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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/79-read-later-apps/ 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: No one would ever write a blog post or a book by hand or on a typewriter in 2023. Yet reading still pretty much takes place in the physical world, at least nonfiction, 90% of nonfiction reading is still paper books, and so our lofty ambition would be, we’ve created such a better reading experience using software that people are motivated to switch and read digitally. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with guests Dan Doyen and Tristan Holmesy of ReadW Wise. 00:00:44 - Speaker 3: Hi, I’m Tristan, co-founder and technically CEO of ReadW Wise. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Excited to be here, Honored to be a guest, huge fan of the podcast. 00:00:54 - Speaker 2: And I understand you two had some fun with Falcon recently. 00:00:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s right. We were just off on a team offsite in Ireland. We’re a remote company, so we try and get the team together about twice a year, you know, with scheduling and all that. We’re about 14 people now, so getting 14 people out of one place is a little non-trivial these days, but we chose Ireland because we have an engineer. who already lives there, so you can kind of give us a good local experience. And as part of that, we had a fun little falconry event where, you know, you have the little glove. I think you’ve done it before, Adam, and the falconry instructor puts a little meat on your glove and then the birds fly onto your glove and eat the meat. 00:01:38 - Speaker 1: Dan, is that a good overview of, yeah, we were able to play with a falcon, a hawk, and 4 breeds of owls. 00:01:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so the fun part was the first owl was like this cute little, I think it was like a snowy owl or something, Barn owl, oh, barn owl, OK. So we take turns each like having the owl fly onto our glove. It flew on to dance, I think pretty successfully, and then we moved on to the next person, I think like one of our engineers or something, and instead of the bird flying onto the glove of the engineer, which had me, it flew back. On to Dan’s glove, which he wasn’t even holding properly or anything, and kind of gained this funny attachment to Dan. Then the instructor was like, Oh, that’s weird. Grabbed the bird and was like, OK, go over here. Go over here. He eventually got it onto the engineer’s glove, and then we did the next person, and the owl again flew onto Dan’s glove. And then that basically repeated for, you know, the next like 10 minutes until Dan had to like hide his glove and basically hide from the bird before it would stop flying to him, so. 00:02:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I grew up reading My Side of the Mountain, so I fancy myself a bit of a bird of prey expert. 00:02:40 - Speaker 2: Missed your calling as a bird whisperer. Yeah, I briefly had the chance to do the glove thing with the yeah, I think it was a falcon, and they’re just obviously really beautiful creatures, also very alien in a way, the way they move and the way they Obviously feathers and all this sort of thing, and obviously we see birds in our daily life, but birds of prey really feel like a different thing, I guess, and being that close and being aware of the weapons, you know, their claws or talons, I guess they’re called, and their beak and that sort of thing. It’s just, yeah, it can be a powerful experience. 00:03:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the descendants of dinosaurs. 00:03:18 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. And tell me a little about Reidwise. 00:03:22 - Speaker 3: Sure, so Readwise at a high level, we basically make software that helps people read better. There’s a lot of ways we do that. Most recently, we’ve been working on this app, which we call Reader or the Readise Reader, which is this piece of software which lets you read basically any type of content from PDFs to books, to articles, to YouTube videos, including their transcripts. To newsletters, to Twitter threads, to a lot more. We let you read that stuff, but more importantly, kind of save it, highlight it, and just kind of get the most out of your reading. And before we built Reader, we also built a slightly more niche app, which we now call ReadW 1.0, which basically helps you retain more from your reading and kind of manage all of your digital highlights. 00:04:06 - Speaker 2: And could you tell me a little bit about the journey you each took in your careers that led you to this venture? 00:04:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the Re Wi story really starts with Dan, so he can probably pick that off. 00:04:15 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll start. My journey was a little bit more non-traditional than Tristan’s or probably the typical guest on this podcast. In high school, I was very interested in computers and entrepreneurship. I actually had a web development agency. This is in the late 90s, early 2000s, when every Main Street business was realizing they needed to have a presence on the World Wide Web. As an expat in Germany, you might find it amusing that we called the company Glowing Pear, because we were studying German and learned that light bulb in German is Glue Bena. So that was a funny name. But I went to school to study business, not realizing that studying business is really finance, so I took a 10 year detour from software and entrepreneurship to go to Wall Street, but then in my early 30s, I had an early midlife crisis, quit my job, sold all my things, and Traveled the world for a little over a year. It was during that time that I became a power user of Kindle, because we were backpacking and couldn’t really lug around all these books. And it was also during this time that I was reading about one challenging book per week, and I got really frustrated with the fact that I could barely tell you the name of a book I’d read a month ago, nevertheless, the key takeaways. So, when that frustration hit me, I was just ascending the learning curve of this challenging flashcard app called Onki, and I had this idea, oh, I’m taking all these highlights while I read in Kindle, not doing anything with them. What would happen if I put them into Anki and review them for 5 minutes every morning? 00:05:46 - Speaker 2: Nke just briefly is kind of the original tool for thought in some ways, a space repetition system that basically uses this technique to help you remember things better. Beloved by language learners for sure, but also could basically help you remember any knowledge. 00:06:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Onki is a very powerful piece of software, but it’s a little bit hard to use. I had to read like a 40 page PDF to kind of get up the learning curve. So this sabbatical afforded me that opportunity to learn it. So, yeah, I did a prototype where I wrote a script that would import my Kindle highlights and then I would review them for a few minutes every morning. There was no commercial interest here, this is purely a hobby, just a personal life hack, but I really became interested when Not only did it help me remember the books, but there were all these higher order second level benefits that I hadn’t anticipated, and that really opened my eyes to what just I now call reading tech or reading technology, which is this idea that the software is eating the world, but it’s barely scratched the surface on the practice of reading. Um, so this was in 2016, and I was in a place where I was looking for what to do next, and that kind of led me to Tristan. 00:06:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a little more traditional background than Dan, I guess, for software founders, I suppose. I was studying computer science at the University of Waterloo. I’d worked at a couple companies, maybe like some startups, a notable one might be Stripe, and another Superhuman. I was actually doing an internship at Superhuman. Even before that, I had a little bit of a background and kind of reading technology. I guess it started when I was working at Stripe, you know, we had these brilliant founders, John and Patrick Carlson, and they’d always talk about how much they’re reading, how much they love reading. How beneficial it is for you, how it helped them form the company, how it helps them be successful, and I was kind of struck by this weird dichotomy that like here were these like super high tech founders who rely on and love books so much and find them so beneficial, and obviously I agreed, I read a lot too, and yet, you know, they were reading basically paper books, there was basically no innovation whatso all. From the practice of reading from what, like, their grandparents or people 1000 years ago would have done. So, I found that pretty interesting, and that kind of got me onto the vein of reading technology. So I had my own side project, similar to Dan, which I called Reading List.io, which was a slightly different tact, but basically, I was trying to build a tool which would help you prioritize. what you want to read. So not discovery and not really trying to be social like Goodreads or anything, but myself and a lot of people I knew just had lists of books they wanted to read in a text file or Amazon card or something, like hundreds of books, but they had no good way of prioritizing them, analyzing that list, and deciding what to read next. So I actually posted a comment to Hacker News, I just on some random posts to do with reading. And I left my email, I mentioned I was working on this product, and Dan shot me an email, which was how we first met. And then I happened to be living in San Francisco a couple months later, working at Superhuman, and Dan was also living in San Francisco, so we actually met up in person, and we became friends and decided ultimately to start on the first version of Reid Wise way back then in 2017, and yeah, that’s how we got started. 00:08:54 - Speaker 2: And how is this vision of reading tech evolved since you joined forces? 00:09:01 - Speaker 1: In some ways it stayed the same. Our initial mission, I remember vividly being in San Francisco with Tristan in 2017, we formed the mission to improve the practice of reading by an order of magnitude using software. That’s still our mission, still our vision. The way we conceptualized it is we broke the process of reading down into 3 stages before you read, while you read, and after you read, and we hypothesized that if we could double the benefit in each of those, we’d get 23 power or an 8 times improvement which would round up to an order of magnitude. So, we decided to start with actually after you read, based on my experimentation with putting Kindle highlights in Anki and the profound benefits I was getting from retaining more of what we read. We found it was a pretty salient problem, like, we could talk to most people and be like, hey, have you invested 10 hours in reading a book and, you know, ever get frustrated that you are nodding your head the whole time you’re reading it, and like, wow, this is amazing, this is gonna change my life. But then in a month later, nothing happens. A lot of people resonate with that, and There really was nothing else out there trying to provide a solution to that problem. So, that’s where we started with Read Wise, what we call now Readwise 1.0, and it’s a very niche product, don’t get me wrong, but people who like it tend to love it, and it’s very sticky, and they use it for Years on a daily basis, and that was kind of the platform for us to move backwards through the process of reading with our newer app, which we call Reader, we were now able to get into while you read and start innovating there, and also to a lesser extent before you read. 00:10:46 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and there’s a long journey between us kicking off on that first Readwise 1.0, help you remember more product and to even when we started Reader, but yeah, a long slow journey, but, you know, we’ve been working on it for basically exactly 6 years now. 00:11:02 - Speaker 2: Our topic today is read later apps. Now, in this framework you’ve already described, this refers to, I guess, kind of before and during reading. This is an area I’ve been interested in for a long time because I have used a lot of Rela apps over the years, starting with Pocket was the first one I fell in love with. And indeed that brought me to your product, Reader, which is looking for that kind of perfect relator app. And so I thought it would be interesting to talk about the history of those and other approaches to this, but particularly within this larger vision that you have about reading technology and improving all stages of this. So maybe we can start with just how you both think about the category of rel apps and how you think about why you wanted to enter that category. 00:11:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So, starting with the history of read it later apps, there were really two prerequisites that were required before that category emerged. The first is kind of obvious, but the internet and This profusion of permissionless content, notably in the form of blogging, you really needed that content out there before there would be anything to save to read a later app. And then the second innovation was obviously the smartphone. This is the first time that computing devices were less about productivity, right? Like a personal computer is more about doing work. Of course people would play games or Watch movies on a computer occasionally, but it was really productivity first, and the mobile phone, smartphone was a consumption first device. So with those two prerequisites in the late 2000s, we saw the first read it later app. There’s some controversy as to who came first, but according to our conversations and reading of the history, it seems like Marco Ormant created Insta paper. And was the first person to kind of check all the table stakes boxes of what makes a real later app, need the ability to save web pages, to read later from both your computer and your mobile phone. You need to parse those web pages into distraction free clean HTML and then you need the ability to read those across devices. So he really kicked off the category with Pocket as a fast follower, and they really kind of dominated the category. There was a lot of enthusiasm behind these. I think Marco became a little frustrated with the whole competition with Pocket, so he sold Insta paper to a venture capital studio in New York called Betaworks, and they took the baton and continued to grow the platform while Pocket raised a bunch of money. And continue to grow the platform. But then around like 2015, I think they reached an asymptote in terms of their growth and kind of put these apps into maintenance mode. Betaworks spun Ins the paper out to Pinterest, where it kind of lived dormant for three years. Pinterest then spun it back out to the guy from Betaworks who ran it in 2018, Brian Donahue, good friend of ours, a lot of respect for him. And then Pocket was acquired by Mozilla, which is why you see Pocket built into the Firefox web browser. I share that history because that’s part of the reason that we entered this category is because we love these apps. I’ve been a user of Insta Paper since, I think, 2011, I tried to go back and figure out when I first saved a document there, but from about 2015, 2016 on, they were just maintained as opposed to adding features, so we felt like there was a little bit of a void in terms of innovation and continuing to build on to the great foundation that they started. So we saw an opportunity there, at least for our user, which is very much a power user to enter that space and kind of carry the baton forward. 