approaches and still get at
least some of the benefits that we’ve come to expect from modern apps.
And I think that’s an interesting avenue because it gives users some
flexibility and some agency in terms of how they store and back up their
data.
00:32:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that is something we’re trying to get
right, but it is extremely hard because even supporting the evolution of
one data structure, right, is challenging. And now with every change we
make, we constantly have to look at, you know, all the additional types
of data structures we want to support. So right now, one of our biggest
challenges is How do we extend markdown in order for it to be able to
support hierarchic? Because in craft you can have notes within notes or
pages within pages, and in markdown that’s not possible. And how do we
do that when, you know, mark downs core premises that it’s very easy to
read and write.
So there are some trivial ways you could add syntax of HTML syntax and,
you know, annotations which could, you know, make this compatible at the
same time would break the core principle or the core value of having a
markdown, which you can just open up and you cannot really screw up. So
that’s a really good thing about Park. There’s no such thing as
invalid syntax or, you know, it’s gonna not render.
So I think all of these challenges are actually super exciting because
It’s really an interesting avenue where we’re trying to in some ways
reinvent the wheel, but at the same time, we’re trying to reinvent it
in a way where we bring it closer to where you said how we could use
this to then support the modern requirements of modern software, and
it’s a quite fun research project actually.
00:33:28 - Speaker 2: A similar thing we run into with Muse bundle
exports, which you get a muse file, but it’s just a zip archive that
you can open up and we, as much as possible try to use flat standard
formats inside there’s a PDF. All the annotations you put on it are
stored in standard format. Text cards or .txt files, images are images.
Recently, I think we switched over to using SVG for the ink, so that’s
kind of retrievable and even editable if you want.
Uh, but yeah, exactly to your point, there is metadata that is part of
what makes Muse unique, which are these nested boards that there just
isn’t a multimedia board format standard.
Maybe there should be, I don’t know, maybe the Melanotes and miros and
muses of the world should get together and make standard format, but in
the meantime, yeah, if you’re innovating on the interface, almost by
definition it means there’s things that will be harder andossible to
represent in standard formats. So you want to stick to that, but at the
same time you don’t want it to hold back your ability to make what you
think will be a great interface for your users.
00:34:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a very strong trade-off.
So you don’t want to move forward, but you just wanna move forward
enough so you don’t create incompatible issues in the long term. So for
a long time, we did not care a lot about will we break or will we lose
features if we export to markdown.
But especially with newer projects like, you know, toggle lists or
tables where losing data could mean losing. Meaning or reducing the
value of the document. It is extremely challenging because we’re now,
our main part of our research is actually what features can we add
without breaking any export and ensuring that your data will be
transferable, because I don’t like severely degraded exports. Because
in some ways, then that means you are still locked in, despite of the
best intentions of the product. And it’s very interesting of how our
designers are now looking at data structures, which typically only
engineers because for us, it did become a part of the design project of
what data structures there are there which we could reasonably well
support and cooperate with.
00:35:45 - Speaker 2: Maybe you could tell us about the storage aspect.
So I think you can use iCloud or Dropbox. This ties very nicely to a lot
of the work Mark and I and other folks in ink and Switch have done
around this kind of local first and data ownership and that sort of
thing, and it seems you’ve tried to set it up so that people can store
their documents in a way that means they can access them without running
the craft apps, so that is to say the data is a little bit independent.
Of the software. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works?
00:36:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I think the Incan switch offline first
piece was very influential for me because I was looking for what they
call this approach, and that was it, when I read it. And for us offline
first really meant that you can always access and edit your data.
But we wanted to make a really fluid experience when you use it on multi
device, so we ended up implementing our own sync protocol to ensure
speed and conflict resolution and collaboration and so on.
But of course, this means you have to trust us in order to use craft,
and that shouldn’t be required. I mean, you don’t know much about us
and really data ownership and who you trust should be your decision, and
we shouldn’t be forcing on. So for a long time now, we’ve been
thinking of how could we do this where you could use craft, but you do
not need to trust us to do that. And obviously local option and iCloud
storage is the simplest way to go. At the same time, if you are a
product which uses local storage, you are expected to satisfy certain
number of checkboxes, which is reasonable. You cannot do much with your
data if you cannot access it. So adding it in, for instance, a database
might be OK-ish, but it’s very far from the intention of what actually
people want when they say local software. And for now, what we could
come up with is Essentially craft stores text as a database inside of
our product. And what we did is we separated documents each with their
metadata in a JSON format, which is hard to read by humans. It’s easy
to read by engineers, but engineers can easily access it and you can
also open it up with just a text editor and extract content if you later
want. Now, over time, we want this to become Mark down this JO because
that would be true power that, you know, hey, I don’t want to open
craft today. I can just open this file with Vizil studio code or
whatever I wanna do and add a few notes inside of that. So over time, I
think our goal is for you not to require to use craft, even if you want
to participate or only use raft on your phone because that’s where you
want to use it and on your desktop, do something else. It’s really
about embedding, as we said at the start, in your workflow, and your
workflow includes your preferences, and really having that in the long
term of you accessing your data very easily. Us being able to inside of
the app store this as a database, meaning we can do very fast searching,
very fast indexing, creating relations between them, seems like a
solution, which could be best of both worlds, and I think we are
relatively new to try this in this domain because most companies
strictly polarize in one direction. They either say, hey, we are, you
know, a primarily offline first app, which we we might do. So iClouding
but collaboration and sharing and web sharing are very much out of the
question, or they say, hey, we’re absolutely online only, and in order
to use us, you have to trust us. And I understand the technical reasons
of why it’s really hard to do both, and we don’t even have the same
product doing both. So we have this thing called offline spaces or
external locations, so you cannot mix online data with offline data,
which point to each other. So it’s not a seamless experience, but our
goal really was to give the users the choice of what they want to do. I
mean, if you’re starting to blog post, you, you might want to have it
in an online space because you want to have feedback on it in
collaboration. But if you’re storing credit card information, I mean,
I, I don’t want you to put that inside of our database, and you
definitely do not want to do that. And then you can use whatever file
system and whatever security your computer already provides to protect
that data. And I think we tend to look at consumers from a product
design perspective of We have to make a choice for them because they
cannot, and I think a lot of people accept choices provided to them, but
I also think there’s a huge step up in terms of education of, I mean,
apps used to be these $1 things which you bought for $1 and then you
used it for 10 years. It wasn’t serious. Now apps with subscriptions,
these are serious and people want to have more control over how their
data is handled, or they actually want to make the choice of how their
data is handled, and they can understand the consequences and make the
right choice, I think.
00:41:03 - Speaker 2: Um, when I think about the privacy piece of this,
which Mark and I have a whole podcast on, but I suspect we’ll be
talking about more in the future.
For me, I think, for example, writing what will be a draft of a blog
post, it’s intended for public consumption. I am going to share it for
feedback on the web or whatever pretty soon, and so it feels basically
pretty reasonable for me to type that into an online place. There’s
obviously things that are more like, yeah, medical data, credit card
stuff and there you have very tight restrictions on what you can do, but
a middle ground to me is things that are more like you talked about
thoughts and the degree to which your note taking tools or your writing
tools are certainly used, which is entirely intended to be a tool for
thought. That is a very kind of personal intimate. private thing and it
doesn’t have this like strict legal restriction of credit card numbers,
but it’s also not a blog post where it’s eventually or even just very
soon going to be public. So it’s middle ground and and maybe that’s a
place where that choice is relevant to a potential user. Now the
business model side of it, that opens a whole other topic, and this
comes up a lot on the, you can switch communities and just talking about
local first software and what’s possible if you remove this data
ownership as kind of a source of sort of the monetization piece for many
companies, then what does that leave you at? And I think that does come
back to kind of the topic here, which is if you’re building a piece of
software that you want to be a great tool, it’s great at Again, this
interface that offers you and manipulating the data rather than the
company owning that data, and you’re willing to pay for that again, not
$1 but like you know Kraft is $45 US per year, uses over double that.
This is a good chunk of change for anyone. These are serious tools.
We’re asking you to pay for the tool itself and what it lets you do
rather than that we’ve accumulated a database that you’re paying for
access to over time. So how do you feel this will work, you know, a lot
of people have asked the question of us and maybe you get this as well,
you know, will people pay a price like this for something that’s more
about the software rather than the database that you’re running for
them? And what do you think for maybe the industry in general, what’s
the viability for business models for local first or just interface
focused software?
00:43:26 - Speaker 1: So I think we’re in swings, right? You know, back
in the days, like 1015 years ago, we did pay for software and software
only and not for data storage and people used to buy hard drives at home
and, you know, had their backups of backups and did that. And then we
realized that, hey, you know, I don’t need to buy those hard drives. I
can just use this all night stuff and internet speed is fast enough. So
I’m just gonna do that.
And now people are much more comfortable paying for services, data
storage in all other areas.
But I do feel a strong swing going backwards of after a couple of years,
you know, first of all, people realize nothing is for free. So I think
Google Photos recently has been a big announcement in terms of it’s no
longer free, even Google cannot pay it, so people are starting to
realize if you don’t pay your product. And when you start to pay,
Actually, I think you start to have a more complex evaluation system,
right? I think Muse is gonna have some level of online storage, so I
don’t need to take care for surnames. If I just want them to sync and
be everywhere, you will be able to craft has this. So I think we’re
gonna have to Just as the iPad, right, is a blend between the iPhone and
the Mac, and it’s going in one or another direction. So modern products
should provide you with capabilities of what you expect from modern
products, which could be data storage, which could be sharing and
collaboration, and I think consumers do need that. At the same time, I
think these features are becoming now almost trivial in a sense, like in
5 years, a new product won’t exist without these. And because of that,
I think a much bigger Decision factor will be the interface and the user
experience of the product. Because 10 years ago, real-time collaboration
was something magical. Right now, not having it is almost like, you
know, a point of I will not use this software.
So that’s the way I think and I think in the long term, the user
interface, the functionality you provide is going to be a stronger
differentiator factor. And products are going to compete much more on
this angle, because free data storage cannot be free forever.
00:45:45 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for some reason it seems easy for people to
understand or intuitive maybe that oh if you need to run servers and do
some kind of data storage that has a cost and so therefore paying that
cost, you know, when I pay for a subscription for Dropbox, for example,
well, they’re storing data for me and so therefore it makes sense that
that costs money and costs money on a recurring basis, whereas a
software interface, which maybe they see as a one and done, you write
the soft. and you put it out and you don’t need to think about it
anymore. And so therefore it should be a fixed price or it should be a
lower price or something like that. And my experience is the reverse of
that, as you said, storage is becoming more and more commodity. I mean,
running servers and keeping them online and having people carry pagers
and that sort of thing for when stuff happens is definitely a cost, a
substantial operational cost.
But building great software, truly great software, especially if you’re
pushing the frontiers, whether And data interoperability, the interface,
or anything else, that is a very big ongoing cost. And so in order to
make that sustainable, folks need to be willing to pay. I agree we are
starting to see that difference, but we’re coming out of a long period
of the expectation that sort of software is free or the marginal cost is
such that you shouldn’t pay or you pay in other ways, and the
monetization is around, for example, data storage.
00:47:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and also I think we do have a backslash as
app engineers of, you know, a lot of users did experience in paying
subscriptions for, you know, non-online software just to not get real
value in return of that, you know, product being abandoned. And I think
because back in the days when you bought a hefty license, but every 34
years, there had to be a significant update for you willing to buy
something new.
And I think that’s another challenge at least I see us facing as
people, as you said, understand the data aspect and the server cost of
that, but they also say, you know, I’ve seen so many subscriptions
where for, you know, 12 months, there hasn’t been a single update. Why
should I be paying the subscription for that? And in some ways, that’s
also true.
And because Apple pushing so strongly towards the subscription model, I
believe a lot of software which frankly, Does not use subscriptions as
they should in order to fund software development.
It’s also, you know, having, I think a negative impact on reputation of
why software should be on a subscription base.
00:48:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a great point. Actually be really
interesting.
So the first Muse customers came online sort of last summer, so this
summer we’ll see the first sort of renewals come up.
And of course, naturally you always have churn people who for whatever
reason are no longer getting value from the product and and they choose
not to continue paying, but that’s a great opportunity to find out who
are the people for whom they paid a year ago. They say this is great, I
want to continue. I feel like I’ve been exactly as you said, getting
continual value, not just what the software does today, but the
improvements that are happening. And I think we’ve also seen that in a
lot of folks, you know, sort of the free version, they come online, they
try it, they like it, but think is this really going to be worth this
price and especially continuously and then they can watch and see the
ways that we’re improving things and developing things and maybe after
some months, they say, yeah, I like this, I like the direction this is
going, and I’d like to support it. But I totally agree, you’ve got to
earn that. It’s building ongoing value and doing that in a way that’s
not just features for features sake. The old world of new version of
Microsoft Office to get everyone to upgrade, but actually because you
think that there is a very rich space for a great tool in where you are
working and you can continue to understand what people are using it for
and how it can be made better.
00:49:32 - Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I also think there’s an angle here
of a subscription potentially buying support, community, a sense of
belonging, even just a sense of being in the professional tier, the
sense of, since I pay $10 a month, if I email this team, even though
I’ve never done that so far, if I email this team, we’re likely to
respond. That’s another area where I feel like some apps are charging
subscriptions even though they don’t really provide that. Whereas
something at Mu we really pride ourselves on is definitely if you’re a
customer and you email us, we’ll reply basically right away.
00:50:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there is the other area of expectation. Most
users do expect you to answer them even if they are not subscribers, and
if they say, you know, they will never subscribe because it’s too
expensive for them, but they have this question and are super upset if
you don’t provide support, so. I think we’re in the global world and
all of these are extremely interesting to see how they will. Yeah.
00:50:22 - Speaker 3: This does remind me of the old Patrick McKenzie,
this is Patio 11 on the internet, quip that like there’s kind of
inverse relationship between support demand and the price you charge. So
as you charge more, you actually get more and more agreeable customers
and inversely, if you have a free product you get a bunch of bad support
requests.
00:50:39 - Speaker 2: Well, the business model also makes me think of
what Mark and I were just talking about in our last episode, which is
this small giants concept, or at least the way we interpret it for our
company, which is a middle path between kind of the go super big heavy
funding startup. Unicorn world or the indie developer build something
with one or two people. I think Kraft is kind of in this category. It’s
called aspiring small giant or middle path. I’d love to hear a little
bit about your team and how you see that kind of like long term
sustainability for the business steady state.
00:51:13 - Speaker 1: Yes, so it’s a very interesting question because
some people jump on this question of asking, is VC money good or bad,
and obviously it’s a lot more complex than that.
So our goal is really to be able to provide value to a relatively large
number of users through keeping the principles we have.
And the great thing about our world is, especially technology in the
last two years has become such a huge market in the sense of, even if
you’re just 0.1% or 0.01% of the market, you can make a sizable
living.
So I think last time I checked, Office 365 had like 40 to $50 billion
of revenue, I mean 1% of 1% is still 4 or $5 million which is a very
healthy, you know, small company paycheck. So I think there’s space and
the good thing is that niches are powerful now because niches are big
enough. So if you only solve a smaller problem but you solve that really
well, you have a shot at that.
Of course, it’s going to be interesting of how many products people
will be willing to pay for, and will be seeing now an unbundling of, you
know, specific niches and then another bundling where people come
together.
But from my perspective, I really feel that the core reason we started
Kraft was we wanted to build a tool we are happy to use, and for us, I
think that’s going to continue for the long term.
As we’re getting more feedback, we are getting more confident of what
we could achieve. And my previous company was Bootstrap, and it does
hold you back. So we are, you know, considering potentially raising from
VCs and, you know, going down the path of facilitating growth.
So, I think it’s really about can we keep our identity, can we keep to
our principles, and do we find partners who agree with these principles.
And believe that Google had this mantra of don’t be evil, and it worked
well at then. Nowadays we don’t see it much, but I think there’s gonna
be a big renaissance in this of people rediscovering that don’t be
evil, can be honest, you know, help the user instead of thinking in
motes can become a very powerful business strategy.
00:53:33 - Speaker 2: It’s a nice combination, having principles and a
strong point of view, being able and willing to serve a niche, which, as
you said, because the, the software world of software and internet is so
big, a niche can actually be a very viable business.
Thinking in terms of sustainability, connecting together your business
model versus the kind of hand wave of like, I don’t know, we’ll figure
out the money later, let’s just grow and get users thing that maybe
plagued some technology companies in the past.
And then the last one I would say there is in thinking about taking
investment, whether it’s venture investment or angels or some other
thing, I think it’s also just thinking about the resources you need for
the opportunity at hand.
Sounds like that’s exactly the thinking you’re doing, which is, you
know, if you’re just two people with an idea, maybe that’s not the
right time to raise $5 million in venture money, even though it’s kind
of possible to do if you have the right pitch deck because there’s so
much investment money available there, that may put you down the path of
hiring a big team.
You’ve even really figured out what your product is, and then that
creates all kinds of unbalances, whereas if you’ve kept yourself lean
with a smallish team, and you’ve discovered that there’s a real market
opportunity, and you see we can add fuel on this fire with investment
and go a little bigger, but also stay true to our principles.
The point of going bigger is to do more interesting things and have a
bigger impact in the world in a way that matters to why we’re doing
this business in the first place, not just to be as big as possible just
because. Absolutely. Well, I think that’s a great place to wrap it.
Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter
at MuseAppHQ or via email below at museapp.com. You can help us out by
leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Ballant, thanks so much for
making a tool that I rely on for my writing as well as inspiring us all
for making an interface driven software company and one that is driven
by principles and just wants to make the world a better place with great
software.
00:55:30 - Speaker 1: Thank you for having me.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The moment when you decide to no longer do your
own support. Naively, you think, oh, that’s taking so much time.
Primary reason to make that decision is to spend more time on the
product as a developer, perhaps. But the side effects is that you lose
all these direct touch points with your users to the filtering of
features of what’s really important.
00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about
Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins and
I’m joined today by Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam and Alex Greekspoor
from Agenda. Hello. And Alex, I understand in addition to being a
company founder and a product developer, you’re also a musician.
00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, that’s a big one. It’s a hobby.
Anybody who has run agenda, you know, knows my music if you want to see
it later.
00:01:01 - Speaker 2: So yeah, there’s a little video on the home page
there, and if you hit play, you get some music in the background, and I
think you were telling me that folks ask you, oh, where did you get that
music from? And the answer is, you made it yourself, right?
00:01:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah. I had 2 or 3 requests where I could
find it on iTunes, and my wife is always saying that you should put it
there. But not, you know, those are the Easter eggs.
00:01:24 - Speaker 2: Well, this is part of the fun of being an indie
developer, a small team, as you get to wear a lot of hats or do a lot of
making of different kinds.
00:01:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and spend a lot of time on things that the
boss wouldn’t have found justifiable, I think, precisely so.
00:01:38 - Speaker 3: It’s funny, I’ve had the opposite experience. We
have some piano music on the video on our homepage, and people ask me if
they know I play the piano. Mark, is that you playing the piano? No, I
regret to inform you I don’t play that well.
00:01:51 - Speaker 1: Well, you know, it’s time to replace it.
00:01:54 - Speaker 2: But notably, yeah, the music in the muse trailer
there, launch trailer is one of your favorite pieces. It’s one you’ve
played, that’s why we chose it. It’s just performed by, let’s say, a
professional, yeah, exactly, yeah. Well, Alex, I was really interested
to talk to you because you work on this great app called Agenda, which
you describe as date focused note taking, and some of the philosophies
behind that I think are quite interesting, as well as being a
beautifully designed app and has won Apple Design Awards and all that
sort of thing. But maybe we could start with your background and
especially I’m interested in your work on papers and how that kind of
led you to agenda.
00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Sure, sure, yeah. I guess like I’m not a
professional musician, I’m also not a professional app developer. I’m
actually a biologist of training.
And that as a hobby, I started programming and that basically got out of
hand and fast forward 10 years and this is what I do now.
But yeah, I started developing apps to help me in the lab. We were in a
biology wet lab environment, and I always had an interest in working
with apps like Photoshop, but never had gotten myself to programming.
And then basically, in the early 2000s when Mac OS 10 came out, That’s
when actually I started tinkering with the then new Coco stuff and
everything around programming that was newly introduced alongside Mac OS
10, and that basically then grew, started making apps for in the lab,
sharing those, all free, they were all free. And we shared them on our
website and that’s basically how it all got started.
And as I progressed, basically, the apps became more complex and You
know, the next one and the next one and then ultimately, I wrote an app
called Papers, which was kind of an iTunes for scientific research
articles, PDFs, and that really kind of took off and allowed me to go
full time in the developer basically.
00:03:50 - Speaker 2: Nice, and Mark and I have worked a bit with
scientific computing tools and kind of creating tools for scientists who
are working in the lab. And one thing that struck me there, particularly
in the maybe in this modern era of, I don’t know what you call it, data
science or whatever, but yeah, for biologists specifically, but I think
the sciences in general, having some programming skills seems to be a
superpower like whether it’s R or Jupiter notebooks or some of these
more consumer-ish tools that are still programmingAT lab data, that kind
of thing. You started there with kind of automation type things because
app development or Mac program development. I feel like that’s a level
up from what I think was the usual, a scientist that wants to crunch a
few numbers, they’ve outgrown a spreadsheet a little bit, seems like
you jump straight to the hard stuff.
00:04:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but it’s interesting because actually, for
me, the hard stuff was exactly a lot of the things you mentioned.
And I think the interesting bit is that actually, I was not going from
this area of I need the program for my science. For my biology, I
didn’t really need any, I was not a data scientist. I was really a cell
biologist doing microscopy work. And I wasn’t using any of the
programming, little scripting.
I had done a little bit of scripting. I had made some web pages more as
a hobby or as a, to earn some money as a kid, but nothing really
special.
I actually, in the, in the contrary, right? I wasn’t able to do any
programming of any form.
But it was always something that intrigued me. And I came always in from
the more visual parts.
So I’ve taught myself a lot of Photoshop skills, or video editing
skills, that kind of stuff.
And I would love to make apps, but at the time it was like C++ and Gold
Warrior and all kinds of very difficult stuff. And I was like, no way is
this gonna work.
But then when Apple released Mac OS 10, they kind of presented that new
stuff, the new programming stuff that came from Next at the time as a
way that it would make it easy. So I was like, oh, maybe somebody like
me can now actually make an app.
And I started looking at it. I actually bought the book at the time
there was just one book about it. That they then advocated as that’s
how you’re learning. And I was like, Oh, cool. Now I can finally make
these apps. And I started reading it within 3 pages, I realized, no,
this is just still serious programming, you know.
But I was motivated enough by then to kind of really buy a book on C and
kind of dig into it and put my teeth in it and really go through the
hard part till the point where I could go back to that original book
that I bought and actually got enough to get going.
So I never used any scripts or I never felt like I could use it in my
science actually. And that’s the interesting bit because I made apps
that I consider not scientific apps in a way because you could better
describe them as consumer apps for scientists, right? So you have kind
of two types of apps or two types of programming, but uh, you know, you
have kind of Two types of programming. One is for your scientific work
and usually there it’s just a matter of getting the shortest route to
your results. You’re not making something for general purpose. You just
want to get to a result.
00:07:02 - Speaker 2: It’s just for you and the code itself is throw
away because what you really want is the results.
00:07:07 - Speaker 1: And this is the opposite. This is kind of a
consumer product. It’s a product you’re working towards a rounded off
thing that others can use. It’s a completely different type of
programming.
00:07:18 - Speaker 2: And papers, of course I’ll link the homepage in
the show notes there, but you’ve got, for example, PDF reading and
annotation on the iPad with the Apple pencil, other features that
certainly sound familiar to Muse users. Do you have any big takeaways
from building a product, sort of a serious productivity tool with heavy
document capabilities that ran on the iPad, among other places? What
were your big takeaways from working on a product like that for however
many years you did?
00:07:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, to go back to how it started and how I
kind of also think, I guess. I always think, what is the problem that I
like to solve, right? And I almost always, well, always basically a
problem that I have. And so I always make the app for myself as the
first customer or the first user. And in the case of this PDF reader, we
were in the middle of the transition to PDF, right? Before that, you
would go to the library. Of your research institute and you would
literally photocopy articles from paper versions and you know, when I
joined that institute, there was just this transition going on.
00:08:25 - Speaker 2: What year was the transition from paper to
digital?
