Visiting Partner @ycombinator, helping founders build iconic startups. Swiss designer, MIT engineer, founder Cron (acq by Notion). I run through forests.
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Life update: I'm joining @ycombinator as Visiting Partner 🤩
Software ate the world, and now AI is eating software — the founders building in this shift will redefine how we compute, work, and live.
In my new role, I'm excited to find those founders and help them build the iconic startups of this generation. YC backed me when I founded Cron Inc. in 2019, and I'm grateful to come full circle and pay it forward.
I'll start reading applications in October, interviewing founders in November, and then pack my battered suitcase in January for the W26 batch 🔥
Follow along here & see you in SF!
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2022 redesign of Swiss passport retains iconic red color on the outside and now has maps inside 🤩
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Every time I come across this (rare) UX pattern, I smile.
The "Only" option for a list of checkboxes (where radios don't apply) is genius.
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When an app is loading & you use a custom loading indicator, users think the app is slow—showing a standard spinny, they blame their phone.
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Worst h1 of a startup landing page in a while?
we’ve been building in silence
reimagining what productivity should feel like
today, we’re opening the waitlist for slane.
your new intelligent workspace for teams and founders
projects, ai workflows, and clarity.
→ slane.app
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Super excited to introduce: Notion Calendar
It's the best way to manage, organize, and prioritize your time across work and life.
But why build a better calendar?
Time is arguably our most precious resource. To reimagine how we interact with time, I founded Cron in 2019. Since then, we've built a beloved product for people to better be in control of their time.
Ever since Cron joined Notion, we've been exploring how to bring Calendar to Notion and built deep integrations between the two apps. Calendar is where you manage your time, and Notion is where you manage your information.
Now, you can add richer context to each event with Notion pages, and display key dates or milestones, directly from your Notion databases. Our vision with Notion Calendar is to bring the digital time layer into all aspects of Notion -- notes, projects, tasks, and more.
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Today is my last day @NotionHQ 🤍
In 2019, I founded Cron Inc. to build a beautiful tool that helps people make the most of their time. Cron Calendar quickly became beloved for its craft — and slotted into Notion like a missing Lego piece.
Together, we grew Notion into a multi-product company, brought Calendar to millions, and laid the foundation for launches like Mail and AI Meeting Notes. More recently, I had the privilege of supporting designers across the org.
Along the way, I worked with some of the most talented, thoughtful people. Grateful to my teammates, partners, and friends who made this journey unforgettable and now carry the torch forward. Merci.
While it's bittersweet to move on, I'm beyond excited for what's next! More on that after the weekend 👀
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Hot take 🌶️
Figma Sites → @framer competitor
Figma Make → @lovable competitor
Figma Buzz → @canva competitor
Figma Draw → @Illustrator competitor
#Config2025 on a roll today!
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Today, we're launching calendar.cron.com — bringing the native-like @Cron experience to the web.
And to pull it off, we went as far as helping to improve Apple's browser engine @WebKit back in 2020:
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Anyone know what Apple Interface Designers use these days to “prototype” these types of interactions/effects?
Assuming (other than fairy dust) Metal shaders directly, in little Swift prototypes. But curious what folks are happy to share or know.
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We’ve reached peak Slack.
Doesn’t make sense for a startup team of 3. Doesn’t work anymore for a company of 300.
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Safari now forcing me to do three taps to close one tab surprisingly is one of my biggest UX annoyances of iOS 26.
iOS 18 vs. 26:
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Talking about COLORS — use the words Hue, Tint, Shade, and Tone correctly with this little cheat sheet: figma.com/community/file/953…
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One of the most undervalued skills in product design is <Dialog> and <Toast> design.
It's how your product talks to your users — how it interrupts, guides, and informs them.
Sweat your dialogs and toasts.
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I'm not the only designer that every so often feels the urge to design a dense data dashboard like edex-ui, am I?
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Wanted it to look like something from 1950s or 2050, but not from today. Bauhaus or future.
Worked with the talented @jasonyuan on this.
The firey Cron orange was sampled from Müller-Brockmann's Raster Systeme book cover.
