20Product: How AI Changes Product Design | Does the Design Phase Become Irrelevant in a World of Vibe Coding | The Five Pillars of Truly Great Product Design with Carl Rivera, Chief Design Officer at Shopify

28:21I know he's a friend of yours. What a fucking great dude. But he was like, dude, I'm not head of product in any way. I'm not CPO in any way. But hell no. Toby is CPO. He's head of product. Do you agree with that? And how do you analyze Toby's product instincts? It's not even a question of whether we agree with it or not. This is as close to a fact as we can possibly get on anything. I came to Shopify and I thought that I would be here through my original earn out. Three years. I'm a startup founder, an entrepreneur. I want to like go through this thing, land the team, make sure that they're off to a great start, launch this thing that turned out to be shopped, and then just take another swing at it.

29:02And I'm going now, I'm getting close to seven years at Shopify and I'm not going anywhere. And the reason I'm here is Toby, because what excites me about Shopify is that we get the distribution, we get the consumer network effects, but it doesn't seem to come at the cost of pace or conviction. And we're allowed to take these big leaps and take these bold bets. I don't agree with every bet. And sure, at some points, I would have rather seen the company go in a different direction. but the trade-off of saying hey i am actually aligned to 80 of his thinking the trade-off of disagreeing to the remaining 20 is so worth it in that i get to be part of a mission that i've been pursuing since 2011 in a company that is so well positioned and so poised to go after it and that is going after it in such a high conviction way but i also always say that like toby's the reason i'm here this i probably shouldn't say on a podcast but he's the reason i'm here and he's the reason that I one day leave.

29:57And I say that in a very loving way in that I also appreciate that at some point, there might be a rift where we think so differently about the future, that it's hard for me to do the best job that I can do supporting that vision. Seven years working alongside him, if you isolated one skill of his that makes him the multi-hundred-brillion-dollar founder that he is today, what would you say it is? It's how long-term he is. You know, companies and startups like to have these like words, they use, they all use the same words. And it's like, we're mission led, and we're long term, and we're building a generational company and blah, blah.

30:33And I said those words, and I actually believe them. But then you come into an environment like Shopify, you realize they mean something else to Toby, or he's acting on them in a different way. He is so long term, and so faithful to the mission. And he's so willing to ignore short term gains, to drive towards this global summit that he has inside. And the ability to think in those timeframes just makes him make decisions differently. When you think about how AI changes org structures, how does AI change the org structure of a company? I mean, you're Chief Design Officer, which is a fascinating title in itself.

31:11How does the future company structure look in an AI-first world? Well, I'll speak to it specifically for design. And what I think is happening is that you'll have a much more fluid org that is less calcified. Like we've had this again, default assumptions of what startups are meant to look like. And it looks something like trifectas all the way down. It's like turtles all the way down. In every level, there's like, oh, here's the big area and you have engineering product design, maybe data. And here's the smaller area, product engineering design, maybe data. And here's the area under that. And it goes all the way through the org.

31:45And I think it makes no sense at all anymore. As a designer, I believe that you are now empowered to create the opportunity space and to imagine the future, what can be for an area that spans across the org and that produces work that can carry you for six months. And I believe that the time it takes for you to catch up on the context and to actually learn a new category is much, much faster than it's ever been before. And you think about the combination of those two, like you can catch up and learn a new area much faster, and you can cover much more ground. The takeaway for me is like a much more centralized design team that really gets deployed, not so much on surfaces or problem areas, but that span across user journeys and span across multiple different teams.

32:38Is that as effective? Are centralized design teams able to provide the granularity, the nuance that a specific team would have with all the historical data and customer experiences they would have if they were only applied to that team? I think it's much more effective because I believe that the experiences that you create are no longer bound to the scope of a surface. Just think about even how you interface with like a chat GPT. Like in one conversation, you're going in multiple different directions. One, you're asking about the weather and then you're asking about the political climate in Argentina.

