Loading summary
Transcript63 lines
- [00:00]
Tuan Kumar
The entire conversation was a lot more around what would it mean to bring generative and 3D together.
- [00:05]
Rid
You describe design as knowing what is desirable. So can you unpack that a little bit and talk about how that shapes the way that you've designed the interface?
- [00:15]
Tuan Kumar
I think this is one of those perennial quintessential design versus art and blah blah, blah. But really the things that are really well designed do have an art like quality.
- [00:26]
Rid
Can we dive into the zero to one design process?
- [00:28]
Tuan Kumar
The person designing has to actually take the idea that's in there head in some cases influenced by 10 other ideas people have built upon it. But then someone has to resolve it into something that makes sense.
- [00:40]
Rid
Are there other ways that you've seen the value proposition of design shift now that you're working in this type of AI native product org, you now have.
- [00:47]
Tuan Kumar
The opportunity to do more. Whether you do it or not is up to you. The caveat being someone else will be willing to do it.
- [00:55]
Unknown
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Tuan Kumar, who's the head of design at Luma AI, which is one of the companies really leading the charge on generative AI today. So we're going to get ultra specific on the types of patterns and interactions and all of the thinking that goes into designing a truly great AI product. And one of my favorite parts of the episode is when we kind of zoom out a little bit and Tune talks about his time at Apple, Airbnb and Metta and all of the ways that working with generative AI as a new material really changed how he thinks about the design process and what it means for the future of the practice even. So let's start by getting to know Tuin a little bit and hearing about the journey that led him to Luma.
- [01:44]
Tuan Kumar
I studied engineering and somewhere mid engineering, I started blogging and then I wanted a prettier blog. So I taught myself HTML and css. Then I realized, oh, that's not enough. Back then this was WordPress era. And so then it's like, oh, actually I have to teach myself php. I taught myself that. And then by the end of the whole process I was like, the blogging part is fine. What was this other thing I did in India? There was no real name for it back then. IPhone had just kind of come out. And that was when Twitter honestly became my really peek into the world. I would follow all the 10 designers at that point. Really, it was that few. And that kind of led me to like, understand, oh, this whole field. So most of my college, I basically just started like picking up design, doing freelance. And then I got here for a really small company called Pulse. It was a newsreading app. I joined them as a first designer.
- [02:37]
Rid
Daily user of Pulse. So as soon as I found out that you were working on that, I was like, this is amazing. I've always wondered who did it.
- [02:43]
Tuan Kumar
Yeah, the Pulse. I feel like life is really funny. The Pulse folks found me because I had written this hacker news team modifier georgify. And really the web engineer there uses it to this date, I have not updated it, I kid you not, in the 10 years, I don't even know how it's in the plugin store, but it is in the Chrome store. And so that's kind of how I got in here from there, Facebook, bunch of other startup, Airbnb. And then Apple was always just like, I gotta work there for the most part in ways like product design, digital design. Do owe it to Steve and Johnny to usher in like the value of design. In the late 2000s, that was like, I need to at least understand what makes this tick. Obviously by the time I joined, even Johnny had left. But that was like a really interesting experience. And from there I was like back to. I keep doing this like pendulum of like, big company, small company, big company, small company. And so that was kind of when I was like itching again of like, okay, I want to join something a little smaller. AI was happening and it was pretty clear this is moving at breakneck speed. And you needed to be in an environment that really promoted that. And so that's kind of what led me to Google.
- [03:45]
Unknown
Real quick message.
- [03:46]
Rid
And then we can jump back into it.
- [03:47]
Unknown
I'm all in on Paper as the next great design tool. And this is coming from someone who's taught Figma to more people than just about anyone. But I'm ready. It's time for a tool that puts creativity at the heart of everything, not systems and processes. And the way that we design and create software is changing faster than ever. And the tools we're using were made for yesterday's tasks. Instead, Paper is putting designers first and building all kinds of features that I've always wanted. So if you want to be one of the very first people to use the next generation of design tooling, then head to Dive Club Paper to get on that list. Or at least early Access launches in May. So that's Dive Club Paper. 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.
- [05:08]
Rid
Now on to the episode. Can you give us a rundown of the state of the product when you joined and what those first few months or initiatives looked like where you were getting momentum on the design front?
- [05:19]
Tuan Kumar
The Luma journey was interesting. I first met the founder in Feb. He had reached out to, like, just learn a little bit more about how to hire designers. Back then, this. They were still doing a lot of like, 3D and Nerf. They were like, trying to figure out, okay, what kind of designers should we go after? And so honestly, the original conversations started there. And then as I learned a little bit more about what they were trying to do, what kind of problems they were running with, I was like, actually, this is kind of exciting. Let's talk more. Let's try and see if there is something here. That was in Feb. And then this was when I think we were talking. And it was a little bit of why 3D, though. I think video models had just started coming, but it was one of those, like, yeah, we don't know if it's actually going to be a thing anywhere. And so the team was still very much, like, focused. The Entire team was 3D background. And so they were very focused like the 3D aspects. And so I let that go. It was like, okay, they seem very interested in 3D. That's not particularly my thing. And so then we caught up again in like June. And by this point, I think seeds of the idea of the video side of things had started happening. But the company was still in the generative 3D land of things. I was still at Apple. The company had released a text to 3D model called Genie. And so that had sown the idea of, like, okay, this can be a generative company. We can attract the right kind of researchers, we can get the right kind of compute to train these models and all of that stuff. And so this time, the entire conversation was a lot more around, like, what would it mean to bring generative and 3D together? And throughout the whole conversation I would basically do this thing where I would try and understand how much flex there was in 3D as like only 3D versus creativity at large. And once I saw there was like enough give there, honestly, and nobody was like, no, no, no, why would we ever do anything else? 3D is where it's at. I was like, okay, this feels like a very opportune time. The other thing that really made it very interesting to talk to these folks was I think it was the only research company that still was talking about product. I had talked to like most companies that were doing stuff back then and they were pretty much like full on research labs and like trying to be a product person who has all their career done product. It is a little bit of a learning challenge because the incentives, the like timescales, all of those are just a little bit different when you're in a proper research lab versus when you're in a research and product company. And so those two stars align. And that's kind of what led me to uma. But the day I joined the company was still technically doing generative 3D. I think the first week we had this group team huddle. I think the team was what, like 10, 15, folks. I don't even remember Ahmed, the CEO, he's like, so we should talk about what we are going to do next. And that's when the idea of the video model and that, that's something that, you know, in talking with folks in the industry, investors, that's something that's been picking up steam. And that's really was like, oh, I guess I've joined a video model company.
