Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Steve Vassallo on the next chapter of design thinking
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Steve Vassallo trained as a mechanical engineer, studied design thinking at Stanford and worked at IDEO as an award winning product designer.
Now he's an early stage investor at foundation capital. Where he helps founders bring their world changing ideas to life. Like the best product first investors, Steve listens carefully for the qualities that separate successful product creators from the pack. He also has a deep understanding of the fluid iterative nature of product market fit.
Steve: Your goal is not to achieve product market fit, but actually to achieve a regular drumbeat of many product market fits. You know, this sort of sense of how do you build the processes [00:01:00] so that when you design product number one, you're beginning to collect the feedback and integrate the ways that product number two needs to incorporate those fundamental elements because, of course, you know, the competitive landscape changes.
Your customers want more. There's a whole bunch of reasons why you need to already be thinking about product number two. And I think very few companies really design, um, their product development process with as much intentionality as they maybe design their first product. And so I, you know, have this notion of sort of product market fit as a liquid, not a solid.
And I think designing your process and your company with as much intentionality as you design your product is really fundamental today.
Amy: If you're into great design, you'll love Steve's new book, the way to design, where he shares his passion for the intersection of user experience and systems thinking, listen in and learn how Steve's design sensibilities inform his investing choices and inspired his knowledge sharing.[00:02:00]
Welcome, Steve, to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Steve: Thanks, Amy Jo. It's great to be here.
Amy: I'm so excited to get to talk to you. Before we launch into the really juicy, meaty stuff, give us a little flavor of your work life. You know, where you work, what your role is, and maybe a story about something that you would typically do in a day, although I know your days aren't all typical.
Steve: Yeah, so I'm a general partner at Foundation Capital where I lead investments in early stage startups across a broad array of sectors and industries. So everything from consumer to financial services to a little bit of energy and a whole lot of stuff in between. And just maybe by way of background, we're very early stage focused.
So about two thirds of the time we're the first institutional investor in a company. So spend a lot of time, you know, with companies that are five, 10 people in their earliest earliest days when they're still trying to figure out what to build and how to engage the market. You know, a typical day for me is starting out with a breakfast meeting with an entrepreneur or maybe an executive who, [00:03:00] uh, we may be courting for one of, you know, the executive positions in, in one of our startups, or maybe even as an entrepreneur in residence at our firm that might be followed by a visit with a startup.
Ideally to maybe a walking interview with actually an exec in one of my portfolio companies to help them kind of think through something that's going on that they need some help with the afternoon might be a board meeting and then there's probably one more meeting with a with an EIR.
Perhaps one of my CEOs and a bunch of calls sort of jammed in the free space. I'd say probably a few nights a week. I'm at a working event, got one tonight, uh, actually around design related stuff. And then I'm usually on calls on my way home. I try to catch up with my teenage daughter and maybe, uh, if I'm lucky, I get a glass of wine with my wife before doing email till I go to bed at midnight.
That's a probably a pretty typical day for me.
Amy: So you're doing a lot of advising and discussing and it sounds like you're giving a lot of people input.
Steve: Yeah, exactly.
Amy: Wow. So give us a whirlwind tour of your background. How did you [00:04:00] first get started in this crazy world of tech and startups? And how did you decide what to pursue along the way?
Steve: Yeah, well, so I grew up back East, actually in Massachusetts, and I still remember my first business because I still actually carry the first business card in my wallet. No joke, which was Steve's snowblowing service. And I made my business cards in print shop in seventh grade. And it's still sort of a humbling thing to carry around because there's no design content whatsoever because we couldn't choose any of the fonts or the spacing.
But it's a great reminder to me as sort of that whole sort of entrepreneurial journey of having to knock on doors in the middle of winter and have to ask folks if they'd be interested in your service and have the vast majority of them slam the door closed and say, no way, like I don't need that. And so that was sort of my first taste of starting my own company.
I went to school for mechanical engineering and robotics. Back East at a great school called Worcester Polytech and and then came out to Stanford for my graduate degree in in smart product design and in robotics. And I still remember and you asked about inflection points, but I still remember that Friday afternoon [00:05:00] seminar when I first met David Kelly, and he just opened my my eyes to the world of design.
It was a few months later, actually, after the design project in the first kind of capstone class for the design program where he told me that I needed to work at IDEO that next summer. I kind of didn't know what I was getting myself into, but when I got there, it was just, you know, a really special place.