33:11It's the same thread on the same surface and I think all interfaces are going to skew in this direction where like inside of the same journey, inside of the same form factor, you will want to get more jobs done at the same time. And then the other side of this that also supports this argument is that I also don't think you'll need a designer for all things. Like so much of this is going to just come from vibe coding and vibe designing. I think many of the surfaces that you have a designer's waste their time on today can be done just as well by a product manager with a good eye or an engineering leader.

33:42Where do you think designers waste their time today where they won't in the future? I'll use a dumb example, but like configuring the toggles on a settings page is really not the job that a designer needs to do. You don't need the Figma for it. If you have a good design system, if you have great components and you have a product manager that can think, then you'll basically be able to say, hey, I want to create a settings page that allows you to configure the markets you sell in and the price points and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you'll have cursor or whichever tool you use build that for you.

34:14And I don't know that the design that comes out of that is going to be much worse or better than what a very good UI designer would be able to produce. And so really what I think is going to happen for design is that you'll have designers that go further down in the stack and really focuses on the design systems and the components that allows any other person to produce better design, right? If you're going to rely more on AI for the outputs, the inputs have never mattered more. So you need to like really double down on your design systems and the foundations. And then I think the other role for designers is to break all of those same systems and paint outside of the lines to create unexpected that experiences where you're not doing the obvious, but you're doing the unobvious, but correct and creating an experience that is like memorable, that stands out, that makes Shopify feel different than any other commerce platform out there.

35:07I totally agree with you in terms of like configuring the settings page. And you said a really interesting word that you said vibe designing. Can you talk to me about how we see vibe designing entering teams and the product development process and whether that removes the initial design phase of figma itself yeah it's interesting i asked on my x account the other day if everyone could just share what they have in their dock right now without changing anything and what's cool right is that like for all of these designers that answered all of them had cursor open like effectively all of them had cursor open and and we're seeing at shopify more than half of all of the design reviews i'm in are now vibe-coded prototypes.

35:47They've been entirely constructed and built using our Polaris components to build it into a real prototype using real data and all of that. And so it's this huge shift. And I thought someone had a really great take on it. I can't remember who right now, which is that Figma actually went from being the first step to being the last step. So now you have this process where you vibe design the kind of journey, the flows, the interactions. and because you're instructing the design through code through writing it doesn't get to be pixel perfect the interactions aren't quite dialed in so once you get to something that looks like 80 complete you kind of take that out then you start to like fine-tune the last few details in a figma or if you want to go further in like an origami or something like that and you bring it to that like 10 out of 10 level but the bulk work is happening in a different workflow now.

36:39That's so interesting. Can I ask, when you look at the internal tooling, one, do you mandate any tools? No, we don't mandate any tools. The only tool that we mandate is the internal tooling of Shopify, which is called GSD, which is how we account for time, projects, tie them into missions, make sure that everyone's moving in the same direction. That's the only mandated tool of the company. And then when you look at the tooling that they do use for vibe designing. What is it? Is it cursor? Is it anthropic code? Is it lovable, replet? What does that look like? Inside of Shopify, the cursor is by far the most used tool in the design group.

37:16How price sensitive are you, do you think, to price changes in cursor? I think Farhan had a great take on this, our head of engineering, which is that the price is really not the right thing to look at. You should really focus on the increase in productivity and then increase in output. And so I think we are like fairly elastic on the pricing piece, but very, very obsessed with like the productivity piece. What have you seen in the productivity since? On the design side, I would say that we're probably moving at the same pace still as before, but the conversations and level of detail that we're able to get into is far higher, 5x the difference.

38:01And I expect that we will also see an increase in velocity as we become better to say, these screens aren't in the hot path, we're fine to sort of have a PM do a 6 out of 10, 7 out of 10 execution against this surface. And so that we can have the design group really double down on the experiences that leave an impression that defines the product experience. And that's where I think we can see a true velocity change. But right now, it's really in the richness of conversations and explorations. And ultimately, I think that will translate into just more ambitious products. What do we do today in the design process that you think in five years time, we will look at and go, that was crazy.