00:14:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and you can kind of take the path to read it later apps forward from us, we kind of start a new one. I’d say the existing ones this paper and pocket basically been left alone, just kind of m…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/8-principled-products/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: One of the things that’s really important, whether you’re talking about product principles or company values, is you have to be able to negate them, cause otherwise you don’t use them to resolve conflict. 00:00:14 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is 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 here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and my former colleague, now friend Max Schoening. Hey, Adam. Max, great to have you here. So, Max has an impressive career in the tech world, both as an indie developer making cloud app years back. The 3 of us worked together at Hiroku and now you’re leading the design team at GitHub. More importantly, for our purposes, you are an early user, you are our very first customer for Muse, and you’re also an advisor, so we get to bombard you with our half-finished ideas once a month, and you can tell them, tell us why they’re bad. 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Uh, thank you for that very generous introduction, and it’s, it’s quite the privilege to be a part of the Muse creation process, even if it’s on the sidelines. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: Now I understand you just got back from a camping trip. That sounded pretty fun. 00:01:10 - Speaker 1: Uh, yeah, I did. I spent The last week completely off the grid, my wife and I with the dog went and drove up to the Tahoe National Forest in a 4x4 sprinter van and did nothing but hike and sort of be in nature, which at this moment in time feels or is an immense privilege, right? But it was good to disconnect a little. 00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Now our topic today is principled products. Now this is your idea, Max. So maybe you can explain what this is all about. 00:01:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it might be interesting to to start at the beginning of how I was introduced to Muse because I think we had talked, we share lots of interest, sort of end user programming, end user computing, and also tools for thought and and making tools for people who make stuff. And so naturally, when you started Muse, you shared it with me and I think my first, I don’t quite remember, so please, please correct me here, Adam, but I think my first reaction was, OK, well, why would I use this? This is not letting me draw the way that I want to draw. 00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember giving you a quick uh just in person demo. I think you were visiting your mom here in Berlin. You stopped by my place. I said, hey, I’m working on this new thing and just showed you, you know, a pretty early version and you I think you liked, you had a positive reaction to the zooming kind of spatial interface, uh, but then when you went off to try it on your own a little bit, you said, well, yeah, the ink’s kind of ugly and I have a better sketchbook app. using notability at the time and yeah, for purely for sketching, that’s true today as well. Notability is a better choice. 00:02:38 - Speaker 1: I think I narrowed in on the on the ink engine very quickly versus acknowledging the principles that Muse kind of stands for. And I think that’s what triggered this entire thought process in me of to actually consider to make Muse work for you, you have to consider the principles that the creators in this case, the two of you and the rest of the team sort of put into the process. And that’s where I think the train of thought of, OK, what are principled products sort of came from, as I tried to define what a principle what we mean by principled, I kind of came to the to the realization of it’s just a set of rules or laws that guide the behavior of the people who make the thing, but then there is even a secondary layer which I think is much more interesting, which is a set of rules or laws that guide the behavior of the people using the thing. And I think Muse is you framed it, Mark or Adam, I don’t remember, but as a as a tool for thought and a tool for rumination. The moment that you gave me, this is obviously not a very scalable process, but you gave me this onboarding onto the muse philosophy after I initially rejected the app and then it clicked. 00:03:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that’s great to hear. Now we just need to figure out how to kind of replicate and scale up. That process, I guess, but in the near term happy to to do the one off, uh, one-off on boardings, I guess. Now, I’d be curious to hear from, from both of you, both of you guys, what are other principal products. And I assume that many, many products are driven by mission or they have a purpose or uniting set of values, but I assume that when we, when we say when we really say principal products in the way you just described Max, that’s, that’s not many or even, that’s not. or even maybe many products that are out there. So what are, what are some examples? I don’t know, Mark, do you have any that come to mind? 00:04:20 - Speaker 3: One that comes to mind for me is SQL light. This is a classic database that has this principle of being super reliable and running everywhere. Actually, the homepage is hilarious. It looks like it’s from the 90s and it says SQL light, it does not give problems. It just works. I think importantly, it’s a trade-off that they’re making. For example, it makes it harder and slower and more laborious to develop the product, but that’s a principle that they’re really committed to and that you can expect from them as developers and you can expect as users of the product. 00:04:48 - Speaker 2: And I think we um pointed out and maybe it was the local first article that SQL Light is now listed by the US Library of Congress as an accepted archival format alongside other formats like PDF or PNG being this very Long term hasn’t changed much. The developers are really committed and show that they’re committed through the already, I don’t know what it is, decades of maintenance that they put into it. 00:05:13 - Speaker 1: I think if you think about products that apply principles very thoroughly, you kind of have to distinguish between the products that are just very thorough at applying the principles that the team sort of believes in. And I think one example is the original iPhone, like it’s very clear. When you use the original iPhone, you kind of feel almost what the team behind uh the iPhone stood for, like what they believed in and what they wouldn’t sacrifice, and like what their principal stack is. And that creates a very distilled experience and it’s also a great sort of um tool for wrangling complexity. Like if you smash the iPhone home button enough times, you will return to safety and then like that’s just it’s it’s a very, very cool design. But uh I’m actually more interested in products that or I, I think we have that covered, like you touched on, on this in, in your, uh, I’ll plug your own show, but uh you touched on it in the, in the manual um episode for the Muse podcast where iOS development mobile development in general has created this structure of, OK, let’s just make the products as simple as possible. Let’s just make them as intuitive as possible, they shouldn’t even require a manual. Why are you shipping a manual with the product like the iPhone comes with 3 pages. And I think adhering to principles is necessary to deliver those kind of experiences for, you know, very approachable, very simple products, but it’s also necessary if you want to deliver products with any kind of like, I think you said any kind of depth. And so I’m more interested in principles or products where they’re almost actively confusing or like they seem like they’re poorly designed on the surface, unless you read the manual, unless you read the philosophy of the creators. And so I think they’re an example is clearlyIM, right? If you, if you use them for the first time, you’re like, how does this even make sense if you’ve never heard of the principles, right? If you want to use the mouse to use them, you’re going to have a really hard time. And in comparison, sort of to pick in the same domain, Microsoft Word is very much a product that tries to adapt to users’ needs and offers flexibility, but in a sense of go use it however you want it, it’ll do that for you. And Vim says, no, no, it’s very composable, but you’re going to have to buy into our methodology and I think the latter is sort of really interesting. Muse fits into that category. I would say that. Uh, we all have a shared background here with with Hiroku, and the twelvefactor app. I think that falls into the same category as in if you’re going to consistently want to write to the file system on Hioku with these ephemeral dinos, you’re gonna, it’s not possible, right? And so if you don’t change your mind, you will have a miserable experience using this product. And so I’m, I’m wondering if there’s other products that come to mind for the two of you that sort of very much like if you don’t buy into it, it just feels like the people didn’t know what they were doing designing the product versus if you read the manual, something clicks and then you’re like, I get it now. 00:08:13 - Speaker 3: I think Git might be in this category for me. So Git, if you approach it and you just look at the porcelain, that is the commands that you do to you use to do common stuff, it’s. Really confusing. So if I want to send you a change to my code, it’s like, check out a branch and then stage your commit and then push it to a remote over at like what? But if you take a step back and see that Git is a system for tracking content, immutable content over time, everything makes perfect sense in light of that. And so you have to have that underlying knowledge and model of it’s this tag of code without it, it’s just very confusing. 00:08:43 - Speaker 2: Talking about the uh the Hiroku example, of course, there’s sort of what, what came first, the principles or the product. You know, I think it’s, it is a chicken and egg thing they developed together and notably their 12 factor app, we wrote well into the existence of the product. It had existed for 4 plus years. And so we, we sort of discovered these patterns and these things that made application. Development easier, particularly in the context of continuous deployment and agile development and all that sort of stuff. Eventually, we wrote them into this manifesto to make it easier to comprehend the product, but the product already existed and already had these principles that we had over time. So I wonder for other uh products maybe that some of us have worked on. I know, Max, you talked about GitHub actions, you know, that was when you, you drove um early in your year run of GitHub and and you mentioned that that kind of was also driven by the same set of core principles, uh, like that kind of these building blocks. But did that start in that example, or other, others you’ve worked on, did you start With a list of products that are enumerated and written down that the team can understand and build against, or do you only realize the products afterwards that they sort of emerge from the crafting of the product itself? 00:09:57 - Speaker 1: I think in the, in the case of GitHub Actions, it’s worth pointing out that GitHub was a 12 or definitely a decade old company, I think 12 years and so it already had Ingrained principles in what it believed in. So I think in that case, you have the luxury of sort of building on top of them. What we did with GitHub Actions is is actually at the root of what GitHub believes in, right? Like GitHub is about multiplayer software development. It’s about saying, OK, how can I reuse and remake the work of others? How can I stand on the shoulders of giants, basically, that’s sort of the whole ethos of open source as well. And so when we looked at Git have actions and workflows for software automation, CI, CD, and so on, we realized that for the most part, that principle is largely lacking, right? Like nobody is actually saying, instead of having one monolithic pipeline that you know, the team that’s building the app built from scratch with some bash scripts, there are very few reusable components. And so from day one, we decided, OK, that’s this has to be part of the uh ethos or the principles that we have. Applied it to design this. But then I think, uh, only it, it really only turns into a true principle once you’ve proven it almost in the market, or when you’re like, OK, this is just not just a hypothesis. This is truly a guiding principle where if we continue to double down on this, then good things will happen. Otherwise, you kind of have to reevaluate it and say, well, are we wrong about this? And so I think the conviction and the principle grew stronger as we went along, but it didn’t start from day one. 00:11:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the idea that principles are something that don’t just come out of the ivory tower, the stone tablets from on high or whatever metaphor you want to use, but are something an idea you have a hunch you have, but then they need to be validated, just like any other part of building a thing. Uh, that, that really resonates strongly with me right now because that’s a lot of the process we have been going through with Muse. For example, the modelessness was a pretty core principle early on that if if you want to make this fast tool and you have all the screen space given over to, um, you know, no chrome, all your screen space is given over to your content that you want to move really fast, like a powerful. On the desktop, then that implies that you, uh, shouldn’t have a bunch of toolbars and stuff, but in fact, you should have these gestures and things and early versions of the product had that say a version of that principle, but often the implementation of it, which involved holding stylus in undiscoverable ways and and other things like that, uh we we found just didn’t validate with users. We couldn’t, people didn’t get it. It didn’t strike a chord, and then we we had to adapt that over time. And I guess that core principle of modelessness or the core principle of try to leave all the screen space for the users’ content, uh, we did ultimately, as you say, build conviction in that over time, but the implementation of how we actually achieved that changed a lot. 00:12:47 - Speaker 3: And now I’m realizing that a lot of the most interesting principled products, the principles aren’t these opinions that come from nowhere, they’re actually understandings about reality that you’ve kind of uniquely grasped. So in the case of GitHub is this idea that basically all software is developed by multiple people, yet our tools initially were very single node based and it had a sort of similar story, um, likewise with, with Git is this idea that code is a, is a. Of content that changes over time and everything kind of follows from that. Um, so as I think about these principles that we have in Muse, they often come back to these fundamental understandings about the human body, the human mind, how, how the creative process actually works and a lot of stuff flows from that. 00:13:24 - Speaker 1: Probably also not a coincidence that you already have fairly strongly formed principles with uh I don’t know how long you, you sort of think of Muse as existing. But the work that you did at Ik and Switch was this cultivation of these principles and the things that you believe in and like that was a very largely like research driven and I think now with Muse you’re sort of putting those to the test, but that still means that they’re much stronger than, I don’t know if you, if you look at obviously the next door neighbor to principles is something like company values. One of the things that’s really frustrating when looking at company values. is you could actually kind of just take all the startups in Silicon Valley and overlay their…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/80-planning/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: A theme that runs through all of this, whether it’s a big company or a small team, is it’s really about building our collective knowledge. We can extract all the most relevant pieces of information from everyone’s domain and bring them together. From that comes a plan that we all feel ownership for, and then when we go off to do our heads down work, we’re working off that shared plan where we for a brief moment, brief beautiful moment in time, we understood the problem in a totality that no single human could. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, I don’t know if I told you, but my Christmas gift was a used guitar, acoustic guitar, and I’ve been blinking around on that, maybe not quite at the same level as devotion as your piano studies, but I’m quite enjoying it and I found myself reflecting on the tacit knowledge revolution of YouTube theme that you’ve brought up multiple times on this podcast because the last time I tried to play guitar, I don’t know if it was in high school or something. And you would seek out these COVID nuggets of knowledge from just people you would meet or whatever and lessons were expensive and time consuming, but now you just go on YouTube and there’s just tons of people who will just show you exactly what you want to know at whatever pace you want in great detail. You can watch it in slow motion if you want, you can rewind. That’s a really incredible way to do self-learning, particularly if you’re not that devoted to it. It’s just kind of a little side hobby when you have a few spare minutes. 00:01:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s amazing what you can find on YouTube these days. It’s so helpful. Now, for you, is YouTube the primary source, or do you also do an app or do you do Zoom lessons? 00:01:56 - Speaker 1: There is a guitar tab app, you know, essentially a tab is like the sheet music effectively for guitar. We can look up a folk song or a popular song and find out how to play it. Actually, our colleague Yulia, who plays the ukulele a bit, pointed me towards that. So that’s nice for learning a specific song, but it’s more about technique, which is, OK, you know, I’d always got to figure it out with like plucking with my fingers, but maybe, you know, playing with a pick could be a good technique to learn, but when I try to do it, it sounds terrible. How do I do that? And again, there’s probably a conventional method of, you know, you sign up for lessons or whatever, but I just don’t have time, interest, whatever for that. But this very self-directed method of I can just type into the YouTube search bar, acoustic guitar, beginner strumming technique or beginner picking technique, and inevitably there’s dozens of really high quality choices. Well, I’ve got exciting news to share. Muse for Teams is now in beta, so it’s open sign up. Anyone can go to the Museapp.com/teams/signup page and you can pick a team and try it out. And essentially this takes the thinking tool of Muse that we’ve been working on for a few years, but adds these collaboration features, what you would think of from like a Google Docs or a Figma with the avatars and the cursors moving around the board. But we’ve had this in kind of an alpha test with a small number of teams. The last 5 months or so, and we’ve done quite a lot. I’ll link out to the announcement there, everything from a new NavA and board Zoom and connection tool, as well as all these collaboration features you expect like comments and following and copying board URLs. So yeah, we’re really excited to share that with the world and it was quite a lot of hard work by everyone on the team, including both of us. So give ourselves a little back pat for that and we’re looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks. 00:03:48 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m really excited. This is one of the big pieces in our long term puzzle collaboration, so excited to see it finally land. 00:03:57 - Speaker 1: Indeed, yeah, I think we’ve often spoken about that long term roadmap as the do the individual thinking tool on the iPad first, then we go to the multi-device with kind of Mac and iPad and the local first sync between them, and this is that next step, is being able to collaborate with others when that’s appropriate. And yeah, I’ll link out to the announcement post that has all the goodies and screenshots and videos and everything like that. But what I’ll direct your attention to for the purpose of this podcast episode is there’s a whole sample workspace that’s included with the new onboarding, and there’s also a templates button in the toolbar that basically lets you add some templates, and if you were to click on that, you would notice that all the entries are things that are around this theme of planning. And so, we’ve decided that based on how people were using the alpha, that kind of narrowing the use case to or kind of a set of use cases around the theme of planning or planning together with your team, is a great place for us to focus. It’s a place that Muse can. Be kind of best to breed even though it’s a very general purpose app that can be used for a lot of things in the collaborative space. We think that this planning realm is where we can really excel, so we’re excited about that, but it naturally leads into our topic today, which is planning. So, let me first pose the question, as we always do, Mark, what first comes to mind when you hear the word planning or planning your work? 00:05:27 - Speaker 2: Well, I certainly get a lot of emotional connotations, as I’m sure everyone who’s worked in product development does, but simply I would just say it’s the team discussing and deciding what to work on in the future. What about you? 00:05:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think there is almost a knee jerk or an immediate thing that comes to mind, which is basically long meetings, listening to laundry lists of details about other people’s work that isn’t really relevant to you and is kind of boring, and yeah, just this really kind of nuts and bolts, just let me get back to work. Why do I have to sit through this doesn’t feel like work, something like that. Indeed, when we were first discussing on the team, whether planning is something that we really wanted to focus and use collaborative product around, there was some level of, I’m not sure what you call it, groaning or yeah, folks have that same, I think visceral reaction that I do in some ways, which is planning’s boring, and we don’t want to make a boring app for a boring thing. Why in the world would we want to make that be our big focus? And indeed I ended up writing a memo based on reflecting on this called Against Boring Planning, again I’ll link that in the show notes here, but when I stopped to think about it, it comes down to the kind of good versus bad planning. If I can go for such a direct value judgment there, which is planning your work as an individual or together with a group, when it has these bad vibes, I think it is because, so you’re not doing it right, and I have been on a lot of teams and have had a lot of experience. that are like that and reflecting back now, I think, OK, that wasn’t a good way to organize a team’s work. But when I think of the positive vibes and the good kind, let’s call it good planning, you know, I think, OK, I’m getting together with a group of people that I like, or at least I work really well with, to think about what’s the next step in achieving a mission that I really deeply care about, and we need to get into the difficult questions and the trade-offs and think about what capabilities our team. Has to bring to bear against the opportunities that are in front of us, which you know might for a product team be as simple as, you know, feature requests and bug fixes and things like that, and going into it and really hashing it out and coming out of it with a sense not only of specifics like, hey, we’re gonna work on this first and the second, but also who I’m going to work with, what’s exciting about the projects and Just a sense of being inspired because it makes concrete that next major iteration of work again against a mission that I’ve signed up for in my career or whatever team I’m on currently. And yeah, a great planning meeting is honestly a really enjoyable and inspiring experience and I come out of it thinking, OK, now I’m really excited for the work that’s ahead. 00:08:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the things I’ve learned, having experienced a wide array of planning processes and outcomes is that it’s a very a chemical process by which I mean in subtle ways it can go very well or very poorly, and a lot of it has to do with inspiration and motivation and interpersonal relationships and stuff. So it’s kind of a subtle process. It’s very easy to wear a lens in which you only see the mechanical stuff, you know, these tasks in this order and this assignments and so on. But I think the key to good planning is getting that alchemy right, and like you were saying, getting everyone motivated and aligned behind the vision. 00:08:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there does seem almost like a, I use the term working chemistry often, maybe we’ve talked about that in the context of team building and recruiting and so forth, but yeah, there is a special magic when you get the right people together, working on the right problem and you have a good plan. But it’s more art than science, that’s for sure. Yeah, when I reflect back on my own career, for sure, I certainly didn’t think that hard about it in the early days, but I think it was at Hiroku where I really started to think in terms of management as more of a first class concern, and the team was growing maybe more quickly there than other teams I’ve been on in the past, and I did end up going a little bit down the rabbit hole of say like agile methodology, which I found interesting or codified a lot of things that I thought were good about ways to work. But I also got really into say like project management software. So back then, yeah, you had probably Jira, there’s all kinds of different kinds of ticket trackers, open source and commercial that often had like the ability to do different kind of like timeline road mapping things and Gantt charts and you could do burn down charts and you could do all these things that seem to bring a kind of systemization to the work a group of people was doing. One that I remember liking was Pivotal Tracker, which was by a kind of a consulting shop in the Ruby Agile world we were part of and was really well made and encoded a lot of their processes, but using that product actually was an eye opener to me because it really encoded their team’s process and their teams. Way of doing things, which I think was good for them, but maybe was a questionable fit for us and indeed even through the course of Hiokku as the team scaled and as our needs changed and as the business was more mature, we just needed very different things all the time and so there was no one. Kind of single process and certainly no one single tool, and especially the more the tool encoded a lot of process and was really rigid and structured like a lot of these project management software tend to be, the more you’re forcing your work and your team’s shape into the software that encodes this process. Actually it was probably around that time I discovered Trello, which is still, I think, a great piece of software for its incredible simplicity, although I think to some extent the conbo boards built into GitHub issues and notion end up competing with it, but at least that had a certain simplicity, the swim lanes and the cards, and there’s a lot of different ways you can use that. It’s more like building blocks that you can use to develop your own team’s way of planning things. So I think it was the whole Hirogu experience that really took me into first of all, caring about this. As opposed to coming at it from the crafts person perspective, which is like, I don’t want to think about planning. I just want a process. I just want to get back to doing my work and I saw what a big difference it made to, you know, if you’re really all on the same page about what you’re doing, you just do a way better job and you go faster and you make fewer mistakes and you waste less work. And I started to care about it there, including the tools and the processes. What were some of your early experiences with planning, I guess, in the form that may have shaped how you think about it? 00:11:51 - Speaker 2: Well, at Rokku, I saw quite a range of both company scales and teams, so I sort of bounced around within the company, so I got a little sampling across both of those dimensions, and I feel like that taught me a lot, and we can talk about some specific examples if you’re interested. And then later at Stripe, that was a larger company, so I got more experienced with more involved and necessarily complicated planning processes, both because of the size and because of the complexity of a regulated financial services business. So I feel like I have quite the array of experiences to draw from for better horse. 00:12:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Well, and if you want to consider the low end of the scale there, you know, we started Muse, it was just me, you and Julia. So, you know, we just kind of sat in a room and said, hmm, what are we going to do? Well, how about this? I actually remember that at my very first business, even long before Hiroku, we just wrote everything we were working on on a whiteboard, the end, because it was me and one other person, right? And that really worked great for quite a while. But I haven’t experienced that bigger scale. I think for me the biggest, well, even company I’ve been a part of is around 100 people and you know, you can debate. It’s probably more about when you say team, does that mean the whole company? Probably not. You’re talking more about the people you work with kind of directly day to day, but you’re much more scaled up experience with Stripe, particularly I assume by the time you left there and they were getting a big company. I’d love to hear some more stories from that because that’s way outside my realm of experience. 00:13:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, probably my most memorable planning experience at Stripe was, it was towards the end of my, my time there, and the company was getting bigger, solidly several 100 people plus, and we were just starting to grapple with company-wide systematic planning because the more informal and ad hoc processes that we had done were sort of breaking down, especially with respect to visibility throughout the company and dependencies, which are a big deal in a financial services firm. And so I ended up actually helping with this process whereby we did a company-wide planning and there was a there was sort of a template. I forget the exact form, but the basic idea is that a company had a vision and metrics and proposed projects for the quarter or the half, I think it was. And those were reviewed in several ways. Obviously the team worked on a draft plan. They were also reviewed upwards, so like the head of engineering or whatever would review engineering plans, but there was also a pretty elaborate dependency management exercise where I made a big spreadsheet. I think it had like 25 rows and 25 columns where each row and column was a team, and if you created a dependency on another team, so for example, if I was standing up a new payment method we needed to work with the risk team to ensure that risk was appropriately managed and the compliance team and the legal team and the infrastructure team and and the country team and so on. And so you would like fill in each of those cells in th…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/81-evergreen-notes/ 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: We have to make sure that if you’re a brand new obsidian user, it feels accessible, it has infinite depth, and you can go as deep and crazy as you want, but that that surface level is intuitive and inviting to most people, and that’s a really hard thing to balance. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us as a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about me use the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. I joined today by Stefan Ago of Obsidian. How’s it going? And Stefan, you’ve got some nice recipes up on your website alongside various blog posts about tools for thought and technology. Tell me a little bit about pillowy Swedish cinnamon rolls. 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Oh, that’s a good one. So I grew up in France. My mom is half American, half Swedish, my dad is 100% French, and my mom is. A teacher, later in life she became a professional baker. She was always cooking and baking throughout my childhood and taught us a lot. And she was also trying to infuse the household with her American culture and her Swedish culture as well, because I lived in France until I was 17. And so, One of those things is a Swedish cinnamon roll. I think in the US, you know, the kind of cinnamon roll that you’re used to is probably derived from that. It’s usually made with, you know, cinnamon or cardamom, and I came across this technique which is common in Asia called tanghong, which is a technique for making bread out of a, it’s almost like a very, I don’t know if anyone knows what a roux is, which is also a French technique, which is a mix of flour and water that you use to make gravy and other types of things. You use basically a very Like a slurry of water and flour that you don’t darken at all, and you put part of that into the dough. And what it does is somehow, I don’t know all of the chemistry of this, but I think what it does is it encapsulates some of the moisture into the flour, and so when you mix that into the main part of the dough. The dough stays really soft and fluffy and pillowy, and it’s just a really amazing texture. And so I discovered this technique and I think, you know, it’s used for like milk buns and different things in Asia, but I thought it would be a good fit for the Swedish cinnamon roll that I always love to make around the holidays, you know, in December, even though I live in Los Angeles now and it’s not so cold, it’s just a kind of a nice memory. And so it turned out to be the perfect fit in an interesting fusion of two things. And so I put this recipe out. I don’t have very many recipes on my website, but it started to become a little bit of a section, and so I decided to post more of these because they’re really fun for me and very iterative. I like to incorporate techniques that I find online and get feedback from people who try it and. Iterate on them, so maybe it will become a more important section of my website. I think there’s only 2 or 3 recipes on there right now. 00:03:28 - Speaker 2: Especially like the I guess cultural mashup aspect of that, obviously drawing from your own heritage but also reaching outside of that. I always find, I guess as a person who’s an immigrant myself and I’m raising my child who has two parents from different countries and is living in a third country, so maybe not too dissimilar from your upbringing. And yeah, I think there’s just a lot of, I don’t know, interesting, you know, if we say everything is a remix now, you know, this kind of remix of fundamental cultures, I just think there’s a lot there. 00:04:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, being able to pick and choose techniques, ideas from different cultures and like bring them together is really fun. That’s how I grew up, and so it just comes naturally to me. 00:04:13 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about your background in the professional world. 00:04:18 - Speaker 1: Well, so today I’m the CEO of Obsidian. Obsidian is an app probably a lot of your listeners will know about in the tools for thought kind of space. Before that, I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. I’ve run lots of companies, probably the most well known of them is called Lumi. We built a platform that helps entrepreneurs and Teams collaborate with manufacturers, particularly in the packaging space, so it’s a really interesting problem of There’s so much manufacturing capability in the world. Like there’s all these factories that are out there that can make things, but I find that the interface to access that capacity is Very confusing and difficult, and the idea behind the company was what if we could make it as easy to interface with factories as it is to interface with cloud computing. And so that was a really fun adventure. We worked on that for about 8 years, sold the company, and then I found myself having a little bit more free time to think about things. I have been using. A variety of different journaling and wiki type of software for a while and Obsidian came along, founded by Shia Lee and Erica Shu back in 2020. I started using it pretty much right away. It slotted into what I was doing perfectly and. I was using other tools before that and kind of had mashed up a few different things together. And Obsidian just sort of did exactly what I was trying to do by scotch taping all these different solutions together. And so I just fit like a glove right away, started using it, became close with the founders and started working on community contributions to the app. And Eventually, once I was leaving Lumi, they brought me on as the CEO and it’s a very small team. We’re only, you know, 6 people full time. So that title probably like yours, Adam, holds maybe a different meaning within our group, but it’s been really fun and I’ve been on it full time now for about 5 or 6 months, which has been really great. 00:06:32 - Speaker 2: And it must be quite a dramatic experience to come. You’ve obviously started your own company and scaled that up and been the leader there, but coming into a tool that’s already established itself, at least within a particular niche, already has a big audience of fans, already has an existing team, plenty of culture and values and all that sort of thing. Obviously you We’re already resonant with that culture and values coming in, but to suddenly be on the inside and particularly to have this vested authority, all of a sudden, did you find that disorienting? How did that challenge compared to the challenge of starting something totally from scratch and sort of building every piece of it versus needing to like, I don’t know, bootstrap all the context or build the moral authority within the team? 00:07:15 - Speaker 1: Well, I’ve never worked at a company that I didn’t start until now, so it was surprisingly natural because I Had developed this relationship to the founders over a long period of time, very gradually, very organically just through chatting with them and reporting various bugs with the app and, you know, building some community contributions and things like that. So it was surprisingly easy and very natural. It was just really like, instead of spending, you know, a few hours here and there working on obsidian every week. What if I was just doing that full time, and I do think it’s a At least in my mind. When I was thinking about what’s next after Lumia, my default would have been to start another company, but I couldn’t think of anything that I Thought was more exciting than obsidian. And so that to me, at least in my own head, it says a lot. I don’t know if it says a lot to other people, but it does say a lot that I would rather kind of go and help build this thing, which I think is is such an amazing app and community than try to start another thing from scratch right now. 00:08:28 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that entrepreneurship, you shouldn’t start with, I want to start a company. You should start with, I want to solve a problem or have an impact on the world or go to a place where I can contribute the most. Really starting a company should be your last resort. If there’s really no other way to accomplish, I agree, 00:08:47 - Speaker 2: that’s what you want to do, then you say, well, damn it, I guess I have to start a company. 00:08:51 - Speaker 1: Oh well, I have so many people come to me for entrepreneurship advice and my first advice is don’t do it. Most of the time. I’m constantly like trying to convince them not to start a company. And part of it is just me kind of probing to see how much they actually care about whatever they’re doing that, you know, they can deal with that because that’s pretty much what you’re going to get from the world, like 99% of the time is like, why does this exist? or why are you doing this? But I kind of took my own advice here and I think a lot of times it’s better to go, you know, put more wood behind fewer arrows. 00:09:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s also a really unique opportunity because getting the chance to, for example, I hired a CEO at Hiroku after we’ve been in business for a few years, and that was a really great opportunity to work with someone much more experienced and with knowledge about the spaces we wanted to move into. For me, that was a new experience, yeah, always being an entrepreneur and then kind of Leading or being a co-leader in it until I’m done or don’t have anything else to say and then I just sort of leave. It’s really tricky to bring in a new leader, but it can also be an injection of new expertise, new perspective, new direction, new vision, especially because very often the kinds of people that like to start something are not the same. People or don’t have the same skill set or just passions to want to scale it up, to want to see it grow wider, address, be available to more people, or just the natural kind of management responsibilities that go with managing a team, and existing product, a big base of customers who just seem to have an endless list of bugs and feature requests. It can take a different personality type. So when that can be done well, I think it’s really great to bring in an experienced leader at the right moment. 00:10:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I was so impressed with Erica and Shea. People might know them as Silver and Leak out, which is their name online, but they’re a little bit younger than I am and have such a mature point of view on how they want to build the business of Obsidian from the start, they Made the decision not to go down the VC path, and I’ve, in my own businesses over the years have literally tried every different method of funding any business. I’ve bootstrapped companies. I’ve gone the VC route. Did Shark Tank, did Kickstarter did every different thing you can imagine, loans like if I type your name into YouTube with Shark Tank right now, will I get a 00:11:12 - Speaker 1: clip? You’re gonna find my co-founder Jessie. I was not brave enough to go on there myself, but she’s great, and you should watch that episode. But I think they took a very mature path really thinking about the long term, which is aligned with kind of what the app is trying to do, and having the experience of going through all of those different ways of building a business. I realized it is really hard to run a bootstrapped company and try to grow it kind of on your own. And I think that the approach that we’re taking with Obsidian is definitely hard mode in a way. It seems surprising that you could just easily get millions of dollars, but if you have a good enough idea, there’s investors like banging at your door trying to give you money and it actually takes a lot of Fortitude to say, no, I don’t want millions of dollars. We’re going to just do it, you know, ourselves, we’re gonna grow very carefully and organically and in an almost like selfish way, because I’m such a fan of obsidian first and foremost and a user of it, you know, pretty much every day, have it open in the background of my computer if I’m not using it actively. I almost selfishly wanted to just kind of help ensure that obsidian continues on that independent path and continues to build kind of in a very thoughtful way. And what could I bring from a business standpoint to the table to create the structure that would enable that to continue being a priority. 00:12:45 - Speaker 2: And it’s going to lead to this later, but since we’re sort of on the topic now of the kind of the mechanics, which includes, yeah, financing, team size, but business model, obviously, it’s what I would call a prosumer model. There’s the free product you can download and use, and then there’s the sort of services, subscription services like Sync that you can sort of add on to that once you’re getting value from the product. So I feel like prosumer is something that has like a longer ramp up, but you need to kind of like do that upfront investment, but it also doesn’t have a very good shape for venture because it doesn’t necessarily have that big kind of unicorn in 10 years shape to the graph that say like a B2BAS company might. And then the middle ground there often ends up that companies like this basically finance it through just doing a bunch of consulting projects in the early days. I think maybe like yeah, the 37 signals folks is one example. I’ve done that with multiple businesses to the point you’re willing to reveal how does obsidian strike that balance? Have you been successful enough that you’re just able to finance on customer revenue or that early upfront investment feels like it’s got to come from somewhere? 00:13:50 - Speaker 1: And when you say prosumer, I think in my head, at least I think of prosumer as a market as a user type, but From a business model standpoint, I would say freemium is more the term that I’ve come to. Is that what you mean when you say prosumer, do you mean freemium? 00:14:06 - Speaker 2: No, because you can have a freemium B2B and you can have freemium B2C. So music is one of the main areas like yeah, podcasters and DJs and whatever. This is actually you’ve got people who are often hobbyists or aspiring professionals though realistically. Maybe many of them are never going to make a living from it, but they are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on gear on software, etc. So classically B2C, you can’t get anyone to pay for anything. You just monetize with ads or whatever, and then B2B, you know, you get those big sort of company contracts where they’re paying thousands or tens of thousands a month. And so I think of prosumer as being that kind of in between state of like Dropbox is a classic example, like pay $10 a month. Yeah, you get access to like, yeah, again, audio and video stuff, etc. I don’t know, maybe you don’t think of yourself that way, but that’s how I would slot it. 00:14:54 - Speaker 1: Well, I don’t, but I’m trying to kind of come around to your way of thinking of it like in that world, definitely, you know, Apple Notes and OneNote or some of these kind of apps that come shipped with the OS would probably be the consumer one like everyone just has it by default and it’s free, it’s bundled in. Obsidian has a Freeman model so you can totally use Obsidian for free and for personal use, but it is a little more advanced, it has more complexity to it than an Apple notes. It’s trying to, you know, give you a little bit more power user type of features, I suppose, and maybe that’s where the prosumer angle comes in. I think for us in terms of what the kind of broader. Goals of what we’re trying to do are we’re really trying to democratize these tools like we’re trying to make it easily accessible for people to think using these tools and so we don’t feature anything behind a price, so it’s not like There’s a pro version that you pay $10 a month for. The c…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/82-spatial-computing/ 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: With spatial computing, there’s a level of trust that the user is placing in you as a developer that most software developers have not had to handle. On a phone, if the app crashes or freezes, it’s annoying, but it’s not going to make you sick. It’s not going to viscerally affect the central nervous system. Whereas in the case of any immersive software, it will. You’re going to directly put their brain in a state that is uncomfortable or even harmful. 