- [08:17]
Rid
The classic pivot. A week after you joined.
- [08:19]
Tuan Kumar
You know, Yeah, I think like, in my case, it turned out to be a happy accident. I was like, that's amazing. Because I had always wanted to broaden the sphere of like, why one modality? In some ways the real unlock in the whole AI stuff, there are two. One, language is now an input and then two, any modality can be any modality. Those are the two most foundational unlocks. And so in that world, trying to limit yourself to one modality always felt a little shortsighted to me. And so for me, this was like, this could not be more amazing news.
- [08:49]
Rid
Okay, so can we dive into the zero to one design process? I want to learn about how you even figured out what this could be after, you know, the company kind of pivots a little bit a week into joining. And you said something interesting to me before we started recording. You said, 0 to 1 is your opportunity to put your signature on it. So what does your signature look like?
- [09:09]
Tuan Kumar
I think this is like one of those perennial quintessential like, design versus art and blah, blah, blah. But really, like, the things that are really well designed do have an art like quality. Like, yes, I understand theoretically, art is not design and design is not art, but they do have that, like, special quality. That is not a rational approach to design. And so when I say putting your signature, I don't mean, like, just doing something because you want to leave your mark. I mean putting a signature so that it can have somewhat of an essence or soul that speaks to some people on a more visceral level. There's no. You couldn't, like, honestly rationalize it if you sat in a design critique and someone asked you, why did you do it this way? And honestly, the answer will be, because I just thought it was better. Like, really, there is no rhythm or rhyme for that kind of reasoning. So that's what I mean by putting your mark as designers. Like, this is going to sound, like, too heady, but I think as designers, one of the fundamental things we are charged with is what should come into existence in the world. And that is, you know, a great opportunity. But that is. I also think that is a moral responsibility. Especially having worked at, like, different companies, I feel like I have a fuller picture of what, you know, business needs, business incentives means what user incentives means and all of that stuff. But I come back to the same idea. Yeah, all of that's fine. But the whole profession of design came into being because we wanted a function to fight for the user. Now it's like, well, designers should talk business metrics and this and stakeholder alignment. It's like, yeah, but the whole function, really, it was brought into existence because we needed a function to fight for just the user. And so it's, like, really interesting to me that we now look at this as, like, well, design should do this and balance this and balance that. It's like, yes, but we also, as a function, have this moral responsibility of, like, we are choosing to bring something into the world. At that point, you have the most influence on what the shape of something can be. And so when I say signature, I mean it at that, like, deeper level than, you know, just doing something fancy because you thought it was the coolest thing ever.
- [11:13]
Rid
I felt that in the product, for what it's worth, like, there were multiple times where I think, even when I hit the Brainstorm panel and I felt like this little background animation, and it kind of took Me to this like almost peaceful state where I was like, okay, they didn't have to do that, they didn't have to do that. And they did and I appreciated it. So there's definitely a lot in that product where it's kind of, that makes me very happy.
- [11:36]
Tuan Kumar
I'll pass it on to the team as well. So this is the other thing that I've learned. I think you can make your life very easy by just surrounding yourself with like minded people. There are environments. Oftentimes people will ask, I think we've been asked when we interview candidates for engineering or design, where, oh, how did you convince XYZ to invest in this? And honestly, I think the answer is we didn't have to. We interviewed every person, a lot of the core team. I brought them on and the whole point was there was this philosophical alignment. We shared a worldview of how should we make things? What kind of things should come into existence, what kind of love and care is put into that. Designers are really good at justifying anything we want, but a little bit of like, you know, bullshitting our way through it. But really it's magic when everybody is like aligned. You don't have to justify things. It's a little bit of like, okay, but we have this kind of time constraint. How do we do it in like the most efficient way? And that's where like, you know, having experienced team members who've done this before in other places makes your life ridiculously easy.
- [12:42]
Rid
I've interviewed so many designers at these like really craft oriented companies and I used to try to get at, oh.
- [12:47]
Unknown
How are you doing it?
- [12:48]
Rid
How are you doing?
- [12:49]
Unknown
And I've actually stopped asking the questions.
- [12:51]
Rid
Because it's super clear. It's just like, well, everyone just cares a lot more than you're asking. It's as simple as that.
- [12:57]
Tuan Kumar
I think I learned this at Facebook from the Paper team. Paper rip. But I like, I would ask my friend Brandon and it's like, how are you able to justify so much work? And like this paper curl animation and all of this stuff. And that was his request, like, because we hired and interviewed every single engineer who joins the Paper team and if they're not aligned, they don't get to join the team. It's as simple as that. I was like, okay, I see. And so yeah, now like having seen it at multiple places, like, yeah, you can't. You either get it or you don't get it.
- [13:28]
Rid
All right, I want to talk about this idea, but from a slightly different angle where right now we're talking about building products the way that we believe products should be built. And there's also this concept of desirability which you mentioned to me the first time we chat. You said you described design as knowing what is desirable. So can you unpack that a little bit and talk about how that shapes the way that you've designed the interface?
