Brushstrokes, Flow State, and Freedom: The Procreate Story

23:32And last year you said, I fucking hate generative AI. Yeah, I feel strongly about that one. No change in view?

23:42No change in view in the sense that emotionally I have a response to it. Logically, you know, AI is here to stay. It's going to make a profound difference for our species, no doubt about that. But there is the emotional side to me that I still struggle with because where to start with that one? It's like, does it rob an artist's creativity or does it amplify? I don't think it robs artist's creativity. I actually think it might even bring people into creativity. Yeah. You know, if they're just jamming away on a keyboard with some prompts, that feeling of making something, even if it's through prompts, if they get the little dopamine hit of like, oh, I made that.

24:23At some point, they're probably going to go, but I want to do more now. And they're probably going to want to start transitioning to I'm going to write poetry or I'm going to paint a picture or whatever. So in a way, it's kind of like a gateway drug or something. I don't know. I don't see that as really the issue. I think the interesting part is the Valley had magic. When I was young and then starting a company, I really admired the Valley for that. But anytime they get up on stage, it's like, holy shit, wow, that's going to be a profound change. And it was. But I think in this instance, I wonder if they're sort of drunk on their own hubris of I can change the world and I can do anything, bring in this new tech in without really thinking about some of the consequences.

25:05And so, for instance, the one that I have an emotional response to is the data. If you were to remove, it's like, look at this magic box. I can type and this magic happens. It can do all these magical things. But if you were to remove all human-made data from it, it's in a note box. It does nothing. It's just a statistics machine. It can't actually function without human data. And so if you look at that from a lens of, you know, we're pretty close to the creative industry. So we hear a lot of the stories. But from my perspective, the emotional component comes from the data use. So an analogy would be like, hey, check out this new car.

25:48We can go anywhere with this. Just put this little bit of magic water in the car. You can go anywhere you want. You can do anything. It's going to change humanity. Yes. Yes, it will. And then if someone was asked, where do you get the water from? Don't worry about that. It's magic. Just put it in the car and off we go.

26:05and it's like at some point you know artists in the creative industry they're providing that data uh without consent and that's going that's some of the magic water that's going into the car and i think if they if artists were responsible for refining the oil then surely they have a say in this new economy and i think they will at some point because at the moment the valley is just kind of like, don't worry about it. It's all magic. For me, that's not sustainable because it's not magic. It's all data driven. AI has always been about the training sets. Yeah. And so if you look at the training sets from a creative point of view, specifically around generative AI, artists are sitting there really beating the drum of, hey, we're not consenting to this.

26:49Can you not use our data? And yet the valley is kind of going, look at this magic. This morning I woke up and was like, Grok has imagined a pod racing scene. I'm like, I didn't imagine shit. It looks like a really bad version of the movie. Yeah. But it just looks like a really bad rendition of the movie. Had there not been a movie, had there not been any content, the box can't produce anything. And so that conversation of how does the creative industry participate in this new economy is a discussion I think that has to happen and will happen, but we're not at that stage yet because I think the stage is still in that hubris of the valley of it's all magic.

27:25But I think time's moved on. This isn't magic like the other technologies, like use the analogy of the iPhone. That shit was mental. It's like, I got the whole internet in my pocket now. I'm old enough to remember when I had to go to a desk and dial up for that stuff. Do you know what I mean? It's like, that was magic. There is a certain magic to ML, but the data, there has to be a conversation around that data. I mean, I use ChatGPT and Grok for web searching. It's way better than Google. It's got its flaws. Sometimes it bullshits to you and you've got to sort of double check stuff, but it's way faster.

28:00And I think that's a super interesting direction. But again, where is he getting that data? Have people who are providing to this new economy consented to it? That's the emotional response. Because when I see artists who are putting their heart and soul, they've trained for years and years. And then someone can use an example, an artist, Sam Jung, who's an amazing artist. The data sets have just eaten all of his work and now people are just prompting, make it like this with Sam Jung. and he's sitting there going, hey, guys, come on. Yeah. Come on. Deft in broad daylight. Yeah, totally. And it's like we need to have the conversation where the people who are refining the energy source get a say in the economy.