00:08:33 - Speaker 2: Around 2000, 9, between 1995, 2000, certainly a
while ago in internet time, but really not so long ago when you think of
it.
00:08:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and the interesting thing was that We went
through this same exactly this parallel with MP3s, you know, when
Napster came out and these apps, you would have all these files on your
desktop and you would have an app that basically would play those files,
but you were still actively busy with an app in combination with files,
loose files, and iTunes kind of solved that by creating a shoebox app
that took away all the kind of concept of a file. And just basically
bring the real concepts there, which is album, artist, song, right? And
so I was thinking that we need that in science, basically an app that
basically lets us search for author, for journal, and basically all
these concepts instead of having these PDF files everywhere. And so I
was at Apple conference in 2004, probably. And Apple introduced a
technology for a database. They introduced a technology for a PDF reader
and Spotlight, which was to be able to index PDFs.
And I was like sitting in the audience like, well, those are the three
components that we need to create a shoebox app for creating that
Napster for research or that iTunes for research, I have to say. And so
that’s how the idea came about, basically. So it’s about thinking
about the solution or the problem that you have and then I’m able to
see these components and then be able to kind of assemble the puzzle,
basically.
00:10:05 - Speaker 2: And I think that is the genesis of a lot of great
technology products is a new. Come along, then someone who’s familiar
with the domain sees how that or in combination with other technologies
can be put together to do something new that you couldn’t do before.
00:10:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s it. It’s not necessarily new
because iTunes did this for music. So it’s not that I invented the idea
of a shoebox app, but I could see that that’s what we need, but
translated to this domain, right? And that’s I think there’s still a
lot can happen in the innovation.
00:10:36 - Speaker 2: So it seems like that one was pretty successful.
I’d love to hear about the journey that took you from there to your
current work on agenda.
00:10:44 - Speaker 1: Well, in a nutshell, it’s the same kind of
process because what happened was that fortunately papers became very
successful. It allowed me to at some point decide, well, this is what
I’d like to do the whole day. I was doing up to that point, everything
in the evening hours, but I looked at some point, like, we got so much
feedback, it was so motivating. I got so much drive to continue working
on it. And in the meantime, I had started making money with it, and it
was surpassing my postdoc salary. So you’re like, well, I can do this
the entire day and live from it, you know, that’s a very easy decision
to make. So then it continued to grow.
I worked alone at it first and a friend of mine joined me and it kind of
organically grew to about 6 people. At which point, And that was in
2012, 1 of the bigger scientific publishers approached me and said they
wanted to acquire papers. And so they bought it and I joined the company
and we continued growing the team.
And at that point, my role became more and more manager than so much
being an indie developer, certainly not indie anymore, but you know,
also not any development at some point anymore. And yeah, I, I just
realized I’d much rather go back to that original phase. So I decided
to end that journey also because I had left the lab and scientific area
for by then about a year or 10. So I wanted to focus again on something
that really was a solution for a problem that I had, right? So, kind of
back to that original setup. But interestingly, when I was at that
bigger company, I had started hitting other problems. Also, that came
back, basically. I was kind of transplanted back in these early days of
a new career and you start hitting new problems for which you’re gonna
think of new solutions. And that’s basically where agenda came out of.
00:12:47 - Speaker 1: Right, you basically traded your job as a lab
scientist for a job as a manager of a small team and company, yeah,
exactly, yeah, and then you hit very totally different problems and
different issues and you start thinking, OK, what is the solution for
this problem, and I kind of naturally start to think about it.
It’s interesting because I never thought about it really, but for
instance in the case of the PDFs. I started organizing those PDFs. I
started manually renaming them, manually putting them in folders, and I
in this kind of stuff, so that you start searching already in a very
kind of primitive way for small solutions.
And in a very similar way, when I, uh, when I was becoming a manager, I
started in a very primitive way, starting to develop methods of keeping
track of what was going on, keeping track of who I should talk to and
what I had talked about with people, what the agenda for the next
meeting should be that I had with my team every week, etc. And in the
way of note taking. And that methodology has started to evolve to the
point where I was like, well, that methodology works really well, and I
can see other people in my team not doing that kind of stuff so well. So
they could definitely benefit from this solution that I have kind of
invented as a big word, but developed, basically. And then That’s where
I thought like when I leave this place, I’m gonna, you know, take that
kind of approach and just put it in the form of an app that then becomes
much more accessible to anybody, really.
00:14:08 - Speaker 2: Well, and that’s precisely what caught my
attention about agenda and brings us to our topic today, which maybe
I’ll call time-based notes or you talk about date focused note taking,
and I guess the meta element there, since we’re philosophical on this
podcast, is that I feel that there’s this, I don’t know, type of
product, it’s not even a category, but an approach which is taking a
philosophy or a way of working and then baking that into a piece of
software.
00:14:37 - Speaker 1: So basically, it started by just a simple
realization that I should just always have a place to take my notes and
seeing that not even that is what a lot of people do.
So it started by, I started just using text edit and I always had
already when I was programming, always had these kind of 4 or 5 text
edit documents open, one for each of the apps I was making, for
instance. Where I would get an idea and then just put it in, but also
put stuff there when I found a certain bug or something that I should
really add.
It was kind of a living document that kind of organically shaped what I
was gonna work on. And more also as a way to calm the mind, you know,
knowing that you have preserved some ideas or some order and where you
can find what you need to go back to, etc.
00:15:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the mind calming thing is a big part of the
getting things done methodology. I always love the term open loop. It’s
the concept of if you feel like there’s something you have to keep in
your mind that you’re keeping that alive, it’s consuming mental
bandwidth. If you have a place to put it, but importantly, it has to be
a place. To put it that you trust, it will be resurfaced at the time you
need it, however you define that. So yeah, big fan.
00:15:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and I think it’s one of the most
important parts of note taking.
And then that kind of was a natural thing to do for me.
So when I moved into this kind of managing role. I just created instead
of one for weeks, one for papers, one for enzymax, I just created these
kind of similar documents, but now for our weekly team meeting or for
the marketing thing or for talking with my boss and etc. And from there,
it evolved into a way where I kind of naturally say, OK, I need to
separate the previous meeting from this one. So I would just, at the
top, I would create a basically just with a few equal signs, like, OK,
that was kind of the last one. And on the top, I started adding. Some
empty new lines where I could basically, OK, that’s where I would
naturally keep the notes for the next meeting. And then I started
realizing, oh, that actually works well, because now I can go back in
time as well, because automatically, as every time I add new stuff at
the top, stuff that kind of is from the previous meeting sinks to the
bottom, but it kind of, therefore becomes kind of a paper trail of what
you discussed in the last meeting and the one before and one before. And
that just started to evolve in a little bit more formal way where I
would just have kind of like a domain language, right? Where you would
just say, OK, I always start with a plus sign and the title or the date
of the meeting. And then I have some topics that I discussed, etc. So
you became almost like a quite nicely formatted document, basically,
with exactly an entire history of all the team meetings that we had.
Which I realized very valuable because at some point, even people from
my own team would come and say, OK, yeah, well, last time we agreed this
and this and this, and I would say, no, look, I can even go back. Last
time we discussed this and before that we did this, etc. And of course,
I was working remotely and then it naturally kind of fits that because
you will have a Skype call or Zoom meeting and you always have that text
document next to it. And so you would be very good at note taking, more
better in a way than. Doing it in present, right, because then you
don’t want to sit behind a laptop or anything.
00:17:49 - Speaker 2: My managerial life, I had a similar technique, not
nearly as structured and elegant as what you’re describing, but it was
really based on the the person, and this was often connected to one on
ones, or yeah, if there’s a particular team planning meeting, then I
have a text file that’s named after that team. running log where the
newest stuff is at the top. But yeah, the idea is as a manager, you’re
context shifting constantly, and if you’ve got 30 meetings throughout
the week, including one on ones and whatever, and then yeah, you don’t
want to spend the first, I don’t know, 15 minutes trying to re-ramp up
on the context. Yeah.
00:18:22 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and Adam, you mentioned this idea of, I
think called open loops where You want things to be written down so you
have space in your head, and I always find that so important because
it’s so deceptive when you don’t write something down, your head is
full and you’re saying, oh look, my head, in fact, can contain all the
things that I want to be thinking about.
It’s just perfectly full, it happens to be. But in fact, when you go to
write something down, you create space and other things enter your mind,
which you didn’t even realize you needed to be thinking about, and you
couldn’t have unless you had ejected some of the other stuff by writing
it down or some other means.
00:18:52 - Speaker 2: Um, it’s almost like a Parkinson’s law kind of
thing.
00:18:54 - Speaker 3: What’s that?
00:18:56 - Speaker 2: Parkinson’s law is I usually think of it as
referring to hard drives, but it can also refer to closets, I think as
well, which is if you have a storage space, you will somehow magically
acquire the number of things necessary to fill that space. So if your
hard drive is a certain size, you will somehow always fill that. If your
closet is a certain size will somehow, and how is it just so that I have
exactly the number of clothes or whatever that this closet, and of
course actually the causality flows the other way.
00:19:22 - Speaker 1: And I think another interesting aspect of this is
when you think about writing versus thinking. Writing, certainly
handwriting is a slow process, right? So, compared to how fast we can
think. So I think it even helps when it comes to writing down your
thoughts and typing them, there’s a number of processing steps to
really, OK, how am I gonna write it down because it’s always, it needs
to kind of be more neat. You have to form proper sentences. Instead of
just some terms that go through your mind. So you need to think how am I
gonna write it down, and you need to actually write it down. And in that
process, your brain is just faster, thinking about all kinds of things
that come in. And so I think it helps really in the creative process.
And like you say, Mark, that it brings up other thoughts that you
hadn’t thought about. You get new ideas as you write down a sentence.
It can really generate this idea of, you feel like an idea generation
machine because while you’re typing, you’re always like, I need to
type faster just to think all these other things that now come up.
That’s also great. I have that very often, actually. And this whole
process helps in that, putting it down. Paper. That’s one of these
things.
But what I found interesting is that you mentioned, I also have this
kind of process. It looks a bit, I wasn’t so organized as you.
And you also mentioned earlier, you know, how did you kind of form it
into a general thing.
It’s a very interesting process what happened with Agenda, because when
I left this company, I was like, OK, I’m gonna put this workflow
exactly like that in the form of an app. So I pitched it to a really
good friend of mine, another fellow in Dev, Drew McCormack, who I always
would meet up a few times a year. And he had once said, if you leave
this bigger company, maybe we can do something together. And I had this,
OK, is this a great idea for an app and I feel that I needed it. But I
felt like when I met him, I’ll just pitch the idea to him. And he said,
Yeah, I think it makes sense, despite the fact that there are bazillion
other note taking apps already out there. And I said, why don’t we do
it together? So we started working on it and we made the app exactly
kind of follow this workflow that if you would say, OK, this meeting is
done, it would automatically create a new note for that meeting at the
top, which would be called next, which was just places where you could
put things out. So effectively, really, literally the way I worked. And
what we saw there is then when we worked after 1.5 years, we basically
brought it into the first alpha of beta that we would send out to
friends and there were like a handful. And, you know, nobody got it. And
they were like, what’s this? You know, because it was this, OK, but why
is this note appearing at the top? And It was just too much my way of
doing it. Then you go into the whole topic of how generic should it be
versus how much should it be steering towards a certain workflow or a
certain way of doing things. And it was definitely something from day
one that we experienced this struggle, basically, to do it in a very
opinionated way or very generic way.
00:22:23 - Speaker 2: And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges
with software that tries to bake in process. You can certainly have
either for a personal piece of software, what we usually call situated
software, or you’re building.
I used to do consulting for basically ERP consulting for enterprise
customers, and we would just come in, they would tell us the process we
would write software that exactly encoded that, but it was never
intended to be used by anyone else.
And so then if you go and try to bring that something and make it more
general purpose, it may not fit with what everyone else needs or wants,
and I feel like this is especially so in project management software.
I’ve written some of that over the years, and I’ve also seen plenty of
others, and there’s this very natural tendency to your company or your
team or you as a person have a way to manage projects.
It’s worked really well for you and you think great, I want software
that exactly encodes that go to make that, and then it’s not really
usable by others and what you probably want is something that has more
some building blocks that can be combined in different ways, but I agree
it’s a very tricky. In some cases just trade off where you just have to
make a choice between opinionated versus open-ended, but maybe there’s
other places where you can have clever moves where there’s building
blocks that can be combined together in a way that reflect a worldview
or a philosophy or a way of working, but also give you some flexibility,
freedom, mix and match, customize your environment.
00:23:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s exactly how we basically then went,
right? We need to make one step back and make this something more
generic.
But that still would allow somebody like me to build that workflow using
the building blocks that agenda provides, but others might not even want
to use any dates, so you can use agenda just as a replacement of the
notes app, for instance, without ever bothering about dates.
And you can build all kinds of workflows, and that’s great. And then I
think that’s what a lot of people like and actually it’s funny because
earlier today. That was exactly the comment that somebody made a user
made. Like, it’s so flexible. I love the flexibility of agenda, but you
need to limit the number of building you purposely limited the building
blocks to make them kind of general purpose.
So you get basically a Lego for your note taking workflow, basically,
you know, so you can build your own way. But that leaves you with the
problem that now, how do you get back to those people that don’t have
those workflows developed.
That maybe are not aware that they need to do it and just maybe are not
that kind of reflective on how to build such a workflow. So that’s
where we are pretty much now, right? that you start thinking again, OK,
back to that person that wasn’t taking notes or that wasn’t really
able to kind of structure his thoughts for a meeting.
How can you help them without enforcing, basically by setting them up in
agenda in a way that really works well for them? And how do you let them
discover this way that works really well for them.
So. I think that’s where a lot of my thoughts go right now, as the
basic building blocks for agenda are pretty much in place. And you start
getting at the point where it’s more important again to start thinking
about how do you teach people to find a great way to really feel like,
oh man, this app is that, I can’t live without this app because it’s
my go to for all my ideas. It’s how I structure my thinking. It’s
where I find everything I’ve done in the past, etc. right?
00:25:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a problem that Adam and I have
grappled with before, the way of working or getting it problem. You have
a product, but you need to approach it in a certain way for it to be
fully useful. So I’m curious what exactly are the techniques that
you’re using to communicate these ideas to your customers or potential
customers.
00:26:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the first thing we do is when you start
the app, I thought it was really important that we show what is this app
going to do and why is it different from the other note taking apps. So
it kind of set the general stage.
What is it, what is it not? And so we have a little animation that just
kind of tells you, OK, it’s a note taking app and there’s these
different aspects to it, and it also shows kind of the weaknesses of
other types of apps. And then you have a kind of general onboarding
sequence of a few slides that just show you, OK, this is where you find
this and that.
But one of the, I think most important things is that we also ship some
example documents, which are, again, I think one of these areas that
comes close to the music stuff where you maybe spend a lot of time or
fun on, but they actually are very useful. And they show you kind of a
few models of working. So they can be inspiring.
And then the last, that’s kind of where we leave you in the app.
I very consciously brought back from the early papers days, which we
over time lost, but I figured that was actually a really big loss, is
that we embedded a community forum inside of Agenda. You can access it
through, if you go to, uh, agenda.community, but it’s built in the app,
so you can access it from there. And That creates a group of users that
also talk on purposely, I added a section called Talk where I invite
people to discuss their workflow. So, of course, it has a how-to
section, which is kind of a manual, a living manual. It has a feedback
section and a support, but it has also this talk section where we
basically say, just let us know how you use agenda and describe your
workflows. And it’s been a fantastic resource of all kinds of people
describing. How they work, which techniques they use, from GTD to settle
custom to all kinds of things and all kinds of topics, but also like
I’m a teacher, I use agenda like that, and that’s been a great
resource, I think, and we send a lot of people to that. It tells a lot
how you do it.
00:28:09 - Speaker 3: That’s super interesting because we’ve long.
Suspected slash slash argued that people mostly learn tools socially, as
much as we invest in manuals and onboarding and stuff, mostly people
learn from other people.
And for more enterprise oriented tools like Notion or Atlassian,
there’s a natural contagion vector which. you’re at the same company,
you’re working on the same project together, you’re in the same
meeting.
And for very widely used individual focused tools, you can also get that
because you have a sort of critical mass where there’s enough people to
spread the ideas around.
But for these more indie independent, individual user focused tools, it
could be hard to get that social contagion going.
But you have sort of a neat mechanism here with the built-in community
into the app to help encourage that.
It’s very cool.
00:28:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and there’s one aspect that also keeps me
busy a lot, which is that it’s very common actually, that people that
love agenda right in support or on the forums, that it’s basically the
second time they try agenda before they really like it.
So I get a lot of feedback that is like, you know, a year ago I tried
the agenda, I didn’t get it or, you know, it didn’t work for me. Now I
got back to it and I absolutely love it.
And so you start thinking, OK, what is it that the second time around
they got? Is it because they saw I need somebody else working with it?
Is it because they come to the app and a lot of kind of wrong
assumptions have been cleared by that first try? And is it because of
the community? It’s probably a whole mix of things, but I think part of
that is what you described there, yeah.
00:29:42 - Speaker 2: I’m just flipping through your community forum
bit here and I notice it’s sort of a mix. There’s both topics
initiated by community members like you mentioned, people talking about
telecasting or other kind of note taking methodologies, but I see you
also post product updates there or something happens like there’s some
external and external review or something like that. That’s sort of all
ends up there and even it seems like maybe use this as essentially
instead of having a company blog or writing kind of standalone web
articles, they basically just go in this forum and they’re part of the
conversation.
00:30:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we don’t have a company blog. This is our
blog. I have a bunch of tutorials there. This whole, for instance, if
you search it for Nextbox, you basically get this entire story about
with images and stuff of how this whole thing started, even including
some screenshots from the.
First beta that was kind of so badly received, etc. So, yeah, and even
as well yesterday, somebody wrote in, I was really surprised as some
person wrote an entire article, huge article about the whole topic of
back linking and different types of approaches, you know, as a graph,
kind of representation of your notes, and there’s a group of people
that just love writing up these things.
There are great kernels of discussions and They teach you how they see
it, and they teach others how they can use it, and they help others
discovering these workflows of how to organize their thought. And that
same article that I just mentioned of this person use writing this huge
kind of overview of all the tools that are there, including a lot of our
competitors, but I don’t mind because he did write a really great
summary because he was mentioning. This aspect of that is note taking is
not so much about writing, but it’s more about the structuring of the
thinking process, basically, note taking is about the thinking process
of where you place things, how you organize things and. It’s also I
think still goes one step further because you see all these discussions
about, oh, this app does it like that, and in this app I can, I have a
core port, and in this app I can link and no and this app can do that,
and this app can’t, and I think a lot of these discussions tend to go
about what app A can do and, you know, program B can do and what others
can’t, and it kind of feature tick boxes and stuff. Well, I think it
focuses way too much on what exactly an app can do and how it works.
It’s much more about how do we get people to find a way to structure
your thoughts, to find this way where you feel that you have everything
in your brain organized. And you can find back things and you can be
really creative because you, you have this capacity for it and a place
to put things and everything. So it’s, yeah, definitely more about the
process. And I’d like to focus in a way more and more on that. And the
community is a way to stimulate that, to be a lot of that thinking
process happens there and it’s nice that you create not just the app,
but also the community around it. It helps people to discover new ways
of better ways of organizing themselves and take better notes, for
instance and etc. So, yeah, it’s a really important part of the app
actually.
00:32:56 - Speaker 2: I also find it really interesting that it’s both
on the web, which of course something Like a forum really should be, but
you also have it in the app. So that dual access means it’s right there
at hand, but it’s also searchable, so I assume there’s some element of
people finding these interesting articles through the web, like they
would a company blog, but now they see the whole community discussion,
and they can follow that and see how rich the community is. But then if
it’s right there in the app, you probably are more likely to get people
using it than if it was standalone web forum.
00:33:29 - Speaker 1: You know, I guess maybe you were hiding that term,
but for sure the term SEO went through your head. And yeah, fair enough.
You know, the marketeer things like like that. Oh, that’s great content
because it’s Google index it and if they search for this, they will
find the agenda, of course.
But for me, those are the kind of byproducts because what I see more is
that people come to the community and because it’s so actively embedded
and referred to in the app, and then when somebody contacts us and
support, we point to it and etc. so we always kind of inward point to
that community.
But it gives there’s also this great impression about, oh, this is a
nice place to be, right? As a user, and it gives some kind of feel of,
if I use this app, I’m part of a group that can help me or if I have a
problem with the app, or if I can discover new things, so that’s
valuable for me. And we see that back in the review comments because we
live there too. I mean, I’m there and Drew, we are there all the time.
We answer everything. We take part in those discussions. Which means
that you get in your reviews on iTunes, you get back, you know, these
developers listen, these developers are there, they’re transparent
about what’s coming up. We know what’s gonna happen. They feel empathy
for being small developers, so they understand when you have to say no
to a lot of things, etc.
So it’s a way to really be there as well. So it has many aspects beyond
being just a community forum in a way, or a discussion board or
something.
And actually, I mentioned this article. Maybe you can point to that
video that I put to this article that is describing the whole next box
idea, because I did an iOS talk where I actually talked about that and
about what I call kind of side effects. So, for instance, we had a forum
in early papers one. And it was a great place. That’s why I knew it
worked. But we got riddled with spam and with some nasty people. And so
what happens is that if you don’t have the tools to manage that, in the
beginning, you have to say, 1000 users, and as one guy is nasty, OK, you
can handle that one guy. But if you now grow 10 times, now you have 10
nasty guys, right? At some point, it becomes hard to handle if your
forum doesn’t really support you in that. And so it started to become a
bit of a nasty atmosphere in some cases.
And the spam, and so at some point you said, ah, it takes so much time,
let’s just put it out. But you don’t only lose the forum where people
could support, but as a side effect, you know, the SEO part is one side
effect. The fact that that’s where we meet enthusiastic users that help
us translate the app in 10 languages, which is all voluntary work done
through people that felt that they were part of the community. And when
we said, hey, we’re going to translate the app, who wants to
contribute? And I’ve got some people there. Well, they’re amazing.
It’s super high quality. If we have an update, they translate
everything within no time. All gained through that. Those are all side
effects.
You can think so many ways. Your new features that you discovered there,
your ideas, your sample documents, your anything. There’s so much stuff
coming out of that. That’s amazing. And we tend to think of like, OK,
what’s the primary reason? Oh, it’s a manual and some kind of support
help. If you make the decision to kill such a community, for instance.
Based on those two things, then you forget that there is this long tail
that probably is worth equally or more even than all these main primary
reasons, and that you base the decision to say in that case in papers,
we stop the community. And I see that pattern everywhere that you can
kind of focus on the 23 things that you think are the most important in
a decision, and there are so many side effects that you throw away or
that you affect by that decision. They are easily to underestimate
effectively.
00:37:26 - Speaker 2: The side effect element of, you have this thriving
community that you really participate actively in and you do a lot of
work to make that a welcoming place, but also a place you post updates
about the product and your own usage and your journey and so forth.
That reminds me of we had Lisa Cole. On the podcast some time back under
this topic of authentic marketing and I guess the idea there was that
there is this crass way to think about marketing I think like SEO that
you mentioned earlier that search engine optimization, which is this
very kind of reductive. OK, if I make content in the very generic sense,
that people will Google something and they might find my website and
then that might lead them to trying my product and purchasing it. And
that’s all true, but that, like you said, you’re focusing on the side
effects there, really.
I think the primary effect is make a great community, be your authentic
self, engage with your users, talk about why you’re passionate about
this. Talk about what’s coming for the product, and I think that’s
also something indie developers have that you don’t get with bigger
companies. You, the individual, and your colleagues can be there
directly interacting with the users as opposed to a larger product where
you have millions of users and the company has hundreds of employees,
you just can’t have that, and that’s something an indie developer can
do that’s quite unique.
00:38:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think, for instance, another good
example is the moment when you decide to no longer do your own support.
Naively, you think, oh, that’s taking so much time.
Primary reason to make that decision is to spend more time on the
product as a developer, perhaps. But the side effects is that you lose
all these direct touch points with your users to the filtering of
features of what’s really important. You get ideas from there. You miss
opportunities that come up are being mentioned reviews or collaborations
and stuff.