00:00:33 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team, the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Hey. 00:00:47 - Speaker 2: Joined today by our guest Eliochenberg of SoftSpace. 00:00:51 - Speaker 1: Hey, Adam, hey Mark. 00:00:53 - Speaker 2: And Elio, I understand that you’ve been doing a little bit of breath work recently. 00:00:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I was just sharing with you some of my learnings on the importance of breathing, which I feel like a lot of people maybe have figured out before, you know, way before I came across this topic, but I started trying some Wim Hof breathing before some of my like cafe work sessions, which is equal parts actually very invigorating and effective. I find it helps me focus and also makes me feel like a complete weirdo sitting in public, like staring out the window and breathing really intensely. So I recommend it to people who are looking for ways to, you know, quickly get in the zone and focus when they maybe are a bit distracted. And if you have any tips, you know, on different resources, I’m very open. I’m very curious about this. 00:01:39 - Speaker 3: What does this breathing technique entail? What are we signing up for here? 00:01:42 - Speaker 1: So, I mean, Wim Hof breathing specifically is this cycle of very intense breath in, breath out. There’s nothing too technically complicated about it, it’s more just about sticking to a certain rhythm and at the end of, I think like 20 or 30 breaths, you hold your breath for about a minute. There’s a very helpful Spotify podcast episode that’s like 5 minutes long, that just guides you through it. And so there’s all this drumming and, you know, Wim Hof is kind of like they’re motivating you through the whole thing. So I find that after I do this breath work, I am indeed able to just like really get in the zone and whether it’s for writing or cracking some other like tough cognitive problem, I’m definitely more focused afterward than without doing this. 00:02:30 - Speaker 2: It feels a little bit adjacent to meditation somehow, but I also know you breath work, I don’t know about the specific one, but just the topic generally, I’ve known people in the psychedelic community that basically say you can get unbelievable altered states. One example here you’re giving here is like, yeah, greater focus or something like that, and you wouldn’t believe it because yeah, breathing is so fundamental, it’s literally automatic and What is there to it? It seems so simple. There’s some incredible potential there to affect ourselves. I never dabbled myself, but I’m certainly curious. 00:03:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so one discipline I came across this holotropic breathing, I believe it’s called, which is you can breathe yourself into a very altered state that’s akin to chemically altered psychedelic states. 00:03:17 - Speaker 2: Have to give that a whirl. And tell us about first what SoftSpace is and then love to hear about your journey and how you got there. 00:03:25 - Speaker 1: Sure, so I am the founder of a software company called SoftSpace, and we’re building a product called SoftSpace. Which is a spatial canvas for thinking. So it is a 3D augmented reality app that lets you organize and make sense of the ideas, the images, the websites, PDFs that you are working with in your creative projects or in your personal or professional projects. And the way we frame the value proposition is that Soft space shows you the true shape of your ideas, and there’s a lot of research that has been done over the years into the immense, almost like superpowers that we have around spatial memory, spatial reasoning, and up until very, very recently. which we’re going to talk about in this episode, until very recently, we didn’t have the technology to really tap into those innate abilities. And so the best that we had was like a larger display, a computer display for, you know, showing you more windows at the same time, but that’s only scratching the surface when it comes to the brain’s ability to make sense of and to remember and to think about objects in space, which we have evolved over millions of years to do very, very well. And so I started building this company in 2017, way before, you know, the current crop of hardware, standalone headsets was really even on the horizon with this kind of, I guess, expectation and faith that eventually the technology would catch up to this idea, and I think that it’s starting to, and that feels really good. 00:05:06 - Speaker 2: And my first introduction to your product was we met in a cafe in Berlin last year and you handed me the, I guess this would have been the, at the time, the latest version of the Oculus, which I think has been, or in the last 10 years has really been on the forefront of this, and, you know, it has this element where I can still kind of see the environment, so I’m not just completely zoned out in a public space, but I’m also seeing essentially notes and other ideas floating in space and indeed I can interact with them and Yeah, the how viable is it relative to the Hollywood version of virtual reality that we have been seeing for ages is a huge question and for sure an app developer like yourself that chooses to not only pick a particular platform, but the technology in general, you’re making a bet that the amount of time you’re going to be working on it will overlap with the eventual viability of it for your particular use case or your particular market. 00:06:01 - Speaker 1: Correct, yeah, and I mean, I would say one of our investors said it’s still early, but it’s no longer too early, and I think that’s getting more and more true all the time. I mean, even with, of course, the very big news of Apple finally entering this space, I think we’re still a little ways out from really mainstream adoption of computers they wear over your eyes, but if It were ever going to happen, this is the path that I think the industry, you know, needs to take to get there. And I think one of my personal motivations for continuing to work on SoftSpace is to offer a vision for what our augmented reality spatial computing future could look like that I think we want to want, right? So, I think up until very recently, the overwhelming popular imagination when it came to VR, for example, was at best like a little bit goofy and at worst kind of dystopian and not something you would necessarily want the next generation of humans on the planet to be living and working in because it felt very disconnected, it felt very escapist perhaps, and I think that this technology is So much more than what we’ve been able to imagine up until this point. Like we’ve been able to imagine a lot with essentially nothing, right? And fictional depictions of, you know, the metaverse or fictional depictions of very futuristic holographic UIs, but those have really only been fictional and now we’re finally seeing. The reality of it, and I think that there are many possible paths technology can take, and the underlying power of it has nothing to do with the computers or the chips or the lenses. The underlying power of this is the fact that the human brain and body are inherently spatial, right? We are spatial organisms. And so whatever positive outcomes or whatever negative outcomes come from this technology will be rooted in that reality. And so I’m both optimistic and also now that the reality is finally here, you know, we see Apple making a big move for it. I’m a little bit trepidatious about sort of where this could all go. I mean, we’ve seen with other technologies that people had very optimistic visions for, right, turned out maybe not completely positively. So I think this is at least has that risk, if not a greater risk because of how it works if it is. 00:08:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and we’ll definitely get on to all the present and future here, but can you tell us a little bit about your background? What would lead you to, you know, that moment in 2017? What you said, this is what I want to be doing. 00:08:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So, I was in architecture school and I was halfway through my second year, and I took a summer job at a design and art studio here in Berlin called Studio Oliver Liasson. They had just bought the Oculus DK2, the Development kit 2 VR headset. It made quite a splash. A lot of people who are excited about technology had gotten their hands on one. I really wanted to check one out. The studio got one thinking it would be like any other piece of consumer tech, you could boot it up and try stuff out, but it really was a development kit. There was nothing that you could do with it if you didn’t code something up yourself. And so luckily I got a job as the research resident, poking around with this thing, trying to figure out both how it could be used as a medium for artworks, as well as a tool for the production of artworks that maybe weren’t digital or virtual of themselves, but would benefit from some sort of like virtual visualization or some other tooling around that. 00:09:48 - Speaker 2: I mean, architecture is certainly a place where use cases spring to mind very readily. Let’s walk a client through kind of a design that we made, you know, in some CAD tool or let’s do some design work there. So presumably those are the sorts of things you were exploring. 00:10:04 - Speaker 1: Yes, and I would say much more than that as well because this studio is very much an art studio first and foremost, and one with a history of being interested in the body, the human body, how we relate to ourselves and to others and what different spaces and different spatial effects like lights, acoustics, atmospheric effects can do to our sense of ourselves and others. And so this is actually Maybe where the most exciting promises of virtual reality at the time, it was only VR virtual reality came in because you could create effects that would be physically either very difficult or impossible to do. So one of my favorite demos that we built was this non-Euclidean, sort of like castle that you walked through. So it was back in the era of like really long cables that connected you to a PC. We had the PC in the middle of an open area. The user would put on the goggles at one edge of the open area and walk in a circle. And as they walked, they would walk through doors, and around each door was a new room with an artwork in the center, and as they walked, at some point, you know, they would realize, wait, I should be back where I started, but I’m not. I’m actually somewhere else. I’ve actually entered yet another larger room that shouldn’t physically be able to have fit into this floor plan. These were the kinds of experiments that we were doing, and during this period of experimentation, um, I came to two formative realizations. So the first was that the physical building that the studio was in, it had about 110 people at the time, and it was in this old beer brewery in the middle of Berlin. The physical studio itself was an incredibly important part of the creative and production process. We walked around and there are models everywhere, images pinned up on boards, books, there’s like libraries all over the place, half finished sort of sketches laying around at people’s desks, and this physical space was in and of itself a framework on which the creative process hung. And that was something incredible to see, and also, you know, this is quite a successful studio, and I felt that having that space was a major asset for the studio to be able do its work. And the second realization, as I was working with VR was that many of the same qualities of that physical space actually don’t have to be physical in and of themselves. So the images that you had pinned up, the notes that you had laying around, these were actually at the end of the day, just media for holding information, right, for conveying information, and you could do something very similar with a purely virtual environment, you know, you can’t completely recreate it, but Not everybody has access to a giant beer brewery or even a very large room, right, to lay out all of their thoughts and their ideas. Maybe this technology could democratize access to space for thinking, space for doing your best work. And once that idea kind of sparked in my mind I couldn’t stop thinking about it and sort of stereotypical, like I was like laying awake at night dreaming, you know, oh, if you could also make this multi-user, then you can like meet with people from anywhere in the world. And so at some point I thought, OK, this has been great, but I need to go see if I can build this thing, and I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. But apparently I was starting a tech startup, a software startup, so we got a bit of funding. I was very lucky that we had a wonderful investor Boost VC make a bet on us, and they flew us out to San Francisco and we learned, you know, like, what’s a product, what’s a market, and we’re still around, we’re still around chugging away. 00:13:45 - Speaker 2: of that story where it’s the serendipity which you know often is a big part of any kind of creative spark, but here both that they were, yeah, you had this opportunity to work with this cutting edge technology for a different purpose, obviously, they wanted to create art or explore the spatial environments that they were working on and then you also through that exact same opportunity had access to information in a space. And then making that kind of leap of, can we make information in a virtual space. 00:14:18 - Speaker 1: Very interesting, right? And, you know, so I was in architecture school at the time, I ended up dropping out to keep running this idea, but because of my background in architecture, and because also of the fact that the tech at the time was only VR, you know, everything that the user was seeing had to be digitally rendered. SoftSpace started with a much heavier focus on the design of the virtual environment, because I believed then, I still believe now that the environment is a critical factor. And getting you into a certain kind of headspace, letting you think through certain problems that you just need the right kind of environment to do. But over the years of working on the various versions of SoftSpace, of course, we also then started doing a lot more design and development work around information architecture and user interface design. And by now, when we have finally the possibility of pass through augmented reality, There’s almost no sort of virtual environment design anymore. I’m not directly thinking about what the digital environment of our app should look like, although I have some ideas about what the ideal space you should be in, maybe when you’re trying to get focused on some work, but we’re now grappling much more directly with problems around. Yeah, information architecture, the right primitives that the user should be working with to help the user work directly with their ideas, with the information that they’re trying to make sense of, and the right UI paradigm and language to express these elements in. 00:15:57 - Speaker 2: And maybe we can briefly define by virtual reality, you’re referring to something that is 100% immersiv…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/83-end-and-beginning/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: We’ll just say that I’m so happy that you are taking this forward and making sure this product not only continues to exist and be maintained, but indeed to grow because there really is nothing like it out there for unstructured thinking. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Adam Wulf. Hey, good to be here again. Well, we’ll jump straight into it today because we have some important and honestly pretty bittersweet news. So New Software Incorporated is the company of course that you and I and the rest of our team work for Wulf, and we’ve been working to build this beautiful product. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say we didn’t manage to find sustainable business. This is something we’ve been working on for 4 years now, and yeah, somehow the particular combination we’ve tried to do hasn’t worked, so we need to make some big changes. So in the near term that’s big scale down of the team. I’ll be stepping away from day to day activities. Most of the team is moving on, but the potential silver lining here is, well, if you’ve offered to step up with a lot of passion and vigor to carry on, use the product as a solo printer. So there’s a lot to unpack there and we’ll dive into that throughout this episode, but I just want to lead with that news and maybe we can just start with a feelings check. How are you feeling right now, Adam Wulf? 00:01:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it’s a weird feeling because I’m very excited about the future of Muse. We can keep the product alive, and I know we have a very energetic user base, and so I’m thrilled that Muse, the product will continue, but of course I’m very disappointed, frankly sad that I’m gonna be losing my teammates that I’ve enjoyed working with for the past 3 years. It’s been just a fantastic company to work for, and a wonderful group of people to work with, and Everyone will be sorely missed, absolutely. 00:02:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll echo that. I’m feeling a lot of sadness, particularly around exactly what you said, the team. I really feel this is one of the best teams I’ve worked with, just the perfect blend of skills and personalities, really perfectly suited for what we were working on, great working chemistry, and yeah, I think I enjoyed the day to day of my job here at Muse the last 4 years more than probably any other venture I’ve ever worked on. And yeah, leaving that behind, you know, you and I will still work together as, you know, be in an advisory capacity, I’ll probably be a podcast host, so we’ll certainly be in each other’s lives and I’ll be in the muse world, but it’s a whole different thing from having a big team that’s, you know, fully engaged and working together all the time. 00:02:52 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the thing that’s been emotionally so difficult or strange or confusing to some extent. is so much of the muse I know is Disappearing or changing because the muse I know is the 6 of you, right? And so it’s all of my team is leaving and that’s, you know, extremely disappointing. But then the other side of it is there’s a lot of muse that is staying the same. It’s the product is staying the same. We have the 3.0 release, uh, that a lot of our users are on right now and are enjoying, and that’s been a huge effort for all of us this past year. A lot of exciting plans coming up to continue Muse and to grow the feature set, and so, I really feel pulled in kind of two different emotional directions. One is honestly a grieving process of the group that I know and the group that I’ve worked with is moving on and is going to different chapters, and that’s hard, and at the same time, we use the product is continuing and I believe it’s gonna keep growing and has now uh Business plan that does fit, even though our current one, you know, unfortunately did not fit. I think there’s new. Business stability now, which is a great thing and really gives it a strong future. But it’s such a weird dichotomy in my brain. My left brain is thinking one thing and my right brain is thinking the other thing, and I’m still trying to, I think, to pull everything together and see it for what it is, but it’s a lot to process, I think, for everyone, for all of us on the team and all the new places we’re going. 00:04:36 - Speaker 1: Well, before we get into what the future holds, what the new era of Muse might be, and why there’s still a long life ahead of it, I do want to address what I think is going to be the first question people will have, which is, you know, what happened or why is this happening? It seems like things were going great. Again, you have this beautiful product, we do have thousands of customers, tens of thousands of users, and how could you not make that work and The answer is kind of complex and I’m not sure I even have fully deciphered it, but I’ll try to give an executive summary of where I see it now and then maybe in the future we can dig a little deeper. So I guess to go back in the history, of course, Muse was born out of the ink and Switch research lab, and the lab’s charter. to look at how we can make productive and creative computing better, seeing the ways that computing has gone in the direction of consumption devices and sort of different forces, economic and social and so on, pulling on how our computers work and that having this effect on using computers for productivity purposes. And the lab explores a wide range of research around that, and some of that research ended up turning into, or a subset of that was something we said, hey, we think there’s something commerciallizable here or something that could be turned into a product that could be not just a research project you read about and get inspired, but you can use in your daily life and you can experience what would it be like to live in this world that I can switch visions where computing is different from what it is today. So we took, yeah, all this advanced research on gestures and tablet devices, things like the canvas and canvas stuff, and obviously the local first sync, as well as many other ideas, and said, let’s take this, take a bunch of these weird ideas and see if we can put them together into this commercial product. And in some ways, maybe the simple answer there is the ambition of trying to do all of that, particularly in this emerging category, tools for thought thinking tools or infinite canvas. It just takes a lot. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of talented people, all of that means money, but we didn’t want to go down the venture capital road because we felt that might create some wrong incentives relative to the things we wanted to express about this next generation, creative or productive computing. And so we sought out this kind of unique blend, you might call it a middle ground between, you know, on one hand, we weren’t like an indie developer just building a one-off app, maybe consulting until they get to something sustainable, you know, pure bootstrapping, but we also didn’t want to go the venture backed thing, fast growth, etc. We tried to go this middle ground, we took a little bit of investment money, but we charged very early, we charge a premium price, we tried to be customer funded. And we hoped that there would be this middle ground. I think you see that reflected in the size of the team, right? We’re 7 today. It took us 4 years to grow to that size. You compare that to a venture backed company that might be at 30+ people or more at that age, or, you know, the other extreme, the sort of indie solo developer who might work for many, many years before even hiring the first person, so we’re in that middle ground. And I was hoping that would let us do what we wanted and kind of turned out it was just like a middle ground that didn’t work. And so essentially that leads to kind of why we’re doing what we’re doing now is we’re saying, look, we got to get out of that middle ground. And so one way to do that is raise a big venture round and we did explore that a little bit, but another way to do it is scale way down, make it into something kind of sustainable quickly and for the long term by essentially making the team down to exactly one person. So there’s tons to unpack there. I am looking forward to the opportunity first of all, to personally reflect in retrospect on this, but furthermore, I’d love to write an article for my personal site or maybe we explore it on this podcast or who knows, something like that where we can dig in a little bit more because I think we made a lot of really good moves and a lot of great bets. But also maybe there’s some things that didn’t work and particularly about the model of how we wanted to finance the company and the size of the team and our ambitions and whatever and so maybe there’s some learning there for either other companies that might come out of the research world later or just others that want to follow our model. So hopefully that’s a somewhat satisfying answer for now. 00:08:44 - Speaker 2: Yes, I think back at the 3 years that I’ve been with Muse and everything that we had set out to accomplish. It’s really amazing how much of that we have accomplished. There’s a new product segment now. Canvas tools and whiteboarding for thinking tools. There’s 1000 of these now today in in Muse’s footsteps, and we were really blazing the trail there as we started out 4 years ago coming out of In Switch. We have a local first strategy, all of the data is physically on your device. We built out local first sync, which is kind of unheard of and is still at the research level but is working in production as good as any other sync and faster in many ways. And then that last thing is the shape of the business itself, larger than a single solo developer but smaller than VC. And it’s such a difficult thing to do new things, and I’m incredibly impressed at the number of new things that we’ve done successfully. And it’s just kind of a shame that one of those new things that didn’t quite work out was the business side, was just the structure and shape of how we’re funding this business. 00:09:54 - Speaker 1: Alright, so that’s a little bit about the past, but let’s look forward to the future now. What does this mean for current new users and customers? And in particular, this is a very interesting one because you’re stepping up in a big way here to provide some continuity and some continuation for this product we all love. 00:10:13 - Speaker 2: I think there’s two questions in my mind. One is, what can customers expect today? And what can customers expect tomorrow? And today, everything keeps working. Ms 2 keeps working. We have the Muse 3 Beta, which is either released by the time this podcast comes out or it’s gonna be released very soon. That has a whole host of new features. Collaboration, so you can invite friends and family into your muse board, you can invite your teammates into your muse board. You have separate workspaces, so you can separate out the sharing parts of your thinking versus the private thought sanctuary of your thinking. So all of that stays the same and is even growing in the very, very near term, which is great. And then for tomorrow, looking ahead, what happens 6 months from now, what happens a year from now, I am eager and excited to continue Muse development, and that means continued bug fixes, of course, continued customer support and customer conversations. I’m gonna be talking with a lot of you. I know a lot of you are already in our Discord community, which is fantastic. And there’s gonna be lots of new features. Over the past years, we have had goals and visions, as every software product does, that are larger than you could build an eternity. And there’s just so, so much and so many exciting things that we’re looking forward to building, and I’m picking up that mantle, and I’m gonna keep building, so it’s more new things, more customer requests implemented, more bug fixes implemented. Everything you can expect from a continued software development will be happening. 00:11:54 - Speaker 1: And when we first started to explore, OK, we’re coming down to the wire here and you know the numbers aren’t quite working and what are we going to do and it’s important to us that this product continue to exist and we do right by users and customers and how can we best do that and you, to my surprise, stepped up and said, look, I think I can do it on my own and At first that seems counterintuitive, right? We have a big team working on it right now, but first of all, you are basically the only person on the team that has the broad base of skills. You essentially touch every part of the code, including the back end and the front end. You basically have led the whole kind of engineering effort around all the sync work we’ve been doing, including all the collaboration that we’ve done in the last year, but of course you’re also a very accomplished iOS client side developer. And you have a background in entrepreneurship and so forth. And so the more I thought about it, the more I said, yeah, actually I think this is possible, and importantly I think it’s that. The foundation we have built in this product and the kind of ideas that are embedded in it. I don’t say the hard stuff is done, but we tackled a bunch of things that would, I think, have been pretty impossible to do without a team like that Sinclair. But now that it exists, iterating on that and adding new features is something that’s in reach for, well, certainly not every developer, but someone with your exact skills, and that’s why I got excited about that possibility. So maybe that’s a chance for us to talk a little bit about your background and yeah, just help the listeners get to know a little bit, yeah, what led you here to this adventure. 00:13:23 - Speaker 2: Well, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur ever since I was a little kid and I always loved software in particular, so I knew going into college that that’s what I wanted to do. I graduated with a computer science degree as well as managerial studies, which is kind of like a pseudo business degree. It’s kind of as close to entrepreneurship as I could get at the time. And I jumped straight into my own company, so myself and a co-founder founded Jotlet.net, and that was an online calendar application launched just before Google Calendar, if you can believe it. That’s how far back that was, and we were really fortunate. We put a lot of time and effort and love and passion into building that company, and we had a successful exit and sold that and was acquired about 2 years later. And so that really fed the flames for me in entrepreneurship. I loved every second of it and knew that that’s what I wanted to do. And so ever since then I’ve been working for startups or starting my own companies. 00:14:25 - Speaker 1: Two that jumped out at me, I think when we first got in touch with you, which we actually contacted you because you have some open source inc engines for iOS, quite a unique thing that’s hard to find and obviously very relevant to what we were trying to do at the time. But then digging deeper in your background, some of the stuff you’ve worked on, including you made an app called Here File file, which was kind of a syncing-ish connecting to your home computer app as well as loose leaf, which in many ways feels to me like a proto muse. It was before the pencil. And that sort of thing, but you were making an iPad, digital analog paper, kind of sketching loose, I don’t know if you market it quite as a thinking tool, but you know, you look at that and you go, this has a lot of the qualities we’re trying to get in use, but was maybe too early in the sense that the hardware wasn’t there and hard…

