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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/33-cities/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while it’s a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo are actually not that high, and people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new things, and it seems almost like a cultural love of newness, and people are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in the place where an old thing stood. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And our guest Devon Zugal, hey. And Devin, not too long ago, I would have said, of GitHub, but I believe as of a few months ago, you are now a free agent. How’s life treating you? 00:00:54 - Speaker 1: It’s been great. I left GitHub about 2 months ago, and I also moved to Miami around the same time from San Francisco, and so I’ve been spending my time exploring the city, writing a number of blog posts about it, talking to people in the government and like housing developers and that sort of thing, just because that’s what I do in my free time is learn about cities. So it’s been really fun to explore my new home. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, typically when people think of Miami, the first thing they think of is speaking with members from government agencies to better understand how the infrastructure of the city works. So it makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. And can you tell us what your background is, how you came to GitHub, what came before that, and what might come after? 00:01:39 - Speaker 1: For sure. My background is computer science, which is probably not a big surprise. I studied that in school and then I worked as a software engineer at a number of San Francisco startups. And then most recently, I was a product manager at GitHub for the last 2.5+ years. I was leading the communities department where we built tools for open source. Communities. And so it ties in a lot with my interests and love of cities and economics, because they’re both about sort of what can you do to create an ecosystem and a platform where people thrive, but without defining it all in advance? How do you create those building blocks so people can live their lives, find opportunities, build really interesting things that you never would have dreamed of and help give them that platform so that they can put those plans together themselves. 00:02:28 - Speaker 2: It’s pretty easy to see the parallels between communities of different types, which includes open source, and then cities as well, which is you can’t really do a top down thing. I’m sure we’ll get into that a bit here, but unlike, for example, me, my experience in designing products or building software products is often that you sit down, you figure out what you want to make, and you make that thing, and it may or may not work out the way you want it in practice and you need to iterate on it and you need to get. Back, but it’s a very highly controlled experience, whereas something like a community can only be grown. It’s incredibly organic and I think at best you can kind of guide and obviously guidance matters a lot because that’s why we get some communities that thrive and others that don’t, but it’s just nowhere near as prescriptive as what at least I’m used to in product design. 00:03:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I moved over to product management from software because I really enjoy what I call social technology. I think that that’s really a sweet spot for me where it’s thinking about the system in terms of how can you shape and encourage behavior that’s healthy, but also without mandating it, like, sort of more of a carrot than a stick perhaps, I’m not sure if even that’s like the right metaphor, but I think that cities are a really interesting lens to look at certain types of software because things like social networks, which I would consider GitHub a social network on some level, and certainly Twitter’s Facebook’s Instagrams of the world, they really are communities of people where you as the designer or the software engineer or whoever’s building it. Don’t really control what ends up actually on the screen completely, so you have to think about what are the affordances that you provide? What does the design language say about what you’re supposed to do here? Kind of like how restaurants will have a sense of the space. So if you walk into a really quiet classy restaurant with like piano playing in the background. Everything about the space is telling you like, don’t start yelling and like dancing and screaming and whatever. Like this is a place where you’re gonna have like a nice steak, you’re gonna sit down, you’re gonna listen to classical music, but then if you walk into, you know, a Miami club, it’s a very different vibe and it says like, you’re here to kind of go wild and have fun. So I think that cities do the same of like, how does this Encourage you to live your life and different cities do that very differently. And I would love for more software teams who are building places for people to congregate online to think about it in those terms because I think it’s been a little bit lacking in the past, and I think it can lead to problems for both the creators and the people who are trying to experience the space. 00:05:12 - Speaker 2: I think that pretty naturally points to our topic today, which is Order without Design, which in fact is a book about urban economics and urban planning, and you didn’t write the book, but you do have a podcast by the very same name in which you interview the author of the book. Certainly this is not necessarily about the book itself, although I think there’s lots to discuss there, but also about this larger question of exactly what you said, how do cities become the way that they are? Each city has its own different character, and some of that evolved organically, but some of it was active choices made by people governing and living in those cities, and this is a topic that Mark and I talked about more in the, let’s call it the user perspective in a Previous episode, I’ll link in the show notes where we talked about our respective decisions to depart San Francisco and why he landed in Seattle and I landed in Berlin, and when you’re in the position of working on an all remote team or a distributed team, and you can basically choose to live anywhere where you have the ability to think in terms of not just I’m going to the city because my employer, my school is there, but you’re thinking, what are the qualities of the city that I like, what would make it a good Place to live that would be creatively inspiring for me at least, that was the experience that got me interested in urban design as a topic, which is seeing the unique character of Berlin and what it was that spoke to me, spoke to my soul about that and then thinking, OK, well, how did it get to be that way? What were the series of decisions and who are the people, and I know how digital products come to be, but how does the city come to be? So maybe you can illuminate that for us a little bit. 00:06:45 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite books, and I read it several years ago when it first came out, and instantly just had to become friends with the author. His name is Alan Berto. And he and his wife Marie Agnes, they’re in, I believe their 80s now, and they’ve spent their life living in a bunch of different cities around the world, creating their master plans. They worked for the World Bank for sanitation systems, transportation systems. They’ve been in places really far flung, such like all over the world, really. They’ve lived in Bangkok, they lived in Sana’a. Yemen, they’ve lived in New York City. I’m missing another dozen or so places that they’ve lived. Some of these cities I hadn’t even heard of, to be honest. And so they’ve seen cities from a lot of different dimensions. They’ve experienced lots of different types of people who have different goals for their cities, and they’ve done their best to shape their work to fit those goals of the residents of those different places. They’ve been in Port au Prince, Haiti, where they have a lot of really interesting stories. And what you’re talking about here about remote work and how the way we think about cities differently now that more and more people are working remotely, really an interesting lens to think about this book, because one of Alan Berto’s main points is that historically, cities have been labor markets. That’s what brings them together. It’s what sort of is the sinew that holds it all together. And what he means by cities are labor markets is that people come to cities to find opportunities to make their life better. And certainly they come for a lot of other reasons too, but finding work and finding a way to pay for their life and to better their life is one of the biggest ones. 00:08:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, at least the way I understood that argument of his was being a labor market is the root of everything else. If you don’t have that, the rest of it won’t come. The population density now leads into culture and, you know, art museums and Interesting cultural scenes emerging, but all of those are secondary effects. You have to start with the labor market. 00:08:45 - Speaker 1: Right. And I think he would point to places that are, let’s say, retirement towns and that sort of thing is somewhat exceptions to the rule, but those will never become massive cities. Those will never become engines for economic growth, for helping people’s lives get a lot better, pulling people out of. poverty. They serve a role, but they’re not really what he’s talking about. But I think it’s really interesting because we’re now going into a new era where more and more work can be done remotely. The labor market is in the cloud. So if cities no longer have to be the labor market, what does that look like? How do we now think about the places that we live? How does that change the decisions that we make? And so that change hasn’t completely happened. The vast majority of people still work in person, but there’s been a real inflection point, I’d say in the last 10 years and certainly with COVID that has made people really start to think about this new paradigm. 00:09:38 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and there’s sort of two dimensions of effects here. There’s the people are free to potentially move to different cities, so one can move from San Francisco to Seattle or Berlin or Miami, or you can move to not a city and participate in a sort of distributed labor market, and so there’s competition along both those axes essentially. 00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Totally, for a really long time choosing to live in a rural place dramatically reduced your opportunities, and some might argue that that’s still true. I personally think that face to face has a lot of really important things that you just can’t get via Zoom, but at the same time, there’s a whole new frontier opening up here, and people from all different countries can now. in labor markets that used to be centered in the United States primarily in the case of tech. For example, my boyfriend is from Argentina and he moved to the United States several years ago, but many of his friends and family were not able to get visas or weren’t interested in moving. They wanted to stay with their families. And so they’re now able to participate in Things that are happening in the United States and and vice versa in a way that they just couldn’t 10 years ago. So, in a really weird way, there’s people who are sitting in Buenos Aires but behind a microphone, who I feel are a closer part of my community than some people who are my neighbors, and that’s just a very different world and will really change the way that cities develop, I think, in the future. 00:11:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. And perhaps the most exciting piece for me as you mentioned this idea of social technologies, I think we’re gonna see some of the benefits and consequences of cities move out to the cloud, if you will, things like aggregation effects, quote unquote population density, self sorting. These are all things that you really needed to have a city in a physical space until very recently to get, but now people can, you know, whatever, join the right Discord or something, it’ll be very interesting to see that all play out. 00:11:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m tentatively excited about it. I have some concerns. For example, I was talking to a friend who’s a venture capitalist a few days ago, and he was telling me about how in 2020, during COVID, roughly the same number of dollars went to venture capital investments in that year as the previous year, but it went to half as many companies. And his interpretation of this was that the business that VCs are in is to find people that they trust and that they think will take that money and do something amazing with it. And his theory here was that because they couldn’t meet people face to face, they couldn’t build that trust with new people on the network, and so all of the money was going to people who are already in network and already trusted. And he was a little sad about this because he was thinking like there’s all these people who would probably be amazing entrepreneurs, but because they didn’t have that access that they would have had an in-person world, they didn’t have that. So I’m not sure if that’s completely the right interpretation, to be honest, I think there’s a lot of ways to look at that data, but it did give me pause and think like, oh, that’s like not great if that is the right interpretation. 00:12:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s still very early. You know, the world doesn’t owe it to us. There’s no particular reason this couldn’t become very messy and weird for the next 10 or 50 years as it all shakes out. We talk often on this podcast about how it takes some time to metabolize these big society level changes. I’d say that our technology and our social technology is still very early, like the communication bandwidth over Zoom as nice as it is versus what we had 5 years ago, it’s very poor compared to being in person and likewise our social technologies are mostly transliterations of stuff from our previous physical world. So I think we solve a lot in front of us to see how it all shakes out. 00:13:09 - Speaker 1: But I’m optimistic. I’m definitely optimistic, but it’s not a done deal for sure. 00:13:13 - Speaker 2: Yeah. So how would you answer the question that I sort of posed earlier or the question I posed myself, I suppose, on discovering a city that I liked really well and wanted to settle in just because I liked it rather than because an employer was there, which is how do cities become the way that they are and in particular who are the people that make that happen. 00:13:34 - Speaker 1: There’s a lot of components that go into that. I think of cities as an ecosystem, and so a lot of different pieces have to be in place for them to be the way they are, but like geography makes actually a really big difference in the way that people interact, and that’s not human made usually. But it has a huge difference. Like, for example, I live in Miami Beach, which is separated from mainland Miami, it’s on an island, and so I’m much more likely to spend time with people who are like on the island with me than I am to like drive into mainland just because there’s a body of water between us. And so that really shapes the way life and culture work in Miami and similar geographical features make a big difference in other cities as well. 00:14:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one I noted in my own city exploration is San Francisco and Amsterdam, two places I’d spent time, were both on these kind of fairly…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/34-bring-your-own-client/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Rather than giving someone this hermetically sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a beautiful Lego set for them and hand it to them, where if they like it just as it is, that’s fine. And if they want to add one Lego right there, it’s not a big deal. They sort of see the composition of how this thing was made, they have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it because it’s made out of parts they understand. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. I’m joined by Jeffrey Litt. 00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. It’s good to be here. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, one thing I’m thinking about these days in raising my young child is growing up in a multilingual household, since both of her parents are from two different countries and we’re living in a third country. I know you grew up in a multilingual household as an adult, what are your reflections on that experience? 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so my mom’s Japanese and I grew up sort of half my childhood in the US, half in Japan, and when I was a kid, my mom sort of forced me and my brother to learn Japanese when we were in the US and I was just thinking about how I’m so grateful now that she sort of overrode our preferences as children, and that now I have some proficiency in the language and so raising kids is complicated. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: There is going to be, I can see this already at this young age, and I think if it gets only more so as children get more agency naturally with age, which is parents do know better. They’re just older and wiser and know how the world works and At the same time, a kid needs to find their own way, and authoritarian upbringing doesn’t sound particularly like a good way to blossom as a person. So finding that balance between what’s prescribed by parents, you’ll thank me when you’re older. In this case, literally so versus let a kid find their own path. I think that’s an ongoing philosophical moral dilemma. 00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, especially for something as difficult as learning a language. You know, I do think with whether it’s sports or music or these skills that take a lot of time to master, I’ve also been grateful that my parents helped me learn to love Japanese and build some of that motivation, whether that’s from visits to Japan to hang out there as a kid. I tend to believe that the goal of education at a young age isn’t primarily to transfer the skill. It’s to, as they say, light that fire that eventually keeps learning going, and to this day. I’m practicing my Japanese trying to keep it up, and so I think that’s an important balance this track too. 00:02:31 - Speaker 2: What’s that saying? If you want to set sail on a boat you’re building, you don’t teach someone to build a boat, you teach them to yearn for the ocean. 00:02:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I think there’s a lot of that at play. 00:02:43 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, I’ve been wanting to get you on the podcast for a while here. We got the chance to work together on the Cambria project at Ik and Switch last year, but I’d love to hear just a little bit about your background, how you came to be doing this work in the tools for Though and independent research space. 