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- [00:00]
Amar Reshi
I think that's the thing that with designing with AI, you need to still capture the essence and the magic of it without putting the burden on the user. Think about those existing patterns. But why did we invent them in the first place? It was because we had some intent that we distilled down into knobs and search fields and stuff. And actually, now with LLMs and contextual understanding, we can completely rewrite those patterns. This is an ambiguous space with no patterns. Like, you have to figure it out.
- [00:27]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid, and this is where designers never stop learning, learning. This week's episode is with Amar Reshi, who's the head of design at 11 labs. And that might sound familiar because it's the AI audio platform that's been brought up multiple times on this show before. So one of my favorite parts of this conversation is just hearing what it's like designing an AI native product and all of the different interaction patterns that they're having to think through, and also just the culture of experimentation that's been birthed out of that environment. But before we get into all of the details of how Design works at 11 labs, I asked, asked Amar to give us the backstory behind some of his earliest AI experiments, because one of them went completely viral.
- [01:12]
Amar Reshi
I remember telling my friends, actually, that I had, like, very, very vivid dreams, and I wish I could have someone, like, paint or recreate a bunch of scenes from them. And it was about the time where I think OpenAI demoed Dall E, if you remember. It was like super, like, wait listed and very few people had access, but it looked like science fiction. That's when I started looking around and I was like, is another image generation thing out there? I don't have access to this, but maybe something else, because this is exactly what I want for those dreams, right? I remember, like, searching and searching in the depths of Twitter, and I found this account which probably had like 7,000 followers at a time, called Midjourney. And they had a research preview. You could sign up and they gave you access to the discord. And of course, that's mid journey, like one or two, right? And so I remember entering the prompt, though, for the first time, and I was just like, this is unreal, right? You just felt like your ideas came to life. But mid journey, one or two, like, you know, people look really weird eyes, had, like, weird holes in them and stuff, so you couldn't share that stuff. And so I got close to the vibe of my dream, but never, like, the scene that I wanted to see. And I. And I left it. I was like, okay, cool. At first I was addicted for maybe like three or four days, just like prompting away. But then I was like, it's just not there yet. Fast forward to Probably, I think November 2022. A friend of mine, his daughter, turn 1 years old. And I'd gone to visit them and I would always hang out with them. And I joke like, hey, I'm gonna be the cool uncle in this relationship. And one day she like grabs my hand and she's like walking me upstairs and I'm like, what's happening? And he's like, she wants you to read her a bedtime story. And I was like, whoa. Like, I'm finally making it, you know, like. And I'm reading her this book. And the thought crossing my mind was like, this is so boring. Like this book. And he was like, he's like, dude, I have to read this to her every night. Like, you know? And I was like, okay, like. And it was a rainy weekend at sf, so that means side project. So I basically was like, huh, I wonder, like mid journey. I wonder how much better it's gotten. And. And then a friend of mine was telling me about Chad GBT and was like, hey, this new thing's come out. It's a week old. Like, it looks crazy. And then it just clicked in my head. I was like, what if I combine the two? Could I make a book for her? And as I was making it, I gave myself just the weekend to do it. And then I was like, well, how do I publish this? Like, how do I get this? Because she's not going to read it like a digital book, right? She needs something like physical. And I found Amazon Publishing and I just filled it all out and within 24 hours the book was on the Amazon store, which was unreal. And then I was like, do they print paperback? And they do. And I had a paperback in my hand in three days.
- [04:04]
Rid
I remember where I was when I read the tweet because I ran and I showed it to my wife and I'm like, look what this dude Omar did. Like, I can't believe this. And it was like dawning on me that we could create a whole series of kids books and like, maybe a lot of what your kid would consume you could actually co create together. And it totally blew the roof off of what I thought was possible.
- [04:26]
Amar Reshi
And that was exactly the kinds of messages I was getting. There were people who were like, oh my God, I've been. Me and my daughter have been like crafting up stories and now I can't wait to actually make one with her or another person. That said, my 8 year old writes a ton of stories and now he can actually go and illustrate them. And so it was really cool to see that people had already been looking for something like this. And this was kind of the aha moment for a lot of folks, which was, yeah, it was really fun to see that.
- [04:56]
Rid
Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. You know what? I can't stop thinking about Cursor. But for designers, and that's why I'm all in on Desen. It's not another zero to one tool for prototypes or side projects. It's a visual interface that gives you access to your company's existing code base so you can make updates to things like components, typography, properties, and push your designs to production without having to go through an engineer. That's what the future of product design will feel like. And you can start experiencing it today. Just head to Dive Club Desen to get started. That's dessn. Look, you know how big of a Jitter fan I am, but their latest release is hands down the best one yet. Now, Jitter has an infinite canvas for animation design. And I mean, within 30 seconds of using it, I knew that this was always the way that it should be. For motion design. It makes iteration 10 times easier. Collaborating with team members makes way more sense. And you can scale content across formats using multiple art boards in a single file. Jitter is crazy. Like, this product is so incredibly good. Now you got to try it out. Just head to Dive Club slash Jitter to get started. That's J I T E R. Okay, now on to the episode. Take us down your like, personal experiment journey a little bit more because this really kicked off like a whole series that I find so inspiring.
