Yeah [laughs].

He doesn't quite have a hand.

Um, you know, that shadow isn't exactly how it would be.

Uh, and so the, the detail in each of these little nuances, like each pixel basically needs the same, uh, amount of attention.

So I think what AI is helping us do is it's helping us speed up our process and certainly helping us explore more.

We can look at, you know, s- 20 ideas in the time it normally would've taken to look at two.

However, the, you know, it doesn't replace craft.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And it's like it, it is of course, you know, history and beauty interwoven.

But I remember a vivid example of where we were on a class trip to Santa Maria Novella, the, the church in Florence, and we were there, uh...

We were talking about the history of the, the space and the area, but I was just, just taken by the beauty of, of this building, you know, from the fourteen hundreds, and the facade is done by Alberti, and it, like, just really, it is a perfection of harmony and balance and proportion.

And, you know, when you just spend some time with that, you just, like, think about what people are capable of, you know, in the fourteen hundreds and, you know, what the impact of these things can have on people's lives and actually even, you know, shape history, made me just...

I wanna, I wanna spend time on that.

That's all, that's all I wanna do.

Mm.

I'm proud of where we got to.

Well, I think with a lot of the design community, you know, I think we're all talking about, like, awesome that these tools are kind of raising the floor.

We can build... you know, more generally good things quickly.

Awesome.

What we also need to do is raise the ceiling.

How, you know, can our taste and ability go further? How, when we're not so busy doing basic stuff, can we take advantage of that time to do something extra special? Like that is, those things are definitely on my mind.

So for example, as we scale and as we use these tools and as we rapidly prototype and we rapidly create, how do we only further leverage our systems? I don't need people to reinvent the wheel when things are working really well and you want to be able to provide good coherency and consistency for the user.

What I'd love to know is when you think about the main signals that you were looking for in people when you first joined Stripe, what are some of the biggest changes now as you're thinking about the types of people that you want to loop into this org and build around for the rest of this vision?

yeah you don't have to yeah it's just right in front of you every day and you kind of like live it

yeah i mean i think if you can hire really really well both on like both sides like the candidate choosing the organization that like they really are well aligned with like principally in character um and then also selecting the people that you bring onto your team i think it is possible to extend that character and that identity and develop it such that like hopefully the organization can live on, you know, even beyond the founder.

But yes, I think in the last three companies I worked there were founder-led and very much these founders brought that character into the work.

You know, the Collisons, I think, They're not designers, but the company is extremely design, I don't know what the word is, forward or appreciative, and they understand the role of design.

I think it really just comes from a passion for user experience.

The founders, when there was no one else there, they were meeting with their users, sitting down with their laptops and like, here's what we've made.

What do you think? And getting that feedback and iterating quickly.

I think there's something to that latter one that maybe I would say it feels like something the world needs more right now.