So you all throw it away with it. And those are all the side effects of
doing your own support and answering these people yourself. I mean, if
there’s one big example, that’s what happened at the launch, right? So
we have this kind of big odd slash uh unique. Business model with
agenda. And when we launched agenda, that business model had almost gave
us equal amounts of attention as to the fact that we had the new product
itself, right? So I think half of the news outlets that kind of talked
about agenda when we launched were probably wouldn’t even have
mentioned us or very little if it was just not a note taking app
because, you know, maybe they were just thinking it’s nothing really
special or anything. But because we had that, plus a completely kind of
new business model or at least something that people hadn’t done
before. They were like, oh, we need to talk about this, etc. etc. We, of
course, we never went there to think, oh, let’s do a new business model
because that will give us so much attention.
00:40:20 - Speaker 2: Let’s get pressed by having a weird business
model. That’s probably not what you’re thinking.
00:40:24 - Speaker 1: Exactly. No, that’s not exactly. The way I at
least I think, but it’s a perfect example of how these side effects can
be used, right? I mean, uh, it reminds me always of medication, right?
And it’s really those kind of side effects. The side effects can be
huge, you know, more important than the actual medication.
00:40:42 - Speaker 3: This is an example of something we talked about on
the previous podcast on small giants where just by virtue of being a
little bit different, you unlock a lot of potential energy. Yeah, but I
think that’s fair or not, it is what it is.
00:40:55 - Speaker 2: Definitely, yeah, and that also comes to where,
yeah, being kind of indie, however you want to define that opens up just
the ability to do weird stuff, to be off the beaten path, to to take
your own.
It’s no longer designing for the mass market or designed by committee
or whatever else, but you can do whatever weird thing you have to
express in your soul, and, you know, that may or may not actually work
in terms of a business, maybe it doesn’t resonate with other people,
but at least for me, I get a lot of. when I see an indie piece of
software that’s just doing something weird, different, expressing
something, whether or not it speaks to me, just the fact that they are
doing something unique and different, and I think that the world is big
enough now. Certainly the world of software is big enough now that we
can have a million tiny niches and a million interesting little pieces
of software that are going to resonate with some relatively small
portion of the population, but that’s enough to sustain the team.
00:41:51 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, yeah, exactly.
00:41:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, being able to do weird things makes me
think of a little story you told me earlier, Alex, about the agenda
homepage, which I love this little animation, kind of a CSS JavaScript
animation thing that has a rising and setting sun and moon going over
kind of what looks like a little mountainous island. I would love to
hear that story for our listeners.
00:42:15 - Speaker 1: Pencil Islands that in a way, it’s just another
example of what we all just discussed.
And there’s also this process of how thoughts grow as you work on them,
right? So if you leave these thoughts in your brains, you kind of think
they’re done or they don’t evolve so much.
But if you start writing it out, or in this case, create actual, you
know, in this case, images or things that you can see and share with
others, it starts to flow.
So what happened? In this particular case, when we were busy with the
app, you always have this kind of empty shoebox problem, which is that
if you start an app and you say, even I don’t want those sample
documents, the app is empty.
00:42:59 - Speaker 2: So you’re looking at a completely empty screen,
the blank page problem, I think that’s usually called.
00:43:02 - Speaker 1: Well, in this case, it’s just aesthetically it
looks horrible, you know, it’s like, why have I got this big wide.
because of the app, it’s natural, we already designed it extremely kind
of clean, empty, right? Without any chrome from the brows, you know.
Anyway, so I asked the designer that we always work with also a good
friend of ours, Marcello. I asked, he, Marcello, can you make us some
kind of placeholder image that will show when the app is empty or when
you don’t have a selection? And I said, Sure. And the natural place to
start was to start with the icon, and we had kind of settled down on.
The icon being a pencil tip. So the idea is the app is called Agenda. So
it’s an A, and the A kind of nicely can be transformed into also being
doubling as a pencil tip. So that’s the icon of the app.
So he put big icon, past the big pencil as the placeholder images, and
it wasn’t working very well. And then the next day he came, I, I was
playing a little bit, I guess he just had a few layers on or something.
And he discovered that if you put a few of those pencil tips in
different sizes next to each other, you basically got kind of what’s
this an island.
And the other element that we have in the app is when you put something
on the agenda, which is kind of the equivalent of flagging a note as
being important. We use a simply orange dots as the kind of way to
signal that. And so he started realizing that that could double as a sun
above that island. And this was how this kind of little scene was born.
So that was kind of a nice funny placeholder. And yeah, we liked it. So
he kind of proposed that you could even have like a moon for a kind of a
night scene. I don’t know how he got there, but basically I started
thinking, actually you can really make this scene kind of dynamic in the
as the day progresses. You can actually put the sun in a certain
different location, and then at night, it becomes night time and it
became kind of a dynamic scene. And it was just, again, one of these
things where you spend too much time on. I actually, there is literally
a piece of code in the app that I found somewhere that kind of
calculates where the sun should be more or less, at which time of the
day.
00:45:09 - Speaker 2: So if you search in agenda right now, so does this
mean if I load up agenda here in Germany in the winter time, the sun
will actually only be up for a smaller portion of the day and in the
summertime, the sun, the sort of the app will show sun version for much
longer.
00:45:25 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s quite accurately knows what time the
sun sets. So if you search for something you can’t find it, at least
you get the island scene.
If you do that in the morning, you see sunrise, if you do it in the
afternoon, you see.
Sun peaking and in the night you get stars and even the, the final
Easter egg is that even the moon phase is kind of accurate, whether
it’s full moon or not.
Anyway, that was kind of the fun there.
And then one of the things that I kind of saw was it’s kind of a little
bit of a yin yang thing, right? The sun always kind of goes on and you
have kind of a night half and a day half. And at the same time I was
working on this intro movie, and I was thinking we want to kind of say.
There’s some apps that know everything about the future, right? So
it’s like your task managers and everything.
But then when you actually check off these items, they kind of disappear
into nowhere. And there’s other apps that kind of know everything about
your past, which is journal apps. Journaling apps is where you keep
track of everything I did today. But they have very little concept of
future.
So you get this kind of yin yang kind of two sides of the story.
And I figured that that works really nice with this little island scene,
because then you can say one app does this, and in the meantime, the sun
goes up and down, and then at the other apps, it’s kind of the dark
side. You have the light and the dark side in a way. So it felt this
kind of, it would make great for that animation. And so that’s what you
see on the homepage right now, and it all came out of that.
Then it starts to grow, because then you’re like, OK, we need to have
some sample documents. One of the sample documents is about somebody who
visits the pencils Islands, and the Pencil Islands feature everywhere.
If you go on our community and our sample documents, even our latest
release where we added tables.
You know, the image I made basically contains a table with a list of
hotels, which are basically the Pencil Island Hotels, one of 5 stars and
a beach cabin for 3 stars, so it kind of provides this kind of coherent
thing or or kind of creative kernel where you hang up a lot of things
too and.
Now, when you buy the app, you get fireworks launched from the island.
We recently introduced referrals, and that’s more that if I say, hey,
Adam, you should try out the gender, you get a bunch of tickets to the
island. And if you kind of register the referral, basically a boat
arrives at the island. It’s like, it creates its entire character. All
started out with just asking for a placeholder.
00:47:49 - Speaker 2: What a lovely story. Well, let’s wrap it there.
Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter
at MuseAppHQ or via email, hello at museapp.com. You can help us out by
leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and Alex, I hope I’ll see you on
Pencil Island.
00:48:08 - Speaker 1: Sure, I hope you guys are there as well.
00:48:10 - Speaker 2: All right, thanks so much for coming on the show.
00:48:12 - Speaker 1: Cheers.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There’s so many zillions of startups trying to
try every single angle and opportunity in that area. And so the marginal
return to investing your personal time in terms of the impact on the
world might be relatively smaller there. Whereas there’s this whole
space that I feel like is really under explored. And if you just make it
about 80%, making a profit and 20% making a statement, that opens up all
kinds of incredible opportunities.
00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse.
Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the
product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it.
I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by Mark McGramigan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, since
we last spoke, I am a father.
Congrats. Yeah, it’s great, or at least the non-sleep deprived parts
are great. I’m actually on parental leave right now, but I enjoy doing
this podcast enough. I thought I could sneak back for just an hour here,
but if my brain is not at full capacity, let’s just say you’ll have to
carry things for us. OK. Now, way back in episode 4, we talked about our
partnership model. And the context there was we were hiring the 5th
member of our team, our engineering partner, and I’m happy to say we
have through that process, we added Adam Wulf to the team, really great
engineer with a particular specialty in inking, which is quite important
for us, and he’s been doing great on the team, so we’re now 5. And in
the course of that, of course, we talked about kind of the nature of the
company and how it’s different from other models, particularly the
startup model, but I thought it would be good to both first take an
episode to talk more explicitly about what this somewhat unusual
business structure we chose was, and then also it’s been a year and a
half actually coming up on 2 years now since we started this thing and
so being able to essentially say how’s it going? Is this working out
the way that we expected. And just to frame things up a little bit, a
starting place and a point of inspiration for both of us is a book
called Small Giants, and I read this many, many years ago, I think when
I was in my startup lifestyle, I would say, but it it had a big impact
on me, and the book basically profiles a bunch of, let’s call them,
businesses that are maybe have an outsized impact. But they’re less
about huge size or making it to the S&P 500 or something like that. So
for example, they have Clif Bars in there or Whole Foods, which I think
at the time the book was wrote was really kind of an up and comer,
independent up and comer, or Union Square Cafe, which is quite kind of
unique restaurant in the New York area, since expanded to other
locations. And the process of profiling these businesses, they showed
kind of a maybe an alternate to, I think they’re thinking more an
alternate to the standard kind of public company path, but I at least
for me, I read it as an alternate to the startup world, which at the
time I was just completely immersed in. I was kind of the only way to do
things with the startup way, and this book suggested another path.
00:03:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that book was quite influential on me as
well. So Adam, I’m curious, what from the book did you find yourself
taking away the most and applying to your future adventures?
00:03:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, in prep for this episode, I went and
pulled out my Kindle highlights as a PDF and scanned through those a
bit, and I have to say I’m not sure it’s actually a great book in
terms of how it’s written, but there’s just a couple of core ideas
that really hit home.
One of those is they talk about businesses with soul or another term
they use quite a bit is mojo, which is kind of a funny one. They talk
about optimizing for mojo overgrowth and growth, of course, a business
exists to Earn money, that’s it’s kind of practical function in the
economy, and growth typically goes with that, it’s almost a
requirement.
So if you’re not growing, you’re stagnating.
And that is taken to a real extreme in the startup world. I mean, Paul
Graham even has an essay, Startup equals Growth, which just says, that
is your sole purpose for being, grow, grow, grow fast as you can, and
the counterpoint this book presents is mojo and expressing something
kind of artistically and Having the soul is something you can choose.
Of course, you still need to pay attention to the business fundamentals.
You do still need to grow, but you can choose to have maybe a different
balance where you say, you know what, this mojo thing we want to
optimize for that and have enough growth to be successful but not have
it be growth at the cost of absolutely every other thing.
00:04:35 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. For me, there are a few layers
here. There’s that first layer of, OK, you don’t necessarily need to
be a huge business or to grow really fast.
It’s a sort of mechanical matter, there are existence proofs of
businesses that haven’t gotten huge or growing that fast, they’re
doing just fine. OK, that’s great. That’s kind of the first layer.
Then there’s this mojo idea of you can use the business as a vehicle to
accomplish something non-monetary to make a statement. To do an artistic
expression, and that’s something that was really important to me in
starting this venture. I’m gonna spend the next 25, 10 years of my
moral life working on this. I want it to be about something more than
making money. And then there’s kind of a third layer, and I don’t know
how much they get into this in the book and if you would even agree, but
I think there’s a sort of arbitrage here where there are so few
businesses that are operating with mojo, as it were, that you can have a
sort of outsized impact if you choose to do so and do it well. This is
where I think the small giants can punch above their weight class. It’s
because so few people are actually operating with this mojo, this sense
of artistic expression, that when you do, you really stand out, even if
you’re smaller.
00:05:38 - Speaker 2: There’s some examples of companies that come to
mind for you that are high mojo.
00:05:43 - Speaker 1: The one that’s top of mind for me these days is
Signal. I’m not sure if that’s the company name or the app name, but,
you know, I’m referring to the company that makes the Signal app, and I
would expect they’re quite small. I’m not actually sure about the size
of the firm, but it can’t be that big, but the impact that they’re
having on the global discussion around the right of citizens to
communicate privately is huge, and they could choose to have a huge
impact going forward. So that’s one that’s kind of mindfully these
days.
00:06:08 - Speaker 2: One that comes to mind for me is Panic. So they
make kind of a variety of weird things, including, I don’t know, FTP
clients, but also games. And now I think they’re working on a handheld
game console and probably an example of a company that does have both
mojo and a lot of growth, but maybe they took their time with that. The
growth happened over a relatively speaking a pretty long time period and
can build up slowly over time. Another one I remember you speaking
about, we talked about this before, is Vanguard. Tell me more about the
unusual structure there because I wasn’t familiar with it.
00:06:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Vanguard is like one of the greatest
business hacks of all time, and I feel like it’s an understudied
story.
So my understanding of Vanguard is the founder, I believe his last name
is Boggle, wanted to make investing more accessible and more successful
for individual retail investors, and he had this insight around
indexing, whereby if you index into the market and operate those index
funds at a very low cost way, it would be very beneficial to the people
who are investing.
Now he could have taken this insight and developed a huge and hugely
profitable firm with it, but my understanding of what he did instead was
he did this move where the firm is effectively owned by the people who
invest in the funds.
So essentially all the profits that would get plowed back into the funds
in the form of lower fees. So he basically forgoes a huge personal
fortune to help bring low cost. Indexing investing to the masses.
And then it got to the point where it was so successful that it becomes
quite hard to compete as a for-profit indexing firm because you can’t
plow all your profits back into lower fees, right? Or at least your
investors wouldn’t approve necessarily. And that’s kind of the sense
of almost art that he’s shared with the world in the form of this
somewhat unassailable venture to bring low cost investing to the masses.
00:08:01 - Speaker 2: index funds, you know, S&P 500, ETFs, guess what
they’re called nowadays, is this huge technology, or maybe you call it
a social technology or just a financial tool or something, but it had
this huge democratizing effect for individual investors compared to the
managed mutual funds that came before and yeah, the art.
Start, as you say, you know, for me that is the reason I am in business
is it is a vehicle for expressing something that matters to me about how
I think the world should be or how it could be better and the business
and the mechanics of all that, how it’s incorporated, how it’s funded,
how it earns money, all that stuff is really a means to an end.
Right, so optimizing for mojo, businesses with soul, expressing
something artistically, that all sounds nice. What does this mean
practically in terms of the business that you’re building? And here you
start to think about these mechanics, which is, OK, you’ve got a group
of people and you’ve got a thing they want to express.
Product they want to bring into the world or a piece of art they want to
create depending on how you want to think about it. That needs time, it
needs money, it needs organization, and that leads you into what I
usually think of as kind of a container or a vehicle, which is typically
a legal entity, could be a corporation or a nonprofit.
Um, and then there are certain models that fit with different kinds of
businesses.
So, for example, if you’re gonna open a restaurant, and for a lot of
people creating a certain kind of food and a certain kind of
environment, that is very much an artistic activity for them. You
certainly see that if you watch something like the Netflix series
Chef’s Table on kind of the high end, but I think even more for your
local corner restaurant, many times those businesses are not very
lucrative. They’re open because people are really passionate about food
and sharing a certain kind of experience with their customers.
But there’s probably a certain kind of legal entity you’re form and
you’ll probably get funding as a small bank loan or some other things
like that.
And that’s extremely different from, let me start a startup, move to
Silicon Valley, join Y Combinator, get venture funding, and ultimately
you still have the legal entity, a source of funding, you know, way to
hire people or bring team members on board and the sort of mission
they’re signing up to, but the mechanics of them are very, very
different.
And there’s, you know, there’s a list of other things as well,
including nonprofits, or even pure artistic activities, art projects,
Burning Man art installations, or you’re starting a band or some, you
know, writing a book or something like that.
All of these need capital and ways to organize people. And there’s
legal mechanisms for that. And so knowing both the mechanisms, but also
what you want to express, and therefore, what is the right vehicle for
that, I think that’s worth thinking through rather than reaching for a
default, which is, I don’t know, everyone starts startups, so I’ll
start a startup, for example.
00:10:45 - Speaker 1: Yep. Well, now you got me thinking about the Wall
Street that stuff that’s going on on Reddit and in that case, I guess
the optimal vehicle was a series of memes.
00:10:55 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I do think it’s ever evolving, and
you mostly mean that as a joke, but honestly, the internet has brought
us some new structures, right? We have Kickstarter, for example,
Patreon. There’s new ways potentially to, in the end, it is really
about organizing groups of people.
Probably if you’re a solo artist, you’re painting, you’re painting,
you’re doing something.
Individual, maybe this stuff matters less, but as soon as you have a
group of people over time they are investing their energy, their effort,
their emotion, and certainly their money, then you need mechanisms,
governance and understanding for both what we’re going to put into this
and what we expect to get out of it and what our goals are and all that
sort of thing. So that brings us to the vehicle we created for Muse,
which I think borrows elements from some of the different types of
containers we’ve mentioned, but we think also has its own special
blend. Can you explain a little bit what that container looks like?
00:11:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so first of all, we did believe that Muse
needed to be a commercial entity, and the main reason was, well, maybe
two main reasons. One is you need a significant amount of investment to
develop a novel product like Muse and bring it to market. We’re talking
about 3 to 5 engineers or 3 to 5 staff members for 123 years. So it’s
not something you could do as a pure art project, you know, say.
Furthermore, if you have this vision of impacting the world in a
particular way, it helps to have ongoing self-sustaining funding for it.
So that’s another reason to make this a business versus a nonprofit or
an art project.
The meat of what makes Muse unique is how we treat the staff and the other
participants around the business. And the top level thing there was we
wanted Muse to be the place that we wanted to work and the place that we
wanted our collaborators to work. And that meant a few things. One is we
wanted to be a relatively team, which has a bunch of implications that
we can talk about. We wanted everyone to feel like peers who were at the
top of their craft and operating at the top of their game. And we wanted
everyone to be treated as well and as fairly as possible. And in
particular, we didn’t want to sort of founder class versus an employee
class where they’re very different, as in typical startups. And lastly,
we wanted a sense of dynamism in the staff and the team, where people
come in, they go, and that’s a very natural thing to happen, and
you’re less kind of bound and handcuffed to the company. And
furthermore, you’re also not constrained in how far you can rise in
terms of your impact and your influence and your ownership, just by
virtue of when you joined. It’s more a function of your contributions
and commitments to the company. So those were kind of our goals that
inform the structure and then in terms of where we ended up, well, first
of all, we did end up with the Delaware Corp, which is the standard
vehicle for startups, among other things, mostly because that’s the
best understood by all the potential participants, staff, investors, and
has the best support for people having ownership, a variety of people
having ownership in the firm, which was really important to us. But then
where we went in a quite different direction was this idea of a partner.
So at a typical startup, you have sort of three classes of people. You
have the investors, you have the founders, then you have all the
employees, and they’re all treated very differently and have different
economics in the firm, and they’re a function of kind of how you join
and how you come to be participating in the firm. And we want this
model, like I was alluding to before, where it’s more like the staff
members are peers with each other and have the opportunity to rise to
that level over time regardless of when they joined. So that’s where
our partner model comes in, which is sort of drawn from the world of
professional services firms, like law firms and accounting firms, and
the idea that There is, if you start a law firm, you get to put your
name on the sign because you started it and your partner right away,
presumably, but also over time people can join and through their
contributions to the firm and their commitment and they’re taking
responsibility for the success of the business overall, they can
eventually become a partner, just like the founding partners. So that’s
sort of the idea that we have with the Muse partner. They’re someone who
can become a peer with the other partners and have corresponding
responsibilities at the firm. So it’s not just that you’re responsible
for being a good engineer, you’re responsible for helping basically
directs how the business operates, making big business decisions and
things like that, and you have corresponding economic interest in the
business, much more so on a percentage basis than a typical employee
would have. So I guess if I had to summarize with the partner, it’s the
idea of we want everyone to act like a real owner in the business, and
in order to do that fairly, you need to actually make them a real owner
in the business.
00:15:24 - Speaker 2: One way to understand the business structure or
how the container is different, is to compare and contrast with other
options. You mentioned taking investment, we did take some seed funding
from a lovely firm called Harrison Metal, who happily turned out to be
understanding or at least willing to try out.
Weird model here, but you could compare to other ways of doing this. So
bootstrapping, for example, and there’s a few different approaches on
this. I’ve done this in past businesses where you essentially do
consulting work on the side or maybe it’s kind of related to you can
try to sell your product to someone, but you sort of do some
consulting.
With them at the same time that like helps you pay the bills until such
time as the product is self-sustaining, or something you see a lot in
the iOS developer world is these what I call these indieDevs.
Many times they have multiple apps, but it’s usually one person or
maybe two people tops, and they can craft an app in Pretty short amount
of time, a few months, maybe they’re doing it on the side, maybe they
have other kind of some passive income from existing apps, or maybe
they’re just doing it in their extra time alongside a job, and they can
do that reasonably in 6 months, put it out on the app store, and then
start making not a huge amount of money, but enough to make it pretty
worthwhile for a single person.
But as you pointed out, for Muse, which has this first of all very
forward thinking or trying to reinvent a lot of these gestures, the
human computer interaction aspects, the tablet power user interface,
there was just a big investment first on the research side when we were
in the research lab, but then even once we left the lab and we’re
trying to take this kind of validated prototype and turned it into a
product people can really use that just took a lot of time, a lot of
iterations in a way that let’s say a safer kind of app wouldn’t.
And similarly, there’s something that I do think is common in the
startup world, which is big investments in design and brand, and you
expect this from Slack and Tesla and Apple, and certainly Any up and
comer startup, you have the money to be able to put a lot of effort into
that sort of thing, and maybe we didn’t want to be quite at that level,
but I also felt that a lot of investment there was part of allowing this
first part of what we wanted to express artistically, but then secondly
I think necessary for it to be successful.
So that sort of says, OK, the iOS indie developer path or bootstrap path
is really not viable. We need a little more upfront capital than that.
But then you can compare it to startups where, in fact, by start-up
standards, the amount of money we’ve taken is ridiculously small. I
don’t think it would even count as a precede. And furthermore, coming
upon 2 years into this, we’re a 5 person team with no particular plans
to expand, but in the startup model you’re expected to really quickly
scale out the team, be 8 people, 10 people, 12 people in that first year
or 1st 2 years. And so from that perspective, the 5 person team, we
would be growing much too slow, but we felt that that rapid team growth
first of all, wasn’t necessarily quite the kind of environment we
wanted to work in. And second, it wasn’t quite right for what we wanted
to express with the product. And so we ended up in this middle ground
that was neither the bootstrapper path nor the startup path, and that
led us to thinking, OK, how do we get some investment, be able to make
that investment in things like design and brand and exploring this more
radical interface, but not necessarily go on the, you got to become a
unicorn startup path.
00:18:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Another way to think about the
funding situation would be, as you get more funding and you have more
external investors and owners, you tend to have fewer degrees of
freedom.
So at the extreme end of you’re a large publicly traded company in many
respects, including basically legally at the whims of the owners, they
can more or less insist that you act purely in their best judiciary
interests, and if they don’t like what you’re doing, they can take
over your company by various means.
And at the other extreme, you would have the art project where you’re
in your house, you can do whatever you want. And, you know, in some
respects it’s nice to be doing the art projects you have infinite
degrees of freedom, but then you don’t necessarily have the capital and
the collaborators and the teammates in a sense to help you accomplish a
bigger mission.
So, when we were looking at funding the venture, we wanted to go in the
direction of raising a little bit of funding, but no more than we kind
of strictly needed to, A and B. In order to minimize the extent to which
raising that funding impinged on the desired degrees of freedom in the
firm, we raised the funding from people who were aligned with our sense
of mojo, if you will, or what what we wanted to do with the venture, and
we’re therefore not going to use the fact that they were investors and
owners as a way to shape the business in a way that wouldn’t fit with
what we wanted to do. So being aligned with the investors was important,
I think.
00:20:10 - Speaker 2: Another piece of the puzzle on funding and money
flow generally is that all businesses should go through this cycle of
they need upfront capital, even if you’re a lemonade stand, you gotta
get the lemons and the pitcher and the cups and the poster board and the
marker so you can make your sign.