I had found my people. And so I really think that, you know, that sort of very foundational experience of working at IDEO and working with both startups as well as large companies was kind of that taste of what it was like to build products where before there was nothing. I think maybe before that, I, I thought that products just fell out of the sky.
And then I ran engineering at a couple of startups, took one public in all of 1999. It was actually a company called Immersion, which really invented force feedback and haptics technology got distributed through lots of different industries and gaming and consumer devices, um, industrial controls, medical devices, and then ultimately found my way to foundation capital as an entrepreneur in residence.
I was on the path to starting a business. a company and after a few months they said, Hey, you need to think about [00:06:00] investing. You keep bringing all these crazy cool projects in and why don't you think about it? And I resisted it initially and then decided that it was actually the most interesting job that I'd ever had.
And that was almost 10 years ago now.
Amy: Wow. That's really interesting. So how did you get involved in the designer fund?
Steve: Yeah. So I met Ben Blumenfeld and Enrique, uh, when they were just getting started. And it actually harkened back to those early days when I was still at Stanford. In fact, I, I remembered some of the things that Bill Moggridge and David Kelly used to talk about in terms of, you know, enabling, you know, designers to express their ideas and build companies as opposed to going and working, maybe as a sort of a 11th hour stylist in a design agency.
And David had, of course, built idea at the time. And Bill Moggridge had his own start up. And when I met Ben and Enrique. I literally sort of felt like I'd been reconnected with some of the ideas that David and Bill had been talking about 30 years earlier. So I met them maybe four or five years ago and we at foundation actually turned out to be one of their first large institutional [00:07:00] investors in their first fund.
And, um, we've co invested in a number of projects together and it's been a great partnership for us.
Amy: Interesting. We're going to come back to that. I want to dig in a little to as an investor, what are some of the patterns that you're seeing? Because you have this awesome quality of operator turned investor.
Like you've gotten your hands very dirty with product, with engineering, with leadership. And. Now you're an investor. So what are the signals that make you lean forward, that pull you in, that make you decide, yes, this team, not this other team.
Steve: So I'm a, a product first investor for sure. And I've got to.
Have a good sense for what these entrepreneurs are going to build what problem they're trying to to tackle. What positive change do they want to affect in the world? And so I always start with the product. I love technical risk. I'm very comfortable with that, having worked [00:08:00] in deeply technical domains.
And so I tend to get drawn to product first founders. that have a deep and intuitive sense for that opportunity that's in front of them. But they also have to have this persistence and pluck to not give up until this vision that they have really comes to pass. That really that sort of sense of, of the product and that sense of persistence is really important to me.
I sometimes joke about it as the, as the Shackleton entrepreneur, I was in the, in the Antarctic actually just this past winter break. And, you know, you, when you read the stories of persistence and creativity and how to build teams that are just incredibly resilient, you know, I'm sort of reminded of, of so many of the startups that I get, you know, I'm fortunate enough to work with.
If I look at some of our most compelling companies over the years at foundation, whether it's Reed Hastings at Netflix or. Uh, Lynn Jurich at Sunrun or Nate Weiner at Pocket. I mean, these are the founders who have that deep, intuitive sense for the market and for the customer. And they tend to have this vision that oftentimes no one else sees.
They don't see it until it's obvious. [00:09:00] And of course, then it's usually too late. These are the kinds of entrepreneurs who create new categories, who create new industries, who really birth new markets.
Amy: And on the flip side, when you're listening to pitches, cause you must listen to hundreds of pitches. As you're listening, what are some of the red flags that make you lean backward and maybe you were into it and then you hit that red flag and it makes you really take a pause?
What are those things for you?
Steve: So I think there's a very fine line between persistence and strident disregard for what the market is actually telling you. I'm generally turned off by founders who. Aren't willing to listen to or embrace even the feedback that they're getting from, uh, those early users.
That is something you can sense relatively quickly in working with entrepreneurs and it's something that I'm very tuned into. I will say another point, and I think this has actually become even more challenging in today's entrepreneurial ecosystem is so many entrepreneurs have been coached almost sort of like pruned and like perfectly [00:10:00] primed on how to, uh, tell their story.
I sort of feel like the origin story for so many startups has been scripted over and over to the point where it's, it's almost meaningless. And I get turned off when I see an entrepreneur, almost story selling instead of storytelling. I think it's something that you can pick up on, um, in terms of how hard there may be pushing metrics that don't matter or connecting their origin story to, to experiences that maybe aren't quite as relevant.