- [13:54]
Tuan Kumar
The thing that I believed was the essence of the idea that we were trying to explore and we could really amplify that. Like, of course there's a job to be done. People who are using it, a lot of AI creators and video production people and people in graphic design, end of the day, of course they are looking for an asset, you know, and then they can take it to their tool and whatever their current production pipeline flows are like, that is known. Of course that's the job to be done. But what can we bring to the table where it's not just your typical, here's a Chromebooks, say something, you'll get a video, off you go. That doesn't, to me feels, even from a business perspective, sticky. The day a better model comes, you will switch. And we now we've seen this play out in like LLM land and like different lands. And so that was always like something we, you can say believe in or you can say we had like thought deeper enough about it that we knew that the product had to give you something else. So that was one idea. The second part of this was because of language being an input. One of the other things that is a thread that you gotta be a little careful in how much you pull on it, especially in like a professional setting thing like Dream Machine. But there is this idea of another entity that is there. And like you can tried and resisted and you know, I think like ChatGPT does a good job of like really resisting. No, it's a tool. It's like, no, but you're talking to this thing. You cannot, at a deep, deep subconscious level ever think of this as a tool. You'd have to think of it a little more than a tool. And then it's up to you, like, you know, how much do you want to personify this and all of that stuff? So for us, that was the second part, which is how do you contextualize this in the creative workflow? And like, if you think about it like, creativity is actually pretty isolating. Like it's a very solitary activity. Like no matter how many people you're jamming and brainstorming with. But when the rubber meets the road, the person designing has to Actually take the idea that's in their head, in some cases influenced by 10 other ideas people have built upon it. But then someone has to resolve it into something that makes sense. And in that there is no one with you, it is truly like, isolating. And our thinking was that if we could design the whole experience where it could have just a dash of creative partnership, where it didn't feel like this was a servant just waiting for your commands, but that it had ideas of its own, it could help your ideas get better if you were someone who was a novice, because that was a lot of the other things we were seeing, which is a lot of people who didn't really know a lot about design, photography, film coming in and just like, picking up prompts from here and there and just like, putting them. You would see things like octane, 8K, renderer, glitchy noise. I'm like, those terms don't even mean anything together. And so our hope was that if you use something like this, A, it should feel like this is a partnership. It's not just you having to work with the machine and tell the machine what you want. It should feel like a partnership. And then, B, as you use more and more, especially if you're someone who has not been deep into this field or has, like, a proper creative art background, you can learn. So Brainstorm was very much from that lens of, like, you can come with the simplest idea. Our favorite example of testing these flows, when I was designing the language, entire architecture was like red kitchen. What do you mean? Red rustic kitchen, red modern Italian kitchen, red farmhouse kitchen. What kind of red kitchen? One aspect is we show those variations. But then Brainstorm lets you kind of go deeper on these so that next time you come, you learn the vocabulary, you learn other ways, you learn how red can be connected to terracotta, how that can be connected to brick, and now their entire play of materiality in kitchen design. And that's the kind of stuff we wanted to imbue in terms of what makes it feel different. So those were the things that we were trying to build on top of conversation as a foundational thing. And then this idea of a creative partner. Back then, I don't think agent was even a term. Looking back, pretty clear, we were just scratching the surface of that idea. But when we started, the idea was very much instead of trying to build an AI artist, we wanted to build a creative partner.
- [18:01]
Rid
Are there any challenges that come with designing an AI product that you might not even be aware of until you actually join a company like Luma, lots of them.
- [18:10]
Tuan Kumar
I think like the timescales are rapidly different. They're both different and a little bit unpredictable. The reason they're unpredictable is because research is unpredictable. I say this all the time. I think this is the first time design has met a function that is even more timeline averse than design has been historically for the last 10, 15 years. And it really, it's not because someone is trying to be difficult to work with, it's they're actually inventing stuff that wasn't possible before. Even when it's like a paper that someone else has written and published and the team is like trying to just adopt those methodologies, those papers were designed and written from a research pov, they were not designed and written from a productization point of view. And so when you start productizing it, you realize, oh, this method is, I don't know, too costly, too slow, doesn't actually converge at scale. It's good for hand picked data sets, but not really at scale. And you then have to solve each of those things and each of those things the solve is unknown. This is not engineering, at least like normal engineering that we've seen for the last 15 years wherein, oh, hey, this thing doesn't work. Oh yeah, we know five other ways we can solve this problem of performance that we are hitting. No, this is really, it's unknown. It could be they can figure it out in a weekend, but it could also be it'll take them three months to figure it out. And that makes it very uncertain. But coupled with the race that is a field right now means the moment you do have something ready, it is in the company's best interest and your user's best interest to get that out in the market as soon as possible. I think the 0 to 1 phase is really good at trying to establish some, I would say big borders of like, okay, creative partnership, one big thing, ideation as a core thing, okay, one big border to establish. But once you have those, these new capabilities are a little bit like as they come, figure out how they fit in the product and get them out the door. Because if you don't, someone else will. And right now it's very easy for people to switch to whatever tool that is of their preference. And so from a company's sustainability perspective from users like using this on a project that is mission critical to them, the sooner it gets out, the better it is for them, the more they can try these things and better the model gets. And so you're probably first like one month soon, but because of your feedback cycle, next time you do an update, you are two months sooner than everyone else and that gap only increases. Compounding is real. And in AI field, it is even more so real. How we balance that with the tricky part is if you don't do that in a way where end of the day, your product is just trying to be a wrapper around the core model, whether yours or someone else's, if you're doing that, that's fine. You can just keep shipping things. Each model, each capability becomes a button. But when you get that in like an agentic workflow, you have conversation, you have all these different pathways. That's where it gets really tricky because you have to design the product. This is something that I think, honestly we are now learning that you have to design the product in a way where these are extremely modular and resilient and you can just hot swap them as new capabilities come. And so that's like a good lesson for us, I would say, because I think we tried to be one big monolithic thing in the past. It is pretty clear modernization should have been the way we had approached this. But those are the things I would say that makes it like, particularly difficult. And lastly, you don't know the kind of edge scenarios in that. What I mean is we started with like in 2007 with capacitive touch. And soon, within I would say three, four years, we had tools where you could actually feel what capacitive touch unlocked. And in the beginning, everyone was still doing really fast buttons. And it wasn't until we got the slide to unlock that we realized, oh, gestures are a whole new capability of this medium. From that point onwards, many designers were like, actually experiencing the medium. They were designing these as if, like, they were controlling the gestures, they were controlling the touch points. And in origami or whatever tool you were using, you could have control over all of these things. That doesn't exist in research land. You can kind of use Comfy, but it's not the same. And you have to build a little bit of intuition of where the arc is going. You kind of in your head be able to see, okay, what are the curves and where are they going, where are they landing? And in many ways, you kind of have to guess a little bit of. I think in two months we will likely have this. In six months, we will definitely have this fundamental step change capability. And then you kind of like work a little bit backwards from that. It's like, okay, if that is roughly landing in six months, what fundamental decisions we shouldn't be making right now, because in six months they will be completely the wrong decisions. Not to say you can't ever change, but then there are some things that are so foundational that, you know, it's like, okay, if this is landing in like three to six months, why would you make this decision? And so you do have to, like, think a little bit forward, which I think is not a trait that I think we've ever had to honestly, we.
- [23:08]
Rid
See the problem and we solve the problem.
- [23:10]
Tuan Kumar
We see the problem, we know the tools at our hand and we solve them. Even with like tech and touch devices, it was pretty clear how to do that. Now you kind of have to also assume the arc of technology a little bit. And so you do have to be a little closer to the medium. You do have to be a little aware of what is the research happening. Something like, how far are we from real time video models? You at least should have some theoretical answer to that question. And based on that, a lot of the decisions you are making day to day might shift. You can nudge research at some point towards those directionalities. So that's how I would say it's different.