Everyone needs some amount of capital, but there’s always this cycle
where initially you’re in the red. You’ve put in capital but you
haven’t produced a functioning business yet and you hopefully over time
in that time period could be very long. I’m gonna say for, you know, a
business like Amazon, maybe it took them a decade plus to go to cash
flow positive, whereas maybe for more bootstrap things you expect to get
there basically right away, but for us, we wanted to have enough capital
to make these investments we knew were necessary to even get a product
that people would want to use or pay for.
But it was also important to me or it was part of what I wanted to
express with the business was to make a self-sustaining business where
the product exists because people are paying for it, not because of
continuous injections of venture capital.
And partially this is my experience in the startup world, both with my
own companies and other companies I’ve advised.
But in the end, you will always serve the needs of the people who give
you money, and that’s just kind of the physics. You can resist that in
some ways, but it’s just kind of the long term, you’ll always converge
to that. And so if your customers are the ones giving you money, then
they’re the ones you’re serving. But of course they can’t. Maybe
putting aside some unusual cases of big Kickstarters or whatever. For
the most part, you can’t be completely customer funded to start.
That’s where professional investors can really help out. They want to
give money to fledgling businesses for a chance at a return, and so
that’s a good deal. But if the startup path tends to be one where
there’s long, many, many of capital and so you’re in some ways I’ve
seen the it’s quite a joke or a criticism or something, but they say
that startups in many cases their product is their stock. What they’re
really trying to do is sell their stock and sell it for ever increasing
prices and the product that they give to users and maybe even charge for
but not enough to break even, that is secondary. And I really wanted the
other way around, which is, of course, we need to do our fiduciary duty
to our investors and give them hopefully a solid return over time, but
ultimately, the sooner we can be funded by customer money rather than
investor money, I think the more that will shape the company and the
product that I want to make in a way that really is focused on serving
customers.
00:22:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And one of the reasons that I like
that approach is I basically prefer to serve paying customers versus
free customers in general. This goes back to kind of the patio 11 thing
of, you get what you charged for or something, where customers who pay
serious money for tools tend to be invested in them and want them to
succeed and understand their value and things like that. So it’s yet
another reason to focus on paying customers.
00:23:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a way to filter out people who really
find a lot of value in your product from those that like free stuff.
Everybody likes free stuff, that’s fine, but I think a business and a
product works out best if you can have that real focus on, here are the
people that get the most value from what I’m doing.
Yeah I’ll note that I think it worked pretty well for us, this idea of
we’ll take this seed-ish round, and then we’ll try to use that to get
to, if not profitability, at least kind of a sustainability, at least
not be losing money, and that really did create a lot of urgency on the
team, I feel, to charge sooner and it was a challenge actually because I
think as craftspeople. You think, OK, I don’t feel ready to charge
money for this yet. I think it can be better. It still has bugs in it.
There’s so many features to add. It’s a very natural thing when you
hold yourself and your work to a high bar, but then you made this
spreadsheet that basically mapped out cash and how we were spending it
and what would happen if we started charging and it really made a
difference starting charging just a few months.
Earlier, because it really takes time to build up your customer base and
that that is recurring over time, we could get to this sustainability on
a trajectory that would allow us to not need to sort of go back to the
well for for more funds and or just go out of business, and that was
really focusing and I think it pushed us to charge a little sooner than
maybe we would have otherwise.
And that in turn I think really changed our relationship with our users
who are now customers because now we have a different obligation to them
and I think that further focused our ability to make a good product.
So overall that kind of charge money sooner and then in turn try to grow
into that price you’re offering or that product you claim to be
offering. For me that was a really powerful focusing thing for the team
and for the product.
00:25:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that was big and by the way, it was
made all the more challenging by our take on pricing on iOS.
Part of the hypothesis about how this venture can work with a small
team, a relatively modest amount of funding, but still reaching
self-sustainability.
Is a prosumer price level on the $10 a month, $100 a year range,
versus almost all iOS apps, which are $0.03 dollars, $5 maybe $999.
It’s the wrong number of zeros to be able to make the physics of the
business work. And so at the same time as we are craftspeople who it’s
tough to charge for a product that isn’t where we want to be
eventually, we’re also dealing with the challenge of we’re doing
something quite different with iOS pricing, so it’s dealing with two
things at once there.
00:25:47 - Speaker 2: Great, so we’ve got kind of this partnership
model, small talent dense team, people who are all owners in the
business.
We’ve got a small bit of seed funding, so we can do a bigger investment
than a pure bootstrap thing, but something trying to get to
Sustainability sooner, and not be on a long term kind of multiple rounds
of investment, and we’ve got prosumer pricing that potentially makes it
possible to get to something sustainable for a 5 person team within kind
of the physics of how many people are out there that need a tool like
this, and what they’re willing to pay and that sort of thing.
So that was, I think, kind of roughly the picture we put together, we
wrote an internal memo that outlined mostly everything we just talked
about back in the summer of 2018. So now the question becomes, OK,
we’re coming up on two years in, how’s it going? Is this working the
way we thought it would?
00:26:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s working out great so far.
Now, there is a huge question mark around the financial success and
viability of the business.
We haven’t fully demonstrated that yet, and that’s a question mark
that’s going to be out there until we have that information, it’s hard
to fully evaluate this model, right? But in terms of how it feels to
work day and day and the staff that we’ve attracted, that feels. Great
to me, and I especially love this feeling with the partnership model
that you have 5 people who are operating at the top of their game, and
who you fully trust to make great decisions for the business
independently. That feeling is awesome and really helps us, I think,
move quickly and punch above our weight, even as a 5 person team.
00:27:19 - Speaker 2: You know I’ve always kind of liked the what I
think of as the pirate ship model, kind of a group of people who band
together for a common purpose, but it’s not this top down classic
command and control.
One person is in charge, everyone else just executes, and individuals
can pursue their own decision making, as you said, but the reality is, I
think I don’t. how it would be with even more than 5, but certainly
any, I don’t know, before this you were working at Stripe as part of a
big team there and amazing company, but it’s just there’s hundreds or
I don’t know even now thousands of people and there has to be some
coherence to the decision making and so that in turn leads you into
cascading OKRs and all the Big company stuff you think of it’s
necessary, and you know, I think it’s necessary to do something at that
scale, but for me personally, yeah, it is a lot more fun to make
individual decisions for my own work and then for my teammates to be
able to trust that we have enough shared vision, alignment around
purposes, sense of trust in each other’s capabilities as craftspeople,
but also that we were seeking a similar outcome in the business. And
that people can have a lot of autonomy while at the same time, we’re
working together for a common purpose. We’re not making decisions that
contradict each other or will make the whole thing feel incoherent.
00:28:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And furthermore, I think there’s a
sort of talent arbitrage that we’ve been able to pull off here in two
respects.
First of all, I think people are stepping into a level of responsibility
and impacts and skill that they wouldn’t have stepped into so quickly
or just such a. extent, if they were in a bigger organization where they
had a more specialized and confined and limited and structured role. And
that’s the result of you give people responsibility, you trust them
with it, and you make them big owners in the business, and they take
that very seriously, and they tend to step up to the challenge if you
find the right people.
And second of all, I do think that the model is very attractive to some
people, and I won’t put on the spot here, but I, I think people have
found their way to the venture that otherwise they’re basically not
hirable by general purpose companies, right? But because the model is so
unique and attractive, and because there is that mojo, I think you can
bring people into the venture that otherwise you basically wouldn’t
have been able to hire.
00:29:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, looking back at this almost 2 years,
we’ve been doing this slightly unusual model. I actually went to review
the memo that we wrote back in summer of 2018 just to kind of look at
our original goals and see the degree to which we’ve executed that
versus it’s evolved. And one interesting thing in there was essentially
what the risks or open questions are, and I’m happy to say that two of
those we’ve already answered in that. Intervening time, just as we’ve
discussed. One is just our ability to raise money. So we went out to
look for seed funding from the kinds of investors who normally would
invest in startups, and we had kind of a weird story where we basically
said, look, this isn’t unicorn potential. We’re not trying to follow
the standard startup model. We do think there’s something quite
interesting here. We think there’s a potentially a very good business
here. But, you know, we’re explicitly not on that path, and we’re
looking for less money in exchange for less ownership, and we’re not
gonna fit the normal model and for many, actually most investors, that
was a, well, we like what you’re doing, it’s interesting, but this
just doesn’t fit our model. But we did manage to find some folks who
liked what we were doing and certainly it helped, I think a lot that you
and I have and others on the team, you know, we have a really nice CV.
In the tech world and the amount of money we were asking for was so
small that people felt they could take a risk. I think that would be
tougher to do without the career capital that we have in this particular
team, and I would like to see if there are more businesses that can do
with a model like this. It would be nice if it was more possible for
people who didn’t necessarily have the background of Stripe and Hiroku
and whatever else to be able to get this kind of funding. So that’s one
item to risk is the raising of money.
The other one is the ability to hire, and I think I outlined that in the
previous podcast episode on this, which at the time we’d just been
joined by our fourth partner, Leonard, but it’s one is can be an
outlier, so I thought, OK, well, we got pretty lucky with that, and he
really seemed interested in being not just a great designer as he is,
but also someone who would have broad ownership in the business and
interested. All pieces of it, not just his sort of specific discipline,
can we replicate that? And the addition of Adam Wulf to the team made me
say, OK, yeah, it seems we can, right? We got not just the original
three who wanted to do things this way, but then 2 more we were able to
attract, as you said, maybe even people we wouldn’t have been able to
hire if we were a slightly more conventional company, that that was
appealing to them. And I do think it’s not a highly scalable model, but
it’s scalable enough to serve our purposes, and we have no plans to
expand the team beyond 5 for the foreseeable future, but we also think
that’s the right number of people to execute on this vision. So from
the perspective of answering those two risks, I would say that is going
well.
00:32:02 - Speaker 1: What are the other risks on the list?
00:32:05 - Speaker 2: Uh, the other big one is the one that you just
mentioned, which is can we get sustainability, right? Because I think
that for the record, at the time of this recording, we are not revenue
sustainable.
Let us say if we run out of our little nest egg in the bank here, we
would not have enough to keep the business going, at least in its
current form.
But the graph is trending in the right direction, we have new customers
every week, and if you look at the way that the lines meet in terms of,
you know, bank account going down, revenue, and new customers coming in,
we do think it is viable to get there, but we won’t know until it
happens.
So I think that remains the biggest risk, and if we do start to get
close to being in the red on the bank account, and then we have to ask
the question of, OK, you know, do we just sort of give up and go to
business, to be revenue based financing, which could be interesting, but
I think maybe we might not be the right shape of business for that, or
do we go back to Silicon Valley investors, but now we’re sort of like
breaking our model, right? We’re saying, well, we were just going to
raise this one round and charge money right away and try. get to
sustainability based on that, but if we need to go and refresh from that
well, that pretty naturally takes us into just the startup path of
raising perpetual rounds of funding, and your eventual outcome is
acquisition by a larger company or in some cases going public, but I
just don’t think we have the right kind of business, nor is what we
want to express the sort of thing that makes sense for a big public
company, right? Yeah, and then addressing the more personal side of it,
which is just creating this company, this vehicle uh that is a place we
want to work. I like you wanted to be a little less of a manager, a
little more of a maker, and It is interesting because, you know, we do
spend a lot of time. I spend a lot of time tweaking CSS and manually
typing expenses into QuickBooks, which is a perpetually rote and
frustrating activity and many other small things that were, how we
raised a little more money on the startup path. Yeah, we would be hiring
office managers and other kinds of people we would have a bigger team
that would mean that we could do less of that stuff. You get more
leverage or something like that, but that’s actually what I wanted.
I’ve gone both directions and I think I’m at my best when I’m, I like
being on a team, that’s really important to me. I want to do things
that are big enough that they require a team as opposed to just, you
know, kind of a solo activity or even like a two person partnership. But
I like to be on a very small team where you can be doing a lot, but most
of what you’re doing is making, I would call it, rather than the
management and leadership tasks that come naturally with the expansion
of a team.
00:34:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. And I think in addition to this
maker versus manager access and how that’s influenced by the size of
the team, I also think that a smaller team gives you more degrees of
freedom, which is great if you’re someone who just likes freedom, like
me, but it’s also great if you want to do something unique that
requires moving several variables at the same time.
So for example, this local first idea that we’re working on, this idea
that you have all the data on your device and it’s very quick to access
and it’s secure to you and things like that, that requires pulling
levers on engineering, products, business strategy, the client side, the
server side, interfacing with the research at the lab.
There’s all the stuff that you Got to kind of pull together. And if you
had to coordinate a bunch of people to do that with meetings and
planning documents and all that, it would take forever. It might just
not get done. Whereas if it’s a small number of people or even one
person, you’re much more able to come up with these weird combinations
of variables to produce novel results. And that goes back to this idea
of making a statement or building something unique for the world.
00:35:43 - Speaker 2: Another element of degrees of freedom is
outcomes.
So outcomes could include, you have a profitable business, but it could
also include something like an acquisition or an IPO and the startup
world, there’s really the outcomes that matter are acquisition, IPO, or
go out of business, and that’s sustainable but moderately sized
business is a non-goal.
That’s actually a bad outcome from the perspective of investors and the
whole.
The system is kind of built around that.
You shared a nice article with me some years back called VCM Math, which
I’ll link in the show notes, but the way the person puts it is, you
know, venture capitalists in pushing these businesses to become a
billion dollar company in 10 years. This is not because they’re jerks,
it’s because the model demands it.
This is how it works. That’s where this money comes from. It’s only
possible if you push for these polarized outcomes.
And that’s well and good if you know what you’re getting into and
you’re seeking that kind of go baker bust result, but for the, I think
potentially large number of potential mid-size businesses, very solid
mid-sized businesses, that’s of course not a fit.
And so by keeping that smaller amount of Capital upfront, keeping the
team smaller, we leave more possibilities for what counts as a good
outcome.
And so, of course, we still can have a startup style outcome, and that
might be something we consider good, but there’s also other outcomes
that I would consider extremely good. But that in turn leads into, OK,
how do investors as well as the partners who have this significant
equity stake and in fact are taking lower salaries than they would in
other places in order to get this equity stake, but how does that equity
become worth something? So the startup world typically it’s through. or
IPO and there’s no other outcome. So you did quite a bit of work on the
financial pieces that could potentially make this work. So how do
investors or partners over the long run, if news is able to be a
successful and profitable business, how do they realize the results of
their effort?
00:37:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a tricky one. So certainly if
there’s a standard outcome in the startup world, like an acquisition or
something that’s straightforward and it’ll work like other places,
just the percentages would be different because again, we’ve given much
more ownership to the staff.
But if you are profitable, it’s quite challenging. So I hope our
listeners who have joined for discussions of gesture-based interfaces
will forgive my aggression in US tax law here, but it’s actually really
important for how you compensate your staff.
So, tax and securities laws makes it quite hard for people, individuals
to get cash out of a company like this, and I can kind of play through
the different scenarios that we thought about. So one thing we’ve
considered is the idea of small scale tender offers. This is where a
company or someone else offers to buy shares from existing investors and
in that way, existing owners of the equity could get some liquidity and
have cash to support their families or what have you.
00:38:46 - Speaker 2: And small digression there when I first
encountered the term tender offer, I just thought it was the sweetest
thing. Here’s an offer for you tenderly for your shares, but I, I
don’t think that’s what it is. It’s, it’s that they are tendering an
offer, right? But it basically just refers to an internal stock
purchase, right? A transaction where one person has some and they’re
going to sell it to someone else on an open market transaction. And is
that similar to or the same thing as stock buybacks and kind of public
companies?
00:39:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so a stock buyback would be buying the stock
from the public, which I guess could conceivably be some of your staff
if they own it on the public markets, where the tender offer, I
associate that more with a more closely held private company, and it’s
not a public transaction, it’s more of a private offer to specific
individuals to buy the equity.
00:39:33 - Speaker 2: How does that relate to, we mentioned taking
inspiration from the partnership model, attorney firms, and so on, and I
think it’s pretty standard there that when you’re going to leave the
firm, they buy you out, right? Even maybe with a restaurant, you know,
you can imagine a couple of people in a restaurant, one person decides
they’ve had it with the business or they’re moving on to other things
in life, it’s normal for one person to buy out the other person’s
steak. Would that be a tender offer or something else?
00:39:57 - Speaker 1: Hm, interesting. I suspect that’s a little bit
different because those are probably LLCs or otherwise not Corps, and
again I associate tender offer with basically with the Delaware Corp,
and that could, for example, even be written into the contract that not
only are they gonna offer to buy you out, but in fact you have to sell.
At perhaps a formulaically determined price, so that way they might
specifically not want the ownership to escape the currently active
employees, for example. Basically, I think when you have LLCs or other
non-Corp structures, things can get a little bit weirder and different
just because they’re not as solidified and standardized in terms of how
they operate. But there’s some similarities in spirit of, OK, you’ve
completed this part of your journey and you want to get some liquidity
for that, and the company has interests in acquiring that equity, and so
it makes mutual sense to do this transaction.
00:40:42 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess they all seem similar to me in that
typically an ownership stake in a private firm of any size is just
totally non-liquid.
You cannot really do anything with it.
You can look at, OK, in theory, our last funding round value us this
amount or I could take a multiple of revenue, the company is worth a
million dollars and I have 50% of it.
Yay, I’m a half a millionaire, but that’s not really how it works
because you can’t actually sell those shares versus public markets,
which of course, It’s very good for liquidity in that way, and then an
acquisition scenario where one company is buying 100% of the stock of
another company, and then you just divvy up that share price among the
owners, and that’s why those two scenarios create exits for the
investors or create ways to get liquidity for the investors and the
employees who have taken options.
But if you say, as we have said, You know, we don’t plan to take either
of those paths. We want to build a profitable business that goes in
perpetuity, making good software. OK, then how do I ever realize the
outcome of my shares? And so the tender offering is one mechanism, as
are these others we mentioned for creating liquidity isn’t the word for
it, but just the mechanism for one person to sell their shares and get
out and get some money to someone else who’s maybe more active in the
business.
00:41:58 - Speaker 1: Yep, yep. And another nice thing about tender
offers is they don’t need to apply the same to every person, by which I
mean if it’s just the case that you or someone else because they’re
leaving or whatever, wants to make this exchange, we could potentially
set that up versus having to do something equally on the basis of
current ownership.
And another example of something like that would be a dividend which we
can talk about. Yeah, there’s a lot to like about tender offer, but
it’s not something that we would do lightly. There’s a variety of
reasons. One is that you need quite a bit of capital for it to actually
make sense for it to be material, and for you to have an appropriate
amount of cash in the bank and the company even after the transaction.
So in that sense, it’s definitely a ways out. But also, unfortunately,
there’s all kinds of really weird tax consequences which we don’t need
to go into the details here, but Basically, by doing a tender offer, you
could potentially impair the equity of the other owners, if you do it
wrong or do it at the wrong time or do it too much. So it’s fairly
fraught. But it’s a potential thing out there. Another thing that we
thought about and liked was dividends, and dividends are nice cause
they’re very mechanically fair.
00:42:56 - Speaker 2: Big fan of dividends. Yeah.
So just to define that, this is the idea that in a way it feels like
almost the purest expression of capitalism or how businesses are
supposed to work, which is when a company turns profit, they can choose
to take some portion of that profit. Some, they’ll reinvest back in the
business, kind of retain earnings, I think that’s what that is usually
called, but then the rest they say, hey, we made some money, let’s
share it with everyone who helped make this business happen.
And that share is determined by your ownership in the company. And so
for me, I had a, I guess personal experience with this in my very first
business, which was a basically a bootstrapped. Business, a payment
gateway called Trust commerce, and we had been operating, I don’t know,
founders, you know, living on their own savings and whatever, just
trying to pay our bills with whatever money came in, or trying to pay
the basic business bills, servers and offices and phones and stuff like
that. And I remember the first time we were left with $1000 in the bank
account that was not accounted for us, well, what should we do with
this? Well, we could pay ourselves, that’d be great. And so we wrote
dividend checks for $300 for each of us, because there were 3 people in
the company, and it felt really great. It felt like this, we made a
product that people valued enough that there was a little bit left over
that then we could give to ourselves. And even though the, the number,
the absolute number was small, that feeling of kind of profit in its
purest form is a really nice one. And so dividends are just the idea
that the company is making money, so you share it with the owners, and
that’s something. It’s not really part of the startup world and even
not really as much a part of, I feel like public equities, where I think
they could usually call them growth stocks or something like this. I’m
probably speaking out of my wheelhouse here or income stocks or
whatever, but the idea of just you’re going to buy the stock in a
company, so that then when that company makes money, they send you a
dividend. Those are usually a lower return type of stock versus ones
that are based on the growth of the stock itself. You buy it at a lower
price, you sell it later for a higher price. But the income stocks,
again, that is business at its most pure and fundamental, which is the
company made money, you own a piece of the company, therefore you get a
portion share of that.
00:45:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s nice because it’s mechanically
fair. If you have $100,000 to distribute in dividends, you look at the
cap table, so and so has 5%, great, they get a $5000 check, and you
know that everyone is being treated fairly, at least insofar as the
equity in the company is owned fairly, and you don’t need to have a lot
of discussions and machinations about how you actually split up the
cash.
But dividends are challenging for their own reasons though. One reason,
for example, that you don’t see a ton of dividends in the public
markets is some companies don’t have cash to throw off. A lot of it is
currently, instead of being dividended out, it’s being used to buy back
stock, which is kind of equivalent actually, but buybacks get basically
better tax treatment.
So there’s those pesky tax laws again, causing weird distortions, but
in our case, it’s hard because Some staff have straight stock and some
staff have options. And that again is because of tax law. Basically, the
US government doesn’t want you giving straight stock to people. They
view it as compensation that needs to be taxed immediately, even though
it’s a liquid. So basically, to avoid bankrupting your staff, you have
to give them options. But then options in uh the Corp, when you dividend
now you dividend to the stock owners, the straight up stock owners, not
the option holders, so that probably wouldn’t be fair to them.
00:46:13 - Speaker 2: And to be fair to the tax man here, trying to levy
income taxes on stock earned for work is very challenging because that
stock has zero value when you get it, and it’s very likely to have zero
value ever, but then in some cases it can be worth a lot, right, that
initial stake that, I don’t know, you know, the Google founders had
turned out to be worth a huge amount, but the vast majority of startups
and even businesses will end up. Not being worth anything.
So how do you tax something when you can’t know its value except
extremely retroactively? Yeah. And I’ve had my own challenges with that
because I’ve basically built a career around starting companies or
advising for companies and taking equity and kind of have this, I don’t
know, flywheel of I basically earned some money on past ventures, and
then I can use that to pay my bills or whatever and earn pure equity in
future ventures, and then All of those pan out, but I kind of have a
portfolio strategy, you might say if I own stock in companies I’ve
started over the last decade or decade and a half as well as companies
I’ve advised for in some cases invested for. And so all of that income,
all of that stock was worth 0 when I got it, but much of it turns out to
be worth $0 ever, but then some of it turns out to be worth a good bit.
And when I can cash that out, I can use that to pay my bills and
continue my career.
But how do you tax that because Typically you tax things at the time
they’re earned, but this can only be evaluated when it kind of
resolves, which can be often 10 years later, that a piece of stock you
earned pans out and has a value that can be attached to it. So it’s not
an easy problem. I think it’s still an evolving area. Certainly the US
tax law. I know Europe is grappling with this as well, because it’s
just the standard models for how we think about income just don’t fit
well with us.
00:48:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely an area that’s being worked on.
It’s just too bad that it hasn’t been figured out yet in a way that
would be more advantageous to basically giving staff more compensation.
00:48:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it can be frustrating, which is basically
trying to do something that’s as fair as possible for investors and
people earning what they call sweat equity, where they’re essentially
earning stock in exchange for their work.
We cannot treat those the same because the tax law basically means that,
as you said, the people earning equity through sweat get screwed, and so
then you have to create these different classes of stock and do
different things, but then that effectively means You have more and more
divergence in the stakeholders, which is against the spirit of what
we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create this thing where
everyone’s in it together, we bring different things to the table.
Some people bring their efforts, some people bring their money, some
people bring both, but everyone can hopefully have a sense of fairness
in the sense of kind of knowing what you put in and knowing what you
potentially get out or how to share in the success long term.