So I'm tuned into that. The last thing, which may seem like a small point, but I pay a lot of attention To how founders talk about their most challenging professional and even personal struggles, um, and how they work their way through those because even the most successful startups have more than their fair share of, of white knuckle moments.
Amy: Say a little more about that. So you, you pay attention to how they talk about it. What are you looking for there?
Steve: I'm looking for a couple of things. I'm looking for, um, how they behaved in the moment when the world was falling down around them. Were they able to, you know, keep their wits about them and find a workable solution.[00:11:00]
And then I'm sort of almost sort of zooming forward to then what did they learn from that experience that changed the way they built their business for the next time that, you know, this sort of nuclear bomb hits. And so it's both that sort of very immediate reactive response and the sort of more long twitch behavioral changes or structural changes that they've, that they've integrated into their thinking.
Amy: Right. The learning loop as Reed Hoffman calls it. You know, you're talking about something that. Is really very deep and kind of paradoxical, which is to build something that's truly innovative and successful. You need to have this strange blend of really strong intuitive vision or strong vision and intuitive belief, but also be really open to and strategically integrate feedback from customers and from the market.
And it's kind of paradoxical.
Steve: It is. It's very paradoxical.
Amy: So how do you think about that? And how do you help [00:12:00] counsel and coach your teams through that?
Steve: It's a great question, and I'd say I fall back on some of the earliest things I learned in my career as a product designer, and there's a very special guy at IDEO, a guy named Denny Boyle.
He's one of IDEO's earliest principals, and in fact, he has this rule that we now call Boyle's Law, but he used to have this guideline, which was that you, Always showed up at a client meeting with a prototype, uh, no matter how simple or small the prototype, you might just literally be testing out how a font might look on a character based display or what literally the shape of the buttons would be on a phone and this notion of always Rushing to prototype really served two purposes.
Number one, I think it pushed the team to answer the most critical questions as quickly as possible. But it also of course served as, you know, a catalyst for dialogue with your customer, with your client. And so what I'd say is I encourage my startups to do the same thing at the product and even at the team and company level, which is, you know, [00:13:00] to build toward a minimum awesome product.
I actually don't think in terms of minimum viable products. I think about like minimum awesome product and then do what I think about is sort of running to the fight. So you want to show it to the smartest people, you know, not just the experts that are in that field, but people you, you actually aspire to serve.
You want to embrace their feedback. You want to pay super close attention to those emergent use cases. And then ultimately, and this gets to your point, Amy is then you want to listen to your own inner still. On how to evolve the product, because that's where your own insights and your own convictions to sort of shape the product in a way that you sort of think moves the world forward is fundamental to that process.
Amy: So you've been working now at the forefront of innovation through your fund and your investments and your coaching entrepreneurs, and also through your work at IDEO, you've been working at this forefront now for many years. What do you know now about successful innovation that you wish you'd known 10 years ago?
Steve: Boy, I wish when I left the Stanford d school [00:14:00] that I actually really did have a sense, a deeper sense for the role of all of the business functions in the success of building a great company. You know, I think the culture of product design often is that the best idea wins, you know, I think through the lens of many of my own experiences as well.
Some of the things I saw while I was at idea, I saw companies. That didn't have the best design that didn't have the best product win. You know, I used to joke that Oracle never had the best databases. They had the best sales forces to sell those databases, and I worked very closely with Cisco on on their voice over IP phones.
It's my last project that I do. And There's a part of me which thinks that we could have literally designed the worst voice over IP phone on the planet, and they still would have sold half a billion of them. I'm happy to say that they didn't or that we didn't design, you know, the worst phone. I think we designed the last great desk phone.
But when you see the power of distribution and of sales and marketing, Run really well. And when product is pulled through so many more aspects as opposed to just sort of done sort of early [00:15:00] on and then thrown over the transom, you can build something of enduring value when you see the full capability of sales and marketing paired up with great product design, paired up with great operations and manufacturing and great customer support.
So it's really the threat of kind of pulling intention through an entire organism.
Amy: It's a beautiful thing.
Steve: When it works, it sure is.
Amy: So as you coach teams, as you hear pitches and, you know, roll your sleeves up and work with these teams, what are some of the most common mistakes that you see, you know, smart, well meaning product owners, designers, product managers, creators, what are some of the most common mistakes you see them making in the early days of bringing their ideas to life?
Steve: Well, I alluded to one of them earlier, and I think in the valley, there's definitely this sense of, you know, just get to a minimum viable product, get to the fastest possible version of your idea, fastest possible prototype. And I think if taken too far, what happens is you [00:16:00] just end up with too much incrementalism.
