🤿 red herring

Soleio is one of my favorite people to learn from on the planet.

So this week he officially becomes our first repeat guest.

If you missed our original interview or need a little refresher, Soleio led early design efforts at Facebook and Dropbox. Now he invests in design-driven startups like Figma, Framer, Vercel, and a bunch of others you’ll definitely recognize.

So this week’s episode is all about how designers and startups can succeed in a world where everything is changing. We tap into Soleio’s unique perspective on:

• Ideal traits for a founding designer

• How startups can strategically attack incumbents

• Why the future belongs to designers who can ship

• The backstory behind Soleio’s investment in Perplexity

• A potential future where one designer can service 5+ startups

• What you can do to invest in your future founder journey today

• How Soleio approaches the design tooling space as an investor

• Why we won’t use smartphones the same way 5 years from now

• + a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH VISUAL ELECTRIC

There’s a new product called Visual Electric that I absolutely love and use for everything now… You can think of it like Midjourney meets Figma.

It’s an image generation tool that’s built specifically for designers and it’s even more photo-realistic than Midjourney.

It’s also super easy to iterate because the experience happens on an infinite canvas so you’ll feel right at home.

If you enjoy it as much as I think you will then use the exclusive code DIVECLUB to get your first month for free 👇

🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

3 key ideas from Soleio

1️⃣ Coding was a red herring

There used to be a holy war over whether or not designers should spend time and energy learning how to code.

But it turns out coding was a little bit of a red herring. Instead Soleio segments designers into two buckets:

1. Designers who can ship real product

2. Designers who create concept cars and blueprints

If that makes you uncomfortable or sparks a bit of conviction… I’m right there with ya 😅 but the fact is that tools like Cursor and Claude (remember, Joel?) have lowered the bar to the point where we no longer have any excuse.

Here’s the thing though… if anyone can create software then design will become an even greater differentiator. And I’m feeling incredibly grateful to bring design as a core skill into the future.

At Facebook in the early days they used to have a saying: “the quick shall inherit the earth”. Well there’s nobody faster than a designer who can ship.

2️⃣ Ideal traits for founding designers

I’m as biased as it gets, but I firmly believe that the founding designer role is the most exciting job opportunity in all of tech. And Soleio is always helping his portfolio companies find their first designers (like this one).

So I asked him… what makes for a successful founding designer?

First off you need to be generative. You don’t fall in love with your work because you’re producing so much of it. That means you have to be quick to throw away ideas.

Designing at a successful startup is like building sandcastles. You’re constantly shipping and experimenting while letting a lot of work get washed away.

He used a metaphor from the book Pattern Breakers (which he strongly recommended multiple times):

Maybe you start off selling Happy Meals but after a while you realize that what people really want are the toys. Founding designers need to be willing to walk away from the kitchen and become a toy maker.

3️⃣ How startups can strategically attack incumbents

In order to gain ground against an incumbent, startups need to attack them along a vector that challenges a core assumption or business model. Hamilton Helmer refers to this as “counter-positioning” in his book 7 Powers:

Take Perplexity for example (remember Henry?).

A few years ago you’d get laughed at for going head to head with Google search.

But it turns out those 10 blue links on page 1 are nothing more than an unnecessary door in a hallway. Remove the door and you wonder why it ever existed in the first place.

Except… Google can’t remove the door. Because it’s the cash cow that funds every other business.

In the interview, Soleio talks about how the same dynamic happened at Facebook.

Once Snapchat started showing significant traction it highlighted that many people didn’t want an internet written in ink. And yet, Facebook was heavily investing in an endlessly scrolling page that showcased a permanent record of who you were.

If you want to go deeper on this topic there’s a fantastic article by Packy McCormick called “The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Positioned”.

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Dessn → How I ship like a design engineer

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Play → How I design mobile apps

Raycast ​ → How I do most things on my computer

Visual Electric → How I generate imagery

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