38:41I find that the biggest thing that bothers me in the tooling right now, and I'll say that this applies to design, but also even in how like Shopify integrates AI through Sidekick, is how stuck you become in a modality. And what I mean by that is that if I start vibe coding a design, if I start open up cursor right now, and I'll start like designing something by prompting it, right? Like by just explaining what I want and becoming more and more detailed. But at some point, I want to take a part of it and I want to pull it out. And I want to have the ability to draw, to change things by hand, then that's a completely different workflow that sits in a completely different application.

39:18And this is true, even in, you know, if you look at Figma, like Figma design and Figma make are sort of like bifurcated experiences that they sit apart. And of course, this is largely due to the technical limitations of the current paradigm. But it's still the thing that it feels the most strange to me that like, I have to choose a path at the start of my process. And I'm stuck to that path through the whole thing. Whereas I think people, whatever they do, they want to change between typing, talking, drawing. If you go into a room with a team, you'll be doing stuff on the whiteboard. And then you'll be like turning your computer and show what you have on the screen and then you'll be talking a little bit and then maybe someone writes like we use all of these different modalities to get to the level of detail of what we're trying to convey and i think that's lacking in the tools today you said there about the communication that you have between teams that are turning around the whiteboarding do you believe you can be as effective as design teams and product teams when doing it remotely no it's the is the short answer.

40:17The way we overcome this at Shopify is by bringing teams together intentionally. So we will have teams come together sometimes for a week at a time to be in a room together to really get to the depth of a problem, to really get all of the nuance that comes from considering ambiguity. But then, you know, at some point you said all the things that needed to be said. And there's also something that's extremely valuable of coming back to your own environment in a hyper-focused setting where you can just go to work. And there's not a bunch of people and distractions and meetings that are being called left and right that is like breaking your flow.

40:58And so we're trying to find the balance. And ultimately, I think it depends, as everything else, a little bit on what's the project, what's the maturity of the team, what's the stage. If you were CEO, Carl, would you have it as in-person? I speak to many of the best CEOs in the world. Every single one behind the scenes says remote just does not work as well. Everyone's back in person. I force everyone to be. It is like a universal consensus. If you were CEO, would you be in person? If I started a new company, I believe I would start it in person. And I would have an agreement that at some level, say 150 people, we're all going to turn remote.

41:36Because I think that there's this thing that eventually the access to talent just becomes so attractive in being a remote company. And ultimately, I believe hybrid is the worst. The worst thing is the thing where you have half of the team in person. They have an enormous information advantage. They figure out their own rituals and ways of communicating and collaborating. The other half of the team sits somewhere else. You try to come together through weekly meetings. Half of the group are tiles on the screen. It just doesn't work. And so ultimately, I think companies need to pick one of the lanes.

42:09And too many companies are ending up in both. What I think is happening is that after a certain scale, you just get so attracted to some of the talent, talent specific to the category you're going after, to the problems you're trying to solve. And they're not going to be wherever you happen to start a company, even when you start in SF or New York. And you're going to want to bring those people on. Why shouldn't you? And then you have a choice, your hybrid or your remote. And between those two choices, I choose remote. super interesting i actually agree with you in terms of i do in person until 150 and then i would absolutely do remote where you have to just for access to talent so i agree with you that if you started a new company would you do it in europe or in the u.s and if in the u.s where well so i'm never going back to europe to live i'm american i became american in january i i love this country i love everything that it's brought for me and my family the opportunities it's given me i love the people i love living in new york i love that new york doesn't feel like it quite belongs to anyone like every person you meet it's very rare you meet someone that actually came from New York in New York City I think there's a real value in closing doors as well we especially startup people are trained to be like maximize for optionality like optionality optionality optionality but the way that you should treat your life and how you should think about work should sometimes be different and the way I think about life is that it's good sometimes to make decisions that you don't challenge all the time.

43:32And I made a decision that this is home. And it just removes this fan. It's like turning off the kitchen fan, like a noise in the background that goes away. And all of a sudden you start living differently. You start making decisions on a different timeline. And that's been super valuable for me and how I approach building a family here. Of all of the places in the US, there's only really one place where I would want to live, and it's New York. What door did you close that you most regret closing? I don't have regrets like that. I can't say that I've closed the door that I regret closing. I got asked this one the other day and it was really good.