- [23:45]
Rid
You know, is there an example that you can share of a type of problem where you can make the strategic decision like, this is not worth solving?
- [23:52]
Tuan Kumar
I can probably tell more of the ones where I think we learned this the hard way. So for the agentic stuff, we were still dealing with 3.5 when I had started, like writing like the basic system prompts and stuff. And the way that process worked was the first step was like, no language should be something we invest in. And kind of getting everyone aligned on that idea to like, okay, but like, how are you even approaching this problem? So, like, a few of us got together. I just wrote a rough notion doc of these are the broad ways to think about the problem. This is very broadly speaking, like, I think architecture is probably even a cringe word to describe what I wrote in that document. But roughly, these are the stages. This is how the agent should think. This is when it should rethink and reevaluate all of that stuff. From there began the work of, okay, this is all great in theory land, prove it. And so like writing the first system prompt just seemed like getting all the tools installed and spending time in terminal because it was the fastest way to get this all done. And so that whole process, we were dealing with 3.5. And so we had to create so many of these special case rules, like, if this happens, do this. In this case, do this this is how you break it down. Lo and behold, now like 4 and 4.0. Like, I think one of the things we are realizing is every time you approach in the LLM side of things a problem like that, you're putting a ceiling on the intelligence yourself. Because the way you wrote those logic pathways and those rules are the limits. No matter how intelligent the model gets, that is all it can ever do because you're literally telling it not to do anything else. And I think in hindsight we should have, you know, this wisdom that I was spewing a second ago of like knowing the ARC and everything, I should have taken that myself and been like, no, no, no. By the time we launch, we would have it. That's like a perfect case of like, where clearly the methodologies got better very quickly over time. This one is tricky though. I think there is a constant push and pull in AI of like, you can wait for two more months and a better method will come, but you will also have waited for two months. And I think this is like on a case by case basis, every company, every feature, you kind of have to call of like, when is it worth it to still ship the thing you have versus actually, no, it's not good enough. Hold on, wait for it to ship because you have a better model that we can have because there will always be a better thing. I think none of these are anywhere close to plateauing. Even video models, like, yeah, in three months we will probably have a better video model. In six months, even a better one than that. But there, obviously we're not going to just wait till the ideal happens because it's never going to happen. But in core architecture stuff, I think knowing that like helps a little bit and you can just plan your work around that. Otherwise you just end up rewriting. Like, we rewrote the agent architecture, I think a month before, because structured responses, all of that stuff came out and we were like, this is so much better than all the logic that we were having to write. And so we rewrote. It's okay.
- [26:48]
Rid
It's interesting to hear you talk about how much of like the design output is being captured in like the system prompts. And you've used the word language quite a few times now and even getting into terminal and just how much the role is even changing based off of the medium.
- [27:03]
Tuan Kumar
I think there are like two parts of it probably. One is my personal view of what I think I do and I want to do more of. I think it was for the last decade or so. I didn't feel like a UI designer. I was decent at it. I never quite felt and I think like Facebook was the first time where this idea of a product designer was exposed. Like that was our role title. And the idea that your job is not to just create designs or pixels output your design is to actually think about the whole thing. Then Airbnb, I think we were called experience designers and not in user experience. It really meant what is the end experience a guest is going to have. And whatever vector can control that. Think about it. That's the role that you have as a designer in that broad view. Yeah, I would call myself a designer. In the tech view of UI design, I feel closer to a product architect than a designer. But a lot of this I think has become much easier to apply. Honestly, with AI, it's so much easier to be able to express. This is the rough architecture that's in my head. But I can't just talk about it now. I can actually go and execute a rough version of it in Playground and then show it to people and then people who are way smarter than me can build on top of it. And so that I think is like a fundamental shift in what design means. From like before UI design was there, we had graphic design, we would look at static things. And then with UI design, interaction kind of became a big thing like prototyping and interactive design and knowing between state A or view A and view B. What were the hundred in between micro moments that happened that took you from here to there, that became a thing you had to think about. And I think in this case or metaphor, I think we're just going deeper. You now have to understand the material through which you can influence because it doesn't need to be deterministic code now it is like probabilistic language which can shape this can happen or then that can happen. It sounds intuitive, but when you actually start working with it, it is very non intuitive. Especially trying to turn off your brains. 10, 15 years of very deterministic ways of thinking in programming and stuff. You start designing and like you find yourself catching yourself being like, wait, why am I doing it this way? Like that's the old way. I would call it like the old way of thinking about this problem. Let's shift gears and think about it this way. So I think like knowing what capabilities exist, how many of the capabilities you can literally like give birth by just writing, you know, four lines of prompts like concept pills in the UI came like that, brainstormed.
- [29:47]
Rid
Can you share the story on the.
- [29:48]
Tuan Kumar
Concept Yeah, I mean, it started off with the idea that, like, oh, it would be nice because again, going back to like, people were thinking of these just as prompt. But we wanted this to feel like an ideation partner. And so, like, what are some ways we can think about it? Of course you can always ask anything. And so in Dream Machine, you know, of course you can get a video, you can get an image, but you can also just get ideas. You can literally just ask, give me more ideas like the one above and it will give you ideas. In trying to first productize that we were trying to think of. Okay, but when people are trying to riff on prompts, often they come. People who are novices are not pro prompt Smithers. They would come with very simple vocabulary. How can we give them options that lets them understand, okay, what is the slightly more nuanced way of talking about this? Still in the same periphery of ideas. So it's not quite about Brainstorm, which is much more go broad. But this is like, no, within this realm. How else could have you set it? What are other things that are in this realm that let you quickly explore in the latent space way of thinking about it, the more peripheral regions of the latent space where you're right now. That's how we started off with. At first it was, oh, let's do some project matching and this and that, or have a hard coded list. Very intuitively I feel like that just felt wrong to me. I was like, we have LLMs. Why the hell would you have to do this? And so I really just wrote a few like things in Claude, I think at that time, just to prove out could it be done. And this was something as simple as like, hey, for every term that's being given, figure out the right set of keywords. And for each of those keywords, figure out other creative alternates. And then like, I had to like prompt Smith a lot on that system prompt to like, because otherwise sometimes it would start writing essays. Then it was like, okay, how do you sanitize the response problem? But that's kind of how the original idea came. Once that camera. Some of the more essay kind of responses is what led to Brainstorm. We were like, holy shit, actually, this thing can go so deep. Let's actually take this other essay form that we didn't need here. Let's repackage it as another feature. Really, if you think in abstract, you wouldn't likely think of Brainstorm as a feature. But when you're in the medium working with these things, each response is a Possibility of a new direction you can take it in. And so that's how concept builds happen. That's how like the brainstorm stuff happen. And they're all coming from the same place of just playing with language models. Once we have the models ready, then kind of hooking it back to, like, then optimizing, okay, what kind of prompt works with our model better so that the users don't have to think too much about this stuff. They can just come with the most simple version of the idea that they have in their head and not have to work so hard with like, prompt smithing or this alchemy of words. You can just come and say things naturally, just be human, just come and express. And it should be the model and the things in between. The system's job to really take your input and do what is the best way to express that.