- [06:20]
Amar Reshi
Yeah, no, thank you. It. It basically clicked in my head that if you could think of something and imagine it, then there's likely an AI tool that'll help you make it. And that's kind of the. The wave we were riding at that time, right? Chat GPT people were prompting books, people were prompting essays and all sorts of things. Schools were freaking out, right? And then video generators came out. And then suddenly you could visualize your ideas in motion. Image generators got better. So for me, it was a massive creative outlet because like I was saying, it goes back to the whole like, dream thing. I was like, well, now I can finally tell the stories I've been wanting to tell and this can patch the skills that I honestly just wasn't good at acquiring. And it kind of leveled me up. And that's what I. That's how I view it today, still. It's. It's an augmentation of your skills and really takes your ideas to the next level. So for me, it was like, okay, what are all the fun other creative projects that are experiments, like, I would want to do? And that was. I wanted to see what it was like. You know that question you always get, if you could have dinner with someone dead or alive, who would it be? And I was like, what if I could just make a podcast with someone from the past and are there tools that allow me to bring their Voice to life? Q11 Labs. Right? Yeah, so that. That was that one. And then I'd studied computer science, but it was so theoretical that I never felt like I had the practical skills to actually build an app from 0 to 1. And. And then, you know, coding got so much better. GPT 4. And I remember that the task I gave myself with that one, and that was with GPT4, it was excruciating. It was. But ignorance is bliss, honestly. And so I was. There was this video game I used to play as a kid, this DOS game called Sky Roads. And I was like, what if I could recreate that with GPT4, make it 3D? Which, honestly, with GBT4, I would just never do again. But I just went at it a whole weekend, like, you know, two OpenAI accounts, like, paying for that subscription limit, until it happened. And I made the game and it worked. And that, for me was just like, even more affirmation of this. Anything is possible if you just, like, push. And I think it's really important. Don't look at it from, like, the tool perspective. Just go for, like, what do you want to make? And then start looking for, like, are there things that can make that happen? Are there ways to generate images? Is there a way to code a video game or pull models from a video game? And I think. And then also, I always tell people this, like, if it didn't work this time, save that idea, because it's going to work in two to three months or six months from now. And that's been the case since these models have gotten so much better.
- [09:05]
Rid
Yeah, I was kind of laughing at myself because you said the word excruciating about GPT4, which probably felt like magic at the time. And it's like, we're going to look back at the current state of the world today and be like, man, that was excruciating. But it feels like magic today, though.
- [09:16]
Amar Reshi
No, it's so true. GPT4 was unreal, like, when it came out. This is like, finally I'll be able to fully code and. Yeah, no. And so I think for me, the feedback loop that kept me going was I kept sharing my ideas on Twitter completely unfiltered. Not like engagement baiting or anything like that. Purely just like, here's what I did, here's how I did it. And there was such a great loop of either people remixing the idea or people wanting to know how I did it, or, you know, showing me something they made. And that just kept me going because I loved the excitement, I love sharing the knowledge, and then just kind of feeding into that and going and going.
- [09:53]
Rid
I want to talk about the Twitter piece, actually, really quickly, because that is, like, why we're even having this conversation. That's how I found your book in the beginning. Like, how much were you even doing on Twitter before this? Because at least from my outside perspective, it's been quite the ascent. And really all it has been is just you continually showing up and sharing your experiments.
- [10:11]
Amar Reshi
Yeah, it's a great point. I actually was not that active on Twitter prior. Like, I would, you know, follow around and just, like, lurk, but never really post. And a friend of mine, when I. So when I made the book, I was just so blown away by the experience. I remember posting it on my Instagram and sharing with my friends, and I said, like, hey, if anyone wants a copy, I'll send it to you. I was so excited. Lost a ton of money on this book, shipping it everywhere. One of my friends was like, you must post about this on Twitter. Like, this is such a cool process. And I wrote the thread exactly how I did it. And in the first, like, 24 hours, it got like, 12 hours. It got like 100ish likes. And that, for me, was, like, the most I'd ever had. And so I was like, this is amazing. Like, wow, tech Twitter loves this. And then I remember waking up at 4 or 5am and my phone is just, like, buzzing away, like, off the night. I was like, what's going on? Did I set an alarm by accident for 5am? And look, and it's just endless. Like, and that's where it got really mixed. It was. It was the fear from artists, from writers. This tweet had crossed from 100, like, I think was like, 50k views to, at that point, 2 million views. Eventually 11 million views. Yeah. And then you're waking up to like Time magazine and NBC and Washington Post and they're like, what do you think about AI and art and the future of that? And you're like, okay, I guess I have to think a little hard about the implications of what I just did. But it was an amazing, amazing journey.
- [11:43]
Rid
Talk to me a little bit about how 11 labs came into the picture. So you're a design director at Brex. Pretty different space. What was that journey like?
- [11:54]
Amar Reshi
Yeah, well, so on Brex, real quick. Like Brex was an amazing ride too. I think it was 2021. 2020 is when I joined and that was kind of the fintech boom was taking place around and an amazing team was forming there. My former head of design at Palantir just joined and I loved working with them. And so it felt like a great period to join a hyper growth startup. And I'm so glad I did because I think it really prepared me for what eleven was also going to be. It was hypergrowth. Our design team grew from the early four or five of us to I think 50 at one point. The company grew from 200 to 1500. And when you see that, it's like focus is so key. Maintaining the quality bar becomes incredibly challenging as every team tries to push forward. But you still are, you're reacting to this growth but you still need to like have a vision and like push ahead and be proactive and so like, but you're scaling really fast and meeting the demands of every engineer. So there's like a huge load balancing challenge there. And so having had that experience and then, and then finally to the point where I was managing quite a few designers and a whole team, whole team and org, I was really enjoying that challenge. It was completely new and different and this AI thing was honestly just a thing I was doing on the side for fun and posting on my weekends. But that was for me the creative unlock, when frankly like fintech isn't that sexy. And so it's, you know, when you're. And as someone who just enjoys being creative and storytelling, this was like the unlock for that. There was a point where Brex was kind of worried. They were like, you know, doing a lot of stuff on the side with your AI projects like, you know, how is that affecting work? And actually was like, it's actually helping work because this has been a creative unlock that's given me way more energy and like design, like creativity that I come and bring back to work and, and that's what I would encourage other designers to do too. Like I Think we. We're like, you know, we do Figma on the daily. And then you're like, oh, like, don't have time for my own things. I don't want to see Figma again on the weekend. But, like, you know, if you find something that you can, like, put your ideas out with and you have that feedback loop, it's such a boost.
