Teaser: What We Learned From Diarra Bousso’s AI-First Fashion Startup

0:00Welcome to Beyond the Prompt, back with another teaser. What you're about to hear is Jeremy and my takeaways after speaking to next week's guest. Who might that be, you may ask? Well, she's only the second guest we ever invited back. Last time, we called her founder of the future. This time, she's back showing what that actually looks like. Hope you enjoy our takeaway so much that you'll listen to the full episode next week. Hi, I'm Diarabuso. I'm the founder of Diarabloo, a fashion company. And today I'm very excited to talk about how I'm using AI to grow liquidity, to improve productivity, sustainability, to optimize for joy, and to really think about what it looks like to update the operating system of the fashion industry.

0:46Okay, Jeremy Utley. Dude, Jeremy Utley. That's Henrik's Jeremy Eleanor Rigby remix. Grey album? What would you call it? that okay so if danger mouse created the gray album as the mashup between the white album and black album you're more of a green guy than than the black so like what would your mashup be would it be the lime album i don't know i'll take the lime album i think that back to business though professor diara i mean first of all i love students who become heroes and diara certainly fits the bill student who's become a hero just incredible founder i mean when we talked to her 18 months ago, she was ahead of the curve.

1:29And I think she's only stayed farther ahead of the curve now. She's just, she's accelerating, which is really exciting. And to hear some of her more recent updates are super fun. You know, one, one word that she used, which I loved, and I wrote down to talk with you about later is the word yet. Yet. She said that at the beginning, right? I can't do that yet. And that I have found is a hallmark of a growth mindset. You talk about this whole, the classic kind of growth versus fixed mindset. One of the ways it's manifested, as I understand it, is the use of the word yet implies someone has the expectation of progress.

2:06And I just love that she started there because so much of her personality and potential gets unleashed by that sense of she is someone in motion making progress. And I think for anybody who feels stuck adding the word yet to your statements especially about your abilities i can't launch a fashion design company yet is a totally different posture anyway yeah that's that's one word that i think has enormous uh power i mean like we talk a lot about experimentation on the podcast i think sometimes it's as we talked about in the conversation here sometimes it's misused a little bit because it's kind of like becomes the excuse for mediocre kind of like ideas and and a little bit like also just you know i was just testing so i think there's two things which if we double click on the experimentation part i thought was interesting the one thing is that she kind of talks about how she's helping specifically some of our junior folks with the origination which i think is interesting because i think there's been like this kind of business praxis for many years was like you know i'll just set overall goals and i'll just let my team do their thing right and you get the sense that yara is like active in her brainstorm and probably even has like a strong voice i would imagine too but on the flip side i think she also is aware of her abundance of ideas and you know she talks about how she's like i don't know she said they used all over the place but she used kind of terms realizing that she kind of has a lot of ideas and a lot of stuff going on and so she asked her staff to help manage output right which is obviously a very kind and not very forceful approach and so i thought there was an interesting dualism in her approach to experimentation which is this is okay to be somewhat explicit with some of the ideas that you have for what people should experiment with but there's also kind of like a stand what you can say but i realize i also say a lot of different things and maybe i'm just saying all this because it resonated a lot with me so you have to manage me back when i come with 10 different things that you can't kind of like run experiments on maybe just manage me back and saying you know hey here's the two things i heard that i like the most from all these ideas you had and those are the ones i'm going to test for next week yeah i love the fact that the culture of experimentation leads people to be excited about sharing ideas she mentioned you know her operations lead who's going oh you got to see this i'm creating this tool but having that leading with that kind of attitude has a ripple effect on others that they start sharing work in progress.

4:44They start sharing ideas that are maybe outside of their lane. And it has a really fabulous impact on culture. When the founder is the kind of person who says, you actually manage me, it allows other people, I think, to have that attitude too, which I thought was cool. I saw this beautiful episode. I'm a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain's and he have an episode where he goes to Denmark to visit Noma. And this is an old episode, obviously, because he's not been here for a lot. And in that episode, there's a scene where they, after final close of the restaurant, which probably is like 11 o 'clock midnight, every week, all the chefs at the restaurant stay back and they show different things that they have, like different ideas they have, like experiments.