00:49:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah. And there are ways you could potentially
work around this for dividends.
You could do a sort of phantom dividend where you say there’s 100% of
the cap table and straight stock and there’s an additional 40% in
options. You can dividend it out 140 units, 40% to the option holders,
and 100% to the stockholders, and the stock would be straight dividends
and the option holders would get like a bonus basically.
To do something like that, and you could even imagine doing more
basically ad hoc type things like that where you essentially make a
formula and then do a bonus payout, but make it more formulaic less just
like, oh I think you did a good job this year, here’s a check and more
you have this sort of ownership in our.
Current cap structure and based on that, according to this formula,
we’re doing bonus payouts like that, but that also gets messy because
there is an element of discretion and also when you’re dealing with
investors, like they don’t want to get a $17 check, and you got 4 more
employees, you got to take down their address or whatever. This is a lot
of weird mechanical stuff there. So I, I think realistically it’s, we
gotta wait a few years and see how this all plays out and what the shape
of the business is, but what we’ve done is we’ve built up a lot of
potential energy, a lot of ownership, a lot of equity with the staff
members, and hopefully we can find a way to convert that into kinetic
energy to continue the analogy in the future. And I’m pretty
optimistic. It is asking the staff to trust us to a significant extent
that we’ll be able to figure that out and treat it fairly, but I’m
pretty hopeful that we would be able to do something that’s fair to
everyone.
00:50:28 - Speaker 2: So, would you recommend a structure like this to
someone else who wanted to start a company and or do you imagine, you
know, if you had to start a new company yourself today, would you reach
for a structure like this?
00:50:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we thought about this for a very long
time and it was hard to come up, and we spoke with a lot of experts, and
it was hard to come up with a better setup.
So one way to think of this is, insofar as we’re talking about staff
compensation, equity ownership, it’s kind of in the standard Silicon
Valley model, but with the percentages dialed way in favor of the staff.
So in that respect, it’s kind of strictly better, I would say, than a
typical Silicon Valley model. And so it can’t be that wrong, strictly
better at least for the staff, I would think.
And we didn’t talk about the other things that we do there in terms of
very long exercise windows and more favorable investing schedules and so
on, but basically, we’ve taken the standard mechanisms that are used in
stock, Delaware Sea Corps and turned the variables that we can so
there’s as favorable as possible as staff. And I think at least that is
a good thing if you would have otherwise considered it a standard
Silicon Valley model.
The one other option that I do think is interesting, but that I
couldn’t quite see ourselves going down was Using more like a phantom
stock approach, where you have essentially an internal ledger that’s
separate from the ledger that you have with Delaware in terms of the
equity ownership in the company, and it’s on the basis of that internal
ledger that you would make decisions about how you do payoffs. And there
are some companies that are exploring this, you know, it’s like every
month you work with the company, you earn a point, and then if we ever
do dividends, you divide the dividend by the number of points and
that’s how much we send you a check for, something like that. That’s
nice cause it gives you a ton of flexibility, but it’s much less
precedented, and it places even more trust in the company, because you
have less of the legal guard rails to confine what they can do or not
do. So I think that’s interesting because of the flexibility, and I
would love to see people try that more, but I wasn’t ready to, you
know, establish a whole bunch of new case law just for the sake of this
venture.
00:52:21 - Speaker 2: Now, precedent is very important. There’s the
general business wisdom is try not to innovate on the model, try to
focus on your product and your and don’t get too caught up in company
mechanics.
It turned out that this was something that we were both passionate
enough about in terms of the place we wanted to work, but also I
honestly do think we needed a different type of container, right, that
we knew that as we talked about towards the beginning there where an
individual productivity tool and what you can sell for even at a
prosumer price and what the mechanics of distribution and things look
like there versus other, you know, there’s a reason why Venture funded
stuff is either Enterprise, SAS, or, you know, a monetized consumer
products. Those are models that work well with that funding style, and
the thing we wanted to express in terms of the product and the thing we
wanted to exist in the world, as well as the company that we wanted to
work at, I think just demanded a different model. I don’t think it
would have worked with another one, so I think that was a way to justify
the ways in which we are deviating or innovating a little bit on the
container side of it.
But then at the same exactly as you said, I remember a lot of design
choices we made and things like, you know, we’d love to give employees
options or we’d love to give employees pure stock, but that’s just way
too hard or even impossible without these punishing tax consequences.
So, OK, we’ll kind of have these two classes of ownership in the
company, that’s not the spirit of what we’re doing, but like, at some
point you gotta bend a little bit to realities and what there’s
precedent for and what attorneys and accountants are used to working
with and all that sort of thing.
00:53:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think in all of this there’s also a
very real morale element where let’s suppose the company is very
successful some years from now, all the current and former staff are
going to remember that we worked very hard to try to do the best we
possibly could by them.
They were like basically on all the email chains with the lawyers, more
or less literally, and we would debrief and talk about, OK, here are the
options that we have.
What do you all think? Does this work well for you and things like that,
versus a model where That was all opaque and there was not even an
effort made to try to set things up as best as possible for the staff. I
think that just helps people feel like they are being treated well.
00:54:28 - Speaker 2: Well, speaking for myself, I am sometimes in the
position of offering advice, let’s say, to folks who are thinking about
what kind of vehicle they use for their business, and kind of the new
approach does come up and Certainly, it’s huge to ask, what are you
actually trying to make, because you need the right vehicle for what
you’re doing. If you need huge upfront capital or a big staff, I’m not
sure this model can work, to be honest, or if it’s something that can
be done with more of a small team, 1 people, 2 people in a shorter
period of time, then maybe this is also not the right way to do it.
And there’s other kinds of vehicles as well. For example, I think The
nonprofit is a little bit underutilized, can be an incredible vehicle
even for software and technology products.
We know of maybe someone like Mozilla or the Apache Foundation. There’s
many smaller examples such as processing Foundation, which does this
kind of generative art coding tool language thing. There’s many others
where I think if you think, OK, what we want to make is more open source
or it’s more of Long term kind of benefit, less of a maybe it’s more
educational or maybe the target audience is not, you know, the mechanics
aren’t there for a for-profit business, maybe you can make it work as a
nonprofit, and again, there are more and more options for how you do
that sort of thing these days between Patreon and so forth.
So I think trying to think in terms of, here’s what I want to make, and
here’s the team, and here’s the place I want to work. And then here
are some different types of containers. How does that fit and in
particular what’s the funding model, you know, if you’re gonna do the
nonprofit, you’re gonna be out essentially fundraising all the time
because you’re trying to raise donations, and that works well. I think
it works great for something like, say, Wikipedia and the Wikipedia
Foundation. They made something very sustainable there and something
that probably would not work the same if they had to come up with some
for-profit business model. So, I think the advice I give others and then
for myself and thinking of anything I might do in the future is think
about what you wanna do and then be aware of the full range of options
and not just go with the thing you know, because if you started a
nonprofit before, maybe that’s what you know. Start another one, he
started a startup before us, you know, he started another one, but
actually there are a lot of options here. They each have their pros and
cons or are more suitable to different kinds of products, markets,
business models. So just try to pick something based on an informed look
at those tools.
00:56:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah. And if I could put on a spin on this, if you
think about the full space of possibilities for how you accomplish a
goal, there’s one point which is you’re 100% focused on earning as
much money as possible through a fast growing for-profit venture. And if
you make a heat map of where people currently spend their energy,
there’s this massive white hot glowing spot right there.
There’s so many zillions of startups trying to try every single angle
and opportunity in that area. And so the marginal return to investing
your personal time in terms of the impact on the world might be
relatively smaller there, whereas there’s this whole space that I feel
like is really under explored, and if you just make it about 80%, making
a profit and 20% making a statement, that opens up all kinds of
incredible opportunities, and you can bring in these tools like maybe
what you need is a for-profit, maybe it’s nonprofit, maybe it’s a
community, maybe it’s a, I don’t know, meme, seriously.
If you open yourself up to those possibilities, I think you have a lot
more potential to have an impact just because so few people are
considering that right now.
00:57:50 - Speaker 2: Well said. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks
everyone for listening. If you have feedback, you can write to us by
Twitter as at museappHQ or via email as [email protected]. You can also
help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and I’m hoping that
if there is a small giants 2 book somewhere in the far future, Mark,
that Muse might be included in it if we can do this well enough.
00:58:16 - Speaker 1: That’d be awesome.
00:58:17 - Speaker 2: All right, till next time.
00:58:18 - Speaker 1: See you, Adam.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Cause there’s more to tapping to other people’s
minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But listening to
feedback through allowing other people to create in the same space that
you create with the right people can definitely feel magical.
00:00:18 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use as a tool for
thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about the product, it’s about
music company and a small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by
Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and Nicholas Klein of FIMA. Hey there. And
Nico, I know you have been working from Europe with a US centric, maybe
even a San Francisco-centric team for a few years. How do you find that
experience of having the evening be your team time?
00:00:48 - Speaker 1: I think that looking at the upside of I haven’t
set an alarm in the last 2 years to get up for work. I think that’s
definitely on the plus side of this, but I like to kind of like keep my
Friday evenings free, that kind of like gives me a little bit of like
time of just spending a normal week evening, I would say.
00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s right. I think the uh there was a
nice thread recently about some Europe to US times and I think on the
Europe side, the trick is, of course, you are giving up a lot of your
evenings, but you gotta make some room in there for a social event, be,
you know, be able to have dinner with friends or whatever here and
there, and yeah, I agree, no alarms slash morning is more free form is a
huge benefit.
So for me, very well worth the extra cost of maybe needing to be a
little more on my game in the evening than I would normally need to be.
And let’s hear about your career journey a little bit, so I think you
have quite a bit of interesting milestones along the way, including
Sketch Runner and artifacts, which we talked about a little bit with
Jason Wa recently here on the podcast, and I think it’s how I first
discovered your work. Love to hear the steps that brought you along the
way here.
00:02:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I studied interaction design in Schwebmund,
and it’s a tiny, tiny school in a tiny city in the middle of nowhere in
Germany.
So I studied interaction design and I think what was very interesting
kind of like studying interaction design was that you get taught these
like behemoths of tools. So you get taught Flash, you get taught
Illustrator, you get taught Photoshop in like classes, and you never
really think about kind of like manipulating those tools themselves.
And interaction design in general was really interesting because it was
just about the relationship of humans to technology and application
design, kind of a concrete UI design was one part of this.
And I’ve never really thought about kind of like, hey, I’m learning
how to design software. And tools are just software that is also being
designed somewhere far, far away, but on a hack day in Hamburg where we
were working on sketch plug-ins, kind of like started and like I
continued to working with the team in kind of like designing and
building sketch runner, and there was a plug-in with which you kind of
like can still like insert components and apply styles from like a
command like spot like UI.
00:03:09 - Speaker 2: I remember using this a little bit back in my
sketch days, and it was quite remarkable to me at the time to bring a
command line interface to a design tool. I feel like nowadays command
palettes are fairly common and power tools, maybe superhuman, and some
others. There’s an article from Repole where they describe a little bit
the rise of the command palette, and the command lines traditionally uh
kind of engineering centric, I don’t know, Unixy particular kind of
power user making its way into much more of these tools, but I feel like
Sketch Runner was a little ahead of its time insofar as bringing that to
a design tool.
00:03:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it was fascinating. We’ve seen that like
this aspect of I know the name of the command and originally it started
with finding a way to make plug-ins more easily kind of like
executable.
That was the start during the hack day, like, hey, there are so many
plug-ins being built for sketch. How can we make them more accessible
and faster to kind of like execute? And then it kind of like we realized
there are so many features that we can add on to this.
And the moment that was like really exciting for me was that I was still
studying in Schwabsmund.
And I saw someone from the Airbnb design systems team talk about sketch
runner kind of like on a meet up and then kind of like also tweeting
about this. And I was just like, holy shit, this is really happening
right now.
And so at that moment I realized that like, hey, there is a potential
for changing design tools. They’re also just software that are to be
designed basically, and that kind of like got me hooked into design
tools. After graduation, I was an intern at Shopify. And continued
working on sketch plugins there. I was building Polaris telescope. It’s
kind of like a tool from within Sketch, you could kind of like see the
documentation for the design system components.
00:04:56 - Speaker 2: These were internal kind of plug-ins or tools at.
Shopify or something for release to the outside world.
00:05:02 - Speaker 1: It started as an internal tool, but then since
like Shopify is a public design system and is being used by third party
people to design applications for the Shopify platform, we also kind of
like made it available publicly.
And during that time, I applied at FIMA.
And one nice story was that at the end of my internship at Shopify, I
had this option of going to FIMA and starting an internship there or
staying at Shopify full time. And I remember my mentor telling me to
kind of like take the job at Sigma because it was like, yeah, this is
more interesting to you, you just kind of like go there and that was a
nice kind of like end for this work at Shopify was very kind of like
welcoming to let me go, if that sounds right.
00:05:43 - Speaker 2: That’s great, and this was early days for Figma,
right? Pretty small team. I mean, I think nowadays it’s a giant in the
design space slash startup space, but maybe this was a little riskier of
a jump to go to this smaller, less proven team at the time.
00:05:59 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think Stigma definitely hasn’t caught
on as kind of like a major tool in the space at that time.
Um, when I joined, we were, I think around 35, maybe 40 people in San
Francisco, and that was it, like that was the whole company. And I think
we’re now at above 250, but I’m not exactly sure when that is. I’m
coming up on 3 years now, and it’s been fascinating to see.
The change in the company itself or kind of like seeing it grow, but
also just in the product and in the acceptance of the product in the
market. Kind of like seeing how many people and how many companies have
switched entirely of using FIMA, it’s still kind of like mind blowing
that this actually has happened over the last years and yeah, it’s
great to be a part of that.
00:06:42 - Speaker 2: Also seems fun to maybe grow in your career along
with the company and see those, yeah, that rapid evolution, that
hypergrowth over time can be nerve-wracking at times, at least in my
experience, but also potentially really rewarding experience. It’s
certainly a great learning experience.
00:06:59 - Speaker 1: Definitely, definitely, especially this aspect of
Getting things kind of like onto a roadmap and actually making that
happen. When you’re studying, you’re kind of like greenfield projects
and you can like imagine the most beautiful things, but then when
you’re building a product, you have to kind of like find a way for this
to actually happen.
It’s been interesting. I’ve been working on mostly focused on
prototyping things and it’s been interesting that kind of like slowly
we’re getting into this position where it’s like less features are
immediately clear of what should happen, kind of like coming next. But
it’s the things we’ve been talking about 3 years ago are slowly coming
to the space where now they are actually being shipped, and we can now
stand on top of them and look even further. And that’s pretty exciting
to see that like these wild thoughts are now becoming reality, and now
you’re thinking newer wild thoughts and I like that.
00:07:53 - Speaker 2: How do you find designing for designers? On one
hand, maybe that sounds great cause you can maybe introspect your own
needs a little bit, but on the other hand, it sounds miserable because
they’re incredibly fussy.
00:08:05 - Speaker 1: I actually love it cause imagine the case where
kind of like I would now just be a designer, basically, and I would like
have all these ideas of how this design tool could be better.
I kind of like love working for designers because seeing what they do.
With the features that you imagine, is so much cooler than the feature
itself.
So kind of like building things where other people can build things,
it’s just really rewarding that on one hand, and then the other hand is
that having designers and user tests, but also kind of like having
designers design features for you.
Because I really want this feature. It is amazing. Just today, I’ve
seen a tweet thread about how comments in Figma could work and it’s
just amazing of how much detail and how much love people put into these
ideas of helping us improve our product essentially.
00:08:54 - Speaker 2: And speaking of that, I’ll also throw out, you
are a new user and customer, so thank you for your business.
That came to mind because, yeah, you’ve given us really great long
detailed feedback along the way, both in the forms of concrete
suggestions, you know, it could work like this.
But also I think cause you know what it’s like to be on the receiving
end of that, sometimes more the why, like what’s the problem you’re
trying to solve, what’s the feeling you’re having when you go to do a
particular thing and you get this particular result, and I think you,
you started with us around the time of the beta, and you know, then it
was a pretty rough around the edges thing and you saw the potential, but
it didn’t really Fit into your flow, but you gave us great feedback
anyways and kind of check back periodically and eventually became
something that hopefully fits into your creative workflow a little bit.
00:09:38 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it’s amazing. Like, I’ve been using it
a lot more recently, especially since the alpha of like the 2D canvas.
That has really changed the game for me, but I think especially kind of
like seeing new too of like from a more, I would say maybe more research
experiment to actually kind of like, hey, this is a day to day tool for
me.
And what I love a lot is how the relationship to the device changes
based on the input.
Just through using a pencil, it’s just a significantly different
experience, a far more intimate experience really with the device,
because it really feels like just I’m writing on paper. Paper with
superpowers, right? Like I can drag things around and I can really
easily switch my tools, and so I love using it. It’s really great.
00:10:22 - Speaker 2: Awesome, thank you, and thanks for the new
marketing slogan. We might need to swap that out on the website.
People with superpowers. So our topic today is collaborative
creativity.
And this is something, you know, Mark and I have been talking a lot
about, we’ve been talking about a lot of the team because as we think
about sort of multi-user features and when or if those make sense for
you, and in general, I think the incredible collaboration features that
are in a lot of the current, let’s say, suite of tools that a lot of
folks in the tech world use, that’s Figma, of course, but it’s also
something like Notion, Google Docs going back a little bit further,
maybe something like Air Table, and so then you have this question about
like how does solo work work or how do we sort of interleave together
the solo time and then the working with others, you know, pairing or
whatever you wanna call that, there’s feedback cycles and all that sort
of thing. So to me it’s a very vast and interesting topic and I know
you have a pretty developed, it seems to me from our conversations in
the past on it, you have a pretty developed or rapidly developing,
let’s say thesis on this, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about
how you think about collaborative creativity.
00:11:31 - Speaker 1: I think it’s interesting also kind of like tying
back to how you introduced me in the beginning, that this is a topic
I’ve ultimately been working on for a couple of years now, on and off
really.
But my bachelor’s thesis was on this aspect of personal creativity and
knowledge management, and I think at the core it’s kind of like, where
do ideas come from and how could computers be set up to support these.
But then recently kind of like flipping a lot more around this value of
iteration, as kind of like working on Figma as a design tool, but also
the value of collaboration and the combination of those two. And I think
that the concept of collaborative creativity includes all of those
aspects and kind of like brings it together. And I think it’s
interesting that really fruitful moments where working together with
other people, those memories just always kind of like relate to being
together in the same physical space. And being able to work on top of
each other’s ideas really fluently, and because we trust each other, we
can like figure out a problem that we have in our heads really, really
quickly. And this kind of rapid iteration, this rapid building on top of
each other’s ideas is, I think, at the core of collaborative creativity
or is collaborative creativity itself.
00:12:45 - Speaker 2: So, give us some examples of collaborative
creativity. There’s obviously like, I guess what you described there is
sort of being with your colleagues, you know, in a meeting room,
brainstorming on a whiteboard, but how do you see this, especially in
the modern distributed world.
00:13:10 - Speaker 2: What I’ve recently seen on Twitter a lot, it’s
also funny but like I’ve seen these things on Twitter, but like these
TikTok remixes, and I think just recently there’s this like sea shank,
the sea shanty TikToks, those are great to describe what those are in
case you haven’t seen them is basically people singing these songs in
harmony, but they do it by one person records singing. And then the next
person essentially layers their singing on top of that video, and you
see all the faces and hear all the voices together, but of course it’s
a very much an asynchronous process in many cases I think these people
didn’t even necessarily know each other.
00:13:37 - Speaker 1: And I think that’s just so fascinating because
it’s really good and I think it’s a different example. So while this
collaborative creativity in the whiteboarding space feels more like an
immediate way of collaborative creativity, this is definitely, it’s
still the same core idea. It’s just kind of like happening
asynchronously. And I think those tools like TikTok allow for this to
happen because I’m able to build on top of your idea. I’m able to take
your idea and not necessarily manipulate. directly, but adds to it,
which creates this fascinating effect.
00:14:10 - Speaker 2: I feel like that takes us to the whole realm of
sort of maybe like remix culture, certainly open source is very much
built on that as well. And of course a lot of discussion, maybe not so
currently, but maybe in the last decade about kind of copyright law and
how that in many ways interferes with this potentially great remix
culture. You had DJs and that sort of thing. You see that in the
spectrum of collaborative creativity.
00:14:36 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely. I think it’s an important
aspect, and we’ll get later in more detail to this that like the
ultimate or kind of like original owner of ideas should be in full
control over what others can do with this, essentially. I think that’s
a key part of establishing trust in such a kind of like network of
people who could work on the same thing. And I think that that’s one
aspect of how to kind of like establish this way of working.
00:15:04 - Speaker 2: I mean, idea ownership is so fuzzy, even if you
leave the realm of, I don’t know, public copyright, intellectual
property, whatever.
I think even on a team making a shared document, in most cases the teams
I’ve been on, I and others on the team feel sort of uncomfortable doing
heavy edits to someone else’s documents unless they were very
specifically invited.
You know, you can leave comments, maybe you can make a little fix, good
suggestion changes, you can add something to the bottom, but you have
this sense of like, OK, they own this and you don’t kind of want to
mess it up. You feel like you’re a guest there, even if it’s in a team
workspace, just sort of an interesting, I don’t know, we have this
innate sense of ownership, I think, over ideas or a creative output,
which may or may not be logical, but nevertheless seems to be part of
the human experience.
00:15:52 - Speaker 1: I wonder how much of this ultimately comes back to
the tools themselves too, in the sense that what I’ve seen happening in
teams using FIMA a lot, that kind of like allowed this very immediate
way of collaboratively iterating on the same space that person A creates
an idea, creates a couple of marks for this.
Person B comes in and takes kind of like the second. and explores the
second mark further.
Person C kind of like uses something else and kind of like just draws
out their their direction of this. And at some point, maybe some person
zooms out and sees the connecting dots between of those and kind of like
puts these things together.
And I think at that point.
What has happened is that people inspired each other, but it’s very,
very fuzzy of kind of like who had the key spark of it. And so I think
at that point what we’ve seen happening, that’s actually really
fascinating is that the culture of teams changed towards a culture where
it feels more like our ideas over my ideas. Where just because the tools
are not just because of those tools, but also because of the tools, it
enabled people to take that ownership less seriously, because they
realized if we take that ownership less seriously, we can actually
arrive at better solutions down the road.
00:17:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
And even speaking in terms of just coming back to the more just
brainstorming in a group verbally or whatever, one of the ways I know
the best collaboration, some of the people that I’ve worked with over
many years, including Mark here, is that often it’s just not really
clear exactly as you said, where the idea came from, and every so often
I feel like I catch it in the moment happening. There’s one case I
remember of, we’re trying to, I think it was actually just a debugging
kind of scenario pair programming kind of thing. And the way we found
the idea that ultimately was the breakthrough was actually one person
said something and I misheard them. I was like, oh, that’s brilliant,
that’s totally it. And, you know, they respond with, oh no, that
wasn’t what I was saying, but now that you mentioned it, and so, wait,
whose idea was that exactly? Clearly it was the product of our back and
forth to claim that was one person’s idea would be, I guess, like a
pointless endeavor to try to assign it to a single name.
00:18:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely the case that
creativity, whether it’s among multiple people or with yourself over
time, is a very iterative process that involves taking a lot of ideas,
remixing them, borrowing stuff, eliminating stuff, adding variants,
exploring, playing. I know there’s something you’ve thought a lot
about because I’m curious if you have more theories on how this works.
00:18:27 - Speaker 1: One thing that during our bassists thesis and also
kind of like now getting back to this a lot, is this concept of
bisociation from Arthur Koestler, and it’s essentially this idea that
Any form of kind of like creativity, be it like humor or science or art
or conflict just I would also just include problem solving, is this
aspect where you have a spark that ultimately originates from two
orthogonal kind of like planes of thought or two orthogonal kind of like
spaces of ideas, and because they meet. They create a new thing or when
they meet, they create a new thing. It’s slightly different than
association, which just means the connection between those two things,
but that the connection itself is a new thing, existing from two
independent frames of thoughts. That’s like at the core of where ideas
come from.