- [14:09]
Rid
Even I'm feeling that a little bit. Like, just, like over the weekends, I try to just make a little thing, and it's so silly, but, like, there is an energy about creating that I haven't experienced in. In, like, years actually, where it just. Everything's so new and so fresh and, you know, you feel like a kid again, where you're just like, grabbing your laptop and you just run around and show it to everyone, like, look what I made. You know, having that moment for the first time in a long time. And I do think it really does trickle back into the. The nine to five or however you want to refer to it.
- [14:43]
Amar Reshi
Yeah. And to your point, like, the programming tutorials of, like, you know, just five years ago were, here's how you write your first hello world. And like, how many people are you going to show that to? And they're just gonna be like, okay.
- [14:54]
Rid
Cool, such a good point.
- [14:55]
Amar Reshi
You know, and now it's like, hey, I just made Snake and Pong and it's a multiplayer game and put on your VR headset and you'll be the ball. You know, it's like, it's completely changed what we can share. And when you get that excitement feedback loop from your friends, it's a phenomenal boost in wanting you to do more. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. As I was doing Brex and making all these side projects, one of those was. First it was a podcast. It was on President's Day. So I was like, oh, I wonder if I could chat with a president from the past, how would that be? And it was a really fun experiment. I went for Ronald Reagan because I was like, it was hard to pick who would be the most polarizing given the current political climate. But I went, Ronald Reagan. And I asked Bing Chat to just kind of go through his history and assume how he would react to a series of questions I had written down. And then I was like, well, is there anything out there that I could use to recreate his voice? 11 labs, which is not allowed anymore, but for very obvious reasons. But. But yeah, no, I. I did that experiment and I had this podcast conversation going with him and it was like a full on conversation. And I was. And a lot of people were like, I want a series. Like, can you chat with this person next? And that person next. But that's when I started to see 11 labs as like this really fun storytelling tool from an audio perspective. And soon it was becoming a platform that had audiobooks that you could, you know, have fully narrated with voices. And then I was like, okay, cool. Well, I love making AI videos and, and now I can finally voice the characters with all these other voices. And so I just kept making stuff with 11 labs. And then at one point I was spending so much on credits that I reached out to a friend and I was like, do you know anyone at 11 labs? And she was like, actually, let me introduce you to the founder. He'd love to hear about your project. We had a great chat and he was saying, hey, I'm actually. Project aside, we'll give you the credits. I'm actually looking for someone to lead design and bridge that gap between the engineering side and telling the story of what's possible with the technology. I hadn't considered it because I was still honestly enjoying Brex. And then I met the team and the draw was too good. And Matty is a very, is very good at closing, so I was pumped. And yeah, it's been a wild ride since.
- [17:31]
Rid
So just to even get the full context, what was the state of the team when you joined and maybe you could even just give a little bit of a rundown for people who have heard 11 labs on this show, but don't actually have an interface in mind or what the software even is making possible for people. Can you just give a little context for 11 labs and then we can kind of drill in from there.
- [17:52]
Amar Reshi
Cool. Yeah. So 11Labs is an AI audio platform. And so the main thing here and the mission of the company is to make audio completely universally accessible in any language, in any voice. And so that means we can dub videos while maintaining the authenticity of the original speaker, but you can hear them in a Spanish accent or a German accent or whatever, which means way better dubs. You have audio generation for voices so you can replicate your own voice. And we also have a platform of amazing voice actors who just lend their voice earn from it. And we can generate all sorts of text to speech with very realistic sounding voices. And so that's been used for video voiceovers or faceless YouTube channels, or if you're, you know, making a cartoon and you want to voice your character, video game characters, there's a whole range Even on CNN, the Trump trials were, you know, narrated with 11 labs voices. And so you're getting to see a whole range. And my favorite one very recently has been there are a lot of people who unfortunately, of course, suffer from ALS and lose their voice. And 11 labs has given them their voice back. They've replicated their voice. They've been able to communicate with family, deliver speeches. And so it's been amazing to see the range of stuff from just on the voice front. And then, of course, we also do sound effects soon, music, then, you know, the whole gamut of audio. So that's kind of the rundown of 11 labs and then, yeah, the state of the team. When I joined, we were about 30ish people. One design contractor at the time. And then, yeah, primarily engineering and research. And, yeah, it was a very early stage. You know, I think the Series B was just about to be announced and the brand was going through a refresh that we were. We were working through. So a lot of foundational stuff. And so, yeah, very, very early on in the mix, I want to, like.
- [19:51]
Rid
Learn a bunch more about just what it's like working in this kind of environment and on this type of product. So maybe even just starting high level, like, what's it like designing the future of something where there's just not as much precedent? You know, like, you all are leading the charge in so many ways. What's that like as a designer?
