Full Stack Whatever

Josh is a digital product designer and prototyper, currently working at Humane. We talked about a ton of things. We went in depth about his extended periods of time spent at Apple and Instagram. Weaved into this, he shared how he thinks about prototyping, and how he draws the relationship between his acting education and design.

Hans Peter is a serial entrepreneur, technologist and photographer. Most recently, he led Everyday Robots at Alphabet. We talked about the experiences he gained from the companies he founded, his time at Nokia during the rise of the iPhone, and his reflections on leading robotics at Alphabet. Towards the end of our conversation, we talked about our mutual love for photography and got a little nerdy about Leica and photo management.

Kim is a designer and leader with a very colorful track record including past roles at well-known companies like The New York Times, Etsy, and Dropbox. She is currently part of the Experience Design leadership team at Netflix. We covered a lot of topics, including burn-out, management styles, values alignment with your team and your employer, our shared thoughts on research, as well as her deep interest in food and wine.

Aaron is one of those great individuals who is both a great designer, as well as a fabulous leader. He recently joined eBay as their VP of Design, where he continues his quest to bring re-commerce to the masses. We talked about his path into design, from his days in service design to realizing he wanted to go in-house, and eventually ending up having a long stint at Facebook, where he most notably was pivotal in the success of Marketplace.

Didier studied to be an economist before making a pivot into design. Since then, he has been a design lead at Flipboard and led a large part of the Uber design team. Most recently, he co-founded a fintech company in Paris called Bloks. We spoke about the genesis of his career path and the big lessons that he’s learned along the way. Some of the notable topics we dug in to were: working on mobile apps in the early 2010s, how to deal with working at a company that is experiencing major adversity, and the challenges of getting off the hamster wheel to take a long sabbatical, and figuring out what to do afterwards.

Mia Blume is an entrepreneur, design leader, and leadership coach. She is the founder and CEO of learning & development company DesignDept, and the founder and host of the design leadership conference Within. We discussed her career and how she went from service design to in-house to starting her companies. We spoke about how she guides and supports design leaders through her workshops and coaching practices, and dug deeper into the importance of having business acumen as a design leader.

Jessica is a lettering artist and author who has created custom lettering artwork for established brands, films, classic books, postage stamps, and so much more. She’s traveled the world speaking at creative conferences and colleges and has befriended innumerable internet strangers while navigating the depths of social media. Most recently, she wrote and illustrated her latest children’s book: “Who Will U Be?”. We talked a bit about her career and the meaningful moments within it. And we chatted about befriending tons of people by being extremely online and the differences in connecting with people nowadays versus the past decade and a half.

Michael is an entrepreneur, investor, and product person. He is currently the co-founder and CEO at Taika, making beverages that fuel creativity. He was Facebook's first mobile product hire and subsequently led their mobile product development and strategy—including the company's pivot to mobile—for more than five years. We talked about his path from South Africa to the US, his career-defining role at Facebook, and his path since.

Entrepreneur Matthew Buchanan discusses bootstrapping and leading Letterboxd, reflecting on digital content preservation, transitioning from computer science to web design, and navigating setbacks in building the platform. The conversation explores slow growth, user feedback, community engagement, and strategic decision-making for platform growth.

I’m excited to bring you a conversation with Haraldur Thorleifsson, or Halli, for short. I met up with Halli at Kinference in Brooklyn, and he was gracious enough to give me some of his time. We recorded this in the venue during the conference happy hour, so please bear with us as there’s going to be a lot of noise. Halli is an entrepreneur, creative design leader, and musician from Reykjavik, Iceland. He previously founded and led UENO. Currently, he is building 1000 ramps in Iceland, releasing music under the name Önnu Jónu Son and just launched his restaurant, bar, and mini theater Anna Jóna. We spoke for a short period of time during the happy hour of the first day of Kinference in Brooklyn. We talked about his experience being a recovering alcoholic, and cover some meaningful stories about what drives him and what projects he is focusing on next.