Um, you see too many lightweight hacks that perhaps are a great way to get started, but they're just not enough to build something. Of enduring value. And I think that that is something where, you know, I joke, sort of the minimum awesome product is what I think you should be shooting for. And that doesn't mean it should take months and months to get to that, but, but really sort of hold the bar higher than you would maybe otherwise.
And I think there's another, and it's related to this, there's another. Sort of pitfall that is often sort of seen in these early stage startups and that I think we talk about today. Product market fit almost as if it were a destination. Um, you know, we sort of celebrate it like we've got, you know, pounding a flag in the ground.
We've achieved it. Now we can go ramp are. spend on customer acquisition or build out our sales force. This sort of misses the point and point that I try to reinforce with the companies that I work with is that your goal is not to achieve product market fit, but actually to achieve a regular drumbeat of many product market fits.
You know, this sort of sense of how do you [00:17:00] build the processes. So that when you design product number one, you're beginning to collect the feedback and integrate the ways that product number two needs to incorporate those fundamental elements. Because, of course, you know, the competitive landscape changes your customers want more.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why you need to already be thinking about product number two. And I think very few companies really design product number three. Um, their product development process with as much intentionality as they may be designed their first product. And so I, you know, have this notion of sort of product market fit as a liquid, not a solid.
And I think designing your process and your company with as much intentionality as you design your product is really fundamental today.
Amy: I love that. So you recently expressed these ideas and some others in a wonderful book, The Way to Design. I read it. That's part of why we're talking. I just loved it.
So how did that book come to life? What's the backstory?
Steve: Yeah. So the way to design really came to pass for two reasons, one's personal and one's more professional. I've been a [00:18:00] designer since before I knew that being a designer was an actual thing. You know, I talked a little bit about how I didn't know that there was a field of product design until I met David Kelly back in that Friday afternoon seminar and discovered, you know, a real passion for this when I went to go work at IDEO.
Um, so when I eventually decided to leave IDEO after five years, largely because I wanted to learn and do more because I wanted to get on the path to becoming an entrepreneur. I felt a little bit like I had abandoned my tribe. And so I think a huge part of why I'm so personally passionate about this project and why I did it really flows from from this compulsion to advance what those design visionaries like Bob McKim and David Kelly and Bill Moggridge were dreaming about, you know, 20, 25 years ago.
So that was sort of the personal reason. And then the second reason, I felt compelled really ties back to the venture industry that I'm a part of now. So, you know, before having done this book project, I had made investments in designer founded companies. In fact, my very first angel investment, um, just before joining foundation, uh, was actually behind a [00:19:00] designer founder named Tristan Harris, who you might know.
He's, um, since gone on to found this nonprofit called time well spent. Which is really focused on helping us reclaim all of the attention that we've lost to so many, you know, digital devices. And I'd also invested in other designer founded companies like pocket and framer. And of course we talked a little bit about designer fund as well, which in and of itself has backed about 25 designer founded companies.
And what I noticed was that I kept meeting these. These aspiring designer founders, I felt like many of them were still so unprepared for the journey that they were about to embark upon. And I felt a little bit like I'd seen a younger version of myself in so many of them. So and then I kind of looked at, okay, what is the venture industry doing to support these aspiring founders?
And it just didn't feel to me like it was really honoring. What made these aspiring designer founders so special or what was making them even a risk to themselves and the companies they were about to start. So I really felt like I wanted to do two things with the book. I wanted to inspire. That was sort of thing one [00:20:00] and get folks to hopefully think bigger to kind of snap out of this sort of incrementalism.
And turn their sort of crazy mutant powers on bigger problems. And I also wanted to provide some really practical tactical resources for designers to level up in order to become great founders. So it was really those two things that were the inspiration for the book.
Amy: Awesome. So one of your chapters is about systems thinking.
And in my work, that's a really core concept. And one of the things I've found is that a lot of people that are trained in the D school, trained in that style, they aren't really system thinkers, and that's a issue in design. I know Paul Adams has talked about this. Paul Adams from Intercom, who you may know.
That systems thinking is a key 21st century skill, especially for designers. So I was thrilled to see you talk about that and I wanted you to maybe drill down on that a little and also talk about resources because, you know, I'm [00:21:00] developing resources to help both game and product designers understand and implement systems thinking.
And I assume you're trying to do something of the same and your book is part of that. So why do you think systems thinking bubbled up as such an important topic and where are you taking that in terms of your own, you know, founder education and support?