44:04It made me think, what would you do if you weren't scared? And so for me, when I thought about that, it would be moved to Silicon Valley. I'm scared to move to Silicon Valley. It sounds awful, Carl, but we'll win in Europe and we're a big fish in a small pond and I think we're great and we'll win. But I'm scared to lose and I'm scared to lose in the Valley. I'm scared to get my ass handed to me by Sequoia and the Collison's in the valley. That's what I'd do if I wasn't scared. You should do it. That's what you should do. If you weren't scared, what would you do? Perhaps a little bit of a non-answer, but it's the thing that comes to mind.

44:38It's actually kind of what I'm doing right now with you. When I did Ticktail, I was like a very public persona. I like was always out in the news. I was posting. I was doing podcasts. I was like putting myself out there. And Ticktail was a great company and I'm so grateful for the journey. But it didn't land where I wanted it to land. It didn't become the success that I was driving towards. And then I came into Shopify and I sort of went into hiding a little bit. And I was like, well, I'm tired of like saying that things are going to be great and that products are going to be huge and that I'm going to win.

45:10I just want to build products that are huge and win in different ways and like do it in the quiet, like do it away from the spotlight. And I've done that now for seven years. And I took on this new role to be CEO for Shopify just a little while ago. So as part of that role, I felt that it was important for me to start putting myself out there again, because I have a mandate and I have an agenda that I want to drive towards. I have a vision for, I think design is going to change how we approach product development. And I want that to be said. I want that to be stated. But it felt really scary. It feels really scary.

45:44I have a note like right in front of my computer that says something that like share something every day. because the mountain I need to climb every time I post something to Twitter or to X or go on a podcast like this, it became this super scary, nervous thing, a cloud that was really hard for me to get through. And so these are my first trembling step out into the open again. You know, the biggest mistake founders make when they speak about personal brands to me, it's just not me. It's not who I am. It's not how I feel comfortable. And I always laugh and I say, do you think it was me as an 18 year old in a bedroom yeah it's like going to the gym you feel very uncomfortable on a treadmill and the 50th time on the treadmill you're actually pretty good and it's just about repetition and consistency yeah that was the thing for me of the post-it not on my screen make yourself heard i just need to get the reps in and eventually it will start coming easier and it will feel less awkward and like i will feel less nervous about putting myself out there this way.

46:43But overcoming that after the tick-tail journey was a hurdle for me. Shopify's value accretion has been amazing. And the market cap today is incredibly deserved, but awesome. But it also means for the senior folks, you're not exactly there for the money anymore. Does not being there for the money change the way that you build product, design product, and work? It does and it doesn't. The right answer is that it should never have affected how I built products during Thicktail. I think that in my startup years, the most inspired work I did was before I had like the constructs of racing the next round in the back of my head.

47:23And you were just building product for the sake of it. Ironically, those were the products that grew the fastest and had the biggest impact. That's really the environment of Shopify that I appreciate so much that we are such a high conviction company and we are truly driving towards long-term goals rather than like next quarter earnings. But I think it's less of like being in a financially secure spot and more about being in a company environment that encourages that type of thinking. How do you think it does that? Is that just Toby saying, hey, you can do that? Yeah, it's basically Toby saying it, but not in those kind words.

48:04It's more Toby getting extremely frustrated when he comes into product reviews, where he feels that the team has skewed too far into short-term thinking and local optimizations. How do you do product reviews and what have been your biggest lessons in what makes great ones? Shopify has a product review cadence that's very special and different in that Toby reviews actually all of the projects every month. Or so every month he reviews half of them. and then the next month he reviews the other half such that on a two-month rolling cadence he will have reviewed every project in the whole company and it's this huge apparatus where we come together once a month for three days live in person the whole executive team but then the area leaders are coming as they present their work and we just go through project for project and it will go as late into the night as is required and it's this thing that allows us to make sure that all of the work that we're doing is aligned to the mission of the company and the priorities that we consider to be the most important right now.