- [32:50]
Rid
Is the cloud artifact part of the quote unquote handoff process at that point? Or are you just basically, as the designer, being like, okay, I have confirmed this is possible.
- [32:58]
Tuan Kumar
I think when we came up with some of these, I don't think we even had a language engineer. So the language team was me and the person on iOS who was, like, very passionate about it. Like, he helped me set up with like all the terminal and all the stuff. And we were just jamming on these ideas to, like, really prove it out. No, this can be done. And so at that time, it was just me, like, promptsmithing, because really, what's special there? We were just saying it to do things in 50 different ways and seeing what works across, like a broad set. Like, I think the idea of evals was not a thing then. It was very much vibes, because it was early days. And so we were just like, like, okay, this feels good for these queries. And so after a while, we started having like, you know, a set of 10, 20 prompts that we wanted to test these with. And so that was like, I think I have like three or four Claude chats where I basically run out of context memory limits. Literally every time I now go back, cloud just says, please start a new thing. At that point you do get to some prompt. But back then, again, something I didn't know back then was like, actually that is very different from how the playground models behave because there's a lot of sanitization anthropic or OpenAI is doing in the public version of ChatGPT. So then you kind of take that in the playground, you decide, Are you using OpenAI's model? Are you using Anthropic's models. And then you kind of then work in the playground because it's slightly different. Again, not day and night, but just a few things are different. And so you use that at this point now, obviously we have like proper evals and there's a whole team. It's a much more proper process. But back then, yeah, it was the system prompt ended up becoming the like, here is the thing that works. And then someone, once we had more folks who can help us just go and run EVAs like it trade on this. At this point, honestly, I can't even recognize the code. Like, I know the rough shape of it, but when I look, I'm like, what is this doing here? I don't even recognize it anymore.
- [34:49]
Rid
So you talked a little bit about collaborating with research. You talked a little bit about the language system prompt elements. Are there other ways that you've seen the value proposition of design shift now that you're working in this type of AI native product. Org?
- [35:03]
Tuan Kumar
For me, it's like twofold. At least the ones I've seen happen. Especially if you know you're working at a company that has either applied research or if it's also like a foundation model company has like foundation model research team 1 is your good old. There's a capability, what should we do with it? That's like your typical product design process. It's the same way, hey, we can now do this, figure out how it should work out in the product. I think with AI we talked about some of the applied stuff. There's a lot of applied stuff that you can actually like intuit. If you use comfy, you can do it on the visual model side. So like someone else on our team right now is playing with. How do you like actually interpolate the embeddings to get better results? And like they're designer, they're not researchers or even applied researchers. So there's like that layer of like a little bit of contribution to the applied side of things you can do. And then the thing that I think is new, especially if you're working with foundation model folks, is often you can shape and guide what research should even research. Like they're not coming with these ideas in vacuum, right? Like once a product is out, it is in the service of product. There is always like some arcs that are like very dear to research because they make the process of training much more efficient. Or you can get a lot more with the right data instead of always being data hungry. But then there's a lot of stuff of like, how should people work with camera control? Designers probably are able to come up with pretty good prototypes of what that could be. Don't get too hung up on one because we don't know if there's a direct research methodology for it. But if you have two or three of these, go talk to your researchers, really show them. Chances are at least one of the three or four you will show it to will get very excited because that is something they have like dreamt about. They just couldn't quite figure out the right way of doing it or the most elegant form of it. But once they see it, they're also able to connect it with like just the way when you see something, you connect it with like, oh, here are all the 50 design patterns I know that will apply there. It's the same. Oh, actually that's very easy. I have this other research technique and then there's this new research paper. Let me try something. That's kind of how you get to. The tricky part is in research you wouldn't get exactly what you asked for. That's just the nature of things. It would be like 60, 70. And so there is another phase of design that happens. So think of that design as like a rough sketch of an idea that you collaborate with research team. Once the capability happens, that's when you're probably doing the production version of that idea. But if you go in with that mentality that what you're first talking about is not like you said it once, it should be this way kind of approach, then yeah, I think that's a new kind of role that design gets to play. If you have the chops, like being able to do that in the applied side of things, in model behavior, all of those are very important. But there you probably have to pick up some new skills. There's so much role of designers or just people in general with very keen aesthetic eye that you can probably bring to the table. You have so much deep knowledge about the workflows that people do in creative industries. Like you bring that to the table. And that's very helpful for the research folks because it truly impacts the direction of research. So those are, I would say, like the big buckets helping see where should research team even channel some of their energy because of what can be or what would be nice to have on the applied side, like helping out with some of the systems engineering, plus just a dash of applied to like make things that already existed. You just connected them in slightly new interesting pieces. On the language side, like the concept build, brainstorms, are very simple examples of that. But you can be as complex as your skill sets allow. And then of course there is the good old. There's a capability get it to market there being just fast on your feet, being able to think through problems and systems and having a system that is modular so you can just quickly plug and play because their velocity ends up being the key. So those are I think the new end slightly different than before because previously I feel like I definitely remember projects where I would just spend weeks just thinking about the right design and iterating. There are probably some projects where you get to do that, but for the most part it is spread out in this process. Like you get to do that before research happens a little bit, then you get to do that a little bit as research is happening. But once things converge it is very much go, go, go.
- [39:32]
Rid
I'm sure there's somebody listening right now that is like man, I listen to a bunch of episodes and it feels like every designer that comes on is just tack more skills that I have to learn and my bucket of responsibilities is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So maybe the flip side of that. Based off of your experience at Luma, do you think that any skills that we would traditionally associate with design become less valuable in an AI world?