- [20:10]
Amar Reshi
It's like a really fun challenge and it's incredibly rewarding because, like you said, there's no precedent. And you get to see. You get to see your patterns become patterns that get copied too. But then you're also like, I don't know if that pattern was right. So you get to test it at scale through that method as well. But I think, I think. And I was chatting with Nate Parrot the other day from the browser company, and we were kind of going, and he's such an incredible creative, like, designer, design engineer. And we were kind of debating back and forth. I was like, is the prompt box just a text field and a generate button really the best we can do? And his opinion was actually that we're abstracting away a ton of complexity to just chatting. And that is actually like, maybe the design move. Like, maybe that is actually as simple as it needs to be. But then I think there's also a step forward here, which is there's a lot of stuff that you can do with these models. You can tweak all sorts of parameters, you can change the model type, you can. And of course, each model has either faster inference or can control the stability more and all these things. But you don't really want people to have to worry about a lot of those things. And so even when I'm thinking about designing music, you can add lyrics, you can change the genre. You might be able to tweak just parts of the vibe of the track and the specific piece, but what is the most natural way to do that? And initially I could have started with just text and you just describe every single aspect. And what that needs, though, requires is that you need your user to need to know all those things to be able to craft a great prompt to get a good result. Right. And I was starting to think about this more in terms of almost a dynamic island kind of prompt box, where if you need to change lyrics, it morphs into prompt box. That's basically best designed around, like, how lyrics need to be edited and the parts of lyrics. If you're about to choose genre, instead of you thinking about it, it populates with pills of all the genres that you actually need to like, maybe want to play with or think about. And you could talk to it and maybe it'll actually point you and grow. Like the UI will expand and grow based on that. So still expanding on that base idea of chatting and prompting, but teaching you along the way in a way that's very intuitive rather than tooltip. Here, click that. Try to understand the thing. And I think that's the thing that with designing with AI, you need to still capture the essence and the magic of it without putting the burden on the user. And I think that's like the thing we keep going back to. Like another debate, you know, I was thinking about was it's so easy to fall into the trap of using an existing pattern that's been tried and tested forever, because you think that's reliable. And don't get me wrong, there's value to that. So, for instance, let's talk about search and search for voices. If you're searching for a voice, classic design pattern, throw a search bar there, have some filter tags, and hopefully people will find the right voice. Or like, what are you actually coming into that page looking for? You have a project in mind. You're probably telling like a storybook for a kid, or you have a horror movie you're making and you want a voice for that horror movie for the villain. So that's all you should be really needing to describe. And we should figure out the tags that you actually mean behind the scenes. And the filters you should apply and the accents we think are best to give you that. And I think that's the push. Think about those existing patterns. But why did we invent them in the first place? It was because we had some intent that we distilled down into knobs and search fields and stuff. And actually now with LLMs and contextual understanding, we can completely rewrite those patterns.
- [23:47]
Rid
I like that a lot. I was having a similar conversation a few days ago with a startup called Desen and talking about similar things where having very small contained dialogues that are dynamically generated based off of like the context in a prompt, for instance. That starts to get a little bit more interesting to me because as a piece of software, you could intuit what a user is trying to achieve based off of just like the initial things that they're typing. And maybe there are some more tailored affordances that you can then generate to control that based off of what you know, it feels like that's like a really interesting entry point for a dynamic interface is building on top of the chat UI even.
- [24:30]
Amar Reshi
Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, to your point, like, why did we end up making all these buttons and search fields and knobs in the beginning? That was our take on how people might approach the broad goal that they come into a product with. It's like, okay, I want to. I mean it goes back to just the, the foundations of the graphical user interfaces, right? It's like we were typing things in Terminal and then Xerox and Apple decided actually you should just be able to click on the thing that you're wanting to go to. And similarly, why can't you just say what you want to do and then the UI reacts and tells you where you need to go and serves it up to you. I think it's not just pure voice, but there's also a bit of that. You still need that control, that tactile behavior, but we can guide you in a way that we just couldn't do before, which I think is very, very exciting.
- [25:18]
Rid
Can we double click on the voice as an interface thing? I'm sure you're thinking about this as much as anyone, like what are the futures that you're imagining in that world?
- [25:26]
Amar Reshi
I think it's interesting because there are a bunch of cool products that have come out recently that a bunch of initial hype and then kind of tanked or are still going. I still have one on my desk like the Rabbit and I love it. I think it's such a cool piece of tech, but it didn't really gain the momentum yet. And I think that's because we're still early in the social norm side of it. It's still weird for a lot of people to just out in the world talk to a device when everyone's around them, right? And that's where Humane, I also thought did some really interesting novel things with the experience in that projector. But again, I still don't feel comfortable just being in a crowd and be like, hey, play this or send a reminder for that. Right. So I think once that becomes more of a social norm, and I think it will happen when Apple leans into it more with AirPods and more of the devices that are mainstream start adopting that kind of interface, we'll have more AR glasses at some point that we'll be able to just like say commands to and talk to. That voice will become more and more the interface that we get used to because it's just about seeing what's ahead of you, talking about the thing that you just want to do and everyone around you, most importantly, is also doing it and it doesn't feel weird anymore. That's when I think it actually becomes the thing and it needs a mainstream player, probably like an Apple, to make that happen. But I remember that scene from her where like in the very beginning, like everyone's kind of on these devices and scrolling and then at some point they're kind of just walking by each other, but they're talking to the thing in their ear and that for a 2013 film to predict, I think it's totally going to happen. Like we're just going to have this assistant that's telling my reminders or maybe it's seen something I've seen and observed that to something I'd put in my journal and reminding me about it, like, yeah, I think that's coming for sure.