00:02:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m currently doing a PhD at MIT in computer science. I’m in a lab called the Software Design Group, led by my advisor Daniel Jackson. And at the highest level, the questions I’m trying to explore are how do we empower more people to kind of take full advantage of the medium of computing? I think it’s very ironic that we’ve invented this infinitely flexible thing called software, and most of the way that we use it ends up being a small group of people, make some stuff and throw it over a wall, and everyone else uses it. And I’m just interested in new approaches to building software that changed that dynamic. But before coming into this academic side of things, a lot of my thinking on this area actually came from working in startups and shipping real software to people. If you had asked me 5 years ago, are you gonna be doing a PhD, I would have laughed at you and said, you know, no, I’m not that kind of academically minded person. But over my time in startups, I got really interested in these topics and I decided that Rather than go try to start a company or something, the academic environment offers a certain amount of freedom from the need to ship real software immediately, the need to make money immediately, that I thought would be really valuable for kind of thinking more deeply about what the problem actually is here, and maybe bigger picture ways to reorient the way that we build software. 00:04:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. You have both industry background, as they might say, ship stuff fast, solve real customer problems, and kind of academic mindset, longer time horizons, more of a search for basic truths, trying to think bigger and more expansively and more philosophically, and that’s actually, I think, a place. That I and Switch kind of excels or part of its reason for existence is to kind of be in that middle space between those two worlds which I think is not well occupied and certainly for creative tools generally I feel like that at least right now is the space where we need the most minds and the most effort. 00:04:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s part of why I have really enjoyed following and can switch his work over the years and have gotten to collaborate a bit with the lab, and I think it fills this really important middle place between those two worlds. Too often I think startups are kind of not reflecting on the larger possibilities of what they could be doing if they had more than, you know, 3 months ahead to think about. And on the other side, you have academics who, I think sometimes It’s not really clear to me how idea transfer really happens from academic human computer interaction research to the real world sometimes. I don’t think it’s a smooth process where, you know, startups are devouring papers that are being written and trying to implement them in the real world. I think it’s a much messier process. If you look at even someone like Doug Engelbart, who I think is a hero for a lot of people in this community, it was really hard for him to get his ideas out into the world, ultimately succeeded, but through a pretty circuitous path. So I think it’s really valuable to have institutions that are thinking about both of those worlds simultaneously, with the ultimate goal of actually deploying in some form, their ideas, as opposed to just sort of just handling the ideas half of things. 00:06:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that’s why I think I really enjoy following your work so much, is that you do fit in that middle space and hopefully can be a role model for the rest of us on that. 00:06:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m trying to, it’s tricky. There are a lot of tensions to navigate as I’m sure that you guys have experienced. 00:06:23 - Speaker 2: And I also thank you for being one of the very early users of Muse during the beta as well as a customer. I hope you’ll consider renewing your subscription when that comes up again. You’ve both tweeted lots of screenshots about how you use it, which is, I think, really great for other people seeing how you use things and the every publication even wrote an article. of detailing your work and you talked about a lot of different tools in your flow, include some screenshots of use there so very much appreciate your business, but probably even more than that, the kind of very public moral support makes a big difference, especially in the early days of a product when you know you don’t have so many believers just yet. 00:07:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks for building such a great tool. I mean, I bought the big iPad Pro originally when I was starting to dip my toes into the academic waters and being confronted with a lot of 8.5 by 11 PDFs and decided I wanted a nicer way to read them, but something felt like it was missing there in terms of synthesizing across them. And when Muse appeared, I was like, this is it. This is maybe the early versions weren’t the perfect product yet, but I could tell the vision was exactly what I needed, and so it’s been a blast using it. 00:07:29 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is bring your own client, which is something you’ve written about, and of course I’ll link that article in our show notes here, but maybe you can tee up for the listeners a little bit what that’s all about. 00:07:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So bring your own client means having the flexibility to pick what application you want to use when you’re working with some data, and for there to be some independence, especially I think between people who are collaborating on the same project, to pick the software that they want to bring to the table. So I think like to give a concrete example, right, back in the old days when we used to email each other files to work on a document, let’s say I could email you a Word doc. And then you might open that Word doc in Apple Pages or OpenOffice, whatever your preferred word processor is, and then you would send that doc back to me, and I don’t care what application you used on your end, as long as I get a file back, we can work together, right? And in fact, if we’re emailing files, I also don’t care what email client you’re using. There’s sort of this inherent point of flexibility built in where we get to make these individual choices about how we want to work. And broadly, the topic I’ve been thinking a lot about these days is how I think that we are starting to lose some of that flexibility with the way that computing is headed. So I’m very interested in this overall ethos of bringing our own clients and perhaps even building or customizing our own clients, um, to gain a little more control over our experience with software. 00:08:56 - Speaker 2: I think email is one of the best examples perhaps because it’s this really one of the oldest standards in some ways, sort of the first internet protocol in some ways, and the plethora of different clients that have existed over time. I don’t know, I used Pine and later mutt, this kind of terminal-based clients. At university in the 1990s and going forward to Gmail was this big revelation in terms of lots of great interface innovations as well as backend innovations, but it could just work right away. You didn’t need the person on the other end to be also a Gmail user, they could be with any email client. 00:09:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think email is one of those domains that really demonstrates how valuable it can be to have this flexibility. You know, I think sometimes it can be tempting to say, does this really matter? What’s the big deal? Can’t we just all agree on the same software to use? But if you look at something like email, I know a lot of people, some of them not that technical, who have really strong opinions about what email client they want to use because they’ve just found one that works well for them. I’ve had many moments of my favorite email clients sort of going out of business or being acquired and hopping from one to the next and searching for that elusive best client. And I think for anyone who’s sort of an email for like 8 hours a day at their job. You start to see why having this degree of flexibility genuinely matters for people, and it’s not just like a little convenience, it’s actually a big deal. 00:10:23 - Speaker 2: Right, and so you see this not only in the big example of Gmail that really revolutionized a lot of things about how email works, but even nowadays we have a plethora of new clients, superhuman, tempo is another cool up and coming one, or for example on the Muse team for our inbound support where you can just basically email hello at museapp.com that goes into a product called Front and so this is kind of a group inbox email thing that has quite different characteristics from what an individual might want. But it’s nice because the person on the other end, they don’t care what we’re using, they can just send us an email, maybe they include attachments, maybe they include whatever we reply back within that, so that gives each party in this back and forth can use what suits them and what’s gonna suit a team that’s going through a bunch of support requests is just dramatically different from what might suit an individual doing their own personal inbox. 00:11:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I actually personally use Tempo, and I think it’s a great example of a niche product. It’s really perfect for what I’m looking for. They have a really minimalist design. They have this concept of batching your emails so you don’t get distracted. And for me, as someone who’s at least trying to not check my email 100 times a day, it’s sort of aligned with what I want. I don’t think it’s necessarily the perfect product for everyone or even the majority of people, but I think it’s right for me, and it’s just great that because we have this shared protocol, I can make that choice to adopt this niche product that maybe only 1% of email users will ever use. Without convincing all this other 99% to join me in using this thing, we sort of take this for granted with email, but look at Slack. There’s not really a concept of a third party Slack client, right? And I think it’s easy to forget how monolithic that experience is. Every team that uses Slack is stuck with the exact same user interface with no ability for individuals or even teams to really meaningfully customize it. And I think that’s a tremendous design challenge to try to make something that works well for so many different people and so many different workforces. 00:12:21 - Speaker 2: Maybe there you illustrate the trade off though Slack because it is an integrated product where they control every part of it, the client, the API, the data storage, all of it, they can work on a very integrated and sleek experience. Twitter went through something similar in their early days. They were moving in this direction of being a platform. There was this initial explosion of clients that tried interesting things. Like TweetDeck and Tweety and so on, and ultimately they decided it was a product decision within their company. We don’t want to be a platform. We don’t want to be the next email. We want to provide an end to end curated experience where when we are going to add a new feature, whether it’s images and video in line or something else that we can fully control what that looks like for all the parties in the equation. And that’s a trade-off that I think you always have to make, an email is a good example. You do get weird stuff that happens when you email between two clients and they don’t quite agree about how to display the results, and also it’s very difficult to add new things. I say that speaking as someone who would really like to embed video into email newsletters and you just can’t do it. You got to use animated GIFs which are low quality and slow to download and so on, but it’s just not a standard that can quickly evolve. 00:13:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is indeed one of the core tensions in this idea. How do we balance moving fast with a single decision being made about an ecosystem versus having this more distributed approach. One idea that I find interesting though is kind of this idea of partial compatibility. Can we find sort of middle points between these extremes of a single rigid standard that hasn’t evolved since the 80s versus a company that just decides whatever it wants and imposes it on everyone. I think we can potentially at least try to have app ecosystems where you might have two appli…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/35-the-future-of-ipad/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: That to me was the magic of the iPad, the direct manipulation of the iPad with my hands. It just felt so human in a way that the computers and even the phone never did. 00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined today by my two colleagues, Mark McGranaghan. Hey. And Leonard Sversky. Hi. And I’m very excited to say that we have just booked our lodging and flights for our first in-person team summit in a year and a half, is it? The last time was Arizona in early 2020. So we’ve been doing all our summits, which is a very important way that we plan our work and just bond as humans get out of the day to day a little bit. We’ve been doing it all virtually, but that just is not the same. So we’re gonna be meeting soon in France for a nice get together and chance to really think some big thoughts. Look forward to seeing you both and our two other colleagues in person. 00:01:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it should be awesome. 00:01:18 - Speaker 3: I’m kind of proud of us for actually making it all this way basically, but yeah, it feels like we really need and would really benefit from seeing each other again. 00:01:27 - Speaker 2: For a team that scaled a lot, we had the benefit that the four of us already knew each other in many cases very well, because we’ve been working together for years, we already have those human connections. It’s easier to translate that to the virtual space. But I think if you had a team that was adding a lot of people swiftly, yeah, seems like a challenge to scale the culture, to keep the creativity and vision, and all the things that just tend to come from being able to not just see each other as moving squares on your screen, but as real full three dimensional human beings. So our topic today is the future of the iPad. So Muse is, at least at the moment, an iPad only app, so clearly we’ve bet our business on it, and we see big potential in the iPad as a creative tool, not just a consumption device, but something you can use to create, do work, be productive, and of course, for our purposes to think as a rumination space. But we’ve been at this a few years now, it’s interesting to look both at the history of how the iPad has evolved even as we’ve been on it. Then furthermore, at this moment, iPad OS 15 is in beta. It’s got some enhancements to the multitasking capabilities, which is sort of a power user capability, and all that just, I think, had me at least as I was using the beta, reflecting on how has this platform evolved. From our perspective as app developers as users that want to see it be a great creative tool. So I guess the first question that a lot of folks tend to ask. And I think it was last year the iPad had its 10 year anniversary, and there was a lot of articles about what does it mean or where are we at or how has this platform evolved in this time, and I think the tenor there was generally negative. I’ll link a few, but Strateteri, for example, has one called the Tragic iPad, and they basically say it’s a device that never found its purpose or never found its real role. It’s sort of too big to be mobile and fit in your pocket the way a phone does, but it’s not as powerful as a laptop. This thing doesn’t have a clear role in people’s lives, at least that’s the way that was presented then. How do you both see the role and who it’s for question with the iPad. 00:03:35 - Speaker 3: I think the fact that it doesn’t have a clearer role is both the appeal of the iPad for many people that it can be a lot of things and a lot of different things to everyone, but it’s also, especially for us, the developers, it’s also the problem, right? That we don’t really know what Apple has in mind for the iPad, but it wants the iPad to be who it markets the iPad for. And so it’s hard to really think about the future of the iPad and be certain what kind of app you should build for it. 00:04:03 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to my mind, the verdict is very mixed here. So I think the iPad has succeeded as this unique third form factor that’s somewhat mobile and critically has multi-touch input with a pencil and for apps that are designed for that hardware, things like Procreate and of course Muse, I think it’s uniquely good and it’s really special. The other thing that I think people envisioned for the iPad was this new general purpose computing platform that would basically replace a lot of the things that the Mac desktop has previously done, and I never saw that and I still don’t see it. I think it’s a future we could get to if we all really want to, but I don’t see it happening right now. I know some people kind of use the iPad in that way, but I don’t get that at all. So we could talk more about that, but that’s what I see as the split vers on the iPad right now. 00:04:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, speaking as a user, I’ve done for quite a while the big kind of stationary workstation, big monitor, mouse, I’ve got my big podcasting mic that’s set up on a boom arm. I’ve got various recording equipment, I got a ring light. This thing is not a mobile workstation. At all, and I like that. It allows me to have all these multimedia pieces that I need, but it also allows a more powerful computer with a bigger monitor and bigger input devices and so forth, as opposed to a clamshell laptop. And then when I’m traveling or going someplace, even in town for a meeting, I bring my iPad. And this is just so much more portable, right? It’s not just the size, actually, it’s probably about the same in many ways as a standard MacBook, but in terms of battery life, instant on, I’ve got an LTE SIM card in there, which means it has always on internet, it’s really just truly remarkable as a portable device. Now you do hit the limits of what it can do, and I run into that when I’m taking a longer trip if I’m traveling for a week, for example, and then I want to do something heavier, certainly anything to do. With kind of web development, for example, but even editing a really long form essay or video editing, you can do all that, but you do run into limits. There’s just less software available. The software that’s there is a little less powerful, but for me that bifurcated thing actually works really well, and I feel like the laptop is actually a weird mix in a way because it’s not as portable as the iPad, but it’s not as powerful as the workstation. So that works for me. The idea of doing 100% of my work on the iPad seems untenable. 00:06:27 - Speaker 1: Adam, it’s so interesting that you and I have arrived at a totally different conclusions than this. I think that that’s been the case since day one. You were like, Mark, you should check out the iPad. It just feels magical. It feels like the future. And my response was basically no, except for the pencil, which is awesome. But you seem to really get along with it. I don’t know what to make of that. And I wonder kind of where the median or average user is. I do think a lot of people get away with the iPad as a sort of laptop light, but I also think a lot of people, it just doesn’t work. And I don’t know, maybe that’s more evidence for the mixed verdict. 