28:41And like I said, I think it will happen, but we're not at that stage yet. Do you have any ideas on how it could work? Yeah, I mean, if it was consent-based. So you could even have an economy where my job now is to just make training data because I get paid really well. There's nothing wrong with that. If you've got a training set data that is completely consensual, great. The artist is getting paid. The company who's profiting from that gets paid. The customer gets a really wonderful experience. That's cool. But there's another side to that. What if you could send to training on yourself? So I'll give you an example.

29:11This is complete pie in the sky stuff, man. But in Procreate, we thought about with dreams, wouldn't it be cool if you could draw your key pose to your characters, some sort of pose? And then 30 seconds later, it's at a different pose. But in betweening those frames, drawing every single frame is a very tedious, laborious task. Wouldn't it be cool if you could just, with a magic button, just inter between those frames? It's plausible, but based on what data? If, for instance, just using our product as an example, if you could agree that maybe Procreate will train on me, it's not going to share the data, it doesn't go into a bucket, it doesn't go to anyone.

29:53It's just for me, I get my own little Terminator in Procreate. That's really interesting. That's super interesting because what that's doing is sort of leveling up and speeding up that creative flow. And so that's an interesting way to do it. I think there's so many different ways you could cut up this new economy to try and do it with ethics. But at the moment, I don't think we're – I think people are just so excited by this shit. And they're just – like every gold rush in the valley, they're just trampling over each other to try and get there. But this one, I think, has a broad implication that perhaps we're not thinking through just yet.

30:26I've seen products like that. I can't wait to be able to train on my own. And if I could train on yours because you let me use it, maybe I'll pay you. Right. And what's wrong with that? If everyone's getting paid and everything - You're saying thank you. Yeah. For the great work you've done. Yeah. I'm using it every day. Totally, yeah. I'd be so down to pay for that. Yeah. And I think if you look at stock photography, for instance, or stock audio, There are people out there who just sit there with headphones jamming away on a keyboard and they're selling their stock. So why can't we have that arrangement for creatives who are selling their artwork to the training models?

31:01I think it'd be cool. But what we can't have is having the whole creative industry in the whole world not having a say in the economy. It's got to change. It's got to change. I see that there will be an opportunity here. Do you remember back in the day with Kazar or Morpheus or LimeWire, any of the peer-to-peer sharing services? There was an economy there. It just hadn't happened yet. People were stealing the shit out of stuff. And remember, Metallica made a big deal of it, and it was very topical. But what happened was Apple, iTunes, started selling stuff for 99 cents, and it just kick-started the whole.

31:38And here we are now with streaming music. I've got every album in my pocket. So there is a story here. We're not there yet at the moment where people are just stealing shit. But I think something interesting will happen out of this. And again, as long as the artists are getting paid and they're contributing in a meaningful, consensual way, the future is bright. The other thing about a predictive engine is that everything just reverts to the main, which is just like if I put a number into ChateWPT right now and just give me a random number between 1 and 10, it'll give me the same number if I start a new show, which is 7.

32:11because that's the data it's been trained on, which is like completely opposite from hopefully what an artist is trying to do in the creative process of finding novelty and creating something fresh and new and something that intersects with their own ideas. Totally. Has that sort of like creative process, do we want to bring AI into the product, come about? Yeah. I know you've sort of rejected it, but I'm just curious, has that evolved? We definitely consider it. I mean, holy shit, when Mid Journey hit the scene, And I was, to be honest, I was smitten with it. I was like, holy shit, check this out.

32:43And in my opinion, I was like, maybe this is something new that we could get on board with. I wasn't sure where we were going to go, but I just, I was smitten with the idea of I can just punch in some words and I get some cool stuff back. And at some point we reached out to Mid Journey, David Holtz, and had a meeting. And it was really interesting because we were sort of back and forwarding about our two different perspectives on creativity. And there was something in the middle there that I was really, really interested in. But without throwing too much shade on David, but he seemed very concerned with the data and where our data was coming from and what we were doing with the data.

33:17And at the end of that conversation, I sort of left that a little perplexed that the conversation wasn't about creativity and making stuff and, you know, really sort of giving people superpowers. It was how do we get Procreate's data? And that was really concerning. So that sort of started the train moving in a little bit of a different direction. We then sort of considered it for different aspects, like, you know, wouldn't it be cool if you saw an artwork and you could press a button and it generated the brush that looked similar to that being used? And there was all sorts of interesting stuff we were thinking about.