Steve: I think systems thinking is perhaps the next chapter of design thinking.
You know, there's probably some risk and I'll probably piss some people off by trying to combine them. But I agree with you. I think design thinking needs to evolve. I think, you know, it was a brilliant synthesis of so many great ideas. Percolating in many heads and, of course, was was really born close to 60 years ago with some of the work of John Arnold in the early days of the, you know, predating the Stanford design program.
Um, but what I've noticed is or what was missing and what I think systems thinking really brings to bear is a respect and a deep appreciation for the complexity and the interconnectedness [00:22:00] that today prevails that just did not 15, 20, 25 years ago. When you think about the fact that there are. Two billion people on the planet walking around with, you know, connected devices, and there will be trillions by mid century of connected devices.
And that as designers, we need to think not with boundaries around our individual devices, but with boundaries around the whole system. And that degree of scale is never been something that I think Design thinking has had to wrestle to the ground before. And so when I began to dig into the readings of Daniella Meadows on Peter Senge and others, I sort of a light bulb went off for me and it struck me that, that these could be some of the tools for this next chapter of design thinking.
We can talk into some of the specifics. I do think that when you are acting as a, as a systems thinker, you really have to engage the whole system. You, you have to have a heightened degree of [00:23:00] awareness and a process orientation, perhaps even more so than a product or outcome orientation.
So it ties back to some of the things we talked about earlier. And then when you begin to deconstruct systems. and understand relationships between them and where to apply pressure and where to sort of intervene. If you will, you have to be much more thoughtful about the downstream effects of those things.
Because, as you know, when you study systems are instincts, perhaps are are reflexive, intuitive responses Um, to challenges are often pushing things in the wrong direction, not in the direction we want them to go. Um, but we don't understand the feedback loops intimately enough to be able to really, to, to really address the, the opportunities the right way.
So, uh, maybe I'll pause there. Cause I think that's maybe a lot.
Amy: That's great. Yeah, that's a lot of where game design has a lot to offer design thinking, because that is systems. Design, you have to, that's what good games are, their systems. And, you know, there's this thing called emergent properties, [00:24:00] which, um, make it challenging, but marketplaces are systems too.
You know, most interesting internet apps are systems. So that's why it's such an important skill. Now, are you seeing this Steve on the front lines with the companies? You're working with a lot of really interesting companies, FinTech and Energy. Are you seeing them struggle to find? Like with systems issues, are, are there UX people needing to get better at that?
Like, what are you actually seeing boots on ground?
Steve: What I'm seeing is entrepreneurs and designers beginning to get more thoughtful about, um, about flow diagrams and literally building systemograms and understanding how to step back from the product where the product might be a digital experience. It might be a physical product.
And to begin to explore the space between the user and the product, and to think about the context and the world in which the product lives, um, we see this, of course, in our energy companies, we see this in our financial technologies companies, when they begin to think about, [00:25:00] uh, about regulation, and they begin to think about the misuses of some of the technologies that they're bringing to bear.
And I think, you know, you brought it up this point of emergent properties. If you were designing a robotic ant and you were, you know, literally sort of figuring out how to design the components of the thorax and the antenna. You could never have predicted the collective behavior of building anthills from, you know, from that design of the ant itself.
And so how do we begin to think about how these systems interplay with each other so that you can have some appreciation for those downstream emergent behaviors? Good examples, I think, in the product domain also are when I look back and people love to celebrate, you know, what has been an amazing run by Apple with respect to I'm the development of the iPod and one of my closest friends actually worked on that.
So I have a dvt unit in its original box and I think about, you know, great. The iPod was fascinating. It's look at it today and it's five times thicker probably than the equivalent product that Apple puts out. And it, you know, only carries a thousand songs physically. It [00:26:00] was not that different from what others were doing at the time.
What made it so fundamentally different was the iTunes ecosystem. That Steve Jobs and Apple built around it. The fact that there was a desktop app and the relationships that they built with the studios to be able to and the record labels to be able to get the content that you wanted on the device on mass.
And I think when you look at some of the success stories of the last, you When you design the whole system, not just the product, not just the interface, but everything around it, um, you begin, I think, build better products, better experiences that tend to be more enduring. And then maybe the last comment I'll make around systems thinking that I think has had a real impact, positive impact in the area of design, is this notion of identifying leverage points.
You know, in systems thinking leverage points or maybe the sort of layman's way to think about this is it's almost like doing acupuncture for your problem solving. You're sort of, you know, applying a pressure on your lower leg and fixing a problem in your upper left shoulder. You're sort of [00:27:00] adjusting the way your posture is and you're standing differently or walking differently.