- [27:22]
Rid
I was joking with my friend the other day about how the way I want to be designing in the future is with some kind of like a wearable glass. And then I can just like send my agents off to like make some software and some flows and then review them on my wearable while like in the park and like give some direction and then they just go off and keep working on it and I just come out of that focus state and, you know, catch the football that my kid throws at me or something like that.
- [27:45]
Amar Reshi
Most productive dad ever. I love that. So Minority Report, right?
- [27:52]
Rid
I know, I'm there, I'm there, I'm ready for it. On that note, what's it like collaborating with a research team where you have almost kind of two sets of inputs, where it's not just, hey, here are all of the user problems and needs, but it's also like, whoa, we just unearthed this totally new thing. What do you want to make possible with it? What's that? Like, they're.
- [28:16]
Amar Reshi
Honestly, it's like. It's like you're working with a set of, like, magicians who are like, you know, in our secret lab, we've come up with the ability to generate a set sound effect while describing it. Like, what? And so I think it's really exciting because, going back to previous points, you don't have patterns for a lot of these things, but you do want to solve the problem. So the problem of, I spend an endless amount of time browsing for the right sound effect for my thing, but I know what I want, right? I'm searching with the intent of what I already know I want. So what if I could just describe it? And so this amazing research team, they just, like, spend their time pushing the models forward. Okay, we've generated speech. Can we generate any form of audio? You know, music, sound effects? And then also, if you can generate, can you also clean and identify which stems to remove and which ones to, like, you know, take forward? Whether with. Even with dictation, if we can generate speech, can we also understand speech? And then create, like, an even better dictation model? And so they'll come to us with, hey, we've had this kind of research breakthrough. How should we go about deploying it? And I love that they approach it that way. How should we go about deploying it? Right, because that gives the designers, the engineers, and the kind of product folks to really think about, how would people use this thing, this incredibly technical model that we've now made? Like, what's the best application of it? And I think often how we start, sometimes even internally, is by just making fun demos of stuff before we even design. So it's like, oh, I just took this model. Like, when we had conversational AI, it's like, I just took this model and I made an onboarding bot that could tell every new employee everything in the wiki and even the wi fi password of the office. And then you start to see, oh, that's a really cool application. How would people go about making one of their own? And then you can start the design, like, exercise of making it happen. But this hacking away culture is, like, very core to us at Elevenlabs, where almost everyone messes around with the APIs now, because you can with cursor and other tools. Right. Where even the comms and the growth people are building amazing demos themselves for fun. And they're like, hey, I just made this thing where I'm chatting with Paint and remember Ms. Paint now you can just like, draw, like, stuff. And I was like, that is an unbelievable demo. And again, a reminder that creative ideas can come from anywhere when people have the right tools. Right. So I think that hacking culture, plus seeing what people are making, and then that allows us to really think about what's the best way to design, to enable anyone to go and make those things.
- [30:54]
Rid
Is there an example of like, a project or a feature that you released that we could kind of trace the idea from inception all the way to actually shipping something to the prod just to get a sense of, like, how you all work and what it's like being a designer at 11 Labs.
- [31:06]
Amar Reshi
Yeah. One of the really fun ones was when we were working on the mobile app and we had seen the Notebook LM stuff. But for us, the form factor, the one that made the most sense was mobile. You have a lot of your reading and content on the phone on the go. And we wanted to turn that into podcasts with our voices. And I remember the way it started was we basically were like, look, this is a really fun way to engage with content. And our readership is, like, growing really well. We're seeing tons of people importing all sorts of stuff. How do we go about this? And the beauty of the mobile team is it really starts with a problem like that, like, how do we go about, like, giving people a new way to engage with their content and it feeling incredibly seamless. You shouldn't have to think about, I'm picking voices or I'm doing this, let's really turn it into this. Like, we're magically going to add two AI co hosts that will take any topic you have and make it a fun story, a different narrative. And then the team kind of just hands off to design at that point and they're like, hey, go. And just kind of go crazy with ideas, like, share what you think, like, we should do. And I remember I had initially made this mock of our voice orbs, kind of like slowly glowing and then like splitting into two to show, like, now you have two co hosts and they're like dancing around each other. And. And the reason I started thinking about that was I knew that whatever we were generating would take at least 30 to 40 seconds to make. And so you can even inject delight into a boring loading state where you have your co host coming to life and it's got like Showtime music, like, playing, so you're getting ready for like a little mini show to start. And I remember showing that to the team and they were so excited about it that we then started thinking about what are cool names for our co hosts and should we have different co hosts for different topics? And that kind of showed how the idea just kept growing into all the different creative ways we could make that feature come to life. But then once we were happy with, okay, we want a few different co hosts because some topics need a serious one and some topics need, like, a really fun one, we had that spec and yeah, I'll go ahead and design. I love showing the engineers very early on, like the early explorations. They'll go back and forth and build prototypes so we can test out how it's working. And it's very much, especially with models that are this early, it's very much an experimentation game where you try it, you see how it feels in real life. You tune it and you go back and forth and change the design. So design is very dynamic and not static at all. It's not like I made this handoff. It's like, like, oh, interesting. Like that part of the experience might need a tweak here, might need a tweak there to eventually getting to when we feel like we have a good final product. And then we'll share that internally and have people generate all sorts of podcasts and things like that. And all sorts of fun bugs show up that the models do at that point too. Like, I remember one of the funniest ones was our podcast, for some reason kept introducing Dr. Sarah Chen to comment on things. We have no idea who Dr. Sarah Chen is to this day, but now whenever there's like a feature or like a hard technical problem that we don't have the answer to, we're like, let's go ask Dr. Sarah Chan. Like the meme of the team now. But yeah, so it's really the cycle of start with a problem, design goes and explores stuff. It's very experimental. It's very much like a back and forth of prototyping. I prototype a ton in figma too, just to see how ideas will feel and people get a feel for how it'll feel on the phone and translate to desktop. I'll even use our product to generate the voices and then kind of record that prototype and edit it with the voices in, which sounds like a lot of work for prototypes, but I think it makes people really feel it, it's like tangible because they're like, oh, so this is what a conversation could sound like. And then once they have that, then we kind of have a very good spec for what we need to do. We don't actually write PRDs or anything. It's very much this, like, back and forth, like, creative process until we feel really good about the build that we have, and then we just kind of go with it.