00:06:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think for a lot of people, it’s a mix of use cases and they basically find the ones that work for them and to discount all the ones that don’t work for them. And that kind of helps the iPad in that, yeah, it often isn’t great because of the software as a general purpose computing was that really does everything you needed to do. And so as long as you’re fine with that and stick to the things that you know you can get out of it, then it can really fill that specific hole that you want it from. 00:07:25 - Speaker 2: That’s true. It may be in some ways the market, especially more on the consumer side, was trained in that direction from mobile devices generally and the iPhone, which is, I know a lot of people who, especially a younger generation or in some cases older people who they just always struggled with computers. Like desktop computers, the difference between I don’t know, minimizing a window and closing an application was endlessly confusing, file management, all this junk that never made that much sense to them. They don’t find it fun. And so then along comes a mobile device where they can do 80% of what you can do in terms of sending emails and That kind of stuff and so they just try to do everything on the phone because the phone makes it easy, they understand everything. It’s hard to mess stuff up, you can’t get viruses, you don’t need to manage your files, and they just essentially decide to not do the things you need a computer for because it’s just they would rather be on the phone and then they can make the decision to. Cut out some of those use cases, whereas maybe a really uncompromising user that has really specific needs, either niche software or just wants a lot of power, a lot of control, something like that is not going to be satisfied with anything but sort of maximum computing capability, and the idea of cutting out a few of those things that they can’t do is just sort of like untenable. Yeah, that feels like the future point you mentioned there, Mark, is something that actually has come up a lot in our call user research, but basically just talking to people that use Muse or want to use Muse, which is they say something along the lines of the first time you use the iPad or when I open the iPad, it just feels like the future. It’s this magic device, it feels like they’re living in the future, and I certainly feel that as well, but in a way it’s sort of like a future that’s never quite coming true in the sense that you can do. A lot with it, but again, at least when it comes to those creative tool things, they haven’t really made the jump, and it doesn’t feel like there’s a fast and furious, Adobe porting all their products over and except far superior versions, or what if you want to use Figma or sketch, those seem like really natural things that a person who is also the sort of person that wants to use the iPad as a creative tool would want, but you really can’t use them at all, and it doesn’t really seem like that’s gonna happen anytime soon. So yeah, again, it leaves this conflicted or mixed verdict in some ways. 00:09:42 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m always reminded of that first slide that Steve Jobs showed when he introduced the first iPad and it kind of had the iPhone on the left, the Mac on the right, and then the iPad was introduced as that third device in the middle. And I think we’re still trying to figure out what exactly the role of that 3rd device is, even though we know, OK, it’s kind of supposed to be in between, but does that mean it takes things from the Mac and makes them simpler? Does it mean it takes what’s good about the iPhone and makes it better? What’s the actual use case that’s being solved by that 3rd device? Is it really only consumption based, which is kind of what a lot of people already use the iPhone for? or is there actually also a place for another productivity device or professional device that can do things that the Mac can’t do? 00:10:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this gets at the heart of the matter because I think once you put these 3 devices on one axis, the iPad’s already in a lot of trouble because the phone is already so pervasive and capable, people use it for a ton of stuff. It’s great for content consumption, and even some creation now, and the Mac desktop is uniquely powerful, and now, I would say that they’re very portable, almost as portable as an iPad. So you really don’t have a lot of space left for the iPad in that model. That’s where you get these like kind of marginal and incremental use cases like you have kids who use the iPad inside the desktops, it’s lighter and cheaper, and you have people who watch Netflix on the iPads as a bigger screen and like Adam types who take the iPad around so it’s a little bit lighter and more portable. Yes, but it’s not fundamentally different in the way that the Mac desktop and the iPhone were. Now I think there is a future where the iPad, it’s on its own axis, which is things like pencil, multi-touch, these things that are uniquely iPad. I just don’t see Apple really pressing on that front. I see that more from a few specific apps. 00:11:30 - Speaker 2: What might be good to talk about now our perspective as app developers in terms of a question that someone asked me recently that I thought was interesting to think about is what are the capabilities that you need from the platform to make your app better or more powerful or more professional. And there are some things that could be surfaced as maybe APIs that we as developers can use to make our app behave in a different way, but a lot of it really does come down to the operating system, and so for me at least, I’d be curious to hear how you both see this, but for me, I think the operating system is the weak point. The hardware is unbelievable, world class. I think it’s just the best computer we’ve ever made. 00:12:12 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the hardware is absolutely the best hardware that’s ever existed. It’s not even close, it’s definitely a software. 00:12:17 - Speaker 2: Right? And then the apps are weak, although I think a lot of that is Ato economics, and we inherited this whole iPhone consumer model and it makes it tricky to basically charge a reasonable prosumer price for your software, so that that’s holding it back as well a little bit. But I think the operating system itself is one of the biggest weak points. And I was really excited when, what was it 2 years ago, something like that when they forked off iOS into, so now there’s iPad OS as its own thing with its own version number and its own that sort of thing. So I was really hoping that maybe that meant I have no idea what things are like internally at Apple, but there’s a team whose job is To make this operating system, it can diverge a bit from the phone. They did that in the beginning with the dock and drag and drop, which were both things that are only available on the iPad, and then that would allow it to find that unique identity instead of constantly inheriting things from the phone, which I think are at this point more of a liability than an asset. It doesn’t seem like that’s quite happened. Yeah, and I’m curious, again, from the app developer’s perspective rather than say the user or just kind of market analysis perspective, how do we see our experience as an app developer and trying to make something for sort of professional use on this platform? 00:13:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, let me give a quick list of what I see as the biggest features, and then I’ll build a little theory around that. So I would say it’s powerful multitasking, general purpose file management, payment structures and expectations, the whole payment situation, and more control over the run time in the form of basically downloading and running code things like scripting, extensions, plug-ins, and so forth. These are kind of the defining features of a desktop operating system. And I think that’s not coincidental. I think the fundamental tension here is pro use cases are almost by definition about taking multiple different pieces and recombining them in novel ways that weren’t anticipated by the original authors of those pieces, because if something was simple enough to do in a fully premeditated and pre-existing package, it kind of almost by definition wouldn’t be a pro use case, right? That’s kind of a casual thing that’s already been done before. So you need this ability to recombine pieces in ways that weren’t anticipated by the platform, but that’s kind of antithetical to how Apple thinks about the iOS ecosystem of they w…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/36-text/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You start with some seeds of an idea. Basically, it might be some sketches or a picture of a whiteboard you took or a voice memo, and what you want to end up with is, say, an essay, and there’s several steps to the creative process. And one of the things that’s exciting about the new text feature plus blocks is you can see it as a trellis for that growth. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Mark, I’m pleased to report that Metause has broken into the top 200 charts on the technology category in Apple Podcasts. It’s a per country breakdown. I’ve been using a little thing called PO status that essentially sort of charts your position over time. Some countries were there pretty consistently, other places like Germany where I live, we kind of pop in and out at the whims of the algorithm essentially. That was quite surprising to me in a lot of ways, cause I just still think of this as, you know, me and you were having a chat sometimes with guests, just people we like to hang out with and seeing our logo alongside these what I consider to be kind of giants of the podcasting world like Cortex and Accidental tech and so on is kind of a thrill actually. 00:01:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I continued to be really pleasantly surprised by the reception we get to the podcast. It’s actually just at a family event about a week ago, and people would come to me and say, Mark, hey, it’s great to see you. By the way, I love the podcast, like, whoa, OK, I didn’t know you were listening to that, but that’s cool. So yeah, it’s been fun. 00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, and I also want to maybe make a little request. First of all, a huge thanks to all the people who have tweet recommendations or a lot of folks tell me that they do more kind of in person. Reminds me a little bit of our episode on social media where we talked about something going viral slowly kind of through word of mouth, sort of the ideal thing, and I think there’s a little bit of that here, which is great. But actually, if you haven’t had the chance to recommend us, you can actually help by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. They make it a little hard to do, but if you go to the new podcast page and go to the Apple Podcasts, I’ll link that in the show notes. You scroll down to the bottom, I think you can tap write a review if you’re on your iPhone. I’m sure Spotify has a similar thing. We only have a few reviews. In a lot of countries, sometimes none, so even just taking a moment to drop in a star review in one sentence of what you think you like hearing these weird guys talk about, if nothing else, will soothe my vanity. So our topic today is text. Now that word even is so rich for me and many of the reasons I got into computing and tools for thought, and so on. The impetus here is we’re just now releasing into beta for all our pro members a text blocks feature, so essentially changing our text cards today, which are kind of these Post-it notes things, pretty basic, to something that is a little more inspired by the notion Rome craft world of things. And maybe we’ll describe a little more of that vision later, but of course I always like to start with the absolute fundamentals. So Mark, I have to ask you, what is text, and I mean not the dictionary definition, but what comes to mind for you with that word. 00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Well I’ll give you a very marked philosophical answer, which I’m sure we’ll hear echoes of in the rest of this conversation. Now, if you think about conveying information, there’s sort of a necessarily most primitive form, which is a string of 0 and 1’s, you know, you can’t reduce the dimensionality beyond a line and you can’t reduce the base beyond two, right, or else you have no information. And then in the case of human acceptable information, it’s perhaps a string of human readable characters. So in some sense it’s the most basic fundamental primitive way to communicate information. So that’s one of the reasons why I think it comes up so often in Tools for Thought, but we’ll talk more about that throughout the podcast. 00:03:51 - Speaker 2: For me, the word text, I think, makes me think of plain text or files that end in .txt and for a very long time, that was my whole knowledge management system was a folder full of text files. Maybe at some point I did mark down or something like that, but plain text is just one of the most fundamental formats on a computer. It’s how code is usually represented, it’s a very durable and long-term format, it’s very flexible, you can do Aski art and things like that, yeah. But I guess going back even before sort of the digital side of things, I really think of writing things down in any way at all as the original tool for thought. And in fact, it feels like almost all of the things that build upon that are essentially variations of ways to write things down. Ways to externalize thoughts from your mind. I think we’ve talked before about even something as simple as using a stick to draw on the dirt and I don’t know, cavemen drawing a picture of a horse on the wall of their cave, and certainly you have this whole history of, I guess there’s sort of written language, which of course is an extension of or a mapping of spoken language. And that leads you into the whole world of alphabets, but actually even before alphabets, you have logograms, things like hieroglyphs, you know, you have a picture of a duck, and that means the word duck, for example, and then you have all these technologies for mediums for writing on, mediums for writing with, for reproducing those things, clay tablets, styluses, papyrus, paper, pens and pencils, printing press, whiteboards, posted notes, etc. And then language, which we typically represent in modern times with alphabets which stand for sounds roughly, but are actually very abstract, you know, they’re pretty far removed from the pictures or diagrams we once had, and I think that leads us to one of the dualities I wanted to talk about or I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of this muse product direction, which is the duality or the spectrum of symbolic versus spatial and visual. 00:05:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this could that something really fundamental, which is formats that are optimal for conveyance and translation and reproduction and storage, which I would say plain text, especially for that category versus formats which are optimized for matching how our minds work and think, which is closer, I would say to the music model of it’s multimedia, it’s free form, it’s kind of messy, and so. Forth. And so there’s constantly a tension, I think, between having a tool that better represents and better works with how we tend to think versus having a tool that, for example, can persist that data over hundreds of thousands of years, or just a few years in the case of today’s software. And I think kind of grappling with that, not to mention just the complexity of actually building such a multimedia canvas is a lot of what the tools for Though space is about. 00:06:35 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I would argue that at least the current tools for thought space, which is maybe a little bit overindexed on building sort of Rome clones and variations, and I think there’s probably much wider space to explore. I’m certain there’s much wider space to explore, but those, of course, yeah, Rome notion, they’re in the same vein of, yeah, plain text files, marked down, Emacs org mode. Very symbolic oriented and of course symbolic representation, yeah, mathematics, written language, of course, even programming is just an incredibly powerful way to do things, but this spatial and visual side, I mean, we talked about this with Anne Lohr back in the episode on thinking in maps and sort of diagrams and literal maps in some cases, as being a spatial and visual way to represent things. Or there’s something like data visualization. Of course we can’t go in an episode without mentioning Brett Victor, and I was just rewatching some of the humane representation of thought, where he talks about the invention of the modern chart or data visualization. I think it’s in the, maybe the 1700s, 1800s by William Playfair. And this idea of creating a chart where you got time on one axis, and some thing that goes up and down, like money or population or some other thing on another axis, turned out to be a really powerful way to tap into our spatial reasoning and a much better way to get overviews and see patterns in data, but that would be invented just like everything. So that’s an amazing tool for thought, I think, an example of in that sort of spatial and visual side that we think is Maybe under explored in the digital realm or right at this moment in the digital realm. 00:08:16 - Speaker 1: Right? And I also think there’s an element of time and process here. So there are some use cases where you want a very visual and spatial end product. A map is perhaps the canonical example of that, but I think much more common is a case where the process along some of the Steps asks for such a format. So for example, if you’re eventually going to write an essay, the final artifact is going to be plain text, essentially. But I find at least it’s quite hard to start ideaating and brainstorming and sketching an essay, like basically in a text editor, you know, maybe I’m going for a walk or I want to be giving myself a voice memo or I’m sketching some ideas in my notebook, or I’m drawing some diagrams, right? And so you have this process where often I find in the beginning stages of ideation, brainstorming, sketching, outlining, you can really benefit from this freeform spatial multimedia model. But then you have the issue of if that’s step one, but the final step is plain text, how do you navigate that jump basically? Do you jump tools? Do you have some kind of conversion step? I think often what people do or often what people have done in the past is they just kind of punt on it. And they find a tool that’s like flexible-ish enough to do some of the brainstorming and like presentable enough to do some final publishing. I think notion is actually a really effective example of that where it’s really nice to do the whole process in one tool, even if it’s not ideal for either end. Or sometimes people, I think they jump tools like they do some sketching in the notebook and they have an outline for their essay, and then they go type it up, they basically got to retype up all their notes. So I think there’s an interesting potential for tools that allow a more gradual and continuous process where the shape of the content evolves from a messy sketch to a typed up essay, for example. 00:09:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and there may even be some value to the transcription process. So in the coming up with what you’re going to write for a long form prose piece, let’s say you’re a journalist or you’re just writing a blog post for your own personal thing, of course, in the end it is going to be this linear one dimensional starts in the top left for left to right language readers and ends at the bottom right and flows very linearly, but when you’re figuring out what to say, maybe you draw on your whiteboard, you’s catching your notebook, you use index cards that you can move around on a table. And maybe you find what you want to say, but then actually sort of transcribing that fresh into, I don’t know, your writing tool or whatever works. Maybe that works OK in a lot of cases. There are some examples in the digital realm. I think we’ve spoken about them or linked to them before, but this company Literature and Latte makes one of the maybe best known kind of dedicated long form writer’s tool, which is Scrivener, I think it’s really intended, especially for novelists, fiction novelists. But they also have another tool called Skel, I believe it is. I’ll link that in the notes, which is kind of cards on a canvas, Post-it notes, desktop thing, maybe it’s not as sleek and modern as Muse, but I’ve run into people who use Skel in the same way you might use Muse, and notably they’re both from the same company. And they’re intended, but they’re just for those different stages, precisely like you said. One is this ideation, you’re figuring out the arcs of your character and maybe even want notes that aren’t even going to be sort of in line to the story. There’s backstory about a particular character or a place. You’re not necessarily going to just have a paragraph where you say so. So it was from here, they’re this old and what have you, but as a writer, having that floating around on the edges as a reminder while you’re near your other kind of plot elements can be useful. So that’s another example of the nonlinear free form, and then eventually you somehow collapse it down to this one dimensional long form prose format. 