49:04Now, of course, between those reviews, we have a bunch of smaller product reviews that are with me or other executives. And my general outlook on these is that the way to do it is by removing all of the abstractions. I actually feel quite strongly about this. And so what I enforce with Teams is that I never want to see a presentation, a slideshow in any of the meetings. I never want to receive a pre-read. I don't want any of the storytelling at the start. I'm basically of the view that every abstraction, every insert of narratives that confuse the story brings us further away from the truth. And so what I want to do is to say, let's look at prototypes, if we have them.

49:47Let's look at real code, if we have it. If we need to use data to make a case, let's look at it inside of Looker Studio, which is the platform we use or Shopify, such that we actually look at the real data and can modify it and manipulate it if we have further questions. And let's remove all of the ways in which we can form an impression that it's not the experience that our customers are going to have. Because the insight is this, right? There's no customer in the history of customers that got the pre-read, that got the explanation before they opened up a product of how it's going to work or why it's not going to work due to certain other things or reasons.

50:26And so we can get to all of those questions and the team can provide all of those answers. But we get there by actually reviewing the real work as close to the metal as possible. Where do most product reviews fall down in your mind, having seen a variety of different types and styles? It is when teams have gotten too stuck on the background and all of the things that led them to where they are today. Teams got too excited about the philosophy of the work that they didn't actually get into the work enough. I'm not here to debate frameworks or to understand the competitive environment. I'm here to really get into the core of the experience.

51:09What product did you let run for too long that you should have shut down sooner? I'll give you two examples. One that is still around, but where I should have closed out the way we were approaching it in the current setting and reset. It was the concept of KYC. And so I had just taken over product leadership for merchant services, which is sort of the other half of the product organization from what Glenn was responsible for. And it's like all of the add-on services, all of the payment services, the banking services, retail, shipping, taxes, accounting, all of this stuff. And I was looking at unified KYC, which is know your customer.

51:46And it was this idea that we have many different financial services and they have different underwriters. So you sign up for payments and it's powered by Stripe, but then you sign up for financial services or banking and it's powered by someone else. And we have different services that need different underwriting with different providers. But our merchants don't really think about this or experience this. They want to give KYC to Shopify once and make sure that we kind of figure out how to distribute this data to the right providers at the right time. And I come into this new area and this feels like a fairly straightforward problem, but the team is giving me kind of a timeline that I can't agree to.

52:23And it's this hard thing, like you step into an area that you don't know that well yet. You haven't had the reps, you haven't been through all of the kind of ins and outs of the problem, but your gut is telling you that this timeline is not right. Like there's something here that someone overcomplicated and turned into too smart of a solution. And that's often the area where teams fail, right? They're trying to be too smart about the problem, trying to anticipate all of these strange corner cases where in fact, a simple system can scale into a complex system, but a complex system can never be simple, right?

52:56And I should have trusted my instinct. This is the thing I take away from most of my product career, that a lot of times the thing you feel, but you can't quite explain why, is the gut that you should follow. I really believe that teams and people should trust their instincts and follow their got much more than they do but it's this insecurity that you assume that like the other person must know more than me or there's context here that I don't understand that forces it to be this way but projects that become too complex at the onset they can never succeed because complexity breeds complexity and so as you work six months it's like renovating a house like if the timeline is two years you know it's going to take four years to renovate it like at some point you just know that like when the timeline stretches past a certain point, the timelines will just keep expanding.

53:43And so what I should have done here is to actually said, you know what, you guys are a great team, super talented, but either we need to figure out how we can bring this timeline down to something that feels much more approachable, or I need to have a different team look at this and have a different take. We avoid doing these things in teams and in companies because it feels like such a statement about the quality of the team. So, you let it run? No, I let it run. It didn't launch. It became the thing I, you know, I worked and it became a timeline that just kept expanding, that kept leading to new different problems and new approaches.

54:21Is that your fault or is that the team's fault? Well, I think it's my fault at a leadership level and it's the team's fault at an execution level. Like, you know, we're all at fault here. And I honestly think it's a great team and a high quality team and they eventually were able to kind of get to a solution that we could all agree to and hold to. But just if you get a very bad prognosis from a doctor, it's like completely socially acceptable that you'll go to a different doctor to ask for a second opinion. I think you should just accept that this is how many more companies should be running their product processes.