5:29And they do it in front of everybody else. And then they talk about them and renee who owns the restaurant then critiques it and what was also beautiful is after that so one is like this whole kind of idea we're all here to try to come up with great things and do a great work now at one point anthony but then says what are you going to do are you know are you then going to put like if somebody does something really well are you going to put it on the menu and he goes like of course not he goes like what do you mean he goes well this is their dish this is not my dish to put in my restaurant this is their dish to put whatever they want to do right which I thought was like such a beautiful thing that they were not out there to mine new ideas to just make his restaurant better they were here for the intellectual interestingness of trying to come up with great stuff and then when they came up it was theirs to keep which I thought was like such an interesting stuff and so I think there's also the idea which kind of made me think more about as business owners we should probably allow people to experiment more with their own things like have their own side project they're working which they should be allowed to be just theirs because that by experimenting something that is just theirs they probably lean even more into it and then i'm sure they'll come up with ideas then that is useful for the business but doesn't have to be that direct idea that they kind of were talking about you know one of the things that i wrote down this is kind of like a mantra but i wrote down your life is your preparation and there's something to the conversation we were having about folks being intimidated maybe by how fast younger people are getting up the learning curve or we talked about the experienced designer who's gone wait you know the the person who can lift 300 pounds but somebody can only lift 100 if ai is going to be 10xing them they're going to be able to outperform and giara's comment that you've already done the hard work.

7:21Learning how to collaborate with AI is actually not the hard work. You have done the thing that can't be replicated. You're able to bench 300 pounds right now. Imagine what will happen if you could unleash. And I really liked that. That felt like a very uplifting statement. Your life is the training. You've been training. Now, use AI to get the supercharge. Use AI to get the uplift, the augmentation. That was really cool. And the last thing that I wrote down that I thought was kind of interesting is just this validating of the novice perspective or the kind of naivete. As you know, I'm a glutton for kind of origin stories of innovation and so many great origin stories come from the person who doesn't know that it shouldn't be done that way.

8:06And Diara said, that's one thing she said is like, I did this because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to, you know? And you said, I mean, it seems like that's the way that everybody should do it. And she goes, well, that's not how the industry does it. And the only reason I did this because I didn't know you weren't supposed to. And I think that just vindicating and validating, sometimes not knowing, is really important. So is acquiring knowledge and apprenticeship and all that stuff. These things, they seem to contradict, but they don't. That your naivete or your fresh perspective is sometimes a tremendous advantage to see an existing system in a new way.

8:43And there are tons of examples of this throughout the history of innovation. I just love seeing it before our eyes with how she's disrupting the fashion industry. The last thing I added, which I think is building on that, is this kind of like world that I think started way back in making an easy landing page day where, I mean, I remember the first BarkBox we did. That was just a Photoshopped kind of box, right? Like there wasn't really a BarkBox at the time where I went out to a dog park and tried to sell it to people with my co-founders. now obviously now you can just render that very fast you can make a website all these different things and so i wrote this post a long time ago about morality versus virality about where do we as founders feel we have a responsibility to the people that we are asking to serve the customers and what's nice about this example is that she already have the raw material she already have to your point, the system on which you can make this thing come to life.

9:45And so she feels very comfortable that she can actually go out and sell it and then actually deliver on it. But some people without her ethics might not kind of feel like that. And so I am curious and scared and inspired by this whole next two or three years where I think the internet just will be filled all this stuff that is rendered and we all will have to figure out how we navigate in this world like as founders for sure because we will need to we'll get tempted to just stewardship yeah and then i think there as we talked about and premise of the book and all that stuff is relationship capital like authenticity and our authority and being a trusted partner is something that's going to matter a lot therefore hopefully people will gravitate to it because the internet will also be transparent so if you're somebody who just render stuff and then don't deliver you're going to have a short career.

10:39Well said, Henrik. Well said. Sounds like you wanted to stop the podcast. Well said. As in like, can I go now? No, but I love, we got to keep that part in because that's hysterical. But the, you know, it's funny, Henrik, you saying that is collaborators mind at Stanford for years. Because like you're, if you're in the middle of a lecture or whatever, sometimes you can lose track of time. and a shorthand that we used to use on stage was, if while the other person is speaking, you say, that's really interesting, what that meant was, shut up, we've got to keep going. You know what we do? And you use it a few times.

11:21You're like, that is really interesting. Yeah, look, you know that means to be quiet. We have at Prehype, which is this company, Uvator product studio, I worked in for a long time, we had this phrase called Elmo. which I think I ponder my Philip kind of came up with, which is short for enough, let's move on. And so he would just go like, you know, I'm going to throw an Elmo here. So the very kind of non-threatening way was basically like, please shut up. That's good. There you go. Elmo, we're Elmo-ing it until saying thank you. Elmo, until further notice. So until then, thank you so much for listening in.

11:57And as ever, do you want to do the begging today, Jeremy? Begging, begging, pleading. For likes and subscribes and all that. Yeah, just do it. Do the thing. Do the thing that you know. By the way, I did notice on Apple Podcasts, we got a rude comment recently, which I would love to bury. So maybe we say the code word is bury the rudeness. And if you've made it this far and you haven't ever written a review, we need your help to bury the rudeness that is currently at the top of Apple Podcasts. and with that bye bye