00:11:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I do think there’s just a ton of potential in that type of tool, and I feel like we’re only just beginning to explore it as an industry. We kind of take for granted that you’re gonna be starting with like a text buffer and you’re gonna type stuff in and that’s that. And I think it really impacts our ability to develop creative ideas, and I do believe that as we develop more tools that are more aligned with how we’re thinking, they’re more multimedia, they’re spatial, they’re free form, we will in fact have better ideas. That’s one of the big bets of news. 00:12:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, thinking about the linear kind of top to bottom flow of text or symbolic language, I also had me thinking a bit about terminals, or reppel, sometimes they’re called. You know, when you think of computers, text is like really foundational, and then the terminal, at least for Unix folks like us, that’s a place where we spend a lot of time, it’s a venerable, it’s sort of a way to have a conversation with the computers the way I think of that a little bit, a little bit of the gliders, man, computer symbiosis, but I always find it interesting if you dig into why does the terminal. Work this particular weird way with a lot of control characters and whatever and then you get into this TTY thing. What does TTY stand for? Well, that’s short for teletype and these like teletype things date back to the 1800s, their stock tickers, that sort of thing. They were essentially these ways to have again the computer or some automated device produce a linear stream of symbols. I think later they were adapted to mainframes, maybe in the 1960s or something like that. And then even when you go to word processors, whether it’s like the WordPerfect and whatever in the 1980s or Xerox PARC and there what you see is what you get word processor, and even today Google Docs still has this quality. You start in the top left, you go top to bottom. That’s kind of it. Except, I do think a breakthrough or, and maybe this is less at the symbol level, but it is at the overall corpus level, is linked. Let’s see you had wikis first, I think the web with hypertext, you could argue is clearly the biggest and strongest example of that. And a lot of the excitement also around tools for thought right now, notion first, you know, sort of a modern wiki in many ways, Rome with its backlinks, lots of others have focused on the linking elements of things, and so now you do get a graph of your knowledge and so. The individual documents are still these linear streams of text, but you can kind of pop around between them and the web, I think, takes it even further and Notion I think does this reasonably well also, which is letting you put multimedia elements in images, video, that sort of thing. Although in the end I think notion is still very much inherits that sort of top…

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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/37-visual-programming/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Maybe the past generation of programmers were sort of subjected to a really awful version of visual programming, but it would be really sad to let that frustration that other people have felt ruin what visual programming could be in a much better design format or just done in very different ways, done in ways that combine graphics and text. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins, joined by my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and our guest Maggie Appleton from Egghead. Hello. Thanks for joining us, Maggie. Now, listeners of the podcast will know that Mark and I are fans of computing history. We think sometimes the technology industry is a little unaware of its own history, and I understand you recently visited a museum on that topic in your area. 00:00:58 - Speaker 1: I did. I got last weekend to go up to Cambridge, which is about an hour away from London, and visited the Computer History Museum of Cambridge, which was mostly a warehouse that some people had put an old N64 in and an old Mac and got to play a bit of Pong and Space Invaders, which is terribly educational, but probably not a comprehensive history of computing. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Now, depending on what generation you grew up with, you know, so now I’m old enough that I go to a computer history museum or sometimes there’s, I don’t know, like the pinball museum in Alameda there in San Francisco or some of these arcade ones, and I remember this stuff when it was new, maybe. Kid, so in that case, it can be as much a sense of nostalgia or a comparison with your sort of adults perspective on something that loomed large as a child. Were there things there you recognized, or was this all like essentially stuff that predated your time? 00:01:52 - Speaker 1: I was definitely of the N64 generation and definitely the, I don’t know which version of the Mac it was, but I have a very clear memory of going into a friend’s house who had the Mac. Windows 95 was maybe what we had had at home. I mean, I was grew up sort of in the naughties, so I’m that generation. 00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Is that what we’re calling it now? I’ve heard the knots. 00:02:10 - Speaker 1: I know. There’s no good word for it. 00:02:15 - Speaker 2: I mean the century, maybe we could go with. So, before we get into our topic, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, Maggie, as well as a little bit about what you do at Egghead. 00:02:26 - Speaker 1: Sure, so, yeah, Egghead is where I currently work and it’s a web development education platform, so we kind of will joke it’s Netflix for developers, it’s mostly video tutorials, teaching anything, mostly on JavaScript, lots of React, Angular view, that sort of thing. And I’m the art director, designer, illustrator there. So essentially I handle most of anything that is visual design, and I also do quite a bit of UX design there. It’s sort of a small company, so you get to be a bit of an all-rounder. And because it’s a very developer focused company, I also develop, mostly working in React. I like to call myself a mediocre developer, so I’m not intense, you know, I don’t really like dig into, you know, the deep code, but I know my way around, you know, front end database. So yeah, that’s kind of me. 00:03:11 - Speaker 2: And it seems like you came maybe from the, I don’t know, illustration or design side, and then that led you to kind of the development side, or was it the other way around? 00:03:20 - Speaker 1: Yes, it was definitely design and illustration first. So I had grown up in a very technological household. My parents were both programmers. I had a lot of access to technology quite young. So I learned, you know, HTML and CSS, but I wasn’t really introduced to proper programming young and you know, there wasn’t any like IT education in school. So I went more into design and illustration in my early twenties and then learned programming, mostly out of employment necessity, you know, I was, I was designing websites and, you know, starting to learn JavaScript a bit and figuring out how to get a model to work. And then, of course, once I started working at Egghead, got a lot more into programming and development. So I very much come at it from, I struggle to learn it. I’m maybe not. I don’t want to get into natural types of people, but of course some people have an affinity for being able to do abstract reasoning and they’re very good programmers because they can hold a ton of cognitive context in their head about what component is connected to our database, you know, where messages are being passed, and I am not strong on a lot of those fronts, so I do development. As someone who needs things visually displayed in front of me, I need a lot of explicit feedback from the machine telling me what’s happening and what things are connected. So my perspective, I kind of bring to programming is, I’m the person that struggles with it. So I really, really want tools that actually help you program if you’re not naturally inclined to abstract reasoning. 00:04:43 - Speaker 2: I think it’s interesting that you saw basic programming through HTML and JavaScript as being almost sounds like a table stakes for your career, and I think that’s the nature of the computing medium. You can imagine doing visual illustration, design work in print, for example, and there you probably need to learn some things about printers, but for the most part you’re fine just doing everything in pixels on the screen. You hand that over and There you go, and that’s probably true in other realms as well, but once you’re on the computer, now you’re working in a dynamic medium, and your ability to express things is very limited if you’re stuck with what’s static. I think that’s going to become more and more true here in the future. 00:05:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was good. I was ignorant of the fact at the time that I was in the generation where people were designing websites in Photoshop, and I didn’t know that was an option. So I went and learned CSS and JavaScript because I couldn’t figure out any other way to build a website. I didn’t know I could just mock up pixels and hand it to a developer. So I’m very glad I was ignorant of that. 00:05:41 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is visual programming and also to some degree, its relationship to the learnability of programming. And since you suggested this one, Maggie, maybe you can explain a little bit for the audience what the basics is. What is visual programming, why is it interesting area? 00:05:59 - Speaker 1: Sure. So visual programming is sort of a catch-all name for a whole bunch of approaches to trying to do programming differently. I want to say I think the name itself is problematic, which we can get into a bit, but it’s essentially trying to explore graphical interfaces for programming in various ways and then There’s been a long history of people trying to do this, and a fair amount of pushback to versions of it that have gone quite badly, which we can also get into. But yes, it’s essentially trying to explore ways of doing programming that is not just based in text, you know, linear text in a text editor, which is kind of the default nowadays. 00:06:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly when people think of programming, they think of it as being synonymous with coding. Think of that Hollywood hacker view where they’re sitting in front of the terminal, the text is probably green on black, and it’s a bunch of text in this computer language. Now, is there a well-known example of what would count as visual programming? 00:06:58 - Speaker 1: The two that jumped to my mind. I’d say most famous is probably MIT has a programming language called Scratch that is technically designed for children in order to teach kids programming sort of as a first programming language. And I think this gets referenced a lot in visual programming, um, circles because it gets rid of needing to use sort of arbitrary syntax symbols to define things like objects and functions. Instead, it uses drag and drop blocks with colors that correlate to the type of each element. So it’s a very interesting example of how you can kind of lower the bar to people coming in and doing programming since it is designed for children. So that’s one that gets famous, but others that I would count as being some form of visual programming that will be very familiar to the audience are tools like Zappia, if this then that, Integrama now, the sort of the whole low code, no code movement where people are essentially building node-based logic flows where they’re saying, you know, if this happens, then do this, else. Do that, they’re doing, you know, programmatic logic, but they’re doing it in a very graphical interface. And I count that as visual programming, but I think there’s also a wide diversity of, we can talk about, you know, the amount of power each of these platforms might have, the amount of flexibility and control they give to the user. But yeah, those would count, I would say, as visual programming. 00:08:21 - Speaker 2: One that comes from my childhood, thinking of kids learning programming is there’s a game called Rocky’s Boots. It was like a 1980s, ran on the Apple II or something, and it showed you how to put together logic gates, the same kind that you use in electrical engineering, to make circuits and solve problems. And that was one of the things that maybe introduced me to this sort of form of logic that eventually led to my interest in programming. But one thing I think is interesting about that is In fact, electrical engineers designing circuits work with a form of visual programming. You make a diagram that shows where the resistors and the capacitors and the LEDs and whatever else go in this form that is very much, I guess it’s less of a flow diagram and more shows where the electricity flows, which may or may not exactly represent sort of the abstract logic, but I think that’s a professional context where there’s kind of a visual programming, at least representation. 00:09:16 - Speaker 3: And we can also talk about examples of visual augmentation. So with Scratch, kind of the whole environment is inherently very visual. Other examples we could look at the spreadsheets where you have the cells themselves are like text formulas, more like a typical programming language, but it has this visual element of layout and spatial based variable naming. Another example from when I was learning programming is the I think it was called Doctor Scheme. I think it has a new name now, or maybe it changed to that from something else, I forget, but it was the scheme development environment, which first of all was all in one, which is great. She’s got this like one executable you could run and do everything, but also when you hit errors, which is the dreaded case of a new programmer, it just drew lines to everything you needed to look at, which sounds so basic, but just connecting the dots between this is your call site and this is your function definition, and there’s something wrong, you know, check where these two lines terminate and see what’s up. We could talk about all kinds of examples of visual augmentation as well. 00:10:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I know you guys are also familiar with a few maybe more powerful visual languages like origami, and I think X code is quite visual in the way that it allows people to program. So yeah, there are fully fledged IDs that have visual elements to them and might not be fully fledged visual programming environments, but the hybrid is actually much more interesting than this idea of pure visual programming, but we can get there. 00:10:32 - Speaker 2: Our colleague Leonard uses origami for some design prototyping. We even put some screenshots in one of the beta memos we did. I’ll link that, but It’s interesting because he’s doing design work and typically he can do that in a tool like BigMA and pretty static mockups and then we go from there working with U interface engineers. They connect the static screens to behavior, but there are certain things, for example, when we were working on this whole infinite canvas flex boards feature where just how it felt. and how it behaved was the whole design and you just couldn’t evaluate that by looking at a static screen and furthermore, just the standard click prototypes like you get in a lot of modern design tools just won’t cut it. And so he ended up doing some fairly complex programs that you could then in turn run on the iPad and really feel how it worked. It’s quite impressive. 00:11:25 - Speaker 3: You know, it’s gonna be very tempting to market this episode with a D&D style alignment chart for visual programming tools. It’s like lawful good is, you know, scratch and what’s the other corner? Chaotic evil is a meme generator as a programming tool or something like that. We’ll see if we can pull it off. 00:11:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m thinking of other ones I’ve seen. I think there’s a category of them that I think was very popular in the 90s, like I’m specifically thinking of Lab View gets a lot of negative press, I’ll say, as maybe not being chaotic evil, but it’s one of the infamous ones that I think was proprietary, so you kind of got locked into the system. And then there’s a whole Tumblr. We can put it in the show notes when I find the link to it, but I can’t remember the name now. That is just screenshots of awful literal spaghetti code because it’s a node-based visual programming language. So it would just be thousands of boxes and lines running between all of them, and literal, just a visual spaghetti that you can’t tell down from up. But yeah, that would be somewhere in the evil dimension. 00:12:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the boxes connected by lines also reminds me of another big category that I’ve come across in my, I guess not my day job would be the way to put it, but music production is something that’s been of great interest to me, particularly earlier in my life. And so I worked a lot with software like Logic Audio, for example, sequencers or something like Reason, which is a kind of an all in one synthesizer plus sequencer, and these typically have various ways to essentially wire stuff together, but I I think one reason that the visual thing works well there is you have this clear kind of input output flow. The output is always going to be an audio stream or in some cases there’s video tools as well where there’s a video stream, but it’s a single sort of time-based flow and so like a music track or something like that. You just got 7 minutes of music output and you can in logic, for example, To the quote unquote environment and there you can just string together, OK, I want to take the source material. I don’t know someone playing a guitar and I’m going to put it through these filters and I want to fork it off this way and then the end output just goes out through you know your master volume and obviously that is very much designed for professional very serious use cases, but these are non-programmers. 00:13:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve had the visual effects industry has a lot of those same sort of interfaces, so the node model box and there I was just connecting different things together and really just showing data transformation over time, which is when a flow diagram actually comes in useful. 00:13:47 - Speaker 2: And then another one I think could be remiss not to mention is iOS has an automation system built in called Shortcuts, which was originally a very cool indie app that Apple acquired called Workflow, and this essentially gives you sort of a scratch style model but probably Even simpler in the sense that you don’t have a lot of nesting and what have…