Full show notes at the publisher

https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/84-retrospective/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think it’s important to deliberately not decide too soon what you’re gonna do in that situation, cause you need time for the existing structure of your brain to basically disintegrate a little bit, like, let those pathways fade away, let the daily patterns of thinking and doing melt away, and create some space for new ideas and new ventures to enter. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. So by now, I think a lot of the listeners have heard the news that the Muse team is downsizing, talked extensively with Adam Wulf about that in the last episode since he’s the one carrying the torch forward here. But I felt like it would be really worthwhile for you and I to discuss, reflect on this podcast here, because I think it has in some ways its own life, that’s a little bit independent from use the product or the company, even though in many ways it’s also intertwined, which we’ll talk about, but one implication of this news, of course, as you and I both are not going to be doing news as our day job anymore, and I’ll ask you the same question I asked Wulf, which is feelings check, where are you at right now? 00:01:23 - Speaker 1: Well, I’m excited for Adam Wulf and the product to continue. I think Adam’s a great person to be carrying that torch and as a very heavy user of news still, I’m, I’m happy to see that for sure. You know, otherwise, it’s, it’s certainly a little bit saddening and disappointing. You work on this so hard for 4 or 5 years plus if you include the work at the lab, it doesn’t quite pan out the way that you’d hoped to. It’s a bummer for sure. But at the same time, it feels like the right move, it feels like the right time. There’s always a natural 4 or 5 year cadence I found where it makes sense to pick your head up and look at new stuff. 00:01:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the 4 or 5 year duration thing when I look back to my career as an entrepreneur and other projects I’ve been involved in that usually is kind of about the period of time that can kind of keep extended concentration on one. Particular topic, you know, you could certainly say the 4 or 5 years I spent on In and Switch were very closely related to the 4 or 5 years I spent on Muse, but in some senses like a resetting of the venue, a different, I don’t know, environment, a slightly different team, even if there’s overlap. Yeah, I don’t know, sometimes that can be a good thing, even if this isn’t quite the way I would have wanted to do it, but there is something about that timeline. Well, for this episode, I thought we could spend some time reviewing, retrospecting, and indeed, I think taking a bit of a victory lap for all we’ve done here on this podcast, which as I said, I think has had almost its own life and identity that is complementary to but also stands apart from you. Maybe it’s a little bit of a self-indulgent episode, but, you know, I don’t know, I think we’ve earned it. Yeah. So just to start us off, I took the liberty of doing a little lightweight data science here and just kind of dug in on our episode history. So, I don’t know, maybe some interesting insights to glean here. So not counting this episode, there’s 83 episodes currently in our back catalog, and they total 83 hours, 5 minutes and 52 seconds. With the shortest episode was episode 4, which was Partnership Freedom and responsibility at 37 minutes and 20 seconds, and the longest was actually a very recent one on spatial computing. That was an hour and 35 minutes, and the median ends up being almost exactly an hour, which I was surprised by. I actually thought it would be a little longer than that, but I’m also pleased because that’s kind of what I’m shooting for. We usually record for 1 hour and 15, maybe an hour and a half, and then trim it down and There’s various schools of thought around this, but for me, an hour is the right chunk of time. It allows you to go deep on something, but it’s not so long that, for example, if you listen to a podcast on a run or a commute or something that you’re going to need to listen to it in chunks. I thought that was interesting, but I’m glad we kind of landed there. 00:04:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really like this length. I can even go longer. It’s interesting. I listen to a lot of podcasts that are 40 minutes, 30 minutes, even 20 minutes, nominal time, which by the way, that’s, you listen at 2x so it’s half that in real life. And so often they’re in a good conversation and I was just like, well, the time’s up, that’s it for today. bro, it’s your podcast. You can go as long as you want. How do you do? 00:04:38 - Speaker 2: Right, right, this is a network TV where you have a slot to hit, right? Yeah. Yeah, well, there’s very much something to be said for having time to really get into something. I’ve noticed, for example, with guests, I feel like the conversation usually starts to get really juicy around 30 to 40 minutes in, and there’s probably something there about you have the context, you’ve hit all the not quite service level things but basic questions, and then that’s a foundation upon which you can go a little deeper. And there’s one podcast I listened to for a while that would typically do like 3 hour interviews and they explicitly say, You know, we want to go deeper with our guests than, you know, if they’re interviewed on a talk show on TV or something, you probably are only going to get to those same talking points and those same questions that they get asked over and over. But if you do the longer conversation, you spend the first hour on that stuff and then you kind of go off script or you get a little deeper. So I see that, but I’m also a 1x listener and so for me, a 3 hour podcast, it basically never get to the end, no matter how interesting it is. So yeah, there’s pros and cons there and certainly we try to let the episodes be their natural length while at the same time, I guess respecting the listeners’ time and trying to, you know, kind of make it information dense perhaps. Another piece of the podcast I have always, I guess, been proud of is our show notes, and so this is something where stuff we talk about, which is often weird obscure projects or articles or whatever, we try to link that so that you don’t need to just Google around for it. So we have a total of 1,943 notes, all of which are links, so that’s around 23 per episode. And then the other thing I thought was interesting was just the podcast format, the RSS format calls it A, which is a lot but basically the people who are on the podcast. And so I did a little breakdown there and it turns out that, well, not surprisingly, I am on 83 episodes, you are on 75, and then a few of our team members like Leonard and Adam Wulf and Julia were on a few each, and then we have a couple of guests like Jeffrey Lid and Max Schoening were on a couple of times, and then, of course, after that, it’s the one-offs. And the author thing points to what I would call almost a type breakdown, which is when we started the podcast, and we can tell the origin story here in a minute, but we didn’t necessarily envision it as a guest. Thing we kind of experimented with that early on. It worked well and we expanded that, but when I kind of did a breakdown, I discovered that episodes that are just me and you, which I think of as kind of our baseline or what have you, where the co-hosts, is actually only 28% of the total, whereas 57% are something with a guest. So when you look at it that way, it actually seems like this podcast is more about having guests than it is about you and I. But on the other hand, I think those kind of non-guest episodes are pretty often touch on pretty foundational topics. And then the last category, which actually might be my favorite and I almost wish we could have gotten more of is what I call the team episodes, and that’s where we bring on someone who is on the Muse team, so they’re not an external guest, but they are someone who you don’t normally hear from. And so that’s about 15% of our episodes, and as we’ll talk about some of our favorites, but I think that category is the one I in some ways like the best. 00:07:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this makes sense to me because ultimately the podcast ended up being about ideas. So there are podcasts that are about the personalities of the hosts, and there are podcasts that are about the lives and activities of the guests, but ours end up being more about the ideas around computing and use and so on, and we have a lot of ideas, obviously, the team members have experience and things to contribute there too, and then all these different guests. It kind of makes sense to me in that respect. 00:08:18 - Speaker 2: Now the origin story here is that I’ve sort of always wanted to start a podcast about something. I just really like the audio format. I actually got a portable MP3 player, not an iPod, but some other product, a long time ago, just for that because I always liked, for example, like MR my mom listened to NPR, but for me, and I have the same problem with broadcast television, I just can’t do it on someone else’s schedule. I need to do it on my own time. And eventually when it became possible to get like audio format through again, MP3s or even in some cases like audio CDs, you have books on audiobooks, I just love that format. There’s something kind of, even though it’s slower or less efficient in some ways than reading. There’s also something intimate and you get to know the personality or character of the host in a certain way and it can be engaging and importantly, it’s something you can do while you’re doing something else. You’re driving, you’re running, you’re doing chores in the house, and that’s a really nice way to keep the intellect part of your brain stimulated while you’re doing something a little more rote. 00:09:25 - Speaker 1: Also, you gotta put that radio voice to work. I don’t know if we’ve ever mentioned this on the podcast, but I get comments constantly about Adam’s perfect radio voice. 00:09:35 - Speaker 2: Well, I’m glad I never would have guessed that. I mean, most people don’t like hearing their own voice recorded and I count myself among that, and I just kind of powered through it cause I felt it was a good format and it’s not that important how your voice sounds. But yeah, glad to hear the good feedback there. So yeah, I guess we’ve always both liked the podcast format and then I don’t know, inspiration struck, it was actually our very last in-person team summit right before COVID hit. This would have been, I think January 2020, we were in Sedona, Arizona, and I just pitched you this idea. We did a little test recording just using the memo, audio memo apps on our phones up in that freezing attic in that house we were staying in. It was only maybe 20 minutes long, but we sort of spliced it together and were able to listen to a little prototype basically. 00:10:22 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that was funny. I remember my teeth were almost chattering. It was so cold up there, and then I was really impressed cause you edited the whole episode on your iPad. I just can’t do any like production work on iPads, but you did it somehow. 00:10:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can back reference you to our episode on iPad where we had differing ideas on that. But yeah, certainly at the time I was excited about the iPad as a place for productivity. There’s a nice bit of audio editing software there called Ferri that in a lot of ways I think with the stylus, it’s actually very natural and yeah, I managed to kind of put it together with some even through in some stock music at the start just to kind of give it that sense. Yeah, I had one of our colleagues listen to it and they said, yeah, I think there’s a spark here, you know, I think you and I have a natural dynamic. We’ve been working together so long, and obviously we have lots of ideas, and so, yeah, those two things kind of made us say, let’s give it a go at this. 00:11:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you alluded to this when you mentioned in the origin story, how the idea was to capture the conversations that you were hearing in the team, but for me, that goes back, I don’t know what it is, 12 or 13 years. So we’ve been having these conversations for that long. I remember we went on those ski trips we worked together on Hioku, we were on the ski lift and we would talk about our schemes for making Hioku better and stuff and so we’ve been at it for a while, just formalizing with the podcast. 00:11:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Now I think that in the original idea I had was that it would be something that was a little more spread out across the team. We would have different combinations of people and it wouldn’t be kind of one fixed host and ultimately kind of became my thing, I would say. I think even in the beginning, you and I traded off reading in the intro and stuff like that and in the end, I think that works fine. I’m the kind of organizer, showrunner, you know, kind of main host, and then we can have this rotating cast of characters, which indeed even extends out into the guests from the Tools for Thought community. One of my big influences from the podcast world is the genre I’ve heard described as two guys talking. You know, that sounds gendered. It’s not always two men, but there’s something about two that makes a really good, you know, assuming that people have good dynamic and and interesting topics, there’s something kind of nice about that number in the back and forth. One person looks a little too monotone, once you get to 3 and especially above, there’s a lot of voices, it’s hard to keep track of it all. And one of my favorites on that was a podcast called Hello Internet, which was not really about anything in particular, but just the hosts had interesting personalities that kind of contrasted each other, and there’s lots of others as well, like Gastropod is a great one. It’s kind of focused on food history and Lexicon Valley, which is a linguistics podcast back then had these two. Host, but one similarity across them, I think was that yeah, you have these two people in this kind of exchange, but then sometimes uh almost a contrast or something about the dynamic is you have the differing personalities maybe that play off each other. For example, I’ve often described you in talking about the format of the show as being the kind of contrarian philosopher, you know, so maybe I come in with the more direct perspective or something like that and you come in with the contrarian and philosophical perspective and something about that just works. 00:13:25 - Speaker 1: So you mentioned two guys talking. I think there’s kind of two dimensions there. There’s the 2. There’s also the just talking. So a lot of podcasts are heavily produced and they’re like they’re basically read, you know, you write scripts and then you read them, you might even have dramatic music going on in the background and everything, and, you know, there’s something to that, but I’ve always been a fan, both in podcasting and on YouTube of the just talking format. It’s less scripted, it’s more train of thought, thing of life, whatever it may be. I think there’s something really to that. Because importantly, there are a lot of ideas that you’re just never gonna get out of someone if they have to go through production, that write it down, get to produce it, especially with gas, you don’t know one has time for that, but everyone has time to sit down and talk in the microphone for an hour, so you get a lot of stuff out that you wouldn’t otherwise get. 00:14:09 - Speaker 2: The informality of it, the sense that you’re listening in on a conversation by, you…