- [35:12]
Rid
Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, it just, it sounds like a real culture of experimentation just listening to you describe the way that you work.
- [35:19]
Amar Reshi
Yeah, yeah, very much. We're all tinkerers, which is, which is fun.
- [35:23]
Rid
My assumption is that you probably have a pretty wide spectrum of users. Some people that maybe are like me. There's just like a dad that just wants to tinker with storytelling, where other people probably are using this profess professionally. So can you talk a little bit about how you think about the right level of abstraction for this technology?
- [35:42]
Amar Reshi
It's a great question. And sometimes it's. It's more that you create interfaces for each of those Personas. And so, for instance, we. We believe that there always should be a playground to mess around with the models, because that allows you to just see all the ways people are going to use it in a free form way. And so that's why text to speech is still very much an open playground. Sound effects as an open playground, you know, when we do music, we'll very much treat it the same way, but then you can build on top of that. So we knew, okay, there are a lot of creators and other folks who just want to generate a voice and have it say something fun and that's it. So we should make that as easy as possible. But then there are a ton of people who have very specific voices and projects with voices that they're like, really working through. And so we knew we needed to give them a full fledged editor for that, where they could assign multiple speaker voices, tune, like the exact parameters. And that's used by authors, by enterprise companies that are making like, episodes and stuff and podcasts, podcasters. And so it's really like, let the playground show you the range of Personas that are working with your product and then talk to some of them and ask them, like, what are the things that they would really love? And you don't want to bring all of that and complicate your very simple playground, because that is what made the playground work so well. You actually want to take that and potentially just spin up a new interface for that existing model for that Persona. And that's where our studio version of the app came through. That's where the dubbing studio, where it was just about precision editing of those dubs to make sure the language that it was translated and dubbed was like perfectly accurate. Because you now have video editing teams that are just dubbing content and they just need to focus on that and nothing else. Right? So, yeah, it's about taking that very broad thing and then just making very, like, niche slices for. For everyone.
- [37:36]
Rid
Hey, it's Red. I'm constantly asked about my favorite product, so I want to take just one minute and give you a quick rundown of my stack. Destin is how I ship design changes without having to code. Framer is how I build my websites. Genway is how I do research. Jitter is how I animate my designs and Play is how I design and prototype mobile apps. Visual Electric is how I generate all of my imagery. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now I've hand selected these companies to partner with me so that I can do these episodes full time. So the best way by far to support the show is to check, check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners. Okay, now on to the rest of the episode. I want to return to some of the things that you were talking about around Brex and, you know, you've now been Plantier, Brex and eleven Labs. So three different hyperscale startups. Based off of that experience, what do you think it takes to thrive as a designer in that type of environment?
- [38:41]
Amar Reshi
Each environment tested me and taught me a lot of different things, but probably the one thread that was the most true in all of them and rang throughout was designers shouldn't shy away from getting close to the business. I think it's incredibly important to actually understand, like, who the customers are, why we're working with them, which contracts have more potential, how do we want to position the company, whether it's small businesses or enterprise or so on, because that just allows you to make stronger arguments for why you're doing the thing that you're doing. There's so many designers I think that give up because they're like, oh, like I proposed, this idea didn't really work. And like engineering overran or what. The reality is, like, a lot of these ideas get passed because they have some inherent business value. And of course, there's also the other tricky thing with design, which is like, it's also pretty qualitative, right? But I think you get to the qualitative side through also building credibility on the quant side and the business side. Because once there's trust, you just have more free rein to do the thing that you really wanted to do. Right? And so I think at Palantir, it was very much encouraged, spend time with the customers and go there no matter what role you had. And so very often as a designer, I would actually just go and fly out to customers in France and Oman and spend a week with them, just understanding their workflow and really designing for what they needed that way, because you become an expert for them and then you have such a great feedback loop with them as you're building through things. At Brex, you have to spend time with founders and finance teams and you realize, okay, you're not just making some flashy fintech app that you know needs to be. It's like, the reality is founders have no time to think about finances, like their corporate card or whatever. And so actually the experience needs to be as invisible as possible for them. And it, you know, the standard metrics of time spent in Brex or whatever, like, you actually don't want that. Like, you actually want them to be able to just get the job done really fast without being in there at all. And similarly, with 11 labs, it was like, you have these incredible models and you have a whole set of people who just want to make all these creative things happen. It's very tempting to expose every single knob and say, like, everyone should do everything, but the vast majority of people actually just want. They have an idea and they want to generate that, and you should make that as easy as possible. And of course, you'll have power users too, but you need to stay close to the business and close to those users. And designers should also not shy away from engineering. Remember that debate we've had forever about should designers code or not? It's like, it's such a bullshit debate. It's like the reality is, for designers, it is so easy for everyone to comment on your work because it's the most approachable thing. It's the thing everyone can just look at and say, hey, you should tweak that button, you should do this, whatever. But for you to have that credibility and to have the deep understanding, you need to know you actually have to spend the time with engineering because that allows you to build credibility and respect with them. Because then they think, you know, they know that you understand what they're going through as well. The business side understands that you're not just dreaming right there. And then you have the Agency, I think to really go ahead and execute. So I would say for designers the job really is there's so much more than just your design execution job. And I would view no, no non technical job as like beneath you. It's a, it's a storytelling job. You have to tie the threads together between marketing with brand with engineering with product with strategy. And that I think has been a thread that's been true through those, through those experiences.