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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/38-calm-companies/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I view my job here is to essentially aggregate this group of entrepreneurs that a lot of the world is overlooking, aggregate them in some way, listen to them, and then build what they want. 00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our guest Tyler Trius of the Calm Fund. Hey guys. And one thing we talk about on this podcast with surprising frequency is cities and in particular that remote work and all these lovely cloud tools make it possible for knowledge workers such as ourselves to choose where we want to live based on quality of life rather than where your employer happens to be. And Tyler, I know you live in Mexico City. Tell me about that decision. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Mexico City is great. The decision is not that interesting. I’ve been working remotely and building remote companies for probably the last 10 years. I spent a lot of time as a digital nomad and then kind of like a slow mad, sort of, you know, slowly traveling to different places. But Mexico City, we’re here because my wife works for the State Department and she’s got a job at the embassy. So since I’ve been running what we used to call Earnest Capital, and now the call company fund. I’ve been sort of just tagging along with my wife. We were in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. We launched it. We’re there for about 2 years and now we’re here in Mexico City. So the decision wasn’t really mine to come here, but I will say I’m very, very pleased to be here. It’s an awesome city. It’s really becoming like the hub of pretty much everything to do with startups up and down Latin America, amazing food, awesome weather, pretty unbeatable quality of life. I’m not gonna lie. So folks should definitely come down and visit us. We throw a conference here and hoping to see a bunch more entrepreneurs down here. So, yeah, it’s good. 00:02:04 - Speaker 2: Interesting, I guess I just assumed because I’ve just visited Mexico City once, we did an I can switch summit there, but I found it such a lovely place. I could very much imagine a person who was working remotely and has any choice they want might well choose it. But you actually highlight another good benefit of remote work, which is then you can go where your partner needs to go for their employment. So I know that it can be a source of great contention in relationships, long term relationships, when it turns out that one person’s school or work needs take them one place and another person needs to go to the other place and someone has to decide who’s gonna make the sacrifice. So here you’re not faced with that decision. 00:02:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we see that all the time. Obviously now knowing a bunch of people living the foreign service life and it is a big source of tension. Yeah, I mean it’s phenomenal to have sort of built this company in a way that’s fully distributed from day one. So it’s like I tell people when we moved from Brazil to Mexico, if I didn’t tell my team, they wouldn’t have noticed basically, which is, you know, super helpful. The one thing I think remote work hasn’t quite solved it is time zones. 00:03:09 - Speaker 2: That’s the last frontier, you know, that’s definitely a challenge for us between Europe and West Coast US although again, you have kind of a nice benefit of being fairly central, at least among those western places. 00:03:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Mexico City is hard to beat. I mean, I think if you’re able to work remotely, you should seriously come and check it out and give it a shot. It’s really a world class city, just as easy to get anywhere, like if you’re sort of US centric, it’s as easy to get to New York or LA as it is from anywhere else in the country inside the US. Yeah, super good amenities, everything just works hard to beat. 00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before this turns into a veiled advertisement from the Mexico City Tourism Board, we can transition to hearing a bit about your background and especially what is the alm fund. 00:03:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the Cound some folks may have heard of us as Earnest Capital, who recently rebranded this year or so, same exact company, same people, same idea. Really, it’s one of those scratch your own itch companies, essentially my kind of personal history involved. Experiencing kind of both sides of the venture capital and bootstrapped world kind of communities, at one point in my life, you know, had a business that I was working on. It was sort of a clean tech software business in a time when VCs were really, really not funding clean tech businesses. It’s like a little over a decade ago. And so I kind of deeply experienced the possibility of having like a really good business idea that just isn’t a fit for the comparatively small universe, you know, hundreds of people that do early stage venture financing and realizing that there wasn’t a sort of 1 to 1 overlap there that you could have a good idea that probably should use some early stage capital. But just as for one reason or another, not a fit for venture and that if you’re building a software company, there’s really no plan B, right? You basically have to either fund it with rich friends, credit cards, or VCs and kind of really explore that, hey, there’s a big gap in the market here in terms of early stage support for a lot of entrepreneurs. Then I went the other direction and said, OK, I’m not gonna ask anyone’s permission to get started on my next business and completely bootstrapped it, which worked out really well. I was just a straightforward kind of niche B2B sass business, ran it for about 5 years, built a remote team and sold it to a private equity shop, which was a great outcome, super fun, but when I was launching that, I had to launch it with credit card debt. It worked out in the end, you know, that was a positive experience, but those first two years with mounting amounts of debt on my personal credit cards was Really not the ideal way to launch a business, both from this capital perspective and also just a complete lack of any other kind of support. And so those two things kind of combined when I sold the company, I said, look, you know, I would like to sort of build the fund or the partner that I would have liked to have worked with on frankly, both of these businesses. So that’s what we do. We’re. Early stage funding, community and mentorship for entrepreneurs building what we call calm companies. And I think there’s a lot of ambiguity over exactly what that means and things like that. But if you think of yourself as like a bootstrapper or an indie hacker or those kinds of things, you know, we’re trying to build the kind of partner for those kinds of entrepreneurs either who have like Different ways of wanting to run their company that aren’t aligned with the traditional venture model or that are building products that just wouldn’t be a fit, right in the sense of, you know, they have perfectly good market and they can build a company that does millions, tens of millions, maybe $100 million in revenue, but it’s really never going to be like a $10 billion dollar company, you know, we’re trying to build the partner from the earliest stages for that whole swath of companies basically. 00:06:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and Tyler, I’ve been watching your journey with Ernest and then calm for some time now. I forget when exactly I found you online, but you’ve been doing this thing where you’re building in public, and I saw your work quite early, and I was really intrigued by it. It did feel like a closer fit for what we’re trying to do at Muse and what I’m trying to do with my career and some of the other options out there, and I’m encouraged to see that it’s doing quite well. 00:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks. 00:07:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ve also been, I guess, following slash part of the earnest community for a little while, but part of why I thought this rebrand would be a great time to invite you on the podcast is that calm companies, I think, match up a lot with something we talk about in the type of business we’re trying to build with Muse. We talked about this. In our Small giants episode, I’ll like that in the show notes, but is a little bit of a reaction, I guess, to, again, startups and venture capital, which Mark and I have been both down that road, and we think there’s huge value to a lot of that, most notably not bootstrapping, yeah, getting investors who help you share the risk. And then Also ties in well with what we talk about on this podcast, also because in general funding models for different kinds of things that could or should exist in the world, things that could improve humanity, make us all more prosperous collectively, there’s kind of a narrow number of ways we get stuff funded. There’s government funding, there’s nonprofits, there’s bootstrapping, there’s venture capital is kind of a relatively recent, but obviously now increasingly high profile way to do it. But if you draw the map of all the things that we might want to build and what the right funding is for them, you find that there’s really a lot of gaps in that map, it feels like, and part of what I liked about what I discovered when you were doing that is it fills in one of those gaps potentially. 00:08:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s gaps all over the place. It feels like we’re not anywhere near having sort of comprehensive coverage, especially at the early stage. I think once you have a mature anything, usually your options do start to multiply, but We’ve sort of found ourselves in this strange moment where I think the internet and software and stuff has just started to dominate everything. I think that the software is eating the world, you know, thesis is largely correct and it’s playing out before us. And what’s happened is just through kind of process of elimination, if you go back like maybe 15 to 20. years, venture capital, which traditionally was this thing designed to fund like really high risk, high capital intensive R&D intensive ventures in building CPUs and aerospace and stuff like that, was also just the only people who would take bets on software companies when you had to spend $10 million to rack servers before you could even launch your website. And so there’s become this sort of 1 to 1 convergence with this like very narrowly defined asset class and all of this exploding universe of opportunities from everything from indie game developers to online communities and all that sort of stuff. It’s basically like, oh, well, if you’re going to fund them, you have to use this really narrowly defined form of funding, which is venture capital, which has all these like. Constraints and expectations from the people who invest in venture capital funds and all that sort of stuff. And we’ve just sort of backed our way into this world where everybody thinks that they need to raise venture capital or nothing, and there’s sort of no other option and I don’t think we’re going to be the only addition to this space. I think there needs to be dozens of different permutations of ways to solve this because we’re essentially refilling the entire economy. With software and software enabled new variations, and the main driver of this is that most of the world of funding businesses is based around credit models, right, where you’re underwriting against assets and things like that. And all of this stuff has this one thing in common, which is there’s no tangible assets, right? We’re all just a bunch of people with laptops, essentially remote working with no offices and no equipment and all that sort of stuff and so. There needs to be this really broad-based rethink of, OK, how do we support these kinds of companies, organizations, nonprofits, co-ops, etc. from the early stage in a way that can leverage the benefits of capitalism, right? You can access large pools of capital and convince people to sort of continue giving you that money. So, yeah, I think it’s still very, very early days and there’s a lot of work to do for sure. 00:11:24 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is calm companies, and part of why I thought the earnest to calm rebrand was a perfect chance to talk with you about this and connect it to small giants and how we think about news and others that might like to build companies in this way, is there’s the mechanical. of how your fund works, and what kind of companies you invest in, and at what stage. We talk about those potentially, but I’m more interested maybe in the philosophical elements. Even the name gives you a sense right off the bat, which implies it’s a good brand. I’ll also like our episode on brand. At this point we’ve got enough back catalog, I guess, we’ve sort of always have something to reference. But yeah, can you define for me separately from what you invest in, what is a calm company just philosophically speaking? 00:12:10 - Speaker 1: It’s actually like a really tough question, in part I think because it’s kind of a call back to just historical normalcy or historical equilibrium of how people build businesses. Like I was at kind of a family reunion thing, bunch of family members, mostly from my wife’s side where I either hadn’t met them or hadn’t had the opportunity to like explain what do you do. So I was explaining what we do, and when you explain it to someone who’s outside of tech, it just sounds incredibly boring and straightforward. They’re like, oh, OK, you invest in these entrepreneurs and They build businesses and they become profitable and they give you some of those profits, or they sell their company and you get a piece of that and then you do it again. It’s like, well, yeah, but it’s actually kind of weird in this day and age, and it kind of harkens back to the idea that like we’ve actually ended up in this weird spot where the kind of default assumption in tech is that you’re going to build this ultra high growth sort of thing that’s gonna raise a ton of capital and move as quickly as you can and then either IPO or kind of flame out trying. So cal companies are kind of a way to position ourselves first as not that. So what that means is basically growing more sustainably, raising capitals sort of a byproduct, not the actual goal, you’re really optimizing for the long term in terms of team retention, in terms of making sure that folks can work on a sustainable schedule and continue to have high quality output. For decades, not just years or quarters, all that sort of stuff. And the reason why we’ve sort of settled on calm is to sort of affirmatively stand for something, rather than kind of just only positioning ourselves as not this, not that, not that other thing, right? Because that was never the right way to think about it. And so as we kind of Aggregated more and more entrepreneurs that we’re all just kind of picking up the same vibe, right? Everything from folks who are investors and mentors to the portfolio companies that we’ve invested in to the many other folks that are all kind of picking up the same wavelength that for various reasons we haven’t been able to invest in, they’re too far along, too early or whatever. And we sort of said, well, OK, what’s the affirmative version of this that says like, this is actually what we stand for and calm was far and away the winner of what resonated with folks there. So it’s basically about being patient and long-term focused and sustainable and operating and Way where you can be what I call long term ambitious, basically. It’s not like the lifestyle business of kickback and passive income and then sit on the beach in Thailand. It’s about, we want to do something important, we want to do it in a way that allows us to st…

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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/39-expressive-tools/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can let our personality and just the little bits of life that we’ve experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays a lot of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an approach for good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make everything look the same. 00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey Adam. I’m joined today by Wei Wei Xu of Sprout. Hello. And one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast for some reason is cities. Weiwei, you’re in Shanghai right now, and what’s the transit situation like? How do you get around town? 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I live a little bit outside of the downtown area, so it takes about 30 minutes by walking to get to the metro station and. Shared bikes are really common over here, so it’s super convenient to get around with shared bikes, but I also got my hands on to one of these one wheel electric scooter lately and I’ve been a big fan of skateboarding since I was a kid. I’ve tried all kinds of boards, so I thought it’s just super slick to try scooting around on one of these electric scooters and That’s what I’ve been doing lately. 00:01:34 - Speaker 2: And in practice, do you end up in the bike lane? Do you go on the sidewalks? I feel like one of the challenges with the scooter micro mobility thing is that you sort of don’t have a great place to go. You’re sort of a little slow for the bike lane, but certainly probably too fast for the sidewalk. 00:01:50 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely something that everybody’s still trying to figure out, especially here, the policy here is a lot more strict and electric scooters are meant to be a toy, something that you play with in parks and in closed communities rather than on the street, so. It’s kind of like softly allowed on pedestrian walkways and not really on the bike lanes, but bike lanes over here are super protected and they are not right next to cars like in a lot of the cities I’ve been to in America, so either way, I feel pretty safe, but whether it is legal or not is kind of a different question. 00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, protected bike lanes or something I I’m a big fan of as a person who gets around mainly by bike, although even there when you talk about legal gray areas and new technologies that sit sort of in between the e-bike thing, which has gotten pretty huge, but then that also seems to challenge, OK, now you can go really fast and with not a lot of effort with this motorized thing that at this point is almost like a low powered motorcycle or something like that, but you get to ride in the bike lane, that feels a little weird, yeah, so. Technology that sits on these in between spaces then ends up forcing a change in not only policy but also just social norms and expectations. 00:03:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I find these in between spaces really fascinating and that could be in the transportation world. I grew up with a mixed cultural background and so, Dwelling in the in between spaces of that has also been something that I grew up struggling with and have now sort of surrendered to in some way, but those in between spaces are something that’s really beautiful and also sometimes really confusing. 00:03:38 - Speaker 2: Makes sense, but also presents opportunity because you have perspective that no one else has, right? Yeah. And once you tell us a little bit about your background. You’ve done some very interesting academic work as well as all sorts of, I feel you’re all over in the kind of tools for thought, independent research, next generation computing space. 