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https://museapp.com/podcast/transcripts/9-the-information-age/ Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Being able to do important and deep work in a world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only abundant, but so abundant that it essentially becomes a problem. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. How’s it going, Mark? Alright, Adam, how are you doing? Yeah, I’m doing well. Reading an interesting book about the life of Claude Shannon, the guy that invented information theory. So this was at Bell Labs circa I guess middle of the last century. Uh, for example, the, uh, that seminal paper coined the term bit, which I think I, I almost take for granted sometimes these fundamental inventions, you think, well, it’s just always, we’ve always known what a bit is, but in fact, boiling information down to a stream of ones and zeros and being able to reason about that mathematically is a uh an extremely significant breakthrough to put the, to put it mildly and surprisingly recent from my perspective. Yeah, interesting. So our topic today is the information age, and I usually put information age in caps. It’s in comparison to say the Iron Age or the industrial revolution. And I guess the the basic idea with this is that humanity or society has entered an era that’s defined by the I guess the massive availability and the free flow of information. This dates back to, I think the Wikipedia page talked about the invention of the transistor which kind of made possible things. Like global telephone networks and radio and TV, but obviously the computer as well came out of that. I think it’s become particularly cute or the information age and how different that is from what came before is really dramatic in the last 10 years or so, uh, with smartphones and the internet and social media. Uh, one statistic I read recently, I found a little Uh, mind blowing was that the essentially there’s total penetration of internet and smartphones, the stat I read was that there’s 5 or 5.5 billion people on Earth who are over the age of 15, so adults, and of those 5 billion of them have some kind of mobile phone and about 4 billion of them have smartphones. So for our purposes. Again, everyone’s connected, and now this new age is kind of defined by that. 00:02:35 - Speaker 2: Well, that’s a broad and weighty topic. What’s on your mind about the information age then? 00:02:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, obviously connects to to muse here because we see it. As a tool that helps with this, which is particularly for creative professionals and being able to do important and deep work in a world where information is not scarce, but abundant, not only abundant, but so abundant that the it essentially becomes a problem. I read a nice article the other day called the Information Pathology. And they make this comparison to how in the 20th century, the abundance of food sort of slipped our widespread health problems from not enough nutrition, not enough calories, which essentially is a problem most humans had faced most of their lives or, you know, most of the existence of, uh, certainly civilization and flipped it over to now we’re worried about essentially having access to too much food, that the problems are obesity and uh diabetes and heart disease and so forth. And the author here makes a comparison to say, well, maybe in the 21st century, we have a similar thing with information, where we’re also hardwired in many ways to seek information, that new information is a way to be. Prepared for what the future might hold, assess our safety and do things to improve our lives when you know things about what’s going on in the world around you that can be extremely helpful to say the least. But then you add in this era of hyperconnectivity and the 24 hour news cycle and social media and newsletters and everything’s being pushed to you all the time and everything seems important. And that can quickly turn into more of a gambler at a slot machine getting the the dopamine hit from that next, um, that next piece of information rather than, yeah, rather than spending your life on things that are more meaningful to the point that we have people thinking about things like digital detox and Deleting social media from their apps and this is, this is quite a big topic now of how you actually manage this problem of information abundance. 00:04:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, you had shared that article with me, and I found it very interesting and indeed alarming. The topic of food and nutrition is one that I’d studied for a while, and that’s an area where there’s something that’s incredibly important, but over the past 100 years. So we’ve really lost the plot and it’s caused an enormous amount of damage to us as individuals and as a society, and we haven’t fully confronted or even understood that 50 or 100 years in. So if you analogize that to the information age, it could very well be the case that we are, you know, victims of our own own abundance here in ways that we don’t and perhaps won’t understand for another decades or even. 10 years. And that’s a pretty alarming thought. 00:05:15 - Speaker 1: It’s hard to know whether it will be on that same scale, but I certainly feel that certainly the the change in our daily lives as humans and the changes to our society of the information age broadly is huge and dramatic. I, I do think it’s on par with the industrial revolution. We we don’t know yet because we’re not far enough to do it, but that’s, that’s my gut feel going from there to, well, such big changes in the world will bring both positive and negative. And there’s obviously many positives to having access to essentially unlimited information all the time, uh, but there’s also many negatives, and I don’t think we’re going to figure that out in the next few years. I think it’s going to be an ongoing process of society adapting and figuring out. Um, how to, how to manage this and try to get the good parts and leave behind the bad bits. 00:06:03 - Speaker 2: So how do you start to grapple with that? What’s good about the information age and what’s struggle? 00:06:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think the, you know, what’s good in terms of access to all the world’s information at your fingertips is almost so obvious that it hardly needs stating, but You know, Wikipedia is amazing, Google is amazing, uh, Twitter is amazing. Uh, you can get access to information that could be relevant to your career. Certainly if you’re a person that does creative, you know, you’re creative professionally do knowledge work of some kind, which probably anyone listening to this podcast, it’s likely in that category, having access to so much is extremely powerful for your career. Uh, and also in your life, right, making decisions about Important life things like parenthood or adopting a pet or taking care of an aging parent or buying a home or any health things, and the abundance of information, you can get personal experiences, you can get academic information. You can download books, you can watch videos on YouTube, you can become, let’s say not become an expert, but you can completely absorb yourself in almost everything humanity knows about any subject at any time, from the comfort of your own home, uh, even just on your phone, if you choose to do that. One personal anecdote I give from my life about how kind of information and particularly broad, let’s say more like global news has an impact on your life. Uh, with the pandemic that of course we’re still in the midst of here in in 2020, but when that came along, I was alerted to it essentially by basically a lot of people being alarmed on Twitter, and that caused me to stop and think, yeah, let me look into this briefly and kind of do my own research, which, you know, for me was making a use board and pulling out a few relevant bits onto that so I could kind of poke them around and try to make, make sense of it. And I’m really glad I did because a few weeks later, someone that I live with basically had a close encounter where basically her school, her entire school was shut down due to someone there uh testing positive and then suddenly there’s all these, you got. quarantine, you got to do this, you got to do that. And I think that would have been really surprising and disorienting and upsetting if I hadn’t already been studying exactly what was going on with this. And instead, I said, oh, OK, I actually have my head around this. I know what to do and um that information being not just that I went out to seek, but actually being pushed to me through these, uh, through social media and through through news channels turned out to be very helpful in making good decisions and uh. Essentially it was, it was information that had an impact on my life. So how do you think about uh the information age? Do you, first of all, I guess do you agree with me, uh, we, we didn’t talk about it before, but do you agree with me that it does have, you know, an impact, such, such an outsized impact potentially, and, uh, where do you see the, the, the, you know, the, the benefits to you or humanity at large and likewise the Downsides. 00:09:05 - Speaker 2: Certainly I think there is a big impact from the information age. I think that’s hard to deny. An interesting insight I got from a book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth, though, is that as seemingly as important as the information age is, it’s, it still hasn’t kind of fully impacted the whole real economy and our, our entire physical world. Uh, this book makes a point that if you look at the, the economy of developed nations, it’s things like housing, healthcare, education, caring for children and elderly people, uh, things like this comprise much of the economy, and those have, you know, started to be affected by the information age around the edges for sure. You have like Zillow for real estate, for example, but the way that we build homes is basically the same. As it is 40 years ago, but you have a nest on the wall that connects to Google. Um, so in that sense, I think there’s potentially actually a lot more that could happen as computing and information pervades more of our real physical lives. Now, now that said, I think certainly it’s already been very impactful and and in my line of work, I enjoy a lot of those benefits, but potentially a lot more to go. And the other thing I would say is, I don’t think we understand the full impact and implications of all these new information flows. Again, I think the analogy to food and nutrition is very useful, where it took us decades to begin to unravel all the weird stuff we were doing to our bodies and our societies, um, with these new food pathways. I’m afraid we’re going to go through the same experience with all these information flows. 00:10:27 - Speaker 1: Well, to bring it back down to the personal level, I guess one question that I see a lot of people grapple with is how to have a healthy relationship with, they usually say technology or social media, but I think of it as the information fire hose being connected to the whole of humanity and everything that it is thinking about and it’s going on because it’s a powerful feeling, this feeling of being informed or in the loop or connected. And you know, whatever that may mean for you, it might be connected to your field or connected to a smaller community that has a private group, but it could also be connected to global news and what you do is you end up or what I often hear people talking about and and face myself a little bit, which is how do you, for example, spend less time on social media and more time reading books. So for example, um, the YouTuber and podcaster CGP Gray. Uh, did a pretty substantial, not quite a digital detox, but basically got off social media and all this sort of thing for some period of time with the justification of, I want us to take more walks in the wood and woods and read more books, and I hear a variation of that a lot, people. I don’t know, maybe in Silicon Valley, people go on their 10 day meditation retreat, they don’t speak and they don’t bring technology with them, and you even see things like software specifically made for this, uh, even as far back as when I was in Y Combinator, which is now 13 years ago, uh, one of the folks in our batch was rescue Time, which is still operating today. It’s basically a plug-in for your computer that monitors how you’re spending your time and helps direct you away from the You know, spending time on Reddit or whatever and towards things that you define as productive how you define those things, which of course is especially confusing for a knowledge worker, I think because you have stuff like Slack and email being connected to your company’s sphere and I think it can have kind of the same quality of being connected to the news cycle or uh sort of the global global news, which is always some new thing, you know, I open up, I don’t know, notion, I open up slack, I open up Figma, I’ve got, you know, a little notification thing. Someone left a comment and someone’s done a new thing and there’s, you know, there’s someone’s pushed a new thing to Github. There’s always, there’s always some some new thing to follow and that becomes even more true as company gets bigger and more mature and that has some of the same quality where you can easily lose a lot of time in your day to these more reactive type things rather than the deep work or the bigger projects or prioritizing your own time. And I think when Apple came along with screen time, that was also kind of an acknowledgement of that and I see people doing tricks there. But I kind of see all of that stuff as as really like mitigation strategies, um, it’s it’s our short term hack for OK, we’ve recognized that losing your whole day to being on Twitter or spending too much time answering email or slack versus focus projects, you don’t feel good about that, you don’t feel like you’ve spent your time in a good way, but the techniques we have for managing that feel less like we found a way to live in harmony with the nature of the world and our information. flows and more like we’ve just put these little blocks in place in various places to again to try to manage that. So I’d love to figure out and I’m still exploring this for myself, but how to, how to live in harmony with the information fire hose and get the most of that, get as much from that as I can for my work, for my life, uh, while at the same time kind of avoiding some of the worst, the qualities of it, the addictive qualities or the qualities that in retrospect I feel like I. Spent my time well. 00:13:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. First of all, I think you’re seeing this emerging intuition that information flows have different quality. Also, we’re seeing that there’s opportunity cost to spending your time with these different flows. Any time that you spend checking Reddit, for example, is time that you can’t spend with your family or exercising or what have you. But then I think there’s in the last 5 or 10 years, this has all been amplified by the social networks and the feeds, and there I think the situation is getting more. Adversarial and intense because you have these companies that are motivated one way or another to engage you right with these, these feeds at the same time, the individuals like ourselves who are on the other end of this, we don’t have full-time people who are working to represent our side, you know, this harmonious engagement with information flows. So I think it’s not surprising to me that it feels like we’re kind of on our back foot, like we’re playing defense, like we’re trying to mitigate, like we’re trying to put our finger in th…

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