33:47But at the end of the day, where we landed was, it's just a tool in our developer toolbox. Everyone's getting so hyped for this new hammer. It's like, let's just bash the shit out of anything that looks like a nail. And it's like, yeah, but what do we actually need to do with it? Can we solve these things with an ARG? Can we solve these things with a different experience? And we sort of landed on the place that right now there's nothing apart from that interp idea that we had. I kind of like that idea. There's not much in there from our point of view that we need to reach down and grab that tool for.

34:17That's not to say that in the future we will. There's a big plausibility we'll reach into it, but it has to be done with ethical data. I think unless that data set problem has a solution, I think we've made that sort of value-led choice to step back and say that we don't want to participate in this unless we feel good about it and we're not creating harm, you know. It's a hot topic, man. It's such a hot topic. I could go for that. I could speak to you about it for an hour. I can speak about it for an hour. I know. And I think what I love is that I love how opinionated you are on the product experience, the Italian in you.

35:00Or the German. Or the German. True that. Highly disagreeable. Pardon me. I'm highly disagreeable, but not for the sake of being disagreeable. But open as well. Yeah. Open first, then disagreeable. Yeah. Like you've taken in the ideas. Yeah. Then you've gone back to like, what are we the best in the world at? It's about the artist. And also, we try and use the word a lot internally about authentic and authenticity. We're trying to really live that. We want our brand to be as real as possible because at the end of the day, I think corporations and businesses change so drastically, especially in the last 10 years.

35:35Like ads, people don't give a shit about big mission statements. No one cares about. They care more about this sort of the person to person. That's why we're seeing a rise of the influencer because people are searching for that meaning. They want connection. with real people. And I think we recognize that and we're trying to make sure that we're on that curve of making sure that we're being open and honest and real, showing our flaws and our wins at the same time to just try and give the customer a perspective that we're people just like you and we're trying to be real and we're not trying to sell you on something.

36:08We're not trying to screw you on something. We're trying to legitimately put something back into the world that makes them a little bit better or a little bit happier? And especially like now when the promise of the internet was to share all this knowledge and make us all smarter. I don't think it's made us smarter. I think it's definitely leveled us up. There's much more we can do. But has it actually brought us closer together? You know, has it really brought us closer together? There's an argument there that we're probably more further apart now than ever. And with that, when you've got the corporations and sort of enterprise still, they haven't quite figured out that people just don't give a shit about a corporate slogan or this new tech or whatever they care about connection and they care about people and i think that's why we're we're trying to be as real as possible throughout our journey how do you let artists like there's just this i can't escape this idea of like the the product is tactile in function like the form totally so you feel like your whole body feels the connection the joy and And the connection of it.

37:09Like you mentioned that you were super collaborative internally. How do you let other artists be creative and collaborative and connect with others as an extension from the product? It's interesting because we try and do it as organically as possible. We've got a team that sort of flies all around the world to events and bits and pieces where we can try and bring people together. There's a selfish and altruistic side of that. We want to get feedback on our product, but we also try and bring people together for no commercial reason other than connection. So a lot of the time, once an event's over, we'll try and chuck a party or get people together.

37:43Because that, again, is not looking at it through the commercial lens of trying to figure out how do we get cross collaboration or tools that collaborate over time. What we're actually trying to do is bring people together in physical sense. And there's something to be said for that in a world and a time where we're more separated than ever. Our brand's trying to bring people in physical space together. Like even internally, our culture book is all about working together, working in person. In the age of remote working, we've got some remote workers, but the majority of the team works together because humans, when we get together, there's that serendipitous nature of doing what we're doing right now, man.

38:21It's like we're jamming, we're talking. It's the highest bandwidth we have. It's the highest bandwidth. And when we reduce it down, 90 % of human communication is body language. So when we reduce that down to just simple text, it's the lowest bandwidth we can possibly have to get meaning, to get communication. And so we're all about trying to connect people together physically and sort of jam together physically. And at these artist events, we'll often, you know, let's all go for a walk, guys. We're going to do some plein air painting or whatever. And we'll all just sit there and that's real human connection.