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To all Creatives, Technologists, and Founders building their life's work —
Wanted to share a sneak peek where @NotionCalendar is headed in 2025 🔥🔥, and as builders ourselves, hear your early feedback ↓
Get Notion Calendar today at notion.com/calendar
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Today, I'm excited to announce @Cron, the company I've founded almost two years ago.
As part of the @ycombinator winter 2020 batch, I set out to build the next-generation calendar for professionals and teams. I know ... a Swiss person obsessed with time, hah!
↓
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Good design is how it's built.
Honored to be recognized for the Best Design in a Calendar App for 2022 by @ProductHunt
producthunt.com/stories/7-be…
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Good, hierarchical, and clean in-app settings are an under appreciated piece of UI.
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No big launch without some hiccups! 😂
Running into Google Auth rate limits. Not ideal. But I guess “good” launch day problem to have.
Please keep trying to sign in, should smooth over, over the course of the day.
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Oh hey, designers have to be opinionated builders with taste again, now that the middle-of-the-road screens draw themselves: usegalileo.ai/
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If you apply to the YC W26 batch, this email could be waiting in your inbox soon …
Sit down and put your mind to it. Writing the idea out is very clarifying. Zero downside, uncapped upside.
Hope to see you in SF in a few weeks — good luck!
YC is easily the best way to start a startup. Can't wait to read applications from brilliant founders — everyone is welcome, especially you.
Undecided whether to apply now? My DMs are open.
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Having gotten the insider view at how Notion is using Notion internally (🤯🤯🤯), I'd love get a peek at …
… how Slack uses Slack to build Slack.
… how Figma uses Figma to build Figma.
… how Retool uses Retool to build Retool.
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Designers are uniquely positioned to start the next generation of great companies.
Here's why:
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Best “PRDs” I’ve “written” were annotations in Figma files …
When possible, I like to start with spatial writing.
I just start typing about the problem without any real idea of where my thoughts will lead me...
Eventually I start dragging things around, grouping by theme, clustering questions/ideas/etc.
But this doesn't always work 👇
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"Real shots of digital interfaces" is underrated.
Taken by @moofeez with a mirrorless camera in a WeWork booth 🙃👌
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Exactly 0 people have been asking for Zoom Mail and Calendar?
Make something people want.
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Notion is a special place to work at.
If you’re curious what it might look like for you, hmu—or spread the word to friends that might be looking. Especially engineers, experienced PMs, designers, and data people.
We’re in the fortunate position to carefully be growing our team.
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I love all these new vertical consumer electronics.
Just set up my Arc Alarm Clock — analog hands (but digitally-set alarm), hefty feel, tactile knobs, and it wakes you up with a mechanical chime — the entire object is totally overengineered 🤯
Phone stays out of bedroom now.
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Demo of Notion in 2013 — the bones were there: piped.video/watch?v=IVl6tUSH…
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1M @NotionCalendar users! Just a couple days in, still rolling out …
Vastly exceeded our expectations — systems are scaling up to ensure smooth onboarding. Thank you for the great feedback & please keep it coming!
Meet Notion Calendar.
Beautifully designed. Fully integrated with your Notion workspace.
All of your commitments, now in one place.
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Some of these oldschool Mac UIs are so still so effective and delightful to use decades in that I want to kiss the Apple Human Interface design engineer that has invented them.
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For everyone traveling home over the holidays to see your loved ones …
… I wish you happy PC and printer debugging because you’re the “computer person.” 💙
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Creating at the early stage — you have two jobs:
Build product, talk to users.
Rinse and repeat. Taking this @ycombinator advice to heart, after the winter '20 batch, we continued to ship changelog upon changelog while talking to countless users. Today, we completed phase one:
Cron Calendar is officially AVAILABLE FOR EVERYONE!
Today (hotkey `T`) is … three years, four platforms, hundreds of features, and COUNTLESS conversations with users in the making.
No more waiting, and it’s free — cron.com/signup 🔥
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Startups should be pushing software design craft — it's a shame that the best interactions are decade-old Apple UIs, and the best UI design case studies come from open source projects.