- [42:21]
Rid
How do those beliefs shape the way that you approach the hiring process then and the types of people that you surrounded yourself basically given a blank slate of a design work?
- [42:32]
Amar Reshi
I think it's very much. I love people who just show and don't tell. You know, I think we've, we've gotten used to portfolio reviews and interview processes where we encourage the, the dramatic storytelling that hides the substance. Like there's so like I do not want to see a wall of sticky notes again. And that you study and then you study three Personas. Like I get it, that's the job. Like you know, that's the job, right? So. But what I do want to see is how maybe there was a cross functional gap between teams and you helped patch that through because that's the real shit that's going on in a company on a day to day basis. Right? Like you help two teams see and understand where the platform maybe should have come together or where they needed to make a compromise. Or you just build your ideas and you show them and you're just constantly experimenting. I love people who like hack and experiment because that's the culture we have and I think that's net positive to what we also want. We want other people to bring into that creative mix. And also I love people who just come from a variety of like wearing many hats because they've built an appreciation for doing the many things required at this kind of stage. Where you don't shy away from biasing towards action, don't look for permission, you just see something that you can improve and do like do it. So a lot of the designers that I've been looking at and looking for have been people who have either just had to stretch across their orgs because that's just what the job demanded them to do. They show their ideas and they don't mind sharing it. And there's nothing like that. There's like a lot of like experimentation with their own creativity because this is a field that requires that experimentation and creativity. And then ex founder backgrounds also amazing because they've gone through the pain of like figuring out like the hard, hard stuff of what it takes to like really build something from the ground up. I think that's kind of the, the initial view and then self awareness too. Right? I think it's always like, again, I don't want the like the bullshit answer of like, oh, I do too much or whatever. It's like, yeah, okay, cool. Like, like we all do. But I think it's like, I love it when people tell me their hot takes on design. Like, I've heard, I've had people tell me, like, actually don't think we should talk to this many users up front because it really skews a perspective. Like, great. I love that this profile of a person actually believes in their intuition a lot more. But there's also open feedback. Right. And that's the right ingredient of intuition, but has feedback so it will course correct. Amazing. Like, we want tastemakers, right? We don't want just people who are like, can't rely on or only rely on data. Because like you said, this is an ambiguous space with no patterns. Like, you have to figure it out.
- [45:08]
Rid
What about the way that you all work as a team? Because you're also given a blank slate in terms of, like, processes and rituals and anything that collaboration looks like as well. So was there anything specific that you were pulling from your time either at Plantier or Brex, that has influenced the way that you've designed the org itself?
- [45:27]
Amar Reshi
Yeah, great question. Palantir was a huge influence in that it had basically given people complete empowerment very early on to go and just do the thing that they thought was really important or would help a team. I remember as a new grad, very early on, we were working for some intelligence agency and I was like, two weeks in and they were like, hey, can you go and design that dashboard for them and it'll be presented to the director of this agency? And I was like, the hell? It was insane. But the confidence boost after you deliver that just gives you a whole set of the energy you're going to bring to work is next level after that because you feel fully empowered. And so with this design team as well, the approach is very much. You see something that a story we need to tell or part of the experience that needs to be better or whatever, just go do it. There's no design system police. There's no someone who's going to be like, oh, no, don't do that. And that consistency, just go try the thing. We can always tweak it. Everything is changeable at this point and no decision feels irreversible at this stage and so very much open to seeing how people operate and then having this team of ragtag especially again, I think this wouldn't work once we scale to a point of maybe 3, 400 people, where you need a bit more process. But we're at the stage where our engineering teams, our design teams are lean enough, where I think it's high trust. People have great ideas, let them do the thing. We can always course correct and polish at the end. But you hired them because you, you wanted to empower them to do their thing. So that I think is a big part of the Palantir side of things, which I think is really important. The Brex side of things I really enjoyed was Brex was one of the first times I fully experienced a remote company because it was 2020 and the pandemic happened and Brexit pivoted to being fully remote. And they did an incredible job of keeping everyone up to date async, no matter what was happening. And so yes, you have empowered people, but always have them loop back with decisions being made in a central place. And so whether that is a quick loom to show their thinking and how they approach the thing and then just running with it or maintaining office hours with engineering teams because there are going to be many requests that you won't get to field on a full time basis and you have like a decision doc of things. That paper trail has been an amazing way to track things like features we said we would do but we didn't have the time to do. And then we've come back and polished or any new hire that joins, we just send them a series of loom videos to watch and we're like, here's kind of the provenance of like how we ended up here. And that's been a great way to catch people up on onboarding because you just kind of need them to hit the ground running and give them as much context. And that's the best way for them to just see it rather than like go through Figma files and wonder like what the hell went through your mind when you made that one. You know, it's, it's, it's just a very fun visual way to kind of help, help people do that. And then I'd say the byproduct of that is people become natural storytellers and become better storytellers because you're constantly explaining your decisions and you're pitching that to teams and you're selling that across the org. And that is another big thing I think I want everyone to be a great storyteller because this is really high tech stuff that we should make approachable to everyone.
- [48:48]
Rid
This idea of like the async video sharing has come up quite a few times and it's still kind of like a skill that everyone's learning going through sometimes even for the first time.
- [48:59]
Amar Reshi
Yeah.
- [49:00]
Rid
What do you think makes for like really great storytelling in one of those videos? Like what do you look for? Or maybe even just a little tidbit of advice or a tactic that someone listening could apply the next time that they do a share out for their own team.
- [49:15]
Amar Reshi
Yeah. One of the first things I always tell people is don't overthink it. I think when, when you see yourself on video for the first time and you trip up on a word and stuff and you're like, oh crap, I'm going to rerecord the whole thing. Like, don't actually keep going. Even if you have to say to yourself like take two and then continue. It's good because you can always cut that out. And you might have said something initially that you really, you would have forgotten about the second time if you had to restart. So I think don't overthink it at all. It's like definitely number one, always start with the why, the problem you're solving, like why did you go down this path? Give people the context as if they were in your head and were your brain. Like, what did you kind of do to get you here? Because then you're opening yourself up to other perspectives on your way of thinking, which I think is also really important. If you just show people the thing but you don't explain the why, then I don't know how you got there. And I don't know if you made the right assumptions or you made the right trade offs or the compromise that maybe I'm seeing right, or you've seen something that I haven't and that's given me new perspective. So I always think that's like really important, like share that upfront thinking. And then I always like to tell the story with the framing of as if I was about to demo it to someone or sell it to someone, could I get them excited about it? And so even with the podcast one, for instance, I was like, cool, so you've got night, you've got this article you really love, but what if you could have another perspective on it? And so you've kind of, instead of saying you got this article, now you can generate podcasts with two echoes. That's not the why, but it's the why was. Here's how you get another perspective. And like, do we like that thread? And that way of framing this feature and then that allows the team to also align behind the messaging and the way we would talk about it publicly. And so try to put yourself in that. Like you're trying to sell the thing. How would you pitch it? Because that forces you to see, is there a worth to this? Like, can I get excited about this? Is there an audience that would actually buy this? I think that framing really helped. And then I love seeing people's random experiments, like, show me the final flow and then just show me every branch off. Crazy idea. Cool, right? I always tell people, like, I don't care how messy your figma is. And even in interviews now, like, like, I'll. They're like, oh, I prepared a presentation, but my figma's kind of like, let's just look at figma. Like, I love to see like what you did and there's no judgment on the messiness. Like, we all have our way of mad scientist way of thinking. Like, I just want to see the craft, right? And like the thinking, that's all I care about.
- [51:44]
Rid
Well, before I let you go, for people who are maybe interested in your mad scientist plans for 2025, is there any future experiments or things that you're working on or things that you're thinking for this year that people can kind of use to follow along?
- [51:57]
Amar Reshi
Yeah, no, for sure. Pietro and I on Twitter, we love sharing the AI apps that we make and all the stuff that we're putting out. We tend to also always share why we went and made like Think, for instance. Recently I made a Perplexity clone, but powered by Gemini's search API because I wanted to see if Google still had what it took. And turns out they do. And it's a really fun kind of personal search app that I made for myself. But what we are going to do is probably. We don't want to necessarily teach like a whole course. I think there are many great ones out there. But for the people who are tinkerers like us and just want the source code, just want to see every prompt literally unfiltered, every prompt, even the times where we shouted at Claude and how we got there, we'll probably start something there where, yeah, you can like follow us and you'll have. Have every prompt, all the source code so you can turn and remix it into your own ideas and hopefully we end up making a small community of hackers who, who are also sharing within there and kind of putting their ideas out there, inspiring each other. So, yeah, I'm really excited about getting more.
- [53:01]
Rid
Yeah, I'm excited about that too. There's a rawness from collaborating with AI that is so important to capture. So even just hearing about how you're thinking about pulling back that curtain really aligns with how I personally want to learn as well.
- [53:15]
Amar Reshi
No, I love it. And to your point, to the rawness, like, it's easy to craft a course where every prompt seems perfect, but there's so many pitfalls that come along the way where you're battling with it and. And people can give up right there. And we want to show people, like, no, there's a little bit more of prompting magic and you can get past that and make something great.
- [53:33]
Rid
Yeah. Even, like, I'm just going to underline that for someone who is listening who's like, kind of on the fence and is curious, but maybe hasn't built something yet, like, the goal is not to one shot something. With Claude, it almost never works that way. Like, you know, like, you always have to refine and massage and shoot. I mean, if you are one shotting something, maybe my prompt would just be push yourself a little bit more and do something more complex. Well, Amar, this has been super fun. Absolutely flew by. Thanks for coming on today and Sharon, and giving us a little bit of behind the scenes of the things that you're thinking about and what you're working on.
- [54:11]
Amar Reshi
Red. Absolute pleasure. I've been following your podcast and work for so long, and so I'm honored to be here.