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Johannes Semann

Founder & CEO of SOONER, building human-centered AI for personal finance; former Strategic Design Lead at Wells Fargo and Head of Design Research at Forge.

Jul 15, 2026

5:12
What did you learn when you spent two years in a big bank talking to people about their money?
5:18
Yeah, that was pretty amazing, and I would say even priceless and quite formative.
5:24
So to provide a bit of a context, what the mission was is to set up a function within their innovation group, and this function was called strategic design, which was a combination of bringing together business design as well as design research.
5:40
I worked there as the design director and trained up a team and did bespoke projects and created concepts and prototypes.
5:51
What was important was to do these deep dive interviews, ethnographic interviews.
5:57
Some were in person, some were remote, and they were really long.
6:02
And over the course of those interviews, we got so much rich understanding of how people relate to money.

24 MINS LATER

30:38
I would love to understand for what you're building, if I land on Sooner, what can I actually do today? And then in the future, what do you imagine is going to be the end-to-end product experience?

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