00:03:57 - Speaker 1: I would say that I’ve been on this journey of learning more about myself and I’m still trying to figure out who I am and what I’m trying to do. Perhaps this is what most people do, but I was lucky enough to study interaction design, that was a fairly new program in the school I attended and through that process, I was introduced to the history of personal computing and That whole genre, that whole world and being layered into that got me really, really curious about what it took to get us to where we are nowadays and also where are we headed and I started looking for places where they’re thinking about the future and thinking about alternative paths that haven’t really been explored or illuminated in different ways and That led to working at and also spending a lot of time at this research group called Dynamicland and I’ve also been sort of being in a part of the creative design school environment has also gotten me really interested in the creative process and also this idea of creative expression. So being immersed in a group of designers, creatives and also researchers has led me to where I am nowadays and What I’m trying to do nowadays is exploring what ways can we take ideas into people’s hands and into reality rather than having them sitting or like brewing in research spaces which is also really fascinating but I think I’m just going through this journey of exploring where I am and who I am and also what’s my relationship with the world. 00:05:40 - Speaker 2: Hopefully that’s all the journey we’re all perpetually on, but it’s good you have the self-awareness of it. Maybe there’s an arrogance of youth that sometimes comes with young people early in their adult life where they feel they’ve got it all figured out or they know their path or something when, honestly, it’s just forever a journey of discovery. 00:05:56 - Speaker 1: I think whenever I feel like I’ve gotten it or I understand what’s going on, life hits me in a hard way and it’s like, nope, you don’t have it, you don’t know what you’re doing and then you go into this other cycle of like learning more about yourself and understanding that there’s just so much more possibilities and so much more unknowns. 00:06:17 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’m pretty sure that’s not something, at least for a person that has a growth mindset or is forever seeking to learn the lessons life has to teach. I’m going through that still in my 40s here, I’ve seen my mom who’s in her 70s, also going through that. There’s just always more, the world always has more to teach, and there’s more to learn about yourself and about other humans, about our society and how to live best in it. So hopefully that never ends. That’s a good thing. Totally. And you hinted at something we’ve talked about privately a few times, which is sort of taking ideas from the research space or the big thinking space or the ivory tower space and trying to bring it to a practical reality and for sure that’s part of why muse exists, you know, Mark and I were in this research lab working on this stuff and saw an opportunity for something that we said, you know, this could be a product people could really use. We could bring these weird HCI ideas and see if we can bring them into, well, a regular app in the app store and see if that would work or be possible. And I think we talked about it with, I believe it was a former colleague of yours, Jason Yuan, and the episode he was in, great Meta Muse episode if you’re interested in design things, I’ll link that in the show notes. But he’s talked about that as well, which is, yeah, I think he may have also done a stint at Dynamicland. They both worked together at MSpace, and the best thinking big picture thinking and forward thinking comes from places that are a little bit disconnected from commercial realities. You’re not about shipping a product that’s going to make a bunch of money tomorrow, but you’re thinking longer term. But that in turn can lead to a kind of disconnection from the world and not really bringing what you’re making to the world. So I know that’s something you’re thinking about how to best bridge those worlds, which is one of many reasons I wanted to bring you on the podcast. 00:08:01 - Speaker 1: I think the phrase thinking about it is a really nice way to put it in another way to put it is struggling with this spectrum. 00:08:10 - Speaker 2: Oh, I think those are two sides of the same coin. Genuinely interesting or hard intellectual or emotional challenge, you wrestle with it, you struggle with it, you fight with it. It’s not a civilized activity at all in some ways. 00:08:25 - Speaker 1: No, it’s not. 00:08:27 - Speaker 2: And tell us a bit about Sprout. 00:08:29 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so Sprout is a product that came out of MakeSpace and MakeSpace was started with Jason Yuan, Aza Raskin and Mei Li Ku and it’s a project and also um really us trying to answer a question of how do we collaborate and communicate. With each other online and also through computers in a way where we can actually feel more of each other’s presence where all kinds of media formats and all kinds of files can coexist with each other rather than being confined by different apps and different windows that only support its own unique kind of media files. So, In a way, Sprout is a canvas-based collaboration tool that value and also respect video presence and telepresence and we spend quite a bit of time thinking about this gradient of synchronous communication, collaboration. Versus asynchronous communication and collaboration because collaboration doesn’t happen on one end of the spectrum, it’s continuous and so how do we create space, how do we communicate and collaborate in a way where it helps us grow and learn together. 00:09:46 - Speaker 2: One of the things that was striking to me about the initial MakeSpace landing page is, on one hand, it did kind of have a look of, I guess video and specifically, you know, webcam videos of people’s faces who are participating in the meeting, let’s call it virtual meeting. That’s a very front and center idea, so immediately you think, OK, it’s video chat like Google Hangout or Zoom or FaceTime, but the reality is the main or if you use the early version, which you’ve given me a peek at. It is this media canvas in many ways that shares some of the same heritage that Muse does, which is you can put images, you can draw, you can put text, you can put links, and one of the things you can put is your own real-time face, and that’s like a useful addition to the meeting, but it’s not really the center point. It almost inverts the video chat thing and then so I’m not sure whether to think of it maybe coming back to your point of living in those in between spaces, you could think of it as Zoom, but with kind of a working canvas, but it really inverts that because I feel the video chat side of it is just sort of a subset of this larger open canvas or you could think of it as open canvas kind of collaborative whiteboard space, a mirror type thing, but it integrates video chat, real-time video and audio chat in a big way, but I think either. Those descriptions sort of does deserve us to at least what I imagine your vision to be that is finding a middle space there that takes elements from both of those but leaves behind many elements of them could potentially be a more interesting or future facing or next generation way for us to have online meetings, discussions, brainstormings, and so on. 00:11:24 - Speaker 1: I’m constantly working on describing Sprout in better ways because video is the channel or the medium that it sort of like communicate and share our presence and intention with each other. So when we’re using tools like Zoom to meet each other. We are primarily communicating with each other through video and audio, but when it comes to Sprout, your video is attached to your cursor and so it’s not really about the video, it’s more about where your attentions are and it’s more about where your presence is and how you’re sharing it with each other. So for example, On the canvas when you’re in Sprout, you could be going into the opposite corner of another person and that other person could feel that you’re feeling shy or you’re trying to run away from a topic, you’re trying to run away from this discussion and that’s perhaps body language, that’s also attention that’s just the entire dynamic of collaborating and communicating with each other. 00:12:23 - Speaker 3: That’s interesting. So does this mean if you’re on a video call and sprout, and someone goes to check Twitter with their mouse, their face actually like flies off the screen, in the same way that if you would see someone’s eyes, you know, leaving the room. 00:12:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so you see their cursor going to the corner and then once they’re in a different tab, their cursor will move around and so when they switch back to the tab, their cursor will be in a different XY position and so it would jump over to that new location and so those are the different ways that you would sense and feel each other’s presence or lack of presence. 00:12:57 - Speaker 3: That’s funny, nice. 00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, they get tension. We wrote about this a little bit in our pointing and virtual spaces memo, but I feel like the body language in group settings or meetings, presentations, that sort of thing, or even like classroom situations, attention and where people’s attention are and how focused they are is really important. And I suppose one version of that is a teacher that is going to wrap you over the knuckles with the ruler because you’re not paying sufficient attention to the lesson. But another one would be if I’m giving a talk somewhere, it’s really useful to me to see when people are engaged, leaning forward, really curious about what I’m saying versus their kind of eyes are wandering a little bit and looking at their other screen and what have you, and that helps me know where the audience is at and how I can sort of tune what I’m saying or presenting to better meet them where they’re at. 00:13:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when meeting and collaborating in person, there’s so much little cues and little signals that you can pick up and when doing so online, a lot of that are being stripped away. So what we spend thinking a lot about is in what ways can we bring some of those. Back and in a way that respect each other’s real presence and just the fact that we’re not just our eyes and our mouth and we have feelings, we have our fingers, we have our body and how do we communicate or try to channel a little bit of that to each other. 00:14:27 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is expressive tools, and I kind of pose this idea to you Weiwei based on what’s on your personal site. I’ll just take a moment to quote directly from there, if you don’t mind, which is, you say, currently I’m gardening at Maspace now Sprout, because computing environments can and should be more fluid, playful, equitable, fun, humane, and expressive. Obviously that. Really speaks to me and Mark and the whole Muse team. We’ve spoken about fluid and playful, for example, in depth on this podcast, but expressive was one that jumped out at me a little bit because first I was thinking, OK, what evokes a strong feeling, but I’m trying to think about what that means in practice, particularly for me as a toolmaker. Is it desirable to make my tools expressive? And if so, how do you do that? So I was curious to zoom in on that. Can you tell us more about what an expressive tool is for you or what that phrase means? 00:15:22 - Speaker 1: When I think about expressive tools. Perhaps we can step back a little bit and think about why do we create as tool makers and when we are trying to create in some way, we’re trying to express and it’s a different kind of way of expressing, but it’s still a form of expression. So when we create tools, can we enable others to express. A lot of the productivity tools that we are familiar with today, they help us in becom…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/4-partnership-freedom-responsibility/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even if they weren’t there at the founding of the company. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranahan, and Mark, I know that, uh, we have to get creative with our hobbies here in this time of staying home. Uh, what have you been doing in regards to your piano lessons? 00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I usually take lessons at my teacher’s house here in Seattle, but now we’re going all remote. And we actually did this once, uh, last year during some snowstorms here, which shut Seattle down, and then I just like propped my iPhone up on my desk and we did our best, uh, but now that I have a little bit more experience with this podcast and with other AV stuff, trying to do a better setup, so. Um, used a, a real mic to record and we set up multiple camera angles with my laptop video and my iPhone camera, and that’s worked pretty well. And then I think the next experiment will be actually plugging the digital output for my, for my digital piano kind of directly into an audio interface. As well as getting a vocal mic and hopefully that will improve the kind of the piano sound quality that she hears on the other side. 00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Well, excuse to play with. 00:01:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a big factor. 00:01:40 - Speaker 2: We’ve got our summit next week as well, which we’re doing all virtual we meet in person for that, so we’re also going to Try to get a little creative. I guess the whole world is is doing that to some degree. 00:01:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, on the flip side of this, as a company, we have a lot of experience with remote, so this hasn’t been too big of a change for us. I’m talking to, uh, for example, people who are elementary school teachers and I just, I can’t even imagine. 00:02:01 - Speaker 2: So the topic we wanted to talk about today was hiring an engineering partner and maybe the Muse partnership model more generally. So I’ll link in the show notes to the job description we’ve got on the web. Beautiful design there done by our colleague Leonard. But, um, I think you wrote most of this, Mark, and, and I wanted to quote from the, the opener a little bit and, and maybe you can expand on this or explain it, uh, further. So the the page says this role is on our partner track, meaning that it has a high level of freedom and responsibility while earning a significant stake in the business. So, can you, uh, can you tell us what does it mean to be an engineering partner as opposed to, say, a soft software engineer as a regular employee. 00:02:45 - Speaker 1: So, our partnership model is, we have a very small team, all of whom are intentionally peers, including the founders, and who are treated more like owners than employees. So, in practice, I would say a partner is In between a typical startup employee and the kind of sole founder of a bootstrapped in the startup, it’s kind of in between. 00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And by typical startup employee here we talk about in the early days when it’s a small team, people have a lot of impact, I guess, on the, on the company because there’s just not that many of them, and option grants are common, which is sort of an option to buy company stock in the future if it does become valuable, uh, but at the same time, they don’t really get a lot of visibility into, say, the financials of the business. 00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the typical model is you have the founders who are there when the company is incorporated and they get the vast majority of the equity and they have very outsized responsibility and decision making ability and and freedom and flexibility, and then you hire employees and starting with employee 1 and definitely on from there, they’re kind of a second and lower tier of staff by design. And what we want with the partnership is more of a model where those Team members are all peers, uh, in terms of the day to day work, in terms of their freedom and responsibility, and also in terms of their equity ownership in the business. 00:04:08 - Speaker 2: And just to make it concrete here, we’ve got 4 partners right now. So there’s Yumi and Yulia, with sort of the 3, that got started last year. Leonard joined us not too long after. So we’re a partnership of 4 right now, and we have maybe some contractors and things we’ve worked with, but for the For the most part, it’s really those 4. We’re all owners in the business and therefore, essentially peers. Uh, now we’re looking to fill in this 5th person, uh, who will come from an engineering background, but we want them to have that same kind of stake in the business or level of ownership or level of responsibility. 00:04:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and it goes both ways like you have this higher level of ownership, you have more freedom, but because this is probably the last partner that will hire for some time. There’s a lot of responsibility. Like these 5 people, they need to make the business successful together. Um, so you really need to have a really high talent density to make that work. 00:05:01 - Speaker 2: So you’ve used this turn of phrase freedom and responsibility, and I don’t know if that’s a call back to the Netflix deck, sort of internal employee hiring and culture deck, but I read this, I’ll link to it in the show notes. I read this many, many years ago and it really had a big impact on me and how I think about teams and hiring and and management. 00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, very familiar, a classic. And interestingly, I think it’s been both very influential, yet it’s still quite contrarian. 00:05:28 - Speaker 2: Having a lot of latitude, having a lot of ability to make choices in your daily work, also comes with it, yeah, responsibility to do the best thing for the business, and you don’t have someone sitting there telling you what the right thing to do is. And maybe this comes to the conventional relationship you often happen have between employers and employees, which is one of the boss tells you what to do and the employee knows they’re successful in their job when the boss is happy, so it’s really largely about pleasing what whoever has the authority says they want. Uh, which produces some, some strange dynamics, uh, sometimes and some power. Obviously there’s a huge power asymmetry there as well. 00:06:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was a big motivation for me in designing our partnership model. I wanted individual success to be measured by the market as much as possible, so it’s not about pleasing your boss or getting some committee to give you a certain rating. Um, there’s one or two people who are working in each discipline, so it’s very clear if your work is having the right impact for the business. 00:06:30 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can talk about the terminology of calling it partners or partnership, and in particular, in contrast to the term that you often hear in Silicon Valley, which is founder. So what, what’s the difference there? Why do we use this term partner? 00:06:45 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even if they weren’t there at the founding of the company. There’s certain things like you’ll always be able to call yourself, you know, a member of the founding team or a founding partner, but we think it’s important that people can come in, uh, demonstrate their skills, prove their value to the business and join this group of peers as a full partner. 