- [39:56]
Tuan Kumar
I don't think I've ever thought about it that way. But that is a very good question because you are right. Everyone just adds more. They should. Every episode aware of sales and business it's like okay, I will just be a one man company at this point. I think some of those skills might be a little less important maybe. I don't think they go to zero though. I think this is a real issue in that if I were like a new grad designer or studying design right now, it is actually hard to understand how would I myself think of what to give my skills in. Designers before this were so boxed into the idea and some of it is like us, but some of it is also like just the way the industry boxed us in to the idea of being able to create something that is a good visual artifact, even if experience is considered even then end of the day it's a good visual artifact. Like that was the job of a designer in tech especially. The right typography, the right ui, the perfect like crisp like looking things, the right spacing, right rhythm, harmony, all of that like, but very much visual attributes, those don't go away. I'm like hesitant to say they become less important because what I don't want people to take away Is like, oh, great. Visual design doesn't matter. It's like, no, I kid you not, that is still baseline, like the thing that you will get in the door with. Because if that can't be like if that basic taste, and not just taste, but actually the execution capability to make something good, beautiful, efficient and effective and desirable. Going back to that word, that's like a foundational skill. Do you think of these at this point as like amplifiers? They don't define you, but if you have these skill sets, you're going to go much further along. Think of it as that. Think of it as investing in. We're starting to see the arc of things in fuzzy, not fully definite ways for the next five, 10 years and think of it as future investment. And like, oh my God, if you don't have the skill today, you just can't make it. No, your baseline skills are still the time true and tested things that will get you in the door. You will land the perfect job that you've been looking for and with the right set of people, but you now have the opportunity to do more. Whether you do it or not is up to you. The caveat being someone else will be willing to do it. And so that's I think like the real thing, which is once you're in that situation, at the grand level, we each design our lives and in this case we each design the exact career we want to have. It's the same way when people would be like, yeah, business skills and like, you know how business works, all of that is super important for designers to understand. Would you have a really great designer who has that skill set versus a really great designer who doesn't? Yeah, if all things equal, you will prefer the one. But if you're looking for someone who is a great designer, but you know, typical great, like visual ui, all of that stuff, like the right ux, that site, or someone who is okay at that but is also really good at business. Depends on the company. It could be that in super early stages a company might prefer this bucket, but the moment they have two or three designers, they will very quickly realize, yeah, we got the right product, but they don't feel good to use and then they'll need this. So at the end of the day, the teams, the skills have to be balanced and this is not a, if you don't do this, you're done. I think think of it as like an investment and of all the places you could invest in, what are the ones that would give you the most return? This does feel like it is a new material. The same way when touch came, people who could prototype went further. That's just a fact. Looking back, we see that doesn't mean people who didn't prototype couldn't do anything. Like, no, they were still valuable. It's still a fully. Like it's actually still a very hard skill set to acquire. But if you could do the other stuff, it was more valuable. And then of course you also see people who push so much on the prototyping side that if you did that well with enough of design, you became a design engineer. It's magical that we get to have so many choices in the different strands of skills that we can acquire. And there are very few things that are like, well, baseline, you should know this. From there it's like, what are you excited about this? Because if you're not excited, you're not going to enjoy it. So it's not a requirement, but it is a nice to have and it does feel like something. Just the way prototyping proves to be a pretty good amplifier for careers. It does feel like it would be a pretty solid amplifier and like something that you can contribute to the company beyond just the immediate project that you're on.
- [44:39]
Rid
You're hiring right now. So if someone's listening, they're inspired, they want to join. What are the amplifiers that you care the most about right now?
- [44:47]
Tuan Kumar
I think growth mindset, it's like one of those before everything. If you don't have the growth mindset, it you wouldn't even be asking this question of like, what else can I learn right now? And so fundamentally that and curiosity are like the most foundational things. We're a small team. So I will say like, you know, being good at visuals, being good at product design, like the good old basic stuff is important. We are not yet at the point where we can like really mentor people a lot. So we definitely are looking for people who are in the middle stages of their career and you know, are self sufficient. But if you're hungry for more, if like AI is exciting to you, if you're curious of what else can happen here, how do we move beyond just like, you know, prompt boxes and getting outputs to like, what are 100 other things? And these ideas are just bubbling in your head, yeah, this is the place to come and be.
- [45:39]
Rid
I want to zoom out for a second and maybe even just give a little bit more context about how you're thinking about the Luma Org. Because if I would ask a random listener right now, name the top design driven companies in the world. I guarantee both Apple and Airbnb would be on that list, which is your past experience. So what are you drawing from at those companies and what it was like being a designer there that's then shaping how you design the Org for Luma.