And leverage points are like that, where you're looking for the smallest shift That will have the greatest impact, positive impact. And, um, you can only do that when you really begin to understand the relationships between products and systems in the environment that's around them. So I think this systems things is going to be one of the more dangerous new ideas for design thinking of the next 10, 20 years.
Amy: I agree. You're a very inspiring person to listen to and talk to. And thank you for writing that book and, you know, really spreading great design thinking. What are you seeing right now that's new and exciting to you in design and tech? There's a lot of trends going on. Which ones are you interested in and following?
What's inspiring you?
Steve: So I'm seeing a lot of fun stuff in a lot of different categories. I would say, you know, you can't ignore This massive push towards artificial intelligence and machine learning being applied to everything from parking in San [00:28:00] Francisco, no joke, to, you know, early detection of cancer to the way we identify what's in an image and whether to pursue a different kind of treatment regime for a specific patient.
And so I'm very fascinated by this. We've made a number of investments in this area, and I think. That we are going to see new computing architectures altogether, new ones that really go back 40, 50 years, um, in terms of decisions, fundamental decisions that were made around how we actually solve technical problems and that those computing architectures will be much more tuned towards the machine learning and AI workloads of the next decade.
Um, so I'm very excited about that. There's a lot of fundamental technology to be built. And hard problems to be solved all the way up and down the stack. And then I would say I'm spending a lot of time on a number of areas that are more focused on the very top of the stack on the interactions with, with end users.
Um, so I think productivity is again, coming up for perhaps a radical reordering. I think we're seeing that, um, there are a number of companies that have stumbled and that end users are still using, you know, 10, 15 different to do apps and notes [00:29:00] apps and chat apps and IRC clones. And, and so managing that whole communication chain, that whole management of your own life.
Um, and how you spend your time is becoming more important than it's ever been. So productivity, I think is an area of great interest. And then the last area that I'm spending a lot of time on is design tools. So design, you know, as we talked about is a huge lever and there's a part of the book where I talk about this notion that in the old days, sort of design was the last thing you did.
It was like, you'd call in the designer. To to prettify your your prototype to, you know, put a nicer skin on your on your plastic enclosure. And I think the notion that design is now first, it's gone from last to first is an important one in terms of what questions are you trying to ask? What opportunities are you trying to to take advantage of?
And then the tools for designers, now they're beginning to be engaged much earlier in the process. Those tools need to follow. All the way through the life cycle of product development, not just through the product, first generation of the product, but all the way through the second, third and fourth. [00:30:00] And so getting product design and product designers involved through the marketing and distribution and sales and product support.
And then sort of, of course, turning that back onto the sort of next generation of products. So seeing tools that really enable designers to have more scale and more impact, um, up and down an organization, I think is something that I'm very intrigued by and encouraged by.
Amy: That sounds like it could be very high leverage.
Steve: For sure.
Amy: When you look back at your career and the common threads that run through all the projects that have really inspired you, the things that make you light up. What is that? What is your superpower?
Steve: I think my creative superpower really is a function of the fact that I've worked on so many different things.
I've worked in business and technology in design, uh, in robotics and embedded systems, uh, financial services. I have a synthetic biology company and perhaps IDEO ruined me early enough in my career that I, that I have some degree of [00:31:00] ADHD for industries or categories. Um, but I think what I've noticed in my career is that some of the most compelling.
ideas, products and services really live at the scenes between disciplines. When you are able to identify a really interesting synthetic biology behavior that applies to a machine learning algorithm, uh, when you're able to see something in, in medicine or in biology. That has a great applicability to how you build a resilient team or sales force.
I think I was just blessed to work with some creative weirdos early in my career. Um, you know, I think the D school has unique attraction for people who don't fit in any other department. And then when you put all these people that don't fit in any other department together, they do really interesting, unusual things.
And, uh, so I, I sort of feel like that's part of who I am and part of why I resonate with, with folks who sort of see these intersections across disciplines that otherwise wouldn't have come together.
Amy: Power to the edge cases.
Steve: Yeah, exactly. [00:32:00] Look for the extremes, right?
Amy: Wow. So thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been a fascinating and mind expanding. conversation for me.
Steve: Thank you, Amy Jo. It's been a real pleasure. Uh, I love what you're doing and I'm excited to have been a part of it.
Amy: Awesome. Well, we'll talk soon.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.
Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.