Closing Remarks and Guest's Future Endeavors | 3min snip from How We Scaled It for Design Teams

Speaker 3
Go. Go. Go. Oh my god. Now. Go. Go. Yeah. Go. Go. Go. Go. To the blink. Go. Get out of here. Go. Go. Get out of here. Go. Go.
Speaker 2
Wait. Go. Go. What's next.
Speaker 4
Go. I want to start this topic off
Speaker 2
immediately with a complete tangent. Wonderful. Good. Of course. Many months ago, a TikTok by a creator called slowmo that's at SLO O W M O E E
Speaker 3
went viral. And it
Speaker 2
was asking people to record themselves before and after Googling, where does vanilla flavoring come from? Oh, do you guys remember that video? Yes. I know where
Speaker 1
it does come from. Yes. I don't remember the video. I think if you had told me this without the context, but but knowing the knowing that we're going to talk about beavers, I, I, I, a horrible memory has been unearthed. And I thought I had killed long ago. Um, oh boy, this is quite the way into this. This is how we're diving into
Speaker 2
this topic. Okay. Either of you told me where
Speaker 3
vanilla flavoring comes from. Well, it comes from vanilla pods. Yes. And I think I don't understand the science of it or how they make it, but something to do with beavers anal glands spot on.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Beavers have a gland in their anus that produces a chemical called castorium, which the beaver uses to market's territory. Castorium has quite a pleasant vanilla smell, basically because the beavers eat a lot of like wood in really simple times. Okay. It just means that the stuff that they produce smells different to what's in our anus. You
Speaker 4
know, imagine
Speaker 3
having a vanilla smelling shit. That'd be fantastic.
Speaker 2
Oh my God. So castorium is quite pleasant smelling and it is very, very, very occasionally used in food perfumes and candles as a sort of high end vanilla substitute.
Speaker 1
I was going to say because to, to, to, to, to, to have brought up sort of a big point, which is that like, I feel like the phases of, of learning this fact are like, wait, what? Oh my God. What have I been doing? And then the, and then the second stage is like, that can't be a fish. We, that, why would that be the primary way?

Alex Schleifer, Former Head of Design at Airbnb — Scaling Design at Airbnb

How We Scaled It for Design Teams

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