00:07:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, founder is a funny piece of terminology, right? It’s not a job title. It’s not like VP of engineering or something. Uh, it’s a statement of where you were at a particular time. And I’ve certainly used that title for myself quite a bit on, you know, CVs or whatever, just because, yeah, I do start companies, that’s sort of my, um, my career. And, and so when you’re doing a jack of all trades, just getting things off the ground, uh, type of a role, well, founder does seem like the right description for that. But it does rule out people coming in later and having a really big, or even a foundational, you might say, impact. Uh, and I think of some famous examples of this. For example, uh, Howard Schultz, I think it’s the fellow’s name from Starbucks. He wasn’t one of the founders of Starbucks, but he, in the sense of being this pivotal person that helped make it what it is today. He was, or that we just don’t have a word to talk about that, basically. 00:08:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and typically there’s a very narrow and rare path for people to say become a CEO externally, and that happens sometimes, of course, um, but the default path is you read the job description and it says like employee of X division, you know, doing this subset of that thing and even before you’ve talked to the first person at the company, it’s clear you’re going to have a very prescribed and small impact, whereas if you come in and say with the job description. You’re going to be a partner in this business, you’re going to own a big chunk of it, and we’re going to expect and hope that you step up to that with your contributions. Um, you’re setting a much higher ceiling for people to reach up to. 00:08:49 - Speaker 2: The one thing I was concerned about when we got this off the ground and 3 of us, the 3 initial partners had this idea to have this small talent dense team was that it would really restrict our, certainly our ability to grow quickly, although that wasn’t, uh, specifically a goal for us to grow the team quickly. But actually that we would rule out the ability to hire a potentially really great people, really great people in that particular craft who don’t have that other dimension of either their skill set or maybe just their interest. Being an owner of a business and feeling that responsibility for the whole thing being successful, versus kind of focusing on your craft and your specialty. It is not something everyone can or or wants to do. And so we rule out being able to hire some a really great software engineer who doesn’t want to be a business owner and be worrying about the fundamentals of the business. Um, and so I was, I saw that as a risk. I felt like when Leonard joined us, uh, that was a great validation of this model because he wanted that. He wanted to. You know, this is a very talented guy. He had the option to go lots of, uh, very prestigious big tech companies. And one of the reasons he told me that he, he wanted to work with us is that chance to have a high impact and be an owner in. Uh, in a business. And so he’s both really great at his craft, which is design, but he also has the mindset to care about, pay attention to, and contribute to all the other aspects of the business. 00:10:22 - Speaker 1: There’s only a subset of people who are interested in this model, and that’s fine because within that universe, they seem especially interested in what we’re doing and kind of more inclined to join our venture versus a typical startup where they’d be, you know, employee number 76 and earn 0.01% or whatever. Um, so I think it’s kind of concentrating and focusing our recruiting ability into uh the type of people who we most want to work with. 00:10:50 - Speaker 2: Now, this works for a 5 person team, maybe you could even imagine 67. I don’t necessarily imagine it would scale to, I don’t know, 1520, 25 people, um, but how do you, how do you think about that if we did at some later time feel like we did want to grow the, grow the team because the opportunity in front of us or the, the, um, money we’re earning from customers makes it possible to do that. 00:11:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think maybe there’s separable axes there. So I think it would be harder to have partners as you go beyond 67 people, although there is precedent for that, of course, and professional services firms that have big partnerships, uh, but you, you might be able to separate kind of how many employees, how many staff total you have versus what percentage of them are are partners, even if there’s some coupling there. I would also say that we did. Design the partner model, kind of the current iteration of it, specifically for 4 to 7 people, because that’s the size of one team, or maybe 3 to 7. And when you go beyond 6, maybe 7 people, you don’t really have one team anymore. You have 2 teams that you like, you know, team divisions and like extra communication and coordination and decoupling and stuff like that. And it’s kind of a different way of operating. You can, you can’t do it totally as modically mind melting like we do now. So I think it would also change in that respect if we move beyond 7 people, but I’m hopeful that we can um get quite far with this small team again, because of the talent density and because of the leverage you can get these days with SAS. 00:12:20 - Speaker 2: And it’s interesting change for both of us maybe because we do come from that startup background where hiring and growing the team quickly is seen as an absolute requirement. And uh you were an engineering manager, ran a team at Stripe. How big was that or how many people were sort of under your um authority there? 00:12:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I managed teams from like 3 to about 50 at Stripe, so I saw a gamut and indeed a huge part of your time as an engineering manager at a company like Stripe, we are growing very quickly, is actually the mechanics of growing a team. So it’s like, you know, recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training, team, cell division, off boarding. I probably spent like half my time doing that. And so part of the idea with a deliberately smaller partnership is you can spend more of your time focusing on the actual products in the business. Now there’s anything wrong with doing those other things. I quite enjoy them. Um, but if you, if you want to grow very fast, you have to invest a lot in it and it necessarily detracts from your work on the product. 00:13:24 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly for me, there was an appeal to being in more of a maker mode, be able to spend more of my time doing writing, product development, design, and so on. Uh, at Hiroku, I was my sort of my largest management experience and at one point had a, yeah, quite large, uh, team under me there and you can do a lot with a big team of expert people. It’s, it, it, it can be a really amazing thing and there are super, uh, opportunities very worth going after that that basically require that. Uh, but then on the other side of things, yeah, being able to make stuff and be really close to, I don’t know, I like a pretty close personal relationship with quite a lot of our, um, our early users and now customers, and that’s a lot harder to do if you also need to be, uh, making your team and all of the, the care and feeding of that, uh, your priority. 00:14:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and to circle back to something we mentioned earlier, I think you have that. That much more direct relationship with the customers and the product and and again the evaluation loop is much cleaner, with a large company, you have like, you know, various management chains that are quite deep, you have the different functional areas, you know, you have multiple phases of roadmap planning, the evaluation process is very complex, and so you end up spending a lot of your brain cycles like managing that social dynamic, uh, whereas here I think we have much more focus on our product and our customers. 00:14:51 - Speaker 2: The time that you need to put into getting everyone on the same page, even…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/40-filmmaking/ Oct 05, 2023

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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Also, in your field that you say, OK, I need this programmer with this designer and together with them and the right vision, we can build something. I think it’s very similar with film production. We all work at the end of what’s possible, and we want to go beyond. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Maximilian Becht of Cosmovision. 00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hi Adam. Nice to meet you. 00:00:43 - Speaker 2: And Max, I know you just got back from a pretty intense film shoot. Tell me about that. 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m just back in Berlin. I was shooting for 30 shooting days. That’s like a little bit more days all around it because we had 6 weeks of prep and 6 weeks of shooting and now 2 weeks of. Post production for my production team. I was a production manager, shooting theatrical movie in southern Germany and this was my rough summer and yeah, I’m looking forward to be back in Berlin and have a good conversation with you today. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the intensity of these shooting schedules. I used to live in Los Angeles, and had a lot of friends that were in Hollywood, and I think sometimes it’s nice to have sort of an intense work period, but then maybe a longer break in between, but it often was quite surprising to me. Puts even the intense work schedules of Silicon Valley, gives it a run for its money, you might say. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah. I think for the last weeks, my workdays had around 12 to 15 hours and the weekends were not really weekends. So it’s like a vacation camp. This filming feels sometimes like this sprint. Maybe you can compare it to the tech industry when you really have this one project, this one program you want to finish and you really give every effort and After it, you feel it drops sometimes in like an emotional hole because you’re way, there’s something missing. I have to be working right now, not, so you were always wondering, oh yeah, what’s happening. 00:02:20 - Speaker 2: Actually I have very strong memories of my first experience of exactly that drop, which was in the video game industry at the beginning of my career. And we were just working these, yeah, basically every waking moment for weeks on an E3 demo, so E3 was the big conference, you gotta have a great demo, and I remember when we finally, well, we shipped it because E3 happened, so there was no more time. After that, I just didn’t know what to do with myself for a day. I couldn’t remember what my life was like when it wasn’t just nonstop working, not a great place to be. But in a way, it had its moments, maybe because I was sort of young and had no other responsibilities in my life. 00:02:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m always reflecting on that part, whether how much energy and, yeah, you put into your work. And with film, it’s always because it’s a passion thing for most of the people I know, that way it’s hard to divide it strictly between your personal life and your professional life because you always do it out of a passion, out of the lust to really create awesome images, awesome films. 00:03:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely a problem we have in the software world as well. So Max, you’re a video producer or a film producer, I don’t know exactly how you title yourself, but tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into this field. 00:03:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m a film producer. I would specify it more as a creative producer because I like to create a content and develop content together with someone, but also have the production side in my head to know how to finance a product, how to organize the product, and how to really finish it in the end. But the part at the beginning where you develop a story where you imagine ideas, where you Look for a concept that’s the part I like most about filmmaking. I, after my A Levels, I had some years of internships with production companies and working on sets as a runner, set runner, you are on a film set and see that all the infrastructure is working well. You run from the set to the base to get a cable or something or to grab a coffee for some important person. But that way you learn the infrastructure, the how film work, how every department has its purpose on the set. And then I applied for film university in southern Germany at Film Academy, uh, Baden Wittenberg. It’s a very renowned film school and yeah, I studied 5 years of film there. I produced several short films, mid-length films. With different formats like starting with uh fiction, also documentary, but also I got glimpses into animation, visual effects, and interactive storytelling. And now I’m back in Berlin and I have my own company, my own office, and I work as a freelance producer for other companies, but also try to develop my own stories together with writers, directors, and I offer my services to companies who needs a sparing partner to produce and develop content. 00:05:40 - Speaker 2: And I’ll link folks to your portfolio, there’s quite a diversity, as you said, there’s, including these short fiction films, you could say maybe high concept or things that maybe submit to film festivals, that sort of thing, very artistic, maybe those are more labors of love, and then you also have things that are maybe more commercial in nature, so there’s quite a variety, although my feeling and maybe part of why I was drawn to it and we’ll talk soon about how it is that we came to work together, but it seemed like a lot of your work, whether it’s maybe fiction isn’t quite the right word, but a story versus documentary, it seemed like you really focused on the people, the characters, showing their lives, their environments. It feels like that’s a, it’s quite a theme, but at least I saw that across your portfolio, but. 00:06:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, always people ask what kind of films you like to do, but this question is hard for me to answer because there’s no genre I would like to be in or just one field, like I’m just a commercial producer or I just do documentaries or nature films. My engine for motivation for filmmaking is always the story and what is behind it. Like, for me, a story has to make sense, has to have an impact and has to be of a topic I find of relevance. So there has to be some kind of political or I would say, the value which a film contributes or puts to the screen that has something I share. And at the same time, film can be an experimental way of pushing boundaries in fields you also find interesting or getting into topics you don’t know anything about, but you want to learn more about. So I give one example. For example, I am producing a documentary about prison television station in a German high security prison. So I don’t know anything about prison. I’m lucky to not have been in one yet, but I was really curious how criminals Live in German high security prisons and how is their view on media and how do they consume media and what it would be if they produce an on television channel. So, this changed my perspective. on how we in a society want to handle people who don’t follow the laws. And if you have been in a prison, you know what it’s like to be in there. So that’s a reflection I find very valuable for me. 00:08:19 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is filmmaking, perhaps obviously, and there’s two reasons for this. It might seem like a bit of a non sequitur compared to our usual world of product design and having ideas and so on, but There’s 2 layers here, 2 reasons to talk about this today. One is I’m really interested in the creative process. Generally, I read a book some years back called Making Movies. I’ll link that in the show notes. I’ve even mentioned here before maybe, and I was really struck by how much similarity there is, not on the practical level of what you do in terms of how films are made. Shooting and getting actors together and things versus writing code, but that there’s a lot of similarities between making great software products and making films, where they have this pragmatic aspect as well as this artistic aspect as well as this team aspect. And so I thought it would be really interesting to dig into the creative process there and find those parallels. But the other reason is that we are doing a little experimental, let’s say a little launch of a small film project. That you and I worked together on Max along with a couple other folks on our film crew, to create a sort of mini documentary series about the creative process. So, just to briefly speak to that, that’s called Create. And I’ll link the launch memo, as well as the pilot episode here, and you can read all about why we wanted to do that, why we think that’s really relevant to Muse and our mission, but I thought it would be great to talk a little bit about the experience of working together on that and how we ended up at this final result. 00:09:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I was kind of surprised to be contacted by you because you’re an American company and I’m here. Upcoming film producer, I just finished my study two years ago and building up my portfolio and I was not actively reaching out to people, but I’m open for, because I’m always also busy with other projects, but I find your reaching out to me very interesting because your product was something very cool because I use productivity apps myself as well and I’m not an iPad user, so I didn’t know Muse, but as I think I got a, a fast idea what it was about, and I was thinking to myself, OK, what kind of content would you want or need? Did you want something animated to like show what your app can do best? And I was Very happy to see that you wanted something bigger or wider than that. So that stands more for the core values or ask the question about what Muse stands for and how does branded content work? Because I share the idea that a good commercial is not always showing all the benefit of a specific product, but to Show what it stands for or what the idea is behind it. And I thought it was very powerful to search for creatives and people who have very unique ways of working and their own way of productivity and where do they have their source of, yeah, structure of energy, of creativity. 