homeschool kid, designer, co-founder @ MoneyKit, previously @apple, @square, head of product design and founding team @cashapp
NYC
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Design talk:
Too much consistency will ruin your app.
Humans are naturally drawn to experiences that create a strong sense of place. This demands variety, and it’s a critical concept many designers miss.
Here’s one of my go-to frames I use with teams to master this…
Think of each section of an app like a room in a house. All rooms should belong to the same house, but not all rooms should feel like a kitchen.
Creating distinct rooms with a clear purpose and intuitive relationship between them is essential.
The redesigned iOS photos app is an unfortunate case study.
Using the app somehow feels like I’m trapped in a living room, and every door I open leads to another living room. No room feels distinct, it’s unclear what each room is for, and navigating between them is a frustrating puzzle.
Early cash app was the opposite, and we obsessed over this.
We constrained the house to a small number of rooms, each with a clear purpose, distinct visual identity and intuitive relationship between them. An iconic keypad, a place for your card, an activity feed, and a settings view. As a whole, these rooms created a really amazing house and over time, a place many people called home.
Revising this regularly is important, especially as apps scale. Growth leads to more uniformity, rigid design systems, a proliferation of new features, pods, PMs, and if you’re not careful— a house filled with kitchens.
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the average person doesn’t care about privacy or decentralization
they care about features, better experiences, and the app their friends use
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designers are the unsung ghost writers for the best products on the planet
the features, the brand, the growth engines, the ux, the breakthroughs
they silently run the world
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playing it safe is the biggest mistake I see people in their 20s and 30s making right now
more than ever your biggest risk is not taking one
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Every day is an opportunity to live and create the life you want— or let life decide for you. The later is the overwhelimg default. No opt-in required.
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“you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology” - steve
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“Don’t be a career.” Some of Steve’s most profound advice…
The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the "Career."
There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life.
If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can't be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one's life.
The risk factor quotient goes down as you encounter the real world. Many people find what they believe to be safe harbors (lawyers and accountants), only to wake up ten or fifteen years later and discover the price they paid.
Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.
The journey is the reward. People think that you've made it when you've gotten to the end of the rainbow and got the pot of gold. But they're wrong. The reward is in the crossing the rainbow. That's easy for me to say-I've got the pot of gold (literally). But if you get the pot of gold, you already know that that's not the reward, and you go looking for another rainbow to cross.
Think of your life as a rainbow arching across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.
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absolutely accurate
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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Question anyone who offers you the blueprint. There’s not one way to build a winning product, team, company. Build in public, build in private, bootstrap, venture, remote, in person, sales driven, product driven. These are all secondary to simply getting after it.
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my car feels like a flip phone after experiencing Tesla fsd
software is about to end every legacy brand
it’s all that matters now
the car is just a container
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In 2005 lego nearly went bankrupt. Now they're the most valuable toy brand in the world, worth more than the next 10 brands combined
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real talk, i’ve yet to find a crypto wallet that doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out
why is this still so convoluted? buy eth to swap to eth? wild fees, random shit coins disguised as btc
16 years in and crypto is still a foreign language
we can do better
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Who’s working on the ai law firm for startups? Generate docs, explain concepts in plain english, provide agents for corporate, IP, regulatory, etc. Automate 90% of the work, make an attorney available for the remaining 10%
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Remember when iphone felt like an accessory for your life not the centerpiece? This was my favorite gen. Great design, fun, simple, unassuming, capable, deferential.
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resilience isn’t your ability to recover from the lows
it’s your capacity to grow comfortable there
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Building a company requires a grounded understanding of reality, and the ability to suspend it. Deeply optimistic.
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Great companies and great product leaders understand this innately:
“Ideas are very fragile… you have to be tender when they are in development.” - Jony Ive
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Embrace the reality that people spend an incredibly small amount of time thinking about you, it’s one of the most freeing unlocks in life
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this is the best speech trump has ever given— focused, systematic, precise, no hubris
time to get to work
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Your number one job as a founder is to hire well and fire well— a company becomes the people it hires.
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115 billion people have lived on this planet to date. what a moment to be alive and engaged in the most unhinged timeline
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i’m genuinely concerned for the future of apple
drop everything and nail ai while you still can
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starting a vc called backchannel
zero contact with founders, just back channeling, cold inbound term sheets and rejection emails
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In 2024 42% of kids had a phone by age 10. 71% by age 12 and 91% of by 14. Who’s building money tools for kids?
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MoneyKit is the best way to use Akoya! Instantly add native SDKs, rich institution graph (search) and world-class UX. Plus seamless connections to any banks Akoya doesn't cover yet. Created by builders from Apple, Square, Plaid
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If you’re a wallet entering 2025 and don’t support dark mode what are you doing? The usdc is blinding.
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agreed— but very misleading when you realize there are more ingredients on the back of the RX bar than the front
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Absolutely accurate, building a world-changing product, company, business takes a surprising amount of naivete
Why first time founders are better than serial entrepreneurs?
@rabois and @mike_sheb with one of our best 20VC’s yet on Monday. 🔥 👇
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"Terrifyingly right" and "violently simple." Design philosophies from @rsa
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far too real
a pm proposes moving a button 5px to the left.
the design team schedules a “design intent” meeting to review pixel spacing guidelines, which references a 96-slide internal deck titled “the philosophy of alignment.
afterward, accessibility raises concerns about button discoverability under different screen reader settings, flagging it for usability testing.
performance engineers jump in, warning that subtle css changes could trigger cascading reflows across entire design system, impacting core web vitals.
legal then demands a patent review, citing a lawsuit the company lost in 2012 over a similar button shift.
data privacy gets involved, worried that this minor change could somehow affect “user consent flows” under gdpr.
before moving forward, a product strategy sync is held with vp-level stakeholders to ensure “design language alignment” with future roadmaps.
finally, a cross-functional task force is created to oversee button movements company-wide, chaired by a design ops director. the task force’s first deliverable: a quarterly report on the risks of pixel misalignment.
the button doesn’t move.
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instantaneous and continuous testing, learning, iterating will definitely happen
apps will update underneath you in real time based on behavior
the future will be far more wild than we understand
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Incredible end run by @satyanadella, likely the most consequential of our lifetime. Wow
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the us deficit is two trillion
that’s equivalent to spending a thousand dollars every second from today until june of 2088
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