Rewatching this incredible breakdown video 🤯🤯 The redesign of MuseScore 4 turns a powerful but clunky open source music notation software into a UI masterpiece:
piped.video/Qct6LKbneKQ?feature…
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I am still trying to figure out why exactly that Jony Ive interview in this moment seemed to have resonated the way it did.
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I love trains. Growing up, the logo of the Swiss Federal Railways has always been one of my favorite graphic designs.
It cleverly combines the Swiss cross with a double arrow, depicting direction and motion. The flag represents the railway company as one that belongs to the people and serves everyone. (1972, Hans Hartmann)
The design was visually "corrected" by tapering the flanks of the arrows on the inside by 1/8 and narrowing the beams of the cross by 1/12, borrowing tricks from typography. The revision softens the strict geometry to achieve a more lively form. (1978, Josef Müller-Brockman)
It is part of a flexible visual information system that includes pictograms, signs, platform numbers, and more. The typeface is Helvetica.
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At @NotionHQ, we help you build beautiful tools for your life's work. With the launch of Calendar earlier this year, we became a multi-product company. Since then, millions of users have started using @NotionCalendar as their daily driver.
Today, @ivanhzhao announced that we'll expand our connected workspace to another critical product: Mail. Email in many ways is your passport to all the services on the internet. We're reimagining how these products all seamlessly work together.
Kudos to the entire team!
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In a small SF studio Nanu Electrics is building the next Braun — beautifully crafted electronics like from the 50s.
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One of the things that’s drives me crazy is that people don’t call anymore. They text asking whether it’s ok to call.
I know many people prefer it and think that’s the polite way to do it, but I firmly come down on the other side. Just call!
Maybe the person picks up and you can cut a bunch of texting back and forth. And if one can’t pick up, can always silence the call, let it go to VM, call back, etc. Bring back the quick phone call.
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Stardust assembled in wondrous ways💫
One of the best things is seeing our older girl already being a loving big sister 🤍
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Perhaps my most fav video on the internet — and it took me months to re-find it (it's pulled from YouTube):
The creative process in action. Paul McCartney is noodling and has nothing. George Harrison yawning at 0:40 is hilarious — almost as if he's used to witnessing genius in front of his eyes. Paul keeps going.
Watching it almost feels like that quote from Michelangelo: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
Once Ringo Starr starts clapping at 1:33, wait for a few seconds, and The Beatles have their next hit single Get Back (1969).
It's rare, but I have witnessed similar moments standing in front of white boards or the like and it's quite amazing, nothing like it.
I’ve never seen anything like this on film before. Paul really has nothing at the 30 second mark—but 45 seconds later he’s got the makings of a hit single. nitter.app/DarthYavin/status/1464…
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I'm so excited to realize Cron's vision — which is dear to my heart — as part of Notion. I also can't wait to put my touches on Notion itself!
Thank you team, investors, users, friends & family that are part of this journey 🧡🖤
Caught a few of our new teammates on camera … 🤗
Big news from our team today! @Cron is joining Notion to help you organize your most important resource: time. notion.so/blog/notion-acquir…
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Totally. There was a period where Ben Silberman signed up for Pinterest once a day (iirc). The flow got a little better every 24h. And that compounds quickly. If you’re lucky to have a big top-of-funnel, honing that conversion is one of the highest leverage points.
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Whatever you're doing on my machine, @Microsoft, you're doing it wrong.
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Designers, start your own companies!
After advising 50+ consumer companies over the last year, the one thing that separates those who can execute and those who can't:
Having a full-time designer in the room at all times
I've met with countless companies that have raised millions—and even one that has raised billions—that do not even have a designer on payroll.
This makes product development broken:
1/ You simply cannot have constructive conversations about ideas without visualizing them in real-time
2/ Your experiments will frequently have inconclusive results because users cannot discover features or they misunderstand how they work
3/ There is no one who can galvanize the team with a vision of what the product could look and feel like
And to be abundantly clear: I'm not referring to visual UI or graphics. I'm talking about someone who can think through the fundamental building blocks of product comprehension—like navigation, interaction and copywriting—and is technically savvy enough to visualize those components in high resolution.
There can certainly be exceptions to not having a designer, like where the CEO is an exceptional visual thinker, but that does not scale beyond a small team.