00:19:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I even go so far as to say, or maybe I’ve
heard creativity defined as connecting unrelated ideas, but maybe where
this fellow Arthur Koestler, I guess his last name, where his work maybe
it’s this idea of two different frames or two different domains where
it’s an unexpected connection, and in fact one of the things that I
think I see written in kind of like how to have good ideas type. Books
like Steven Johnson’s works or whatever, is often about people who are
in different domains. They work in one field, for example, and then they
go to solve a problem in another field and they’re able to apply ideas
that are commonplace in one field in this new place, and that’s that
weird intersection that produces something truly new.
00:19:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think part of the challenge here is
the ideas need to be primed in a sense to be joined or synthesized. So
that’s why things like chewing over ideas, discussing, debating,
remixing, these are all different ways to basically ruminate on the
content, and by doing so you sort of prepare it for synthesis with
another idea.
00:20:18 - Speaker 1: Exactly, that was one of the things that was also
really fascinating to read through, is basically kind of like debunking
this myth of this eureka moment. Whereas like, you expect this eureka
moment to be this like singular entity where everything kind of like
goes from 0 to 100 and it’s like all kind of like falls in place, but
then you look closely at these stories around Newton and around Darwin,
and you kind of like see that they have had their theories around for
years before this, and they were really close. And so it’s not that in
this eureka moment everything fell into place. It’s just maybe this
last thing connected. But 95% of this idea was likely existing already
or of this theory or of this concept.
00:20:59 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and a sort of corollary of this is that you
can’t stare at something too hard. Like if you just sit down and think
really hard about a particular idea or even a particular problem,
you’re likely to be too constrained in your thinking, you’re get a
sort of tunnel vision that obscures these other ideas that you need to
connect in. So you really have to step back, chew on some other domains,
chew on some other topics, and then hope that eventually it will sort of
pop out as a synthesis with your other problem domain.
00:21:24 - Speaker 1: There was some interesting research we’ve read
into and if there’s any kind of like neuroscientists there and I’m
like representing this inaccurately, let me know, but that basically you
have a set of stacks of possible kind of like positions for thoughts or
snippets of thoughts, and between that stack you can create
connections.
And if this is a new connection, that would be considered an idea, and
you do that in your subconscious all the time.
But basically, when you’re staring at something for too long, all of
your stack will be kind of full with all the things you’ve read and
worked on. And there is a point where you just don’t see any new angles
on this content, cause like the stack is the same things since 3 hours,
but then you go outside, you summarize these stacks. They become kind of
like less defined and more blurry, and then you see a dog walking around
and some other things kind of like are popping up, and suddenly they’re
like, oh, I could connect those two together, because suddenly you are
free of these distractions.
That’s the perfect shower moment actually fits perfectly into this.
Because in the shower, there’s just not a lot of things you can do in
the shower. You’re kind of like just naked there and alone with your
thoughts, quite literally.
00:22:37 - Speaker 3: Rich Hickey makes a similar point in his talk,
hammock Driven Development, which I very highly recommend.
00:22:44 - Speaker 2: I’ve probably recommended it on this podcast
before, Mark, it’s always tricky because I think you’ve mentioned that
enough times now. I’m probably gonna stop putting it in the show notes.
OK. But clearly I can see it’s a high impact piece, so everyone should
go and read it.
00:22:56 - Speaker 3: He makes the point, there’s also a sort of
priority que element to this, which is you have end domains that you’ve
ever thought about, but to pick a number, the top 7 that you’ve thought
about most recently are sort of candidates for this background mind
synthesis to happen.
That’s not exactly true, but there’s a sense of the things that
you’ve chewed on more recently. are more likely to be part of a
synthesis of an idea.
And so part of the work is actually to constantly shuffle your priority
cue around by changing the ideas that you read about or think about
together in time, and eventually you kind of find the right combination
of 7 things in your head in the shower and out pops the shower idea.
00:23:31 - Speaker 1: I think this is great. Yeah, there’s a ton of
approaches on how computers, but also just processes and behaviors can
support this concept of by association, kind of like make the right
content available at the right time is something where I think all
played with of recommended content, right? But also. As a way to
structure your research in a different, more natural way, ultimately
follows the same goal. It’s about kind of like making the content, the
knowledge that you have available at the right time, so it can be in
your head, so you can connect it to other things, to new ideas. And I
think that’s also where I would place muse into the space, that kind of
like it’s a space primarily for kind of like maybe marinating on your
ideas and exploring it maybe in different ways. Here’s a PDF, here’s a
video of someone explaining this. How do you see the role of muse in
this personal creative process?
00:24:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, that’s certainly exactly how I
use it.
I feel like one of the cornerstone maybe features we introduced was the
excerpting, which the idea of pulling out pieces.
This isn’t quite a remix, it’s almost the reverse of that. It’s
almost like a deconstruction, and for me I often have successive stages
of that, which is, OK, I’ve read a few books on a particular topic. Now
I wanna go and kind of apply that knowledge to a domain. And I’ve got
my Kindle highlights and I’m pulling those, and there’s a pretty easy
way to pull that in this PDF to muse and then I’ve sort of got those
there and I can go through it and then I can pull out of my highlights,
sort of like highlight my highlights or something like that, but I exert
out the ones I think are most relevant. And then importantly order them,
so they’re sort of near each other in different combinations, or do a
little bit of the affinity mapping thing or something like that, push it
around, but yeah, part of what I’m trying to do there is boil down to
some components that hopefully for me will add up into a call it a new
idea or a strategy for whatever problem I’m specifically trying to
solve in the moment.
00:25:35 - Speaker 1: I think this fits into what we learned during our
special the well. We interviewed an historian and she had a word
document, which was, I think, up to 300 pages long, and it was just a
glossary of words and references to other places where she’s read about
these words in other books and other sections. And just that document
alone, it was just 300 pages of references to other content. And just
seeing that and how people use even a very simple tool like Word
basically for something like this knowledge management task, like this
humongous knowledge management task was pretty inspiring too.
00:26:13 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting spectrum
here with tools for thought in terms of how explicit they try to make
these connections and how much the tool is actually designed to output
those.
So Muse is, I would say on the end of the spectrum, it’s more like
you’re meant to marinate with your content, then it’s swimming around
in your head and out are gonna pop new ideas from your head.
And that’s good for like intuitive domains and coming up with new ideas
and brainstorming and things like that. But then when you’re writing a
history paper, for example, you need extremely specific documented
references, and so there it’s more important to have a very explicit
trace of every connection that you might have made in the past so you
can substantiate all your claims and have all your sites. And I think
both of those things have their place, but I think it’s important not
to confuse their purposes. I think you can’t force having new ideas by
kind of structuring all your stuff in a graph or something. And
conversely, if you try to intuit your way to a history paper, you’re
gonna have a bad time. So I think that both of those extremes have their
uses.
00:27:10 - Speaker 1: Definitely, I think that another thing that fits
into this is how can you frames of thought come into your mind, kind of
like diving more more deeply into iteration itself. I love this model,
this, I think it’s a mind sketch model from Bill Buxton that is kind of
like outlined in sketching User Experiences.
It’s an amazing book.
My roommate recommended it to me because he did his bachelor’s thesis
on how to prototyping tool, and he basically gave this to me, I think 1
year ago or something, after I was already working for nearly 2 years on
prototyping at Figma, I hadn’t seen that book before. And then when I
read this, like a lot of what is today originates from this book.
And the core process of federation is this aspect that you create
something, you externalize something. Because you externalize this
knowledge, you can now take a step back and evaluate what you’ve
created and learn from it.
00:28:05 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and in Buxton’s model, that’s the sketch.
And when he talks about making a sketch that has this very, it’s not
just a pencil on paper or that has a particular line width or something
like that.
It’s specifically that it is a very rough and purposely Not complete,
leaves a lot to the imagination, maybe raises more questions than
answers, but it is this externalization that then you can step back
from. You can both share it with others, but even just yourself, you can
step back from, you can look at it, kind of look at it from different
angles, squint at it a little bit, and it will reveal new things that
that same idea just purely in your mind might not.
00:28:45 - Speaker 1: Exactly, exactly, and I think that’s just amazing
that that’s possible, that we as humans are capable of doing this, of
externalizing our own ideas and then gaining new knowledge because
we’ve done that. Like, where does this information come from?
00:28:59 - Speaker 3: I think there’s actually a lot going on there,
right? Because some of the knowledge you get from the process of
actually having to externalize it, cause you’re changing the format
basically, and that involves processing of everything. You’re also
learning by looking at it and seeing, for example, the empty space,
which wouldn’t have been present in your associative mind.
And you’re also learning at it by being able to show people.
You’re also learning by being able to refer to it later in time, and
you’re also freeing up space in your mental priority queue because you
no longer are subconsciously thinking, I have to remember this, I have
to remember this.
So it seems like a simple thing, but there’s so many different ways in
which you’re learning just by doing the simple process.
00:29:34 - Speaker 1: What I love is, or also where the core of my
thesis is placed around is essentially, what are the models now with
collaboration that fit into this? Cause you mentioned it that
collaboration can help with this process as well. And of course I can
show it to someone and they can kind of like communicate things back to
me, and they can talk about this and directly give me some kind of
advice on how to change things.
But I think it’s interesting to look at it more closely on
collaboration through creation, or communication through creation or
manipulation, essentially, that if I create something and let’s say I
create a file, I create a design file, and I sent this design file to
you, and now you have a copy of this design file, and you make changes
in this design file and send it back to me.
Or I just kind of like take a screenshot and send it to you and you
scribble on top of that screenshot and send it back. That’s the first
step, kind of like the first model of collaborative iteration, and I
would call it kind of redundant collaborative federation, cause we
duplicate these objects, and because we’ve duplicated these objects, we
can collaborate on those, and I think that has been in a lot of times
the way we just collaborated on nearly anything in the digital space.
Like duplicating things in the digital world is slightly harder. But in
the digital world, it has been like this since email basically existed.
00:30:55 - Speaker 3: And I’m curious if you see that as a strictly
inferior form of collaboration or if it’s more like a different mode.
So to my mind, to my hand here.
I feel like that’s one of a few possible modes of multi-user
collaboration and it has its uses. So for example, when Adam and I are
writing, we’ll often have a draft and we’ll send a bunch of other
individuals their own unique copy of the draft so they can be able to
write whatever they want and they’re not getting groupthink by seeing
everyone else’s comments. And then we take all those comments and we
synthesize them in another draft, and then you might go into another
type of collaboration, which is everyone’s looking at the same document
and making real-time edits because you’re kind of converging. It’s a
different use case.
00:31:31 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, definitely, and I think that that was one
of the big steps basically that for me at least internally you kind of
like wrapping my head around this, is not looking at these different
modes of collaborative federation as good or bad, but it’s just solving
different types of problems, solving different kind of like steps in the
process essentially cause what you’re saying is totally right, like
what this redundancy also helps is comparison. And when we talk kind of
like more detail about these like open canvas tools like Figma.
What happens a lot of times just inside of those is redundant iteration
as well, right? Like I’m duplicating this frame, I’m just not changing
this frame because I need the ability to compare this.
What you’ve kind of like mentioned is the need for different audiences
of people ultimately, and different audience levels have to respond to
the relative content level inside of there. If there’s a lot of work in
progress comments. That you don’t want leadership to see, you might
want to bring this into a different document where there’s an empty
collaborative space. So that definitely makes sense. I think it just
solves for different purposes.
00:32:36 - Speaker 2: That potentially could take us to a whole other
space or a whole other discussion topic, which is feedback, what is
feedback, how to give good feedback, how to solicit good feedback.
Probably we don’t wanna, uh, get too diverted on that, but it, it comes
to mind because talking about the different audiences, if you’re
presenting something to your boss, to a client, or to anyone where you
know their time and attention bandwidth is limited, and you want to get
there.
Like big picture view on things or just kind of a thumbs up, thumbs
down, or keep them in the loop. And that’s different from, here’s my
teammate, we’re both collaborating on this thing and we want to really
go into all the fine details together. You’re just seeking something
different from the feedback and being aware of what it is that you’re
seeking in that feedback loop can help you have the right format or the
right level of detail.
00:33:25 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that for a tool or for a
creative tool, essentially, it is important that people are in control.
Like this is kind of like looping back to what we’ve discussed at the
start, that people can be fluently moving between the different ways of
collaborating, and that they kind of can invite the stakeholder with
certain permissions, and the client with certain permissions, and the
teammate. And I think the question is kind of like, can this still
happen in the same space, although those people have different
permissions.
00:33:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is something that I feel like we’re
still organically discovering as tool makers. So if you go back to the
before times where everyone was emailing attachments to each other, that
worked very well for the what you call redundant collaboration use case.
You just send someone a copy and they can do whatever they want, and
then we’re done they can send it back.
But then if you want to have a Shared unified state somewhere, that’s
really hard in that world.
And then we got this whole world of new tools including Sigma and Google
Docs, and that makes the real-time synchronized shared collaborative
space, first class, but I feel like sometimes it actually makes it hard
to do the individual private collaboration, often just because it’s
really hard to make a copy of stuff. I feel like in Google Docs, for
example, just to make a copy of a document is a bit of a heavyweight
operation, it takes a few seconds and makes weird names and so on. One
of the reasons I think it happens more often in Figma is that it’s very
easy to make a copy, especially if you’re doing a very lightweight copy
on the same canvas, you just highlight command C, V, I think, and that
just pops out a new version, then you can kind of scribble on that and
then go back and do your merge later. Another tool example here would be
Git, which I feel like has its UX challenges, but it does get this
right. Well, plus GitHub. It didn’t have this before GitHub. You know,
the local Git gives you the privacy to do whatever you want and mess
with stuff, and then GitHub provides the unified central state.
00:35:13 - Speaker 1: Exactly, and I think that I would categorize all
of those into kind of like restricted collaboration or restricted
collaborative federation because they somehow constrain how the
different people can manipulate these shared objects. Either they kind
of like restricted through having a private copy first that you need to
kind of update manually or through kind of like enabling people to limit
someone’s access in there.
One thing that I’ve seen quite often now is that in Google Docs and in
paper, the like, is that people create their kind of like appendix,
trash, don’t look below here.
Yes, these kind of spatially close areas because it maps toigma too. I
was like, here’s my trash area, don’t look at these things in here
like, like, like please don’t, these are bad ideas.
There’s an interesting aspect there that I would love to dive deeper
into at some point around like, why can’t we let those things go.
Oftentimes you don’t look at these things, but you kind of still want
them to be there. You want them to keep them around because in the case
you need them. You feel really bad if they’re gone.
00:36:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, old notebooks is the same way.
Even older muse boards for me in a lot of cases are things that are
mostly just historically interesting.
Every once in a while it’s kind of cool to be able to reference it, but
the reality is, you want that end thing. You usually don’t need any of
the steps that led up to it. Get history. the same thing. Like you could
probably for almost any project, go in and chop off all the Git history
from, you know, prior to a week ago, and it wouldn’t really make any
difference for any day to day work, but yet there’s that feeling of
something lost, something important that every once in a while it’s
nice to be able to reference.
00:36:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so I feel like there’s that temporal angle
of eventually you might want to archive something, but I also feel like
there’s sometimes a tooling limitation where, especially in these
modern apps, they’re very oriented around enterprise work groups, and
so if you want to have a personal space, it’s a little bit unnatural,
you either need to go out into your my driver. Something which is a
whole ordeal, or you need to effectively carve off your own little
personal space within a document by hitting enter 10 times and saying
mark notes and typing below that. And one of the things we’ve explored
in the lab and with views is, can you make that more fluid by making the
transition between the personal and the collaborative space much more
seamless.
The analogy that I always come back to is the university department.
where you have a private office and you have your faculty lounge, and
you can take a few steps over and back and you can bring your papers
over and back and you can check out the whiteboard across the hall. And
that’s sort of very seamless collaboration, where it’s all the same
office building, it’s just different zones are demarcated slightly
differently, and it’s very lightweight to move in between them. That’s
the kind of vibe I’m hoping for with digital tools.
00:37:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that would be amazing. Like the
current solution basically in Figma is that like drafts or new files
always open in drafts and drafts are private by default.
So that creativity as an intimate process can start in private, because
oftentimes there’s a ton of internal barriers in your head of like, is
this really a right idea? Do I want to share this? There might be kind
of like external barriers of a culture in which kind of like bad in
quotes, bad. Ideas are shut down from the beginning, or you’re fearing
being judged for those ideas or just sharing those ideas in general. And
I think there’s a ton that like how this flow can just feel a lot more
fluent as you described.
I could imagine like news sports, basically, this is my private news
board and we can be together in the same news port, but down here, like
inside, I’m zooming into this space, that’s my office space, right?
Yeah, exactly. This is new.
Because office space, you’re just technically not allowed to go in
there. I think there’s a ton of fun stuff of how the interface
paradigms will change the relationship of how we look at these digital
collaborative spaces and how we also kind of find ourselves leveraging
the cultural habits that we have with shared physical spaces and
bringing them into these digital spaces.
If you’re in an office building, it seems like decades ago that you’re
like in an office building, right? But like you have this cultural
understanding that you don’t go into someone else’s office, especially
when there’s other people sitting in there. You just wouldn’t do this,
right? And in digital spaces, it feels different, but I’m interested to
see kind of like how this will evolve over the next 5 to 10 years.
00:39:28 - Speaker 2: I think learning from the physical spaces and the
social cues and all that that we’ve built up over a very long time and
trying to bring some of that to digital. is certainly a rich well to
tap.
I also feel like sort of video chat and screen sharing and things around
the live synchronous video and audio might also have some clues for us.
One to me that’s pretty telling is the screen share stuff, which of
course is just huge for a distributed team, and I’ve gotten pretty
handy with setting up my screen in a particular way so that I’ve got a
window to share that’s kind of the right size and orientation, so
it’ll look reasonable on most people’s desktops.
But then if you actually have a multi-window flow, you wanna show, now
you kind of need to share your whole desktop, and for some reason that
seems way more intimate. I don’t even have, like, I don’t know, text
messages going to my Mac, so it’s not like someone’s gonna see a
personal message come in on my notification center, I don’t think, but
still there’s this. that that’s a much more really letting someone
into your private space, which is kind of interesting. And then, of
course, there’s all the stuff around. If you have other devices that
you need to show like an iPad, or you’ve got an external camera that’s
showing, which we often need for showing a person actually using the
iPad with their hands. So I feel like there’s a lot there that affords
opportunities, but also we need to adapt to and how we think about
collaboration and privacy and synchronous and asynchronous for how we
work together in, let’s say the modern virtual office.
00:40:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’ve mentioned this theory before that a
lot of collaborative and social technology first appears in games.
And according to that theory, within a few years, professionals will
need to use OBS to do exactly that.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with OBS, but it’s a program for
streamers to basically render their stream from a bunch of different
windows and graphics and stuff and kind of.
Deposits it all together into whatever they want to present.
And I actually know some professionals who do use this for things like
teaching classes where you need to composite a bunch of stuff together.
Well, the best program in the world for that is what streamers use. So
just use that. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that or a technology like
that becomes standard in the same way that microphones and ring lights
and all that stuff did become standard for office workers.
00:41:37 - Speaker 1: Zoom definitely, I think there’s Studio Beta,
which is I think basically like Snapchat like filters for Zoom, and I
think there’s some feature in there that look like integrate kind of
like a PowerPoint slide presentation, right, into your background and
maybe key things out or something.
And I think that’s a start in this. I think you’re totally right that
like these things will just become a lot more accessible for day to day
work of kind of like creating these mixed media streaming environments.
One thing I’m really interested in though is this aspect of kind of
like what makes this work ultimately in the end, like, what is the oil
for this collaborative iteration process of we are improving each
other’s idea really work, and I think that there’s a bunch of things
to dive into in this aspect around the culture for collaborative
creativity. Cause we’ve touched on it a little bit, but this aspect of
people can feel comfortable sharing bad ideas, essentially, is what at
the beginning of an iterative process, right? Like the ideas you’re
going to share are not ideal. And if we look at collaborative iteration
and we see that there’s value in bringing people together that trust
each other, what cultures would we have or kind of like what cultural
shifts would need to happen for this to become more fluent.
00:42:55 - Speaker 2: Well, trust certainly seems like a huge part of
it, and that’s how you actually build trust on a team, you know, it’s
one thing if you’re longtime friends or longtime collaborators, but
when you have particularly, for example, a fast growing company, as we
were talking about earlier, and you have essentially relative strangers,
maybe from different backgrounds that come together, it’s probably even
harder when you have less or no in person time.
In the world we live in now.
And so, is that something software can solve at all or is this purely a
classic human management problem and we need to like do exercises where
we fall backwards into each other’s arms in order to be able to make a
a shared document uh together successfully.
00:43:34 - Speaker 1: I think it’s actually kind of like interpersonal
maturity and interpersonal relationship that we have to learn through
the tools. Tools can give us guardrails. Like, if I know that this is a
production thing, this is the thing that is used in production, I’m
definitely going to kind of like use GitUp and will restrict the access
to this and maybe only allow me to merge things into the main branch and
like have these guardrails and structures in place so that collaboration
can also grow in this environment.
But then separately, being together in the same file at the same time.
At any point in time, you could hit command A, select everything and hit
the delete key and just get rid of everything that’s there. Yet we
still don’t do it. So the tools still allow this. They still allow
fucking up each other’s work. So the fallback has to be a cultural way
of working together.
But one thing that we’ve seen with Sigma is that Sigma grows rapidly
inside of a company once you invite other people, and they kind of, they
invite other people, they create content, they invite other people, so
it’s beautiful to see that.
But then separately, one thing that at the beginning seemed kind of like
independent of all of this was that like Halloween 2019. I’ve seen a
lot of people dressed up as figma cursors for Halloween. And I was like,
why is this happening, right? Why are you dressing up as feeling my
curses? Why do people have kind of like group costumes where everyone is
a thing about curses and they’re just like roaming around this like
space. And it’s been fascinating looking back at this, because I think
looking at the culture and looking at the tools, is that what FigMA had
enabled for these teams was that they trusted each other, and now they
were able to build on top of each other’s ideas in a far more efficient
way than they’ve ever done before.
And it might have even helped them to establish these cultures in the
first place. To be like, now that we are in the same space, this
maturity of how we work together becomes more important.
We see how beautiful it is when it works, and now we actively want to
work towards this, so that it’s not kind of like, oh yeah, this is like
randomly happening, that I’m able to have another idea because you’ve
had an idea and put this down and shared it. It’s not serendipity,
it’s actually something that we can actively to work for.
And so I believe that like the tools that open up these collaborative
processes actually can incite a change of making cultures more inclusive
and more open and more respectful to work with, and especially getting
rid of the Steve Jobsmith of like, hey, good feedback is like direct
feedback, right? Like this is dog shit. It’s not gonna help you in the
long run build better ideas or come up with better ideas.
00:46:17 - Speaker 2: On the feedback side, I feel like the culture,
it’s culture, it certainly is trust, but when I’m working with a new
person, whether it’s on a writing project, something product design
related, or even things externally in my personal life, you know,
collaborating with a cohabitation partner on Decor, for example, I feel
like when you’re first doing a project together, you’re first
exploring that part of a relationship with someone, a new colleague,
whatever it is, and I’ve sort of learned to prime people a little bit
though, like, if you share something with me, I’m gonna give you tons
of feedback, usually. Like, often I’ve gotten the feedback on my
feedback that it’s sort of a fire hose and can be overwhelming, and
I’ve actually learned to even try to trim it down a little bit to like
the key points. But that’s also because it’s kind of a golden rule
thing, that’s what I like to receive. And in particularly I like really
stream of consciousness feedback. I don’t want you to do my thinking
for me. What I want you to do is react. I want your hot take, I want
your snap reaction of this made me feel like this, and this made me feel
Like this, and this made me angry, and this made me happy, and this made
me confused. And, you know, it’s not to say that every single point of
feedback is something I’m gonna do something about, but that overlaid
with feedback from others is how I get a picture of how something I’ve
created is. Perceived or potentially could impact an audience, but
that’s not necessarily maybe how others work, and maybe they’re
surprised by that in both directions. So I really try to establish that
up front. You share the thing with me, I’m gonna give you this style of
feedback, and likewise, if I’m sharing a thing with you, this is what I
want, is this kind of heavy feedback.
00:47:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think like getting everyone to share
these thoughts in the first place, I think is going to be a big change
instead of companies where with tools like FIMA, people now have the
ability to communicate visually. Anyone in the organization now
basically has the ability to communicate visually.