54:54Sometimes teams just get so stuck on a specific way of doing something that it's really hard for them to see the full opportunity space or to take different approaches to things. And I believe very strongly that all problems are people problems. It's actually very seldom it's about like, oh, the brief wasn't right or the feedback came at the wrong time. It's mostly about like a configuration of people that could or could not take on a certain configuration of a problem. And more often than not, it's about them just saying, you know what, we have so many different problems to go and solve. Let's shake things up, have some of these people go look at a different problem, bring in some new fresh eyes to take a different approach and think about this opportunity differently.

55:38Can I ask you what role within a product org do you think we have today that we won't have moving forwards? It changes so much. We've mentioned before how it changes the design process, the vibe coding, the product owners. What role do we have today that we won't have anymore? I think that for the foremost experts for any role, there will always be job opportunities, but far fewer of them. And I think the general shape of the job market will move people towards being more generalists than specialists. You basically have like specialization. If you become like the best in the world, you'll always have a job market.

56:14But specialization, any point towards the middle, it's just going to go away. And it will favor generalists that can cover more ground and think more broadly about product problems. And so, for instance, I announced when I took on the chief design officer role in Shopify that we're dropping UX from the designer title. And we're only going to be designers working at Shopify. And part of this for me was to articulate to our teams and to the market that we expect more of every person now. We're not going to have people that think about just the user flow or the interactions or any of that. We want you to be able to cover information architecture, UX, polish, and prototyping all inside of one person.

56:58But when I started my career, those are four different roles. And so you have job compression happening. And each of these tasks aren't going away, but they're being compressed into a single role. How does the role of the PM change? I'm always told, dude, that PMs are the CEOs of the product. Yeah. Does that continue? do they still exist with the bundling of these different skills? How does that change? I think PMs will continue to exist. I think that you can have PMs manage larger teams and be more orchestrators. But ultimately, I don't like the thing like PMs are the CEOs of their teams because I think PMs serve the context they're in.

57:39And their job is to keep a team aligned to the direction of the company. And this idea of a CEO suggests this responsibility to actually consider an entirely blank canvas and build it in a completely independent way. I actually think the job is quite different or opposite, which is to really consider everything around them and make sure that all of the different teams are connected at the right places and are collaborating in the best ways. And in this way, you know, a PM, a large part of the role is project management. and it doesn't sound as fun and it doesn't sound as sexy, but it is a really important part of the role.

58:19I think in teams, depending on which people you have there, the aiming, the strategy, the visioning for the future can come from product. It can come from engineering. It can come from design or data. It can come from anyone and I've seen all flavors of it, but I think it's incorrect to assume that that should always be owned by the product leader. What part of your role do you dislike most but continue to do regardless? us? It's sometimes very clear for me where we need to go and how we're going to get there. And very often, I just want to bring everyone into one meeting, basically say it once and then have everyone be on their way.

58:56But we're in this time of change. And of course, it's breeding a lot of insecurity for everyone about the future of the business, the future for their roles, the future of their personal identities, like what it means to be a crafter today. And I wish I could tell everyone all at once that as long as you're curious, ambitious, continue to learn new tools, you're going to be fine. But it's all going to come down to the quality of the work that we produce and put out there. So let's put our fears to the side and just be on our way. And I think that I do a poor job of reminding people of this and rearticulating it because it's something that is so intuitive for me, but that I have come to learn needs constant reminding for others.

59:43Final one before we do a quick fight, dude, I could talk to you all day, but you sent uncertainty there. There's a lot of uncertainty about the security of revenues that a lot of companies are seeing. Will it last? Is it sustainable? How do you think about whether the revenues that we're seeing a lot of these AI application layer companies have, whether they are frivolous spends by intrigued customer bases or sustainable revenues which can be tied to for the long term? My outlook on AI is that unlike many other disruptive technologies, AI is truly clearly here to last and truly clearly have immediate business benefits.