38:55To me and I think to a lot of us here, those connections are far more valuable than any kind of tech we could possibly develop just bringing people together to connect you've been very either disciplined or defiant or disagreeable in maybe all of the above not not deciding i i'm curious to i mean i think the learning from this is that it is like the the starting point is disagreeableness but uh it's like strong opinions held loosely, but staying in Tasmania, not taking on AI, some of the opinions you've shared on how the team works, not taking, I don't know if I said this already, not taking on venture capital and never wanting to take on venture capital.

39:38Maybe we can just hang on venture capital for a piece. What are the hot takes? Was it born out of necessity or was it born out of a deliberate decision? Probably born out of selfishness, if I'm honest, Mason. There's a reason why that we've sort of swum in the opposite direction to a lot of other startups. We value our creative freedom more than anything else. Internally, it's the highest value that we have. And our own agency to make whatever we want, how we want to make it, that creative freedom, oh man, it's intoxicating. When you know you get up in the morning, you go, I don't know what the fuck we're going to make today.

40:17It's going to be fun. It's up to us then to have that commercial reality come in of making sure that we're meeting market demands, we're doing our competitive analysis and all the other stuff. But at the core, what we're really, really focused into is our very own selfish, creative freedom. And because that for us is our kind of guiding star, there's no price that we can sort of sacrifice that for. We've entertained the idea of getting some venture capital and we've talked to yourselves and a bunch of other firms. But to us, it always comes back to, but can we really have the freedom? Because that's what the money's for, from my perspective, is like we've been lucky enough to have a good, strong, healthy revenue.

40:59The revenue itself isn't to buy a car or to buy something from our perspective. It buys our freedom, our complete and utter creative freedom. And I suppose our concern is that if we were to sacrifice that or dilute it, are the products going to be better? Are we going to feel better? And that's the question mark that sort of always kept us along the lines of, well, we're going to do it our way because we value our freedom above anything else. Well, ultimately, it's complete alignment. Yeah. You haven't found it yet. Not yet. We've come close, man. I mean, we've had some really good discussions in Palo Alto with some friends up there, which has been really fun.

41:37They're really fun. But again, it's like, I suppose we see ourselves as artists as well. Yeah. And if anything compromises our ability to make the canvas that we want to make, we're going to selfishly choose that. But who knows, man? It's good for no one either. You want to build the most powerful experience for an artist. Yeah. You need to be an artist and have that artistry internally. Totally. And if something toxic comes in the way of that, then yeah. VCs, I think we don't see them as toxic. We do see them as just different alignment. It's a different one. Maybe I misword it. More like if you're in flow, you don't need a distraction.

42:17Good call, man. Yeah. A hundred percent. I don't need that J-I pop-up bubble that gives me a summary of like - Time and space is warping and we're having fun. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, who knows? Like our roadmap is so ambitious. I mean, it's weird. Like after the J-I statement where I said those colorful words and it sort of got a bit of attention, we got just people like, please, can you bring this stuff to desktop? can you bring it to Android? Can you do this? Can you do that? Because all of our competitors are sort of rushing in this direction of generative AI. And we didn't mean to put ourselves at a commercial advantage here.

42:52There was no point of difference we were looking at strategically on paper. It naturally manifested after we just sort of made our statement like, oh, look, this is how we feel. And we started getting a lot of enterprise businesses and small to medium businesses sort of hitting us up going, can you please just do this and we'll drop said product that we use and we'll use this because we're concerned about our data. And so we're getting kind of hammered at the moment with this demand. And we're trying to now react to that demand because we're like, holy shit, we didn't see ourselves as this kind of beacon, but we want to answer that.

43:23We really want to answer that because these kind of moments in time, they come past and they go again. If we don't answer it, someone else will. They'll fulfill it. It's the beauty of the market. Someone else will fulfill that. So at the moment, we kind of got this renewed spirit behind us of like it's a bit more than us now. We've got all this demand to bring our stuff to bigger platforms and more products and we can. And so we're now got this renewed outlook that's super motivated. I mean, holy shit, I go to bed thinking about this and I wake up thinking about it. It's cool. It's beautiful. Yeah, a lot of fun, a lot of fun, a lot of demand, a lot of opportunity.