00:11:47 - Speaker 2: So it’s just a tad more context. I think what we wanted to do here, you mentioned the term branded content, which I think is kind of a film concept that I guess there’s what you would call traditional commercials, and so those are usually sleekly made, they’re usually 30 seconds, and they show, maybe there’s something clever or funny, but they show really directly. Here’s this product, it exists, here’s why you might want it, you know, linked to a place you can download it or buy it or whatever, and those are fine. Certainly for the Muse brand generally, but also for me personally, I saw a more interesting opportunity, or at least for me more compelling than a classic advertisement was instead to take what we had learned through interviewing with really hundreds of creative professionals in our research lab days and now thousands that we’ve interacted with, maybe tens of thousands through our support channels and try to tell their stories. Cause it really struck me that, I mean, use exists because of this research that we did, of going to people who make things, create, call them knowledge workers, I usually go with creative professionals, but think people who make things and inspiring things to me, and try to understand how they work, and in particular, we, we narrowed in on the ideation process, that early stage is something that’s not really well supported by computers, and this is why Muse exists. And so the contents of those interviews, those early interviews are things that are all now essentially baked into the product, all the insights we got from those interviews. But as I speak to people individually and feel inspired by that, again, now just kind of through supporting our product naturally, but even if I flip back through the old interviews and review them, and I think there’s some amazing stories here and some amazing creators, what’s another way that we can share that stuff and film seemed like the right media for that. 00:13:38 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we are also still on the journey with the product because at the beginning, we said, OK, let’s talk to one or two people and we find the right one and we’ll do one shooting day and then we have our product. Then on the way, we saw that we have to meet so much more people, have to prepare, like we have to get to know them a lot better before really deciding on. They are the protagonists for our shooting day because we have just one shooting day. That’s a budget wise restriction or also, I think for this format, 5 minutes, 1 shooting day should be enough. And we have to kind of know the script before we shoot. So the script and a documentary portrait may seem kind of OK. This does not make sense, but It makes sense in a way that we need to know before what kind of facets of a specific person we want to show, because I think everyone has so much interesting stuff to tell, but for us and for this product, we need to condense it and also we need to find visually compelling situations that are not just someone sitting in his flat and talking to the camera, but also doing something and That with, I think a lot of your users are not people who build something with their hands, but also are programmers and people who have very static work environments, but they have also sites in their lives which are visually interesting if they do sports to clean out their head or something like that. So we had to find that with the protagonists. 00:15:26 - Speaker 2: Yes, so for me it was surprising that how much of your time, and particularly how much of the director, that’s Marcus Hannaish, how much of his time, and the cameraman, how much of their time was this, I guess, scoping locations to shoot, they would have things that were visually interesting, so that we can better relevant to the story that we want to tell. So, clearly you got these protagonists, as we’re calling the subject of the film, they do inspiring work and you see that in the end result, but how they do that work doesn’t, I don’t know, if you’re filming athletes, for example, that’s a naturally very dynamic thing, or they’re out in nature or whatever, so how do we make visually interesting film out of this, and that was a big part of the film based or the visual storytelling that for me was totally new. 00:16:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is a good bridge to tell something about, because I’m the producer of this product, but this film was made with a lot of effort of Marcus, the director, and Jasper, the cameraman. And we also had more with our sound designer and music composer. So I wanted maybe to share something about how this team came together because my process from starting at the beginning was to propose several directors to you because I thought it would be interesting to get Different ways of thinking how this format could work. So I looked in my bubble kind of what are the directors I know or I heard of which are interesting. 00:16:59 - Speaker 2: In the tech world we’d say your network. 00:17:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in my network. I just didn’t find the word but yeah network bubble, yeah, and I contacted them and I pitched the idea and then I wanted them to not know everything about our product, but to come up with something, a visual world, storytelling, a kind of a style. Even if it’s kind of similar, every director has its style and he has work he can show which reflects the style, but he also can look for skills for images w…

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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/41-local-first-software/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: And I feel like this idea of really changes the abstractions that operating systems should provide because maybe OSs should not just be providing this model of files as a sequence of bytes, but this higher level CRDT like model and how does that impact the entire way how software is developed. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and joined today by Martin Klutman from the University of Cambridge. Hello. And we talked before about Mark’s dabbling in playing the piano. I understand this is a hobby you’re starting to look into as well, Martin. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Oh yes, I’ve been playing the piano, like trying to do it a bit more consistently for the last year and a half or so. My lockdown projects. 00:00:57 - Speaker 2: And do you have a technique for not annoying your neighbors, or is this an electronic piano, or how do you do that? 00:01:03 - Speaker 1: It’s an electric piano, although I don’t think it’s too bad for the neighbors. Lately I’ve been trying to learn a WBC 400 piece that I can play together with my wife, so she’ll play two hands and I’ll play the other two. 00:01:15 - Speaker 2: Nice. I suspect a lot of our listeners know you already, Martin. I think you’re within your small, narrow niche, you’re a pretty high profile guy, but for those that don’t, it’d be great to hear a little bit about your background. What brought you on the journey to the topic we’re gonna talk about today? 00:01:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I’m a computer scientist, I guess. I started out as an entrepreneur and started two startups some years ago. I ended up at LinkedIn through the acquisition of the 2nd startup. And they worked on large scale stream processing with Apache Kafka and was part of that sort of stream processing world for a while. And then I wanted to share what I had learned about building large scale distributed data systems. And so I then took some time out to write a book which is called Designing Data Intensive Applications, which has turned out to be surprisingly popular. 00:02:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you wrote a nice kind of tell-all, you showed the numbers on it, which it’s been financially successful for you, but also one of the more popular O’Reilly books just by kind of copy sold in recent times. I like that post, like the candor there, but yeah, it makes you a pretty successful author, right? 00:02:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s sold over 100,000 copies, which is, wow, way more than what I was expecting for something that it’s a pretty technical, pretty niche book, really. But the goal of the book really is to help people figure out what sort of storage technologies and data processing technologies are appropriate for their particular use case. So it’s a lot about the trade-offs and the pros and cons of different types of systems. And there’s not a whole lot on that sort of thing out there, you know, there’s a lot of sort of vendor talk hyping the capabilities of their particular database or whatever it might be, but not so much on this comparison between different approaches. So that’s what my book tries to provide. Yeah, and then after writing that book, I sort of slipped into academia, sort of half by accident, half by design. So I then found a job at the University of Cambridge where I could do research full time. And since then I’ve been working on what we have come to call the first software, which we’re going to talk about today. The nice thing there is that now then academia compared to the startup world, I have the freedom to work on really long term ideas, big ideas which might take 5 or 10 years until they turn into like viable technologies that might be used in everyday software development. But if they do work, they’ll be really impactful and really important and so I’m enjoying that freedom to work on really long term things now as an academic. 00:03:53 - Speaker 2: And certainly it struck me when we got the chance to work together through these Ink & Switch projects that because you have both the commercial world, including startup founder, but obviously you’re very immersed in the academic kind of machinery now and again just that long-term mindset and thinking about creating public goods and all that sort of thing. And I found that I actually really like now working with people that have both of those. Another great example there would be another former podcast guest Jeffrey Litt. He was also in the startup world, now he’s doing academic work at MIT. 00:04:26 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I’m actually doing a project with him right now, right, I forgot about that. 00:04:29 - Speaker 2: There’s a current Ink & Switch project there. So I find that maybe if you live your whole life in one of those two kind of commercial slash industry or academia, you get like a fish doesn’t know what water is kind of thing, but if you have experienced both models, then it’s easier to know the pros and cons and understand the shape of the venue you’re doing your work in in the end. The point is to have some meaningful impact on humanity through your work, whatever small piece of the world you hope you’re making better. In our case, it’s computer things, but that the venue you’re in is not the point, that’s just a vehicle for getting to where you want to go, and each of these styles of venue have different trade-offs, and being aware of those maybe makes it easier to have your work have an impact. 00:05:19 - Speaker 1: Yes, I think it is really helpful to have seen both sides and I find it allows me to be a little bit more detached from the common mindset that you get like in every domain you get, you know, there are certain things that everyone believes, but you know, they’re kind of unspoken, maybe not really written down either. And so like in academia, that’s like the publishing culture and the competitiveness of publication venues and that sort of stuff, which seems ridiculous to outsiders. But if you’re in it, you kind of get accustomed to it. And likewise in startups, it’s like the hype to be constantly selling and marketing and promoting what you’re doing to the max crushing it, always crushing it, exactly, and to an outsider that seems really. it’s kind of a ridiculous show that people put on frankly. But to an insider, you know, you just get used to it and that’s just your everyday life. I find that having seen both makes me a bit more detached from both of them and I don’t know, maybe I see a little bit more through the bullshit. 00:06:21 - Speaker 2: So as you hinted, our topic today is local first software. So this is an essay that I’ll link to in the show notes. It’s about 2 years old, and notably there’s 4 authors on this paper, 3 of them are here, kind of almost a little reunion, and actually the 4th author, Peter van Hardenberg, we hope to have on as a future guest. But I thought it would be really fun to not only kind of summarize what that philosophy is, particularly because we’re actively pursuing that for the Muse sinking persistence model, but also to look at sort of what we’ve learned since we published that essay and revisiting a little bit. What do we wish we’d put in, how’s the movement, if that’s the right word for it, how’s that evolved, what have we learned in that time? But I guess before getting into all that, maybe Martin, you can give us the elevator pitch, if I’m to reference the startup terminology, the brief summary of what is local first software. 00:07:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, local first software is a reaction to cloud software and so with cloud software, I mean things like Google Docs, where you have a browser window and you type into it and you can share it really easily. You can have several people contributing to a document really easily, you can send it for comments. Very easily and so on. So, it has made collaboration a ton easier, but it’s come at a great cost to our control and our ownership of the data, because whenever you’re using some cloud software, the data is stored on the cloud provider servers, like Google servers, for example. And you know, as users, we are given access to that data temporarily. Until that day where Google suddenly decides to lock your account and you are locked out of all of the documents that you ever created with Google Docs, or until the startup software as a service product you’re using, suddenly goes bust and decides to shut down their product with 2 weeks’ notice and maybe allows you to download a zip file full of JSON files as your data export. And I find that tragic because as creative people, we put a ton of effort, time and our souls and really our personalities into the things that we create. And so much now the things that we create are computer-based things, you know, whether you’re writing the script for a play or whether you’re negotiating a contract or whether you’re doing any sort of endeavor, it’s probably a file on a computer somewhere. And if that file is in some cloud software, then there’s always this risk that it might disappear and that you might lose access to it. And so what we try to do with local first software is to articulate a vision for the future where that does not happen, where We have the same convenience that we have with cloud software that is we have the same ability to do real-time collaboration. It’s not back to the old world of sending files back and forth by email. We still want the same real-time collaboration that we get with Google Docs, but at the same time we also want the files stored. On our own computers. Because if there are files on our own computers, then nobody can take them away. They are there, we can back them up ourselves. We can optionally back them up to a cloud service if we want to. There’s nothing wrong with using a cloud service as long as the software still continues working without the cloud service. Moreover, we want the software to continue working offline so that if you’re working on a plane or working on a train that’s going through a tunnel or whatever, the software should just continue to work. And we want better security and privacy because we don’t want cloud services scanning through the content of all of our files. I think for creativity, it’s important to have that sense of privacy and ownership over your workspace. And so those are some of the ideas that we try to encapsulate in this idea of local first software. So how can we try to have the best of both worlds of the convenience of cloud software. But the data ownership of having the files locally on your own device. 00:10:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, the core of it is really agency and much of the value of cloud, and I think there’s a version of this also for mobile apps, let’s say and app stores and that sort of thing, which is not what we’re addressing in the paper, but maybe there’s a theme in computing that we’ve made computers vastly more accessible by In many cases, taking agency from people, and that’s actually a good thing in many cases, right? You don’t need to defrag your hard drive anymore. You lose your device, your email, and your photos and all those things are still in this cloud that’s managed by experiencedmins and product managers and so forth at companies like Google and So forth, and they can often do a better job of it in a lot of cases than an individual can. I mean, I think of managing my own email servers, SMTP servers, years back and needing to deal with data backup and spam filtering and all that kind of thing, and Gmail came along and I was just super happy to outsource the problem to them. Absolutely. They did a better job managing it. So I think that’s basically in many ways a good trend or as a net good in the world, and I don’t think we feel like we necessarily want to go back to everyone needs to do more of those data management tasks, but I think for the area of creative tools or more, I guess you call them power users, but it’s like you said, if you’re writing a play, that’s just a very different kind of interaction with a computer than the average person doing some calendar and email and messaging. Yeah, maybe they want different trade-offs. It’s worth doing a little bit more management and taking a little more ownership to get that greater agency over something like, yeah, my work product, the script of my play or my master thesis or whatever it is that I’m working on is something that really belongs to me and I want to put a little extra effort to have that ownership. 00:12:08 - Speaker 1: Right, exactly. And I feel like it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to be a sys admin and to set up their own services, you know, you get this self-hosted cloud software, but most of it is far too technical for the vast majority of users, and that’s not where we want to go with this. I think you still want exactly the same kind of convenience of clouds software that, you know, it just works out of the box and you don’t have to worry about the technicalities of how it’s set up. But one part of local first software is that because all of the interesting app specific work happens client side on your own device, it now means that the cloud services that you do use for syncing your data, for backing up your data, and so the cloud services become generic. And so you could imagine Dropbox or Google Drive or AWS or some other big cloud provider just giving you a syncing service for local first apps. And the way we’re thinking about this, you could have one generic service that could be used as the syncing infrastructure for many different pieces of software. So regardless of whether the software is a text editor or a spreadsheet or a CAD application for designing industrial products or music software or whatever it might be, all of those different apps. Could potentially use the same backup and syncing infrastructure in the cloud, and you can have multiple cloud providers that are compatible with each other and you could just switch from one to the other. So at that point, then it just becomes like, OK, who do you pay 6 cents a month to in order for them to store your data, it becomes just a very generic and fungible service. And so that’s what I see makes actually the cloud almost more powerful. Because it removes the lock-in that you have from, you have to use a single, the, the cloud service provided by the software offer. Instead, you could switch from one cloud provider to another very easily and you still retain the property that you’re using all of the cloud providers’ expertise in providing a highly available service and you don’t have to do any admin yourself. It’s not like running your own SMTP server. So I feel like this is a really promising direction that local first software enables. 00:14:24 - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, indeed, and you could even describe local first software, I think, as sort of generalizing and distributing the capabilities of the different nodes. So in the classic cloud model, you have these thin clients, they can dial into the server and render whatever the server tells them. And then you have the servers and they can store data and process it and return to clients and when you have both of those at the same time, you know, it works great, but then if you’re a client like you said, who’s in a tunnel, well too bad you can’t do anything, and the local first model is more that any node in that system can do anything, it can. Process the data, I can validate it, it can store it, it can communicate it, it can sync it, and then you can choose what kind of typologies you want. So it might be that you just want to work alone in your tunnel, or it might be that you want to subscribe to a cloud backup service that does the…

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