1:00:19But because of that, we tend to kind of skim over the fact that AI is also in a hype cycle and we are in something that is and feels a little bit like an AI bubble. And just like.com is bigger today than it was during the.com bubble, it didn't mean that we wouldn't have a crash or correction along the way. In fact, there will be many ones like that. And my general outlook right now, if I just think about my own spend, is that I'll sign up for anything that comes my way just to play with it for a couple of days. I don't know that I'm going to be a retained user six months from now, but if I was a betting man, I would say no.

1:00:52And I think the other thing that's happening is that we're seeing increasing consolidation in the market where these kind of core foundation models needing to live up to the very rich valuations that they already have are sort of pushed to take on more and more scope and bring about more and more capabilities. And they own distribution and have all of these sort of benefits that I do all of these other utilities inside of them already that I worry perhaps for startups that a lot of the things that they offer that are these sort of like niche carve out experiences for a category will be replaced by the broad based foundation models.

1:01:28And that many of these companies that I've seen a very rapid rise will discover that customers think they're better served elsewhere. I want to move into a quick fire. I can't believe by the way, I still am like, shit, 10 years ago, me and you were here. You know what, I was actually semi tempted to listen to the episode last night. And then I was like, just don't, because I occasionally listen when people send me stuff. And I was so bad that I just can't even listen. I'm so embarrassed. And so I couldn't listen yesterday to it, but I could talk to you all day, dude. So I'm going to say a short statement.

1:02:02You give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months? It will be a personal answer, but I think I've changed my outlook on spirituality the most. I've lived my whole life a very secular person, an atheist of sorts. And I'm starting to feel curious and excited about inviting some spiritual practice more into my life. And also, I think it's as a grounding for my kids. And I think a lot right now, I think so much about the environment, not that I want to live in, but that I want to provide for my kids. and I find that giving them something that's bigger than the context we exist in to hold on to feels like the right thing for me.

1:02:47What's your biggest advice to a new parent today? My brother's just had a baby for the first time so I'm a new uncle. What advice would you give to a new parent? My best advice is to go for number two and go for it sooner than you think. It's so overwhelming to have your first kid, your life gets turned upside down. And so many people have the immediate reaction of like, whoa, this is wonderful, but it's a lot. But the thing that happens is that it actually isn't that much more work to have two kids than to have one. My wife jokes that it's like pulling up another chair at the dinner party. Like you're doing a lot of the same things.

1:03:23You're just doing them for two people. And what you fail to appreciate when you're in the thick of it with your first child is having kids that are close in ages, how much time you save later when they go off to a room to play together for hours without any kind of adult supervision. And it turns out it's the biggest time save you'll get. Plus, it's a wonderful thing. You've been with your wife for many years now, very successful, loving marriage. What's your biggest advice to me on partner selection? My biggest advice on partner selection is less about the traits in a person, but the appreciation that a relationship is really hard work.

1:04:01And I find that this is the greatest thing that's missing when I have friends that are kind of in the dating scene right now, because it's so fast to go through so many different potential partners. If I think about my relationship to my wife Baba, the first year we had together we fought non-stop all the time about everything. I don't know exactly how we kind of managed through it but we did and it set up this foundation where on the other side of it we understood each other so well and I worry for a lot of friends again today that a bunch of these like people that they see could have been the right person for them.

1:04:40But it takes work. It takes so much work. And I think people are just hoping that they'll find like a special someone that checks all of the boxes without any of the kind of effort it takes to get to know each other and understand each other's issues and insecurities and all of that. The framework that I have is three things. And you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. Number one, it's like physical attraction. Are you physically attracted to them? Number two is intellectual capability do they are they interesting smart you can have good conversations with them they don't need to be a genius but like are they interesting enough intellectually and then third is like laughter do you joke and have fun together and if you have those three fantastic yeah those are great great uh things to be on the look for okay listen dude i'm loving that little detour.