43:57But again, doing it our way is the difficult part. How do you think about simplicity with that abundance of optionality. Yeah. What a tension. Gosh, what a jump between the iPad to a desktop. So yeah, how do you think about that? Like it's not in the focus in the camera lens that you were describing, but like even just the ideas that you would lean on. Well, I think it's interesting. It's like DreamWorks, when we showed them Procreate Dreams. Yeah. Oh, they were like, this is cool, man, but I ain't making a movie like this over a couch. And I was like, yeah. Ah, fair point. Because it's not a, what we realized is it's not a, they're not mutually exclusive.

44:39Yeah. Artists just want to make stuff. Whether it's at the desk, at the beach, they don't really care. You know, it's not really what goes into their mind. They see an opportunity of like, can I have my desk set up where ergonomically I've got a larger screen, my back's not getting destroyed and I can work for long hours. But then I can just jump on the couch by the fire or something, continue making the movie. That customer flow, if we sort of look at that, that's super exciting. There's a tension there. But that's super exciting in the sense of what Procreate could give to the artists in the sense that perhaps they do just approach their desk.

45:14We've got a CloudSync file type that we're bringing to market. How cool would it be just to draw your movie and you're doing your timings, et cetera, and turn it off to walk away and grab your pad? I see what they want. And I get it. I totally get it. It's not an if or an else. The challenging part to us is, well, if we jump to a desktop, there's a lot of heritage. A lot of things don't transpire. Like you can't just grab the iPad and just blow it up. Desktops have been around for 30 years. Very, very different input methods. And if we were to do that, what we don't want to do is just sort of follow the trend of just blowing an iPad up and throwing it on there.

45:53If Procreate is going to make a desktop app, we want it to be the best Mac experience, like better than first party. We want it to be the best, almost like we've always been Mac developers. But that's a challenge. It's a real challenge because our mindset isn't in that direction. It's always been on this magic piece of glass that can kind of transform itself into whatever we need. Whereas on the desktop, it's very different workflows. Very, very different. Yeah. Massive. But I can totally imagine someone leaning over a couch and creating that next movie. Well, there's people doing it. Yeah. Just maybe not at Disney yet.

46:29Totally. If you have any advice for the artists out there, whether they're founders or artists themselves, what would you hope that they can think about? I'd turn that around and say the best advice I could offer is listen to the little voice. as artists, we have this high amount of intuition generally. And it's so easy to suppress that tiny little voice that sort of tells you what you should be doing or what could be great or what the right answer is. And we often suppress that with logic and data. But the advice I'd give out would be always listen to that little voice because that's just some total of all of your knowledge being accessed in an instant.

47:09There's something there. There's something very truthful and emotional about listening to that little voice inside. It's not easy to do. It's so easy just to kind of rationalize your way through commercial decisions or product decisions. But I find the strongest sort of superpower we have as artists is that little voice. I have to ask a follow-up. Yeah. How do you bring, so you listen to it, you can hear it. Yeah. It's starting to bubble. The weight, it's building. What questions would you ask yourself to start putting words to the feeling? The first thing you've got to do is be honest. That's tricky, man.

47:46That's so hard. It's weird. It's like, you know, you make a call. Is this my ego or is this true? Right, right. Yeah, like you're making a call and the little voice starts chiming in. You're like, shut the fuck up. I know what I'm doing. And you keep going down that path and it gets louder and louder. The first thing you have to do is just really be reflective and be completely transparent with your own person. And that's not easy. It's not a path for everyone because no one really likes admitting that they're wrong. That's just a human condition. But if you could push past that and really like be really honest with yourself, then that little voice becomes so powerful.

48:22Thank you for joining me on Wild Hearts. That was beautiful. Cool. Thanks for having me, man. So good.

48:31Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Wild Hearts. If you want to learn more from the most ambitious people working at the front line, designing, creating the future, please hit subscribe or follow. Please share it around. It would mean the world to us, as you know. Frankly, the show would be impossible without the help of Camilla Herring, Amelia Rayner at Blackbird, and our editors, Annie Jones and Sanjay Chabaria at day one. Thank you all for listening. And if you're a wild heart with a wild idea, please get in touch. I'd love to hear from you.