At the end of day, products live and die in the pixels: it's what the users see and tap. And without someone shepherding that process, you are effectively wandering the desert blind.
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Heartbroken about Enrique's passing 💔
In 2011, I moved into this little house in Palo Alto that we came to call 'Blue Shala' — this is where I lived with Enrique and a couple other guys, just as he was starting Designer Fund and I had my first job in the Valley at Flipboard.
Those years were some of the most formative in my life: it's when I met my wife, Enrique met his wife, and our careers really started.
Enrique gave the gift of design to so many. He also encouraged designers to become founders — something that was life-changing for me and a mission that is dear to my heart.
He was an incredible human and when I saw him last a few months ago we mostly chatted about our experiences having become fathers around the same time. Sending my deepest condolences and strength to to his family.
His friend and partner Ben wrote a beautiful tribute: designerfund.com/page/Rememb…
Live the moment & tell the people you love, how much they mean to you, while you can.
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Don't say "bi-weekly", it's unclear. Better:
- "Twice a week", or
- "Once every two weeks".
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Two Figma tricks I use all the time when making compositions: video.cron.com/TdbMrT
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If you're designing productivity software — essentially for every UI element that can be acted on, add a ⋯ menu on hover, listing the actions.
Users don't try right-clicking anymore. We sort of lost this powerful paradigm gradually over the past decade. Time to embrace it.
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Craft in software is less a pretty landing page or cute loading animation.
It's crafting a fast, cohesive app that thoroughly considers all workflows and edge cases — and the way software converses with its user is through <Dialog> and <Toast>
See more: piped.video/watch?v=rYggVlTX…
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I can't see Apple not win in AR …
- iPhone is a much better "puck in your pocket" than Orion's. And it already has an install base of 1Bn.
- Apple Watch can easily do what Orion's wrist band does.
- AirPods, need I say more.
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I don't know it's as true anymore as it was in 2013, but I do think it's a timeless lesson on performance vs. user perception.
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People are often curious what pens & papers I use.
For UI sketches, I use COPIC markers and pens from Japan. I think they originally were used to illustrate Mangas. The only notebook that lays flat and doesn't bleed through (trust me, I've tried them all) is RENDR by Crescent Creative.
For thoughts, ideas, and notes, I actually have an entirely separate process (and set of pen & notebook) … I'll talk more about all this at the upcoming Config talk, which you now can register to attend for free, if you're interested: config.figma.com/agenda/sess…
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Love how the row of vertical bricks above openings optimizes load transfer and minimizes shear cracking — while creating a clean horizontal line and adding rhythm to the facade. Perfect example of “design is not just how it looks.”
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I've been testing iCloud for months and can't live without it anymore — one unified view onto my time.
Huge bonus: 'Birthdays' from your iPhone's Contacts automatically appear in Notion Calendar … makes it easier to be that thoughtful friend :)
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I met up with @garrytan to give him a peek behind the scenes of my design process and he made a video of it (please gloss over the title, he's way too kind). Fun conversation!
piped.video/watch?v=2MrNSjJF…
Here the ideas we cover and people I admire ↓
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Happy #config2025 designers & builders! Miss you all this year, as our family has our own launch any moment ✨
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Before 'Design' was as established as it is today, most 'design-minded' people were actually just engineers and craftspeople with an aptitude for design.
Excited that it's now the norm again — designers helping to make the real thing in the final medium. E.g. majority of designers on my team at @NotionHQ now open PRs.
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Founders sharing hard-earned lessons with new founders is what makes this community so powerful.
Especially when each founder on stage started a 1Bn+ company — and afterwards is just a DM away.
Co-founders of Segment, Clipboard Health, and Zip talking about their pivots tonite:
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Excited to take the stage alongside an incredible list of speakers at #Config2024, Figma's annual conference.
I'll speak about design craft, and may talk about… paper!
See you in SF on June 26 & 27 or virtually from around the world → config.figma.com
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For Cron users, here are all the things that change:
- The name & icon.
And all the things that don’t change:
- The quality app you love.
- The committed team behind it.
- The attention to details.
- The roadmap including Android.
- That it's freely available.
- My posts on here about weird & beautiful time things.
🧡
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