1:05:31What's the most significant life hack that you found recently? I know you're an Aura Ring user. I know you cycle. What's the most recent significant life hack? So I become much more stringent with my phone. My sleep was terrible. I didn't get sleep. Like every day I woke up and my Aura Ring told me that, hey, you basically didn't sleep tonight. And so now I've set a really strict schedule, which is basically like I work 8.30 a.m. till 5 p.m. I then go down I have dinner with the kids I put them to bed at seven they're asleep by 7 30 I then go back into my office so when I go down to have dinner with the kids I leave my phone in my office so I'm like there's no phone then and then I come back into my office work for an hour and a half and then I have the sauna beyond so then I when I leave my office again I leave my phone in the office and then I go down I do a sauna I do cold punch sauna again and then I read and then I go to bed without a phone in the bedroom and it gives me sort of an hour and a half to like read and wind down and not like think about work and then I go to bed and it's been the thing that has just changed how I sleep.

1:06:39Does your wife mind? Oh, we have the same routine. We're doing this together. So, she also like puts in the extra hour or so of work after the kids fall asleep. We do this at the same time and then we both leave our phones in the office. We go down, we sauna together, cold plunge and then we sit in the in the room and and read together oh that is amazing do you sleep much better on the back of the sauna and the cold plunge or on the back of the phone deprivation i think it is the phone deprivation because what i would do is that i would like right before i went to bed i would go through all of the work things again and then the whole night my brain would just be processing i don't think it did very like i don't think i'm very productive at work when I'm in bed right before I fall asleep.

1:07:20Like I don't think I'm actually like contributing much to the business, but I know that I'm a much better team player, partner, leader when I get like a good amount of sleep in the night and I wake up focused. Which brand do you most respect for their design principles and opinion? Bit of a cop-out answer, but it's very nice and cool, inspiring to see the Swedish brand, Teenage Engineering, that have really owned and cultivated such a unique and clear form factor that is truly uniquely theirs and that they see through from the interfaces, the website that they've created, all the way down to every hardware detail on each of their keyboards.

1:08:02Final one, why are Scandys so good at design in a way that most other nations aren't? I think it comes back to just a deep appreciation of craftsmanship and the pride in doing something well for the sake of doing it well. It's a country where the output isn't the growth of the thing you created or how popular it became. It's really valued in how well you practiced your craft. I once went out with a Swedish girl who taught me that there is a saying in Sweden, which is like, it's good not to stand out. Like, it's good to remain mediocre. It's the law of jante. It's the worst part of Sweden. And part of the reason why I could never move back there.

1:08:48But it's basically the notion that no one is allowed to be better than anyone else. And it's similar to tall poppy syndrome. And it creates these terrible social dynamics where trying to become the best is like kind of almost a very un-Swedish thing to do. Dude, I've loved this. I so appreciate you. This has been fantastic. 10 years. I hope we don't wait 10 years for it to happen again. Let's do it again sooner. Thank you so much, dude. You're a star. Awesome. It's great to see you again, Harry. But before we leave you today, on this show, we care about velocity. Most teams lose it in code review, not in writing code.

1:09:28Now, CodeRabbit fixes that. The second a PR opens, it leaves clear line-by-line comments, calls out what the change might touch, and offers one-click fixes. You can teach your organizational standards using your own custom instructions, such as cursor or clawed rules, and enforce them on every PR. CodeRabbit has so far reviewed more than 13 million PRs and installed on 2 million repositories used by over 100 ,000 OSS projects. If you want to cut code review time and bugs in half, try a free month at coderabbit.ai with the code 20VC. And while CodeRabbit keeps your code clean, WarpDev makes it fly.

1:10:11AI coding is everywhere, but most of it, honestly, it's pretty chaotic. Code that is almost right, but you don't really understand. Well, that's why Warp exists. With Warp, the old lines between terminal and IDE disappear. It's a seamless environment for coding with agents, where you can prompt, plan, review, and ship production-ready code, edit files in-app, review diffs as you go, and deploy straight to production without switching tools. Warp tops the benchmarks, literally number one on terminal bench, top five on software engineering bench verified, and is trusted by over 600 ,000 developers and used by 56 % of the Fortune 500 engineering teams, making it one of the fastest growing AI companies with revenue growing 30x this year.

1:11:00With Warp, you don't just get speed, you get code you can trust. The average developer saves five hours a week with Warp. That's almost half a day. Try Warp for free at warp.dev forward slash 20VC. And to get Pro for only$5 for your first month, use the code 20VC. That's 20VC.