But that they are actively actually doing this and using this requires
them ultimately to put down ideas that they might not be sure about at
that point. And that might be common for designers, right, to kind of
like share early thoughts.
But if we talk about kind of like PMs or engineers who may have a design
idea, or an architecture idea of how something could work, maybe
slightly differently, or if the user flow kind of like breaks off here
and goes to the path, those things can be amazing ideas even if they’re
just shared in the form of a diagram, or a little scribble, or a little
kind of like, I don’t know, just like jotting on something, yeah, but
those people have to also feel comfortable in sharing this in the first
place. And if you’re an engineer in a company or if you’re a PM in a
company and you might not be sure of how this design tool space is owned
by the designers, right? Can I use this? Does that make me a designer?
If that makes me a designer, are other people like annoyed that I call
myself a designer, like, there’s nothing about this. It’s just kind of
like a core skill of being able to communicate visually, and it can help
discussions, especially if that happens in spaces where other people can
take those visual objects. And immediately iterate on them. Like we’re
still in this concept, we’re still in a space where people can work on
top of these ideas again. But I think the key barrier that we’ve often
seen is that people kind of like are a little bit shy of sharing this
idea in the first place, cause they might feel that, oh, this like, will
shine badly back to me. And I think that’s a call for designers
essentially of sharing the bad work more openly. We have a design work
in progress channel and it’s fascinating to see how much is like work
that’s just happening is visible there. Although it’s not always
polished, although it’s not always kind of like perfect, it’s so just
like, you see that these things are happening. And it has become kind of
like one of the most active channels because it established a culture of
a different kind of critique, not this culture of kind of like, hey, we
shouldn’t ship this, right? Like if you share something in this
official design critique channel, you might get feedback of like, hey,
maybe we shouldn’t ship this. This is not up to our quality standards.
But then it’s like work in progress channel where the quality was just
said very differently. The feedback is a lot more of like, yes and
style, of like, oh yeah, we could do this too, or like, hey, this could
fit into this project that I’m working on, and it feels very different
culturally.
00:50:25 - Speaker 2: I have the sense, maybe it’s a stereotype or just
reflects some of the designers I’ve worked with over the years, but the
designer archetype for me is someone who is much more likely to want to
stay in their ivory tower longer and kind of really polish something
until everything is completely perfect and without any conceivable
critique, and maybe to a straw man a little bit like a delicates. Flake,
where when someone says, you know, I don’t completely 100% like this,
they’re very upset and maybe engineering types, again, this is perhaps
just a stereotype, but are more likely to be a little more willing to
take feedback on work in progress. I don’t know, do you think that’s
accurate? Is that an outdated point of view, or is that accurate, but
something you think you and your team are working to change with your
product?
00:51:11 - Speaker 1: I’m lucky that I can say that it’s like outdated
for me, that the people that I work with are at least kind of like
don’t show this kind of behavior that significantly, at least.
I think it definitely exists. It definitely exists. I remember reading
the first comments of Figma being published on design and use. If this
is the future of design, I’m like changing careers. And I even remember
the video, I think. It was like from Sandwich video, this like first
initial teaser ad of route Pigma when it first launched, and I remember
kind of like it showing a use case where someone just moved something
like 10 pixels. Some senior designer moved something 10 pixels and it’s
like, oh yeah, I just tightened it up a pitch. And I’m like, if this is
the future of collaboration, I wouldn’t be sure if that would have
worked. But I think this aspect of once you feel the value of other
people adding freely to your ideas, and at the same time also being
respected for the things that you’ve done, and you realize that you can
now take from all of these ideas and you can like combine them into new
ideas, and those are maybe your ideas again, that feeling of being able
to tap into everyone else’s mind. I think it is amazing.
And one thing that comes to mind is something that started very early on
at FIMA that ultimately kind of like kicked off this value of
collaboration or this thinking about the value of collaboration a lot
more for me, because I initially joined Figma because I liked the
components overriding behavior. I was like, hey, this is cool, like I
can overwrite more stuff than in sketch. So I got intrigued by that, but
then I joined Figma and I was working on the common pins and I just like
outlined a couple of the states that we need for common pins. And we
joined into the design grid. There’s just a couple of people. Dylan was
also working joining Design grids at the time, that was kind of like how
small the company was. And then we just for 15 minutes just riffed on
top of each other’s ideas. And then I went back from this design grid
room with this file in my computer that everyone literally around that
has something to do with design at FIA at the time worked on. And it was
an amazing feeling because I’d sat there, I was like, there’s so many
good ideas in here. And the beautiful thing was that they were not
named. I wasn’t even sure who created which parts in this document, and
my role as a diner was then to look at these things and see kind of
like, how can I combine them into something that is most promising. And
so coming back to your question, I hope that this experience pushes
people towards working more in the open. Because they see the value of
this open iteration, they see the innovative value in being able to tap
into other people’s minds, cause there’s more to tapping to other
people’s minds and sending something and asking for feedback. But
listening to feedback through allowing other people to create in the
same space that you create with the right people can definitely feel
magical.
00:53:57 - Speaker 2: It’s really powerful, and yeah, it’s kind of
vulnerability, but then if you open yourself to that, it’s
simultaneously open yourself to it with a team of other people who are
doing the same thing, and then have that experience of the shared mind
and how much more powerful that is, then maybe that. Charges you up to
see the value of it and be more open in the future. Whereas maybe if you
get the reverse experience, if you try to open yourself that way, you
don’t have the right team or the right culture or the right setting,
and you get shut down or you feel rejected or something like that, and
then that’s maybe a negative feedback cycle of the same kind.
00:54:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and this is also one of the
underlying motivations of why I’m trying to build this model on top of
the core aspect of what thought or creativity is for a single mind.
That, you know, creativity is pushed through having a diverse set of
thoughts in your head, and that the question is, how can these diverse
set of thoughts come into your head, and that at that point, you realize
that like if other people share their bold ideas and if you’re
comfortable sharing their wildest dreams, even though they might be kind
of like going against company policy or something, that those things can
be the missing spark that someone else needs.
And so that because this is tied to kind of like the core aspect of
creativity in the mind, you can’t really argue with this. And so that I
hope that through this and through experiencing this and the tools and
the products that we build, that companies see the value in an open and
inclusive design process where people can feel safe of sharing ideas and
do not have these experiences that you describe.
And I hope that in the next 50, 100 years or something. That’s just
seen as an old way of working if you don’t allow people to work like
this together.
00:55:40 - Speaker 2: I feel like I can see a parallel there with open
source, and in fact the style of working in public with strangers on a
code base over time or relative strangers, and that in turn fed back
into even private collaboration on code, which is there’s just a
different perspective or a different way to be creative, maybe, but you
have to bootstrap and do it. So maybe you’re helping do that for design
and maybe even the larger world of technology.
00:56:10 - Speaker 1: I think the beauty in this too is that I think it
could help design, elevate from being seen as this thing that people do
in making things pretty, to be a lot more focused on an aspect of
problem solving, essentially, that problem solving in an open solution
space.
We just don’t have any idea of where to go next or how to evaluate your
idea in the beginning, that design can kind of like feel bigger than
that, and because it feels bigger than like UI design as we know it
today.
That through that it becomes more inclusive too, and people might
identify more with, hey, I also work creatively. I also iterate on my
ideas. These are words that I use out of a context from like a UI design
context or general design context, but I might apply the same iterative
strategy to my financing models, or my strategy plan or business model.
And all of these are creative outputs in some way. And all of these can
be iterated upon and have the potential to be improved through the
thoughts from others, but the culture needs to allow for this to happen.
00:57:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think of designers. Both a way to connect
why you’re doing what you’re doing and why it matters to what
decisions you actually make, and then making a series of decisions which
are thoughtful and considered and not arbitrary. And from that
perspective, you absolutely can design a UI just the same way you can
design a financial model, just the same way you can design a building,
or you can design a trip. There’s a similar process there with the
right kind of thinking can get consistently good results.
00:57:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and in the same way that you can apply this
process of what is traditionally software design to other domains, I
think you can also flip that around and you can bring people from other
domains into the software design process. I think if design wants to be
about how the thing works, it really needs to grapple with all the
realities and complexities of the real world, a lot of aspects of which
the capital D designers aren’t the experts in. Patrick McKenzie at 11
on Twitter actually had a pretty good thread about this recently, where
he was pointing out that there’s an emerging consensus that there’s a
set of people who kind of get software and therefore you can contribute
to his design. It’s not just capital D designers or capital P product
managers, it’s also people like the user ops team who engage with the
customers day to day. I think finding new tools and practices that can
tap into that will be helpful.
00:58:36 - Speaker 1: I totally agree and I think it fits well to this
aspect of this need for mixed media inside of news, right? The same way
that you need to look at an idea or at information in general, in
different ways, like, here’s a video, here’s an excerpt from a PDF.
Here’s the PDF with me scribbled on top of this and adding other images
to this.
So kind of like combining these different dimensions of this at that
point, very abstract thought. In exactly the same way, these different
dimensions need to be looked at and considered throughout the entire
process, right? That these dimensions just need more clarity and more
preciseness, the closer you get towards the end goal. But that of
course, like a designer can’t have all these things in mind that are
required to get this over the finish line. And a funny example was when
I was working at Shopify, I was working on the financial services
payments settings page. Yeah, exactly. Payment settings, and there’s
contracts with Mastercard or with Visa or with Stripe. I can’t remember
exactly who we had which contracts with. But they partly defined the
size of the icons in pixels for the design. And I was like, OK, this is
cool, but this is also not my level of expertise. Like I’m not gonna
read the legal contract that we have with these companies to understand
how to make these design decisions. But this is ultimately just a
different creative dimension, important for this problem at hand, and it
needs to be understood and if other people can help you understand this,
then that’s great.
01:00:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I never thought of the mixed media canvas
aspect of news as having some elements in common with the sort of a team
with a lot of people with different skill sets, which is, I think the
classic team uh arrangements back in, I guess olden times now, but
certainly when I got into software was all the designers sit in a room
together and they all use Photoshop and all the engineers sit in a room
together and they use, you know, their code editors and all the
salespeople sit in a room.
They think of their team as being the designers or the engineers or the
salespeople rather than a team as a group of people with different
skills that are working together to a common cause, this particular
feature we want to ship, this product we’re making, this initiative
we’re doing, this event we’re putting on, and you need people with
different skills, and furthermore, that you all respect each other, have
different things to bring to the table and different perspectives, and
you need to put those together into a shared mind in order to have a
good Outcome.
We’ve made maybe a similar argument about the mixed media, which is
sort of siloing into your images go into your photos app and your text
goes into your text editor, and it’s like, well, no, the ideas and
knowledge come in many forms and to build new good ideas, you need to
get those different types of media altogether and arrange them all
together.
01:01:27 - Speaker 1: I think it allows everyone to have their own
personal access to this abstract concept of an idea, right? Like, if I
think more in diagrams, then it helps me understand this abstract
concept of an idea, and now I can communicate with you on a different
level, on a better founded level, while you might think in a different
way.
And what I like about this, and also kind of like about this flow of
iteration is how it somehow also ties back to the history of computers
in general. And kind of like how we transitioned from computers being
these huge rooms, right, that multiple people operate the same computer
and you kind of like create punch cards and put those together.
This relates to the book, The Dream Machine, which is by far my favorite
book of kind of like computer history essentially cause it shows the
step of moving computers from these rooms as these kind of like places
where you give some task to. And you get a response a couple of hours
later to these personal machines that I can immediately iterate with,
that the computer can give me immediate feedback on the interactions
that I do, which is the core of allowing me to use it as a tool for
thought, right? The other one is still a tool for thought, it’s just a
very, very slow one. But I wonder that these paradigms we’ve had on a
desktop and implications and all of those aspects, they fit very well to
a personal process of this. But what we’ve seen over the last 10 years
is that the digital space that I have opened on my computer is very
often, more often than like 5 years ago, shared with others at the same
time. The amount of time I’m in a Zoom call and I do share my screen is
tremendous, or I’m in a Figma file with other people. And so I wonder,
will we move from an era from personal computing to collaborative
computing even? What does that look like? I don’t know. I’m intrigued
to find out. I think it could help us use those computers as tools for
collaborative thought, to kind of like add something to that saying.
01:03:27 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and we’ve seen in our conversation today
and in a lot of the previous podcasts that we’ve done, that it’s very
good for your tools to resonate with how the problem actually works.
So for example, the problem is multimedia, your tools should be
multimedia. The problem is cross functional, the teams should be cross
functional, and so on.
And I think what we’re discovering on this podcast in the process of
this creative collaboration is. We still have some learning and some
theorizing to do about the exact nature of collaboration and therefore
how the tools should work. Again, it sounds so easy. It’s just, you
know, people are just working together. They’re all in the same space
or something. Yes, it’s a piece of it, but there’s all these little
nuances of how people work together. So I think as we better understand
that and make it more explicit, we can develop tools that better
resonate with that aspect of the real world.
01:04:13 - Speaker 1: Yes, 100%, and help to bring more of these
experiences that we probably all have of like, hey, we’re together in
this room, and we stayed together in this room for 3 hours, and we like,
really got a huge amount of progress because we were able to work
together so rapidly, that the more of these experiences can happen in
the digital world.
01:04:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, on one hand, and maybe this comes back to
kind of where we started the conversation, but it feels like on one
hand, we’re both trying to catch up to physical spaces with our digital
tools. But then at the same time, we’re also just starting to step into
things that are only possible in the digital or virtual space or never
possible in the physical world, and the combination of those two tracks
developing, it feels like we’re only in the very beginning, the very
stone ages of that, but seeing the ways that can and I think will
develop. I think that makes it a very exciting time for collaborative
creativity.
01:05:08 - Speaker 1: One thing I come back to as an image that I have
in my head from time to time, is, imagine we’re sculptures, we’re
together in a studio, and there’s like this granite block of, I don’t
know, 3 m tall, 2 m wide or something, and we’re kind of like actively
working on this together and kind of like creating the sculpture.
And the wireless thing I think about this aspect of being in digital
space, is that duplication is free. Right? Now imagine that same
scenario in the physical space, and you kind of like hold option, hold
your physical option key or something, and you, you drag out the
sculpture, and there’s a new sculpture, right? And there’s another
sculpture, and there’s another sculpture, and suddenly you’re in this
room of like, I don’t know, 20,000 sculptures, which would be
impossible to do, creating this in the physical world, right? But in the
digital world that’s possible. So what is the upside of this? In the
long run, how will this change creative expression even? I really don’t
know. I’m really excited to see.
01:06:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it’s really exciting. I think we
have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do in this space, and some of
it is a little bit scary or intimidating at times, you know, we’ve seen
some fallout from social networking technologies and so on, but I think
the majority of it is very positive and exciting, and I’m really
looking forward to seeing what we can figure out.
01:06:27 - Speaker 2: Well, and I guess speaking of feedback, if any of
our listeners out there have some for this episode, feel free to reach
out to us at MAHQ on Twitter or we’re hello at museapp.com on email. We
always love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes. Niko,
really great to. collaborate with you creatively about this big topic,
and I was already excited about it, but I think now I even have more
sense of what the potential for collaborative digital tools are and
leaves me feeling really excited. So thanks for coming on.
01:07:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I think it’s
been a fun last few weeks where I’ve started to listen to more podcasts
and just the depth of the conversations in this podcast has been
astonishing. So, yeah, I feel really honored to be part of this.
01:07:12 - Speaker 2: Thanks so much for coming on and we’ll see you
both around in digital spaces, if not physical ones.
0 min
January 12, 2025
Discuss this episode in the Muse community
Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter
Show notes
00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Curious is interesting because of course you can
describe your mindset as a user of Muse, but it could also apply to the
software itself. And I do think there’s an element of Muse is a little
bit weird. It’s a little bit different, it’s a newcomer, and it takes
an approach that no other app has really taken before.
00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for
thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s
about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins,
joined today by Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Mark.
00:00:36 - Speaker 1: Adam, so exciting times for you?
00:00:39 - Speaker 2: It is. I’m expecting a baby very soon.
00:00:42 - Speaker 1: Congrats.
00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And while there’s many things that make pregnancy
its own journey both emotional and physical, I will say that one of the
big challenges and one that’s emotionally fraught is picking a name.
And I was familiar with this from picking names for products, companies,
I don’t know, software libraries, but something that is going to affect
another human whose opinion you cannot consult on it for literally the
rest of their life. Oh, it feels like a lot of responsibility.
00:01:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I bet.
00:01:11 - Speaker 2: And maybe that also connects to our topic today,
which is brand.
00:01:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, brand is not necessarily the native
territory for you and me. We grew up in the engineering and product
areas mostly, but we’ve been, especially you have been getting into
this, I think more as we’ve gone to start this business. So where are
you at in your journey on brands?
00:01:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s been a long journey. I
definitely started from maybe a place of assuming brand was, I don’t
know, a logo or something and not the hard or important part of a
business.
And one of the things that turned me around a bit on that or opened my
eyes, I guess, to the importance and potential power of brand was
reading history, as always, that’s something that gives a lot of
context for me.
There’s a book here called Brand New and it essentially walks through
some historical examples, including the company that was the first real
department store in the United States, or some more recent history like
Dell. The story that really struck me, I think was Heinz, which nowadays
has a very strong brand for ketchup. They got started at the time when,
and hopefully I can remember the story correctly, it’s been a number of
years since I read the book, but basically they got started at a time
when mass produced foods were first starting to become a thing that was
possible thanks to the US being connected by rail transit for the first
time. And apparently what had happened was Heinz was originally a
pickled foods company, and apparently this was a big problem to solve
because this was something that American families and traditionally the
women would end up being in a position where they would do a bunch of
essentially pickling of foods for the winter, and it was hugely labor
intensive and not a lot of fun and whatever, and at some point someone
figured out that, OK, you can send traveling salesmen around to sell
pickled foods. But the problem with that is you’re buying a product
that you won’t use for many months later, and so it would turn out that
a lot of times these were shady and they would open it up in the
wintertime and discover like sawdust inside. And so this was essentially
a problem to solve if you want to take advantage of this potential at
scale food business. But how do you build some trust in the same way
that you would have trust with your local merchant where if they sell
you something bad, you can go back and complain to them. And I guess
Heinz was one of the pioneers here of thinking, well, I’m just going to
literally put my name on the label in a very not only a name that’s
always kind of the same, but a very recognizable typeface or logo or
logo mark, and I’ll put that on there and I’ll work really hard to
make sure the quality is high and build a reputation and connect that to
the name and the logo and even the shape of the jar, and that was
immensely successful and built the food empire that exists today, and
now of course that’s totally standard practice, but at the time that
was a huge innovation. And so thinking of brand as a technology, you use
the term social technology sometimes. I don’t know if this would fall
into that category, but that was an unlocking thing. And of course mass
produced food, while we have some negative associations with that health
wise nowadays, it was a huge unlocker for basically low cost food and
more people being able to have full and healthy diets, um, which is, you
know, for most of human history, getting enough food has been one of the
primary concerns for most humans. So yeah, that historical context
helped me think, oh, OK, maybe it’s not just kind of a logo.
00:04:30 - Speaker 1: Right, there are actually a lot of good and
important reasons to have strong brands that ultimately will benefit the
users and consumers.
00:04:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, now, of course, I like to dig in on the kind
of what’s that core thing, what is a brand ultimately? Is it a logo, is
it a name, would be more like a reputation, like we’re describing with
Heinz, how do you think about that?
00:04:50 - Speaker 1: I guess I tended to come at it from the
reputation, character, voice, personality, angle, in part because I’m
partial to these small giant type businesses where they often lean on
that aspect of it a lot. But I understand there’s also the aspect of
color and fonts and logos and names, and I’m just not as familiar with
that, so I have more to learn there, but I’ve always been fascinated by
the character side of it.
00:05:11 - Speaker 2: Hm. Yeah, I think for me at least that is the
heart of it looking past the surface, you know, saying that a brand is a
logo is kind of like saying writing software is typing on a keyboard.
It’s like there’s some literal sense in which that is true, but it
really misses the essence or what’s at the heart of it.
Yeah, I think it was one of Richard Branson’s books. So this is a
fellow that’s very good at his own personal brand, kind of flamboyant
Playboy style personal brand, as well as his sort of business
conglomerate, which is Virgin, and he talks about brands as being a
communication on what a person can expect from your product or service.
Hm, yeah, I like that. And one example he uses, that’s obviously a very
strong brand is Pixar. Pixar makes a certain kind of movie, and I think
that brand is so strong and so well known that if I say to you, hey
Mark, there’s a new Pixar movie out, you want to catch it with me, you
don’t need to know anything about the movie, even what it’s called,
but you instantly have a picture in your mind of what you can expect,
and maybe that thing is something you’re in the mood for, not in the
mood for, but you know what you can expect, and that’s the power of
brand.
00:06:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you can see how that would help both in
the classic marketing sense of it gets people excited or interested or
aware of what you’re doing, but also in the more tactical sense of
addressing the information asymmetry, you’re going to buy some ketchup,
like you need to know that it’s going to be actually be there and be of
high quality and not going to make you sick.
And that’s something that people encounter all the time, especially
with our very global and distributed commerce now, like you need to buy
a pair of running shorts. You can expect that if you buy it from Nike,
it probably has some property, it’s probably pretty well made and it’s
gonna fit well and things like that, where it’s not necessarily the
case for the default pair of shorts that you buy online.
00:06:54 - Speaker 2: And Nike is an interesting example and certainly
often listed as, you know, textbook case of extremely strong and well
executed brand over the course of many decades, and part of that is that
Nike swoop and the name, which are both good and somehow seem to capture
some things about being a runner or an athlete or, you know, who their
target customer is. But more than that, I think it’s also what they
stand for, so. Yes, Nike presumably stands for quality athletic goods,
but it’s really that just do it message and the imagery that they have
used consistently over the years that says it’s about celebrating human
athleticism and that individuals can strive. be their best self
physically. So for a certain kind of person, say you’re a runner and
you enjoy that process of pushing yourself to achieve more physically
and that incredible feeling of pushing past your own boundaries and what
that can mean for you personally, and you see this imagery that
resonates with you and you think, OK, this company stands for something
that I personally believe in or has been meaningful in my life.
00:08:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this comes back to the idea of aspirational
marketing, which I think we’ve talked about before and it’s actually
pretty, I think, effective and resonant in the tools for thought space.
People want a combination of permission, vision, architecture, name
around how you think better and have better thoughts, and the tools for
thought movement, I think, has successfully tapped into that. So it kind
of seems like it shouldn’t be that big of a deal just to say you can do
it, but actually it is a big deal, and there’s a lot that goes around
that to make it effective for people in their minds.
00:08:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, coming to digital products, do you
think there’s particular products that have a brand that either speaks
to you or just is really effective at communicating what people can
expect or a particular vibe?
00:08:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I can give you a few examples. There’s
perhaps the most obvious suspect of the high-end premium brands, stuff
like Apple, and I don’t think we need to elaborate on that too much,
but I think that is an effective brand for me. Another one would be,
again, the small giants, so I think 37 Signals would be the classic in
that space, company that’s very vocal and frankly kind of loud, but
they’re also very clear and they stand for something. And if that’s
something that you also believe in, that’s a very effective brand for
you. And if you’re not, it kind of correctly repels you away. And you
shouldn’t partake in their products.
00:09:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe being a bit polarizing is a desirable
quality in a brand because it lets you know it’s a beacon for those who
are drawn to that message or that set of values or that character, and
it repels those who are not interested in that, and that’s actually
what you want for business.
00:09:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah. Another category might be these brands that
are extremely direct. So Duck Duck Go, I would put in that bucket. It’s
like search that’s private. Tar snap is another one that I love in that
space. I think their tagline is backups for the truly paranoid. And
unless you fit in a very specific niche, that product doesn’t make any
sense to you, but if you are in the niche, it makes total sense and
it’s very appealing.
00:09:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s the ideal thing is that the brand
conveys either on your first encounter of it or more just anything that
you come across if you have consistency in the materials that you’re
presenting, that should, for the target prospect for the right kind of
person, they say this resonates with me. I want to learn more. Yeah.
00:10:08 - Speaker 1: What about you? What brands come to mind?
00:10:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I was thinking about this question, one
that came to mind was slack, and I think one of the places they managed
to be really effective is in projecting a playfulness.
And that is really what maybe sets it apart from all the group chat that
came before and in general from work and productivity products.
Maybe this has actually become more commonplace since they have come on
the scene. Maybe Mailchimp has a similar thing, a little bit of
reverence and fun, but for something as practical as an enterprise
communication product.
And you just associate with that, OK, you need it, but it’s not really
gonna be particularly fun, and slack really turns out on its head and
makes your work communication into something fun, a little silly at
times, playful, taps into some of those consumer social media dopamine
hits, which, you know, you can debate the merit of that, but again, it
presents a very differentiated and strong character relative to other
products that solve the same problem. And I was contrasting that to
there’s plenty of other products that I think do not have a particular
strong brand in the sense we’re talking about.
One that comes to mind for me is Trello, and I really like Trello. I
think it’s a great product, it’s fast, it’s reliable. I’ve been
using it for many, many years for all kinds of business ventures and
personal projects, but even so, if you ask me, and I don’t know,
they’ve got a pretty good name and they’ve got like a cute mascot, but
if you ask me what does Trello stand for, I would just kind of think, I
don’t know, being organized, I guess. So it’s just a product that
solves a problem, and that’s fine. I don’t think every single company
and every single product needs to have some strong mission or some
strong character, but it’s interesting to contrast those two.
So then coming to the muse brand, vibe, character, whatever you want to
call that, I was reminded of when you and I were first brainstorming
this a bit along with our other colleagues back when we were getting
started with the business, and we sort of looked through some different
products that we thought had good brands, and in particular characters
that maybe fit a little bit or were similar to what we wanted. One that
stuck in my mind is a Go player. Sort of a Go program slash assistant
just for desktop computers called Sabaki and their website is very
simple. It just says, you know, it’s an elegant Go board and an SGF
editor, which I guess if you’re a Go player, maybe you know what that
means for a more civilized age, right? So they’re telling you
practically what it is that it’s this editor and, you know, game board,
but they have a couple of words in there like elegant and civilized.
There’s a Star Wars reference in there as well. And then visually, you
know, they show a screenshot of the product, that’s the main thing you
see. But there’s sort of this mood imagery on the side, which they have
a wood table with some, I guess these little clay or wood jars that
contain go pieces. So it’s obviously relevant to the product, but it’s
also something that just gives a vibe, right? It’s a little bit relaxed
and elegant. And there’s a little bit of humanity to it, and it’s a
small thing, but to me that really makes a big difference from the, you
can imagine a version of this that was slightly more practical. You take
away those little mood images and you just have the screenshot, you take
away some of the adjectives there, like elegant and civilized, and you
can see what it is, and maybe people would still want to buy it, but it
doesn’t really convey a character, right? If you had to characterize
the muse character and the brand vibe based on either what we thought we
were gonna make it back then, or maybe what you think it has evolved
into today, what are some words that come to mind?
00:13:44 - Speaker 1: I think thoughtful is a big one. You people are
spending a lot of time in use thinking and striving to come up with
better ideas. I think high quality as well, in the sense of it’s a tool
that you spend a lot of time with, and your hands are on it constantly,
and you want the sense that it feels good while you’re working with it.
00:14:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, those two are on my list. Two others that I
often reach for, one is serene, and we sometimes use calm or something
like that, but to me this is in contrast with the, I would call it
franticness of a lot of digital products of the digital age, maybe, you
know, social media is a good punching bag there, but In general, I feel
like software products, even productivity tools are very often trying to
grab your attention and being pretty demanding with what they want you
to do and calls to action, and there’s a million things and pop up
dialogues and do this, do that, and one thing I think we always try to
do is be more relaxed, calm, serene, and we try to convey. That through
websites, through any materials we do, but then in the product, right,
that’s something like we actually had this come up on the team just
today. There’s a situation, a rare situation where there’s a certain
circumstance that an easy thing to do or an obvious thing to do would be
to pop up a dialogue, but that feels very kind of demanding and I don’t
know. That’s the sort of thing, at least I’m against, and I wanna see
how far we can get at the moment. There is nothing you can do inside
music that will pop up a dialogue that demands your attention, if you
don’t specifically ask for it, and I wanna see how long we can keep it
that way.
Nice, yeah. Now the one that’s on my list is Curious, and probably it
helps, you know, I think there’s some degree to which the character of
your company comes from the character of the people who started it. You
know, we are all curious people, so some of that is just who we are.
But I think it also fits with, you know, you have this tool that is
designed to help you learn about the world, solve problems. To explore,
to understand something and curiosity, I think we even mentioned this on
the last episode there talking about how to spot good ideas and how to
have good ideas. The curiosity is upstream of having good ideas, and so
that naturally fits with kind of the purpose of our product, and
additionally, we try to, through other means, live that. A good example
of this is that we have our product newsletter that goes out once a
month, and it’s mostly stuff about what we’ve been working on and
what’s new in the product, but I always try to include at least one or
two small sections. It’s an interesting book we’ve read recently, or a
podcast that we like or an interesting new tool, and that just kind of
fits with this sense that it’s about more than a laser focus on the
thing that’s right in front of you. It’s a willingness to see the
wider world and just be open to possibility and have an open mindset.
00:16:30 - Speaker 1: Curious is interesting because of course you can
describe your mindset as a user of Muse, but it could also apply to the
software itself. And I do think there’s an element of Muse is a little
bit weird. It’s a little bit different. It’s a newcomer, and it takes
an approach that no other app has really taken before. And I think that
kind of pervades the product, the marketing, like we don’t quite do
stuff exactly like other people do, and a lot of our users, I think,
appreciate that.
00:16:55 - Speaker 2: Hm, yeah, exactly. Maybe the product itself walks
its own path, and that in turn, maybe attracts people who are also
willing to take that on the road, take the road less traveled, you might
say.
Yeah. Now when it comes to the practical elements of what is a brand,
I’ve talked about the vibe or the character, but what in practice are
the pieces that make a brand.
Once I discovered or read about this history and started to look closer
and realized that a lot of the products that I like or companies I
respect the most are ones also with strong brands, and then that leads
into, OK, what actually is a brand, not in the sense of character, but
in the sense of what are the pieces.
And we touched briefly on the kind of the visual element there, and we
can speak to that a little bit, but I think the really big one, or even
a almost the starting place of everything else is name.
Hm yeah, names are so tough. Names are important and challenge to get
right and not something you want to change too often if you didn’t get
it right.
The one place I found, once I got curious enough about what makes a
brand, I wanted to dig in a little bit on the practicalities of it,
looked around for books to learn more about that. And there’s a few
different ones, but I think one of the seminal ones for me is, I think
it’s a pretty old book, might be from the 70s or 80s, called the 22
Immutable Laws of Branding. And here it’s talking about pretty old
school stuff, but they make this list right from the start of what the
author believes are great brands, and that’s Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Jello,
Band-Aid, Rolex, BMW, FedEx, Nintendo, Tide, Heinz is in there, Visa.
And it’s notable that for many of these examples, I’m not a customer
and never have been, but I instantly know the company, I know what they
sell, I know what it’s going to look and feel like, and in many cases I
have a sense already of character, what kind of person would buy
products from this company, for example.
00:18:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and apparently those have stood for several
decades anyways.
00:18:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly so. And this book kind of rattles
off a lot of the, it’s called the practical mechanics, which include
the name side of it. And for example, the author makes the point that
you want something short and punchy, it’s memorable, and it needs to be
in this kind of middle ground between not too generic, but also not too
weird.
So he gives some good bad examples. So a good name from his point of
view for laundry detergent is tied. A bad name would be the Procter and
Gamble home laundry detergent. Now, of course, you can make a brand on
maybe not a great name. I think a good name makes it easier for people
to remember you, makes it easier to brand things, but ultimately you can
attach a company reputation and a vibe and a character to any name you
choose, but certainly something like an abbreviation is not great.
Some other points this book makes is that the brand is not the name of
the company, it’s the name of the product, and it’s really important,
and the only one that really cares about the name of your company is
your team, and that’s fine, and you know, you do want your team to be
motivated, but ultimately you should be really thinking about customers
and how your brand is filling a space in their mind, and a test for this
almost linguistically is People use it as a noun or a verb, he says,
basically it’s what’s in the box. You say, I’ll have a Coke. You
don’t say, I’ll have a flavored beverage from the Coke company, right?
You say, I’m going to drive a BMW. I say, let’s play a Nintendo, or
you can do the Verb version, which I think maybe is more common a little
bit in the tech world, which is, yeah, I’m going to Google it or FedEx
me that document. So that’s a brand.
00:20:28 - Speaker 1: So what would be some examples of getting this
wrong and confusing the product of the company?
00:20:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so there’s a few examples of this.
One of the most notable ones that unfortunately is pretty prevalent in
the tech world, I think, is something where you put the company name and
then the product name after. So in the Microsoft suite you’ve got
Microsoft Word, and this is actually a clumsy name because you can say
Word with a capital W by itself, and many people will know what that
means, but it’s a Little too generic, so you kind of need to prefix it.
Well, it’s MS Word or Microsoft Word, but now you sort of have two
things because there’s Microsoft, a company which has its own identity,
and then there’s this piece of software. And the interesting thing
there is a contrast to another product in the same exact suite, which is
Excel.
Excel is a great brand name because Excel is what you buy in the box
back in the days when you bought software in boxes. Now it’s, I don’t
know what you download or whatever, and you say I’m going to use Excel,
or let me put that in Excel, or let me check my Excel spreadsheet, so
that does not have any of that confusion.
I think Google’s also quite an offender here.
Google Docs is one of the most awkward product names of all time. In my
point of view, it’s hard to use in a, let me put that in my Google Doc,
I guess, my Google Docs doc. It’s just, yeah, it’s terrible. But
Google, as the search, let me Google that and I’ll look up a Google
search, that works great. Yeah.
And notably also Gmail, Gmail’s a perfectly good brand, and yes, Google
is in there, that G is in there, but it sort of is, you don’t have that
confusion of like pasting these two things together. Gmail is its own
brand that stands essentially alone.
00:22:10 - Speaker 1: OK, that’s interesting. So naming the thing
that’s in the box and not the company. What are some of the other
things in this book that were most surprising or interesting to you?
00:22:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, another point that this book makes is
talking about how you want to think of owning a piece of mental real
estate with your brand, and that you stand for one thing, and that that
thing should be pretty simple. So, it gives the example of FedEx.
So FedEx stands for overnight.
And apparently this was actually kind of a pivot for them. They used to
be more of a general purpose mail provider, they competed with UPS and
the post office and so on, on that basis, and their big breakthrough
was, and actually there’s a great book, I have to look up the name of
that for the show notes, which is kind of an autobiography by one of the
FedEx founders of the early days of that.
They basically made a kind of pivot into overnight as their focus and
something where when you think of FedEx, you think of getting something
to someone reliably really fast, like the next day.
Yep. And that’s connected to their logo and their colors, and even that
distinctive. The envelope that you buy to put stuff in and then you even
get the reverse of that which is when something comes in a FedEx
envelope they oh this is important so that shows you right there a
powerful brand because they don’t just stand for male or male that’s
efficient or something like that. They stand for something really
specific and differentiated.
And this points to a mistake that’s easy to make once you have a strong
brand as you think, well, great, let’s put that brand name on a similar
product, essentially expand into a new space and we can use the
reputation on that new product, but you can actually destroy your
reputation. If you move into a space that doesn’t feel related, and you
can find yourself putting a name that owns, for example, in the case of
FedEx, owns overnight, and you put it on something else that just
confuses it and now you’ve essentially destroyed that real estate in
the customer’s mind.
00:24:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the FedEx example is interesting because I
think that brand has been very effective and it’s premium, it’s super
fast, it’s reliable, it’s high value, and the flip side of that is you
expect as a sender to really pay for it.
So whenever I think, you know, I got a mail, uh, I don’t know, you
know, t-shirt, if I’m gonna send a FedEx, it’s gonna be like $72 or
something, you know, and so I’m always hesitant to do that, whereas if
I’m sending a really important piece of paperwork, OK, sure, I’d be
willing to pay something like that.
But then they have now it’s like FedEx Ground and FedEx 2 day air and 3
day air and FedEx fast, you know, it’s kind of a whole thing, so it’s
a little bit confusing to me.
00:24:38 - Speaker 2: So that’s names, and that can bring us to the
visual or aesthetic side of the brand, and there’s a bunch of elements
to that.
The logo, of course, is a big one, and so here that can be your name,
typeset in a particular way, is a good way to go, may also be a little
mark that could be either paired with the name or use standalone.
And then we’re in the iOS world where your app icon is essentially your
most important logo, and that has some slightly different properties
from a logo that you would put on a sticker or a t-shirt or a business
card, but it is extremely important in terms of it’s the first thing
people see every single time they run your software.
00:25:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this area reminds me a lot of this
branding stuff is a combination of memetic and emotive. So by that I
mean, emotive is like how it makes you feel, of course, a big part of
the brand is people aspire to or want to feel a certain way and a well
executed brand can do that. But also, especially these days, the memetic
aspect is very important, you know, how does it help you remember, cut
through the noise, share with your friends, get transmitted, go viral,
the name, the image, the fun, they all play a big role in that.
00:25:44 - Speaker 2: Exactly, and I was thinking of some examples from
the tech world and notion comes to mind in terms of they have this kind
of black and white illustration style that they use throughout and even
their team members will often have a, I don’t know if they have an
illustrator on staff whose job is just to draw people in this particular
style, but it’s a very notable style. It’s not a logo. a name, but it
is this visual style that you come to associate with and the black and
white, it invokes kind of, yeah, printed paper or maybe a notebook or
something like that and fits with their generally pretty kind of
pragmatic but chill, but you know, nicely designed but not overdone,
very different from the highly richly saturated colors of slack, for
example.
And then maybe to take a third example, which is quite different from
those two would be Craigslist, which I would describe as brutalist HTML.
And some of it may evolved organically in the sense of it’s just an old
site, and when it was originally made, it was not put through the kind
of let’s do a classic visual design past, but now it’s very much part
of their brand. It says to you, this site is no nonsense, it’s
practical, it’s just the basics, it doesn’t try to be something fancy
or impress you needlessly, it just really is focused on this very simple
way to list and look up classifieds.
00:27:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think a flip side of that, perhaps the
other end of the spectrum is brands that do a lot of proof of work
around some quality that they want to show. So this would be very well
designed websites that gives the viewer a sense that there’s basically
a higher probability that the product itself is going to be well
designed if you have a well designed website. Of course, the correlation
isn’t perfect, but if you come to a very well executed website, you
have more confidence via this proof of work mechanism that what’s
underneath is going to be good too.
00:27:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, what’s the old saying, you can judge a book
by its cover. Yeah, yeah, so that’s logo and illustration and name, but
also something like the typefaces you use throughout all your material
on your website and your product and your advertising, you may have a
single font family or a set of font families that hang. and if you use
those consistently over time, I think something like the typeface Apple
has used for many years in its advertising, you don’t even need to see
that little apple with the bite taken out of it. You can just see the
typeset text and you already know it’s an apple. It’s something Apple
related.
And certainly for physical products, packaging is absolutely huge, and
there’s a lot of folks who are very skilled at packaging design.
I actually quite enjoy going through, for example, packaging design on
Drribble or 99 designs or whatever.
You can scroll through the portfolios of these folks in there, they need
to work within the constraints of the physical world, you know, if it’s
a can for a Beer or soda or something, they need to work with that
cylinder shape and there’s practical things that need to be put on the
can, but people get very, very creative with that and conveying these
ideas and having a visual brand where all the elements hang together
across something like a physical package, a website, a digital product
that work within their medium and what’s needed for each of these
different settings, but also all hang together, all identifiably part of
the same universe of stuff.
And for me, a great visual brand is one where in the end, it feels a bit
like a flag to rally behind. Or sometimes I think of it as sort of a peg
to hang your feelings about the brand on.
So if the visual brand is strong, then that means that love it or hate
it, it’s easy to attach those feelings and recognize right away,
particularly when there’s a new product or even something like
something coming out of their Twitter account or any communication that
you know right away who it’s coming from and what their character is,
and you draw up those feelings you may have about the brand. So I think
in the end with these elements together, the right name, strong visual
brand that’s conveyed throughout a set of values or a vibe that it
stands for that makes sense within the product and the mission of the
company and the product but also has maybe something a little more
expansive, something like curiosity in relation to a tool for Thought as
an example.
And in the end, I think all of that can add up to hopefully if you do a
right kind of almost a tribal affiliation because I think for many
people when they make product purchases, they’re thinking not just does
this solve my problem, but they are also thinking, what does this
product say about me as a person? Are the people who make it, and the
other people who buy it, are they part of my tribe? Do they share values
with me, and then what will people think when I purchase this? So, in
the Nike example we were using earlier, maybe if you feel like, OK, the
people that purchase these products are people who care about personal
athleticism and trying to push yourself to reach higher heights, and I
want to be seen as a person like that as well. So, therefore, I wanna
purchase these products.
00:30:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s a big one. It’s such a
powerful force, a desire for tribal affiliation. I think both be
affirming in the sense of, OK, I am an athlete, so I do want to buy from
this brand, but it can also be aspirational. OK, New Year’s resolution,
getting off the couch, let’s make sure I have the right vibe around me
in terms of my clothing.
00:30:51 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. One of the examples, I think
that was from one of the earlier books I mentioned that I found quite
remarkable was Harley Davidson, I guess they’re a motorcycle company.
Although again, another good example of something where I’ve never
ridden a motorcycle, I’ve certainly never purchased one, and
nevertheless, that name, Harley Davidson, evokes a pretty strong vibe in
my mind. I feel like I know what that stands for, for sure, which says a
lot about their effectiveness as a brand.
Part of what they’re saying, the tribal affiliation or the what kind of
person does this make me or as you were just saying, what do I aspire to
be, and for them it’s very much I think about a kind of masculine but
independent, a little bit rebellious, you’re out on your own, you’re
taking some risks, you’re kind of dangerous.
And so it may be that you’re drawn to that because, in fact, you are
those things, but it could be that you want to be those things. You want
to push yourself to be those things or you aspire to be those things, or
you see something laudable in that, and buying, maybe not the
motorcycle, but maybe the jacket or the shirt, or whatever other product
that the company is selling will somehow help you make that come true or
grow into that person you want to be.
Yep. So we said that Muse today stands for thoughtfulness and maybe it’s
a little serene and a little curious. What do you think in the future
would be an expansion or an addition to that set of values?
00:32:13 - Speaker 1: Well, there’s a lot more that I want us to do
around developing and articulating the character of Muse, this
personality small giants idea, and we’ve, I think, done some of that
with the podcast, but there’s a lot more to do with writing and video.
But I think an interesting fulcrum for us over the next year or so is
going to be the question of privacy. We came into Muse with this
hypothesis that privacy is really important and perhaps we would even
elevate it in terms of our brand. And that’s kind of the path we’re
pursuing now because right now it’s a single player app, it’s a single
device app and so all of your data is private.
But as we go to expand Muse to sync across multiple devices and perhaps
even collaborate across users, that becomes a much bigger question.
There’s a question of can we implement something like that in the end
encrypted way. There’s a question of do users value that if we had this
as part of our brand, would actually resonate? Would that be something
that people aspire to participate in? And there’s a question of is that
even legal to do anymore at some point. So that’s a big question mark,
I think for us in our brand. I could see us going quite deliberately in
that direction, perhaps not as much as that duck.go, but making it a big
piece of what we’re about. And I can also see us going more in the
standard enterpriseas direction where our data is in the cloud. So I
think that’s a big question mark for us.
00:33:27 - Speaker 2: From the tone of your voice there, we can see
which uh outcome you would be happiest with. Yeah, absolutely it is. I
think it’s something we personally value privacy and particularly in
connection with creativity and tool for thought because your thoughts
are such an early raw, intimate thing.
It’s something we want to just see more of in the technology world is
greater attention paid to privacy and protecting the user’s content.
And yet, there are huge technology challenges here. We don’t even know,
as you said, what’s actually going to be possible, and if that comes
into conflict with other more important things that are just more
important to our customers, we need to listen to that and we can sit
here and say, well, we value this thing as people, but if that is just
not achievable in a practical way with the business, then we can’t say
that’s part of our brand.
So that’s part of what makes it an open question to generally hard and
challenging problem.
I think one I would be inclined to list is one of my, I guess, goals for
the company generally is to help people be more thoughtful, so it’s not
just that our brand or vibe or the product’s vibe or the product’s
character is one of thoughtfulness, but then in fact it will help those
that are already thoughtful or aspire to be to move more in that
direction or to embrace that fully.
And so one maybe expansion or future direction I might see that as We do
go to say more like team collaboration features, that that’s something
that we could bring along for the ride that I think thoughtfulness for
an individual and bringing thoughtfulness to a team kind of collectively
is bringing that into say a team culture of let’s make decisions and
considered and thoughtful ways. I think that sort of value or approach
is fairly common among designers. Maybe also among certain categories of
more leadership and managerial people, but maybe is not a kind of
necessarily as broad across a given team. And so, is there a future
where somehow bringing news into your team’s work flows when it’s some
future time, when we have some as yet undefined features around that, is
there a way that it actually allows your team collectively to be more
thoughtful or move in that direction? I think that’s a big challenge,
but that’s all the more reason to build a strong brand around it first
in the easier single player space.
00:35:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is actually giving me another idea,
maybe this is too diffuse, but I think there’s this sense of agency
that we could really emphasize and use.
So it’s traditional software, especially these days, it’s like all
your data is locked up, yet the company’s hosting it can see all of it.
You have no ability to really manipulate or control your software and
you’re part of a big org, you know, you’re part of this enterprise
software org and you’re just a data point in that.
The model that I’m interested from use is more of the.
Individual agency network of collaborators model where you have your
stuff, it’s your stuff. Also you have some elective collaborations with
other individuals, other groups, and perhaps other organizations, but
the individual is kind of the primary node, and I think that’s too
abstract and diffuse to bring that into a brand as is, but I feel like
there’s something there around software that brings the power back, the
agency back to the individual creative user.
00:36:36 - Speaker 2: Mm. It reminds me a bit of the, maybe the
consumers. of IT or they talk about bringing your own device, which was
in the, I don’t know what ancient times, 15 years ago, 20 years ago,
whatever, particularly in the larger the company was, the more you were
issued equipment to use, you know, your laptop came from the company,
certainly your BlackBerry company issued and very locked down, right?
There’s all these IT administrator controls, you know, there’s a VPN
you have to log in just to get access to anything.
And what that meant was that these products were good from the
perspective of the administrative legibility side of things.
But they really weren’t kind of optimized for call user experience, but
just the happiness and productivity of the individuals use them, and
then on comes things like the iPhone and Gmail, whatever really raises
the bar on what people can expect, and then suddenly by comparison,
their clunky kind of company issued stuff is just so far below, and they
just don’t want to do that, and eventually there’s have to be This
adaptation, and now it’s even to the point where, at least for me, like
a company issued phone, that seems crazy. The phone is such a personal
device and each person has strong feelings about which one exactly that
they want, and certainly the idea of not having total control over my
device to set the preferences as I like feels very weird to me, and I
think that’s become quite common. So yeah, is there a version of that
for productivity and collaboration tools where there’s less of the IT
administrator decides exactly what’s best for the user, and more that
you have the creators who are part of this collective, that is the
company or the project team, they can bring their tools and their
practices and make their own choices to this larger whole rather than
the top down process. Yeah, nice. But yeah, you’re right, how that gets
boiled down to a, you know, one or two word brand character thing, well,
I guess that’s an evolution that happens over time. Yeah. Well,
certainly I think brand development is like product development, as much
discovery over time, not a sitting down upfront and figuring it all out,
but a process of developing that. It’s a combination of your personal
characters on the team, it’s a combination of what the product is today
and what you aspire for it to be, and then it’s Also the users, the
customers, and the people, particularly early on, who come in with their
own set of values and ideas and affiliations, and that’s something that
evolves, develops, grows over time. So looking back on this discussion
maybe in a couple of years and seeing how the Muse brand has grown and
developed in that time. Right on. If any of our listeners out there have
feedback, please feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter, or
you can send an email to [email protected]. We always love to hear your
comments and ideas for future episodes. Thanks for the chat, Mark. See
you next time. Thanks, Adam.
0 min

About Metamuse

From the publisher's feed

Tools for thought, product design, and how to have good ideas.

Share Metamuse

Sign up to save your podcasts

Metamuse

Metamuse episodes

About Metamuse