- [46:09]
Tuan Kumar
I would honestly call it luxury that you get to have when you are the Apple or the Airbnb because they are established products, they have a clear product market fit, they are mature products. And so you actually can afford as a product team, as a design team, to really go deep on one problem. And in cases of both the companies honestly spend months. I think my average time for any project at either of these companies was 8 to 12 months. Almost everything I worked at these companies was that long. And they were like, don't get me wrong, they were very deep things. They were like, you know, a whole window management feature or a whole redesign of the entire design system of Airbnb. But, like, they did span that kind of time horizon. So the thing that I draw from is the like, relentless pursuit of trying to be good or better than where you were yesterday. These are like good north stars to have. But at some point you also have to realize even Airbnb is not like Apple, and Apple obviously is not like Airbnb. They are are completely different businesses. They exist in completely different sectors. And so they have like, very different business dynamics and market dynamics that affect, like, how things work and how things don't work. And so the same is likely going to be true of Luma and the same is probably true for whoever is listening and is in a similar role at a different company. So try to not think of these as like, this is the archetype, this is exactly how design should be. Take the parts that are more universal from there. So I think like, one of the things that Johnny, he left these like, deck of cards that every new hire would get. One of them that has stuck with me is trust the expert. Especially true in case of Apple because you would have probably someone who has worked at Pixar and like, done characters all their life. So you should at least have one second of thought before you give them feedback on memojis or something. You know, it's like one of those, like, dude, this is all this person has done. They are probably the leading expert on this in the world. Like, not even in the country, like actually in the world. The other thing both these places had is like, huge, huge respect for individual contributors. That is something that I, as much as I can, I do try to bring over to The Luma both on the design team, but also on, like, the larger product and engineering side of things, which is we're a small team. And especially with AI, it's possible that small teams actually have way more of an alpha than, like, much larger, larger teams with layers of management. The more you can empower engineers and individual contributors or designers, the faster you can go, the more ideas come into table. Like, historically, you wouldn't think of Facebook in the same breath as Airbnb and Apple, but this one actually is one of the core things I picked up from Facebook. Anyone could just come up with any idea, like, the number of product features that were created in, like, an overnight hackathon that are now used by billions is shocking. Like, literally, video chat was a thing someone created in an overnight hackathon. I was like, oh, it would be cool if you could just video call someone. And then it became a product feature. It's insane. And so when you give people that kind of agency, beautiful things happen. Different companies work differently. At Facebook, it was like, go try. We'll see. At Apple, it's a little bit of like, go try. But then we will really be the editor of the entire experience and then bring that out into the world. Both can work. The fundamentals are still the same. You know, you value the people who do the work. You give them the agency to do the right kind of work. And lastly, the thing that, like, these companies have that I think we're trying to increase more of but are not fully, there is just the time and space. Good things take time. This is like, you know, one of those duh kind of statements. But good things do take time. You need to then learn how much you can go deep on something given the time constraints you have have, versus trying to craft this masterful web of ideas. But because you don't have the right set of time, it all comes crashing. And the good part is it's a small team and you have all the agency. So once this version is out, nobody will stop you from coming up with the better version of this idea. And so that's, I would say, something that is actually different from the Apples and the Airbnbs of the world. But truly, in its most, like, fundamental form, the thing that both companies share is design. As a very almost optimistic view of the world. It's really funny to think of design apps as optimistic because we are one of the most judgy people in the world. We, like, critique everything. You go to a restaurant, you're like, why is this. Like, why is this like this, but, like, behind all the snark and whatever, I think is this, like, relentless, like, like, hope of, like, it can be better. And to me, that is extremely, extremely true at places like Apple and Airbnb. And my hope is in all of this, we're able to bring a little bit of that idea of, like, the optimistic aspect of, like, design and product at large at Luma and in this, like, AI field where right now everyone seems to be the Velocity is the only thing. But my hope is if we do this right, it's sure Velocity has its value, but it's a lot of other things that make the product sticky, make people actually love our product, not just love our models.
- [51:40]
Rid
You've talked about a growth mindset a few times now, so maybe I'll even flip the question back at you. When you reflect on your time at these companies, was there a specific inflection point or a particular area where you feel like you really grew as a designer from those experiences?
- [51:57]
Tuan Kumar
Something changed when I joined Airbnb. I don't know what. I really don't know what. Like, I think at Pulse, like, I was too new. I was new to the whole country. I was like, I remember going to rent a house with my co founder because I didn't have any credit score. I didn't know that was a thing. And so, like, one of my co founders had to come with me and really vouch for me and Bryant. I remember the landlord's name. Really cool guy. But, like, this old dude and he's like, oh, yeah, I can tell you just landed. You're so lost. So I think, like, at Pulse, I was, you know, like, trying to do the thing. But honestly, Pulse was very much like, understanding what design meant. Facebook was this, like, step change in, like, seeing what the grits look like in design. Everyone was there. Tim Van Damme, Wilson, Mike Mattis. Honestly, the name, there's like enough, more than enough people to name for, like, hours, but everyone was there. And all those, like 10 people, I said I started following on Twitter, they were all there. That exposed me to both, like, the things that they were, like, really good at, but it also exposed me to, like, end of the day, they were people. Once you start sitting in crits with them, you could see the things that they were excellent and world class act and the things that were there, like, weaknesses, and they were different for different one, including me. And so that made it much more normal to be like, okay. It almost, like, I would say, anchored and grounded me a little bit to be like, it's not this, like imaginary. You become this like star designer. It's like, no, everyone has their strengths and everyone has their weakness. One person can't be doing the best branding and the best interaction design and the best product design. It's just not possible. And so from there, like knowing, okay, what excites you? What do you want to go deeper? So that was like a lot of Facebook. And so, so for me, Clara, the next startup that I joined was this coming out of age experience A little bit. I was back on my own. I felt like I had picked enough skills where I could see things in a broader perspective and I was able to do everything from the brand design to the product and be in AI at a point where nobody even knew AI was AI. So that was for me, very interesting. And I think like, bit by bit, like the fact that I could do that on my own made me actually become very confident in my own set of skills. Like now getting like comments and DMS from like people again, the same 10 people, some of them like complimenting the work, praising, you know, talking nicely about the things that we had done or we were trying to do. That was a huge, you can say a confidence boost, but also like, it really made you realize that when you do things from things that you deeply believe in, they are good things. And so then, honestly, when I started at Airbnb, I felt over prepared. I don't know what changed in my mind, but I remember even through the interview loops, I had like zero shred of doubt I wouldn't get the job. Like, it just was not a part of, like, oh, maybe I won't get. I was like, no, like, you can call it overconfidence, possibly was a little bit of that. It's like, oh, this hotshot designer from Facebook. Well, probably, probably some of it. But I never felt that I couldn't do the job. For me, like, what was important at Airbnb was to make sure I was able to like actually have impact on the company. And so like the first year's project was a little bit like very experimental. The second year I just went deep into something that was both work wise, hard, but also organizationally challenging. And then in my third year, I think for the first time in my career, I had a manager who I would say truly saw me. That just gave me winks. I think I was just like, I am truly unstoppable. I was suddenly leading organizational meetings with the GMs of a different org to work on some design system and make sure Their entire product line can adopt the design system, meanwhile also redesigning the design system, having brand reviews and all of this stuff. And so I think maybe that's the inflection point. Having someone who actually believes in you, having someone who is able to provide the air cover for you, especially in larger companies where there's a lot of other agendas going around, that was life changing. Some of these things you work on, you never realize you're getting better at it. I never thought of myself as good at visual design, but towards the end of my career at Airbnb, I was mentoring people on visual design. I still don't think of myself as a good visual designer, but I guess these things are always relative. And so I think I've taken a.
- [56:47]
Rid
Fine comb through your ui. I'm gonna say you're a good visual designer. So I'm sorry, I don't know that.
- [56:51]
Tuan Kumar
I feel like I look at some other people's work and I'm like, how did they. How could they even see this? This looks so pretty. I don't think I'm there. I can make things look pretty, but not. Not that level of pretty, but that's okay. I'm things I'm good at. I know I'm good at, so it's okay.
- [57:07]
Rid
And I think that's like a. That's what I'm gonna underline, too. Like, what? My interpretation of just connecting the. Through lines of some of the things that you've been saying is how important it is to recognize the fact that you can't be great at every skill. And, and even the people that we look up to on Twitter, they're probably not great at every skill. Like, everyone actually is human. And so, so much of. Of, like, I love that your inflection point was about people and, like, this inner belief rather than. Yeah. And then I learned X, Y and Z.
- [57:37]
Tuan Kumar
The thing that I resisted for the longest time in my career, personally, was being a manager. I just didn't want to be one. The thing that I'm most passionate about is being able to make sure the individual contributors have the space that many times I didn't get to have in my career. And so I think because I was an ICE for so long, I have, like, a very different kind of empathy for that body of work and that career track. I'll do whatever it takes to like, preserve their creative spirit, their creative energy and channel it, you know, of course you still need, like, to give feedback and all of that stuff, but I think, like, creative energy needs to be Preserved and protected. In some ways people think of design teams being very exclusive because you know, you should invite everybody for conversations like, yes, but sometimes ideas are like, I think Johnny is another one of those things. Like ideas truly are fragile and you can't just go around poking holes in them. But also you have to have thought about the idea deep enough to be able to have a discussion at the similar enough frequency wavelength. If you're just shallowly thinking of ideas, I personally think it is unfair to expect everyone to bring you into the discussion because no, you haven't thought deeply enough about the idea. And so whether you're a designer, whether you're an engineer, that's not the part that matters. What matters is have you thought deeply enough? Because it's a sign of respect that when you're engaging in truly dissecting an idea, you have done your homework, you have figured it out, you've thought about it, you have an original point of view that you're bringing to this conversation because you have thought deeply enough about it. It. Yeah, then who cares if you're a designer, engineer or someone else? I don't care. You just need to have thought about it. That is again another way of protecting the creative energy because it's very easy to kind of not have that be protected. And I think that's when I've seen designers get burnt out. Some of them switch over from designs to never being a designer. They become engineers and stuff. It needs to be protected. So Apple is really good at that. They do that by really keeping all designers in an ivory castle. Airbnb also is pretty good at that. They are very good at preserving the creative energy of design team. And I'm sure like other design teams that are like really stellar and world class at what they do. It's probably like a core aspect of how they allow people to flourish is by preserving the thing that like that's where you get all your good ideas from. That's how you come up with like good stuff. You got to preserve it just like any other resource.
- [60:16]
Rid
We've covered a ton of ground. So before I let you go, I kind of want to just give one more generic catch all to make sure that we're hitting on everything that you want to talk about. So. So maybe we could even address the person who's listening, who is inspired by everything you're saying. They've been kind of keeping tabs and some of the AI stuff, but they're not at this forward looking company and none of it is really seeping into their day to day yet any advice or any other learnings that you want to share with that person before we let you go?
- [60:45]
Tuan Kumar
I feel like if you're in the Twitter sphere of things like you will hear so much about taste is all that matters. High agency is all that matters. I think agency is really important. Important. When you don't have agency, you end up becoming this like pessimistic, snarky person. But also when you don't have enough agency, you also start lacking being curious. So I would say like don't like go after high agency. Like that's not a thing you go after. Like you can cultivate it, but like maybe start by just being curious. Okay. You are at a place where maybe it's not at the forefront. Not every place needs to be. There is definitely a little bit of everyone trying to jump into it. At least a year ago there was definitely a little bit of. A lot of companies were just jumping in because AI was the thing to do. So maybe you are lucky that you're not at a company like that. Your company is probably more intentional. I don't know. So the first question to answer is, are you drawn by it? Is anything here somewhat interesting to you? Because if it's not, you're just chasing another meme cycle. It's like people who got into crypto because they thought it would make them rich, not because they were fundamentally allured by the idea of like, oh, things can have shared ownership and that can be anything. For me, that was the most exciting part about crypto in this world. Like for AI side of things. First of all, is it intriguing to you? Is there any of it that you're like, huh, that's exciting. Mildly scary, but also interesting. I think the second part is if it's not something that you can see, if there are small ways in which you can use it in your day to day life, it's not hard. If you're a designer using things like cursor, lovable, V0, whatever it may for creating quick tiny prototyp is very easy. I don't know, you work at Apple where NDA is galore. You can probably find ways to do this and that. You're already like ahead of many, many people because you're not just tweeting about it, you're actually experiencing it. You actually understand what works and what are the limitations of this thing. And this can be true for text or language to like prototyping, coding side of things, text to image, text to video. If you're a creative person and see if, like, the text to image, text to video side of things can bring in a new approach to your creative practice. Can this be the beginning of something that you've always wanted? Like, one of the things I have always wanted to do is, like, do a fashion line. And so for me, like, a lot of these end up being like, honestly, I could just be sitting watching something or commuting. And this is like a quick way of tapping into that seed of practice just a little bit. So that's like another way of doing all of this. Lastly, you can always change your job. Wink, wink. We are hiring. But, like, okay, before that last one, there's like, so many side projects you can do. Like, one of them that I saw recently that was. I was like, kicking myself, like, oh, that could have been an idea. I should have done that idea. I think she's someone who works at Meta, I think, but she's done this, like, podcast where it's her and like an AI thing and they just, like, talk.
- [63:45]
Rid
Mohin Sahel.
- [63:46]
Tuan Kumar
Yeah. And I was just like, this is so cool. The field is super fresh. It's like barely two years. So again, taking you back 2007, you are at best at 2009. Most interesting companies didn't even start at that point, so there's so much left to do here. So just follow things that you're naturally curious about and see if there are parts of it that are exciting again. You don't have to learn about everything. You don't have to learn about agents, all multimodals, and all the other 50 things that you see in your Twitter feed. Pick the one or two that actually excites you and go deeper on them and see what form it takes. Maybe it will actually, maybe lead to your next job, or maybe you will actually convince the company that you're at because by building these, you show them the value of what this domain can bring. Both of these in my head are things that high agency people would do instead of just saying, oh, well, my company doesn't let me do. It's like, so who's stopping you? That's. That's kind of my advice.
- [64:45]
Rid
I love it. I love it. Well, dude, this has been really, really fun. Thanks for coming on. Likewise, sharing a little bit about what you think and what you're working on. Really enjoying. Just following along with your journey in the product so far. So appreciate your time.
- [64:58]
Tuan Kumar
Thank you. And thank you for having me.
- [65:00]
Unknown
Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research, Granola is how I take notes during crit Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full time. So by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners.