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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I look for when I’m hiring designers or what’s the experience of encountering a stranger on the internet. I like this phrase proof of curiosity. Is this person curious about the world, but curious in a way where they take action on that curiosity, and that can manifest itself in lots of ways. One way is, you tweet about it, right? Like you learn something, you tweet about it.

00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by Brian Lovin. Hello. Brian, you are a designer at GitHub, a prolific podcaster with design details, but before we talk about all that, I know you made a move recently and you’re getting to design a new home office space. What are some of your goals in building out that workspace?

00:01:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, where we’re moving from, my girlfriend and I, we both work from home and we were in separate rooms, and it always felt pretty isolating. Where, you know, you’re working for most of the day, so you’re in separate rooms most of the day, but also those rooms were the bedroom and the living room, so the office and living space and sleeping space always felt intermingled.

So, with our new home office, it’s actually a bigger room where we decided to put both of our desks, which is great cause we see each other throughout the day.

The problem is You have video calls and you’re always interrupting each other, so we’re swapping in and out.

So one of the big goals that I have for the space is there’s like this tiny little closet off the edge of the office space, and we want to convert that into like a little phone booth, you know, soundproof it, put a little monitor in there so you can just carry your laptop in, plug in and go.

So I’d say that’s the biggest goal, but honestly, we haven’t even started cause I don’t know about you both, but post move, you get unpacked and you’re motivated to fix stuff, and then as soon as you’re settled in, you’re like, yeah, it is what it is. You just got to live with it for a while, you know.

00:02:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a dangerous valley in there where you have unpacked enough to live, but you’re not fully unpacked and settled, and sure enough people have boxes for months and years, if they’re not careful.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Which is also a useful little rule, you know, it’s like whatever is in the box for more than a month, you probably can just get rid of. So just take that box away, don’t even open it.

00:02:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I call this moves as copying garbage collectors, you know, and copy everything once and some stuff goes.

00:02:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I first started seriously doing work from home, remote work, and lots of video calls and so forth, I didn’t move, but I realized how important it was to have a separate space. I think I had a desk kind of shoved off the corner of my living room, which was fine when I had an office, but once I was working from home, there wasn’t enough separation for me between those spaces.

But actually the insight that someone gave me was I had sort of a very small room and a big beautiful one with big windows and you naturally think of the big room as well, that’s the master bedroom, but actually you don’t spend that much time in there.

And eventually I converted the biggest room in the house with the nicest windows and all that into a home office. And that was an absolute game changer.

I had a big workbench where I could do kind of stand up and do kind of more physical tasks with the hands and I had a big desk. I had a Pin board on the wall for keeping all my stuff up, could also even think about and now always in my mind is what’s going to be behind me on video calls and what lighting is going to be in there.

So for example, my current space, I kind of arranged it so that there’s some nice windows right in front of me, so I’ll get, you know, sunlight on the face and then behind me is not facing, I don’t know, out over the whole house so that when the partner walks by, she like suddenly panics because she realized she’s, you know, on camera in the background on the camera, yeah.

00:04:03 - Speaker 1: I did the exact same thing as you. So when we moved this big office space was staged as the primary bedroom cause it has the big windows, it’s the most beautifully lit.

And then there’s this other room which was intended to be the office, which isn’t well lit, it’s a lot smaller.

We’re like, you know what, we just sleep in the bedroom. 99% of the time the lights are off, so we might as well take the space where we’re gonna spend most of our time and make that the most beautiful and inviting and warm. And enjoyable, right? Like this is where we’re gonna spend all of our time. So yeah, very much with you on that idea, swap the bedroom in the office to match time spent, I suppose.

00:04:44 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I also take a bit of inspiration from there’s a couple of subreddits, one that I like is Battle stations, yeah, slash slash battle stations where people do these beautiful setups. It’s obviously their computing devices and desks and things, but they also get the aesthetic element and yeah, the carpet and the chair and all this sort of thing and. I don’t quite have the time or inclination to go to that level, but we do spend so much of our lives now in a home office in front of one or more computing devices, spending some time to make that aesthetic and pleasing and good vibes just seems to make sense.

00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, the last thing I really want to get in here at some point is the couch. I’ve never had a couch in an office and there’s something very attractive to me about.

Going and having a sit or a lie down in the middle of the day, where you might be sketching or reading a blog post or catching up on email, but just having that short break from, you know, sitting upright in your office chair.

Sounds really attractive.

I don’t know, we’ll see. I don’t know if I’d actually end up spending time on it, but there’s an idea of kind of mixing the feeling of what kind of work can be done in there, right? It doesn’t just have to be upright desk keyboard kind of thing. It could also be a little bit more lounging, reading, that kind of stuff.

00:06:02 - Speaker 2: Relaxed posture, reading and thinking. Now you’re very on brand for me. Thank you for that.

00:06:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go.

00:06:09 - Speaker 2: Well, tell us a little bit about your background.

00:06:13 - Speaker 1: So like you mentioned, I’m a product designer. I’m currently working at GitHub. I’m working on the mobile apps there, and GitHubb is an interesting place because there’s a lot of different kinds of jobs that it solves for people in the world, you know, you have, of course, developers who come there to code and review code and merge code, and there’s the whole DevOpsy side of things. Then there’s this whole other side, which is like the social productivity side, organizing work and in my case, like taking work on the go.

And so I’m interested in that part, that’s what I’m working on and get with the mobile apps.

On the side I podcast, I host the Design Details podcast. I’ve been doing that for, I think, 7.5, almost 8 years. So that’s the thing.

00:06:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah you something 400 some odd episodes in.

00:07:02 - Speaker 1: 429.

00:07:03 - Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, and then you were nice enough to invite Mark and I on there recently. I’ll link that episode in the show notes. Very interesting to be on the other side of the conversation there, but it definitely provides me inspiration, which is, I worry sometimes that we’ll sort of run out of things to say, you know, we’re 50 some odd episodes in here, but you’ve managed to keep going this long, keep it fresh and relevant, so maybe there’s hope for us too.

00:07:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the nice thing about what you’re doing is if you do interviews most weeks, you’ll never run out of people to talk to. There’s just too many interesting people in the world to learn from.

00:07:37 - Speaker 2: We’re outsourcing the problem of being interesting to someone else.

00:07:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like, yeah, just extract that from other people. Our problem is we stopped interviewing, you know, my co-hosts and I just chat back and forth every week and try and mix it up with things like listener questions or talk about industry news.

But there are weeks where we just look at each other like, have we talked about this? Have we answered this exact question already and you just can’t really remember, so you answer it again. So I do worry about that, like going in circles a little bit.

So that’s the podcast, I guess before that, I started a company it was called Spectrum.chat, and that was myself and two other people, Bryn Jackson and Max Stoiber.

The three of us were trying to build large public asynchronous forum software, really ended up gravitating towards like open source communities and design communities.

That company was acquired by GitHub, which is how I ended up at GitHub.

And before that, I was a product designer at Facebook, and before that at a company called Buffer. And then I guess throughout all of this, I’m a side project, tinkerer kind of person. I like writing, I like building websites, I like the podcast. I really enjoy interviewing people. I’ve launched a couple of interview projects.

And I would say my most long lasting side project besides the podcast now has just been my personal website where I have all these random subpages that tickle my brain in different ways.

So one of them is like a security checklist, how to be safe online, and the other is A better, more readable version of hacker news, and another is my personal bookmarks and an AMA and my blog and on and on and on. And so that’s really where I find a lot of joy and fun outside of my day job.

00:09:27 - Speaker 2: We’ll link that site in the show notes.

I think it is an inspiration.

We’ll talk about personal websites here a little, a little later on, but I think Mark and I, for example, both have incredibly minimalist personal websites that we update pretty infrequently.

I think you have a pretty comprehensive design.

It’s, I think it’s a full web app you wrote about the technology stack there, you use it to kind of.

Explore interesting new front end and back end technologies, yeah, tons of writing, that’s obviously the podcast, you’ve got a newsletter now, so yeah, really, I don’t know how you find the time, but I guess the answer is that these are your hobbies and as you say, they tickle your brain, so it’s less of uh finding the time and more of a following your nose to your interests.

00:10:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, hobbies and many, many years, you know, I think there is an incorrect perception that I work all the time. People like, how do you have time for all these different things like, I don’t, these have just accumulated in the dustbin over, you know, a decade. And so with a decade in hindsight, it looks like a lot and it looks like I’m busy, but really it’s quite incremental.

00:10:31 - Speaker 2: That leads nicely to our topic today, which is personal brand. So, I’ll ask first what that means for both of you. Actually, Mark, maybe you wanna start us off there.

00:10:41 - Speaker 3: So two things come to mind when I think of personal brand. The first is the brand in the more pervasive, thicker sense like Coca-Cola is a brand, and I think that some people have such a personal brand, they invest a lot in building it up, and the other more general sense is like information theoretic in the sense of people having Knowledge about other people on the internet or being able to obtain that knowledge if they if they want to, versus the base prior of you’re a random person on the internet and could be, you know, a dog or whatever. I think both of those are interesting and we can talk about them.

00:11:17 - Speaker 2: And I’ll note on the company brand side we did an episode on that some time back because some I have pretty strong feelings about about how to kind of intentionally build a company brand. We ended up describing it as the character and what you know the company for, and you know, if the company has a personality, what is that personality? And so you can imagine that mapping to a person as well, not in the real sense of a fully fledged human with many interests and many dimensions and so forth, but maybe a little bit more narrowly defined as how you’re representing yourself to a field or on the internet or to some target audience.

00:11:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I suppose my personal definition of personal brand maybe skews that direction.

I’m stealing this. I can’t remember who said this, but at one point I heard someone say that a personal brand was really just how someone would describe you if you weren’t in the room, which I guess could apply to a company, but for a person, I think you get to capture a little bit more of the nuance there.

Like, how would somebody describe you? And the thing is, you’ll never really know.

I think that’s kind of the ideas.

You can try and influence that, but really people will describe you however they want to describe you and when you’re not in the room, they can be a little bit more open in that description. So that’s how I’ve thought about personal brand and I don’t know, adjectives come to mind like curious, fun, kind, excited, and then maybe some negative personal brand characteristics would be like complains a lot or rants a lot, or is an asshole, right? Like those all fit under the personal brand vibe for me is those kinds of adjectives.

00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess there’s also the, you know, if I think of looking at your website, for example, to get a feel, you know, let’s say I had somehow come across you and was interested in learning who is this Brian fellow, maybe in the context of I’d like to hire you, maybe in the context of like to have you on my podcast, or maybe something a little more general, which is just you said something interesting, and I’m just curious to know the person behind that.

And there’s the very practical element of, you know, you say off the bat, I’m a designer, podcaster, writer, and even the order there, I think tells me something. It’s like you may have a long running and a pretty successful podcast, but that’s not the first thing you list, you consider yourself a designer first. So, you know, there’s that sort of pragmatic aspect of just what do you want to be known for in your career, but then yeah, you’re talking about maybe the softer side of it as well.

I think aesthetic conveys a lot, maybe this is a medium is the message sort of thing, but right, you have a website that says you are a person that likes clean, modern design, whereas you can imagine there’s this, what is it called, the professor style website. Just these kind of like very bare bones, HTML, you know, not only is it not responsive design, but it’s like barely even styled at all, but you come to associate it with often busy and successful professors who are very erudite and accomplished in their field, and they do have a representation online, but it would almost be confusing or maybe feel wrong in some way. had a sleek, well designed site like a designer would that conveys maybe the wrong idea.

00:14:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it would feel like they were trying to sell you something.

00:14:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s an aesthetic, maybe some of that is almost like tribal affiliation to some degree, you know, you go to the punk rock band’s website and there’s going to be a very different color palette, for example, then you go to the designer’s website and a lot comes across, because almost anything I think you would want to get to know someone online for, again, whether it’s Hiring them, applying for a job at their company, asking them on your podcast, meeting them in some professional context, kind of a lot of what you want to know is just like, are we in the same tribe or do we vibe together or do we have the same interests or the same values because often that’s the thing that matters a lot for those kinds of connections.

00:15:12 - Speaker 1: I think that’s amazing, especially in the designer developer space. I don’t know about you both, but when I find somebody on Twitter and they have a link in their profile that is firstname lastname.com, that’s an instant click for me, right? That already says something about this person that they’ve gone out and bought that and invested in that.

Then you click and you get the aesthetic. I like to go just a tiny bit deeper and like, did they build this or was this a template, and that distinction also tells you a lot about that person, you know, maybe it only makes sense for designers, developers, but I find that developers often don’t care as much about having built it themselves.

Like I think you encounter a lot more stock WordPress themes or something like that, but designers, I think there’s perhaps this.

Community pressure to represent yourself in a unique and special way, so there’s a lot more playfulness with color or imagery or, you know, drawing your own custom icons or things like that.

And I suppose maybe I’m like squarely in the middle, like my site is pretty boring, like you mentioned minimal, but I see it as fairly boring. There’s not actually much color or visual interest on the page.

But that can be its own tone, right, and people can read into that, how they will and maybe be surprised if they meet me and, well, maybe I am a boring person actually. I don’t know, but I guess that’s up to other people to decide.

00:16:44 - Speaker 3: I don’t know if I would call this boring. I mean, it’s minimally styled, but it’s like it’s a whole app. I mean, there’s a whole sidebar with all kinds of different categories and everything. It’s a whole thing.

00:16:52 - Speaker 2: And maybe that sort of begs the next question, which is if representing yourself online, it is to someone. And that someone is again someone that maybe you want to connect with or they want to connect with you and you’re trying to find the like-minded people to connect with, and that maybe leads into a question of what you might call your, how available you are. To outreach. So, for example, I have my email address on my home page. Some folks maybe have their Twitter handle, but they have DMs turned off. There’s many pros and cons to making yourself more or less accessible and be curious to hear how you think about that.

00:17:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question because my perspective is maybe changing a little bit over time. Which is, I’ve always just tried to be accessible because I’ve always been so thankful to other people who made themselves accessible. For example, I started the Design Details podcast because I wanted to meet other people and what we did is we created a spreadsheet of 100 people who we wanted to meet and just started going down the list and emailing them. And everyone was super kind and most people were open to being on this brand new podcast with these young 20 something designers trying to figure out what they were doing in the industry, and that approachability was magical, and it really opened a lot of doors and helped, I don’t know, get me into the room, so to speak.

And so I always wanted to have that same feeling that people could reach out to me, especially. Younger designers or people just getting into the industry who might want to learn about, I don’t know what it’s like working at GitHub, they might want to apply there or work there someday, like having that approachability has all sorts of benefits.

But when I said I think I’m starting to maybe change that over time, I’ve just noticed, I don’t know if you both have your DMs open, but like when you have your DMs open, surprising stuff comes through and a lot of it increasingly is noise. Or even if it’s not noise, I feel bad not responding to people. And so there is this trade off of like being approachable and accessible, and then all of a sudden having a 3rd or 4th to do list, you know, you have your work to do list, you have your emails to go through, and now it’s your direct messages and you want to come across as a friendly person who responds quickly and thoughtfully and carefully. But then there is a little bit of a burden there, I suppose. I mean a good burden to have. It’s awesome that people want to reach out and chat, but sometimes that’s overwhelming. I’m curious if you both have experiences cause you both are also quite public and put yourselves out there.

00:19:33 - Speaker 3: In general, I’m very bullish on this channel that is cold contact over the public internet in both directions. I think people underestimate the opportunities that you can create by sending a good cold email or cold DM as it may be. And I think there’s also a lot of value potentially in being open, and I’ve always been open for a similar reason I think to you is I was incredibly fortunate to have people help me out as I was entering Silicon Valley, basically on the basis of cold emails.

00:19:59 - Speaker 2: Mark, I feel you gotta tell your story here about how you came to San Francisco.

00:20:04 - Speaker 3: Oh, the full story will not be told, but I will give the abbreviate story.

The abbreviate story is someone posted on the internet that they were looking to help people who were we help people in San Francisco or early in their career, something to that effect, and I emailed this individual, and we ended up meeting at a bar in San Francisco, see if he can help me out, and he introduced me to someone there who worked at Hiroku and one thing led to another and I ended up working there for about 4 years, and the career went on from there. So there’s a classic example of Silicon Valley and cold emails and Just being willing to just reach out. Yeah, so I’m very bullish on the channel, and I think furthermore, there’s not too much downside to being open. I found quite a bit of value in receiving communications and my experience is that very few people actually write in. I get a few emails, mostly about go by example, and I get a few DMs, but the volume isn’t an issue for me, and if anything, I’m surprised at how little it is.

00:21:04 - Speaker 1: I wonder if email is a good filter there versus DMs, like the act of cold emailing something requires a little bit more activation, probably because there’s a subject field, right, and you’re forced to consider what do I actually want to get out of this interaction, whereas the DM it’s just a chat, right?

00:21:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, and on my personal site where I have a contact page, my line is that I respond to every thoughtful note.

And that eludes this activation energy, which, by the way, is just one special case of this overall dance that we’re doing as strangers on the internet, because again, the base case is that You’re a random person on the internet, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re probably malicious, you know, whatever, but if you’re able to provide just a little bit of signal, which can be a first name last name.com website that’s well done, it can be a simple thoughtful email, either of those, and especially if you do both, it’s like, OK, you’re already in the 99th percentile of random internet people, and I’d be happy to chat with you.

00:22:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. The bar is low in that world, right?

00:22:05 - Speaker 3: You would think, but then most people fall blow it, but most people don’t, yeah, yeah.

00:22:11 - Speaker 2: And my experience is that, yeah, maybe through your podcast and Twitter and other things and all the writing you do maybe you end up being higher profile, Brian, but yeah, I would say the amount of inbound kind of both DMs and emails that I get are certainly manageable, but yes, it does create a new to do list. I do like to, even though I don’t say this explicitly, have kind of a similar policy to Mark, but I think it’s easy for me to sort out. There’s ones that sort of obvious good signal where it’s like an interesting person and they have a clear request that’s something I can fulfill in not too much time.

Or there’s the case that’s clear spam or something close to spam, let’s say, not classic spam necessarily, but something where I don’t know, you know, the recruiter, the classic recruiter thing. Oh, I see you have a Ruby on Rails project. I’m working with a company that, you know, they clearly just didn’t look at my profile for more than 5 seconds.

The middle ground, I think, is the harder thing where someone does know me personally in my work, they are writing to me saying, hey, you know, I’ve enjoyed what you’ve done at, I don’t know what I can switch, Muse, whatever, and here’s the thing I’m doing, you know, I’m a student, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m something else. But then if that doesn’t lead into like a real clear request, it’s more just a general like, I’d like to get to know you or it’s just unclear what they’re asking for, and then maybe it’s a long email, and then it’s like, It is thoughtful and it’s in this middle ground that’s tricky and it’s hard to know 100% what to do with it.

I still try to like find a good reply if I can, but it’s often ends up being more of a thanks for the nice words. I think you’re doing something interesting. You know, if there’s some specific thing you’re looking for, let me know, but this kind of comes to the rules for emailing busy people thing, right? Like make it short, have a crisp and clear request. Maybe they’ll say no, but just make it easy for them.

00:24:06 - Speaker 1: Just to add on to that, you know, speaking of what the bar is to stand out as like a non-random person on the internet, like have a domain, have a clear ask. I’ve found. If that puts you in the 1%, well then the 1% of that is people who actually follow up.

And what I’ve been really surprised by is, you know, people will email you and they’ll ask a question and it’ll be very thoughtful and you’ll maybe send a reply and say, hey, I think this, or I’m not sure, but I read an article about this, or here’s a person that might know better than I would, and you send out this information, you’re connecting people and ideas.

Nobody ever responds to those, but the 1% of people who do are really special and I feel like that’s where you build really cool relationships is, you know, somebody asks, hey, I’m weighing these two offers at a job. What do you think I should do? I’ll tell you what I think. And then they respond, and they say, hey, by the way, I ended up doing this, and even better is they say, oh, I did this, and I learned this, right? And so one thing that I’ve started doing now recently with sort of these kinds of engagements with people I don’t know, where it feels a little bit transactional is I try and explicitly request a follow up, and the way I frame it is. Hey, by the way, if you end up making a decision, I would love to hear how you made that decision if you learned anything. So a lot of times this will end up being like job hunting or negotiation. A lot of people have been asking me how much to charge for freelance service, and I love to say just let me know what you end up doing. Like, no matter how much you decide to charge as a freelancer, please just tell me because I’m trying to populate my own data library so that I can be more helpful or more fine tuned in future interactions.

And most people don’t, but the people who do, it builds a cool, cool relationship there and it feels like it keeps the door open for back and forth, right?

00:25:55 - Speaker 2: Nice. Now another topic related here maybe is what some folks call audience, and audience is pretty clear, I guess if you’re a YouTube influencer and your audiences your subscribers, people who are, you know, following your work and you want to grow that because the whole point of your business is, or I should say the business is built on attention and the more kind of attention engagement you have, then the stronger your business is, and it also reflects your impact. You’re sharing ideas, maybe you’re creating some kind of entertainment, and you want to get that out to as many people as you can. That’s kind of what you’re in the business for. Now, all of us, we’re in the business of making products. We want to get our products to a lot of people. That’s kind of our main goal, but if personal brand is sort of a helper, contributes to Your career, but also just your ability to meet interesting people, maybe your ability to hire or be hired. Uh how important or how much do you, Brian, and Mark, I’d love to hear your answer as well. Think about audience as a thing you want to grow, Twitter followers, podcast subscribers, or is that a thing you think about at all or do you think that’s not important to you?

00:27:09 - Speaker 1: I’d love to hear your answer first, Mark, I’m curious how you think about followers specifically. I think first of all, the term, but yeah, how do you think about this?

00:27:18 - Speaker 3: This goes back to the answer that I gave to Adam’s original question, which by the way, I was getting some quizzical looks from you also maybe I can elaborate a little bit.

I think there are some people who purposely build a brand as a first class goal and want to have a lot of followers, either because they just enjoy playing that. Game or because they’re in some type of role where having access to that marketing channel is valuable if they’re developer advocate or they write a newsletter, someone like that. And that again is that sort of classical brand that you would think of if you compare it to something like a Coca-Cola. I think of it more as an asset that I can draw on when needed, so I don’t particularly need any followers. I need the ability to point to something and say, hey, I’m reaching out to you. You can refer to this artifact and see that I’m a clueful person, and that’s really all that I personally, and I think that covers most people. Now there’s a bit of a spectrum there, but I think it’s important to differentiate between Having this big standing audience and that being a first class value versus having some signal that you’re able to draw upon.

00:28:22 - Speaker 1: Hm, so maybe more clearly, do you care about how many followers you have? Like if you had 10,000 or 100,000 or a million, like are these break points interesting for you at all as far as Communicating ideas, marketing for use, the product and company hiring, like, those things matter, right? But how much do you care about how much that matters?

00:28:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so mostly not because I don’t need to do a lot of this called outbound. Now there are a few exceptions including marketing, use the product, and recruiting, and so they’re having a little bit of a follower base helps, but there’s also liabilities that come with a larger following base, especially from a personal perspective. And there’s this joke that as you approach Infinity followers, your tweets become like fortune cookies, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And so I think there’s kind of a sweet spot in 1 to 10,000 or whatever, but people have different takes.

00:29:15 - Speaker 1: What do you think, Adam? Do you care about this stuff?

00:29:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it is good to look at the difference between company and personal in this case. I do care about the followers for, say, the Muse Twitter account because that reflects our ability to get our message out of the world, right, or our newsletter subscribers or whatever.

In the beginning, when you’re brand new and no one knows who you are or cares what you have to say, if you Built something good or you believe you built something good, it’s hard to get that out into the world and you compare that to working for an established company, you know, I was part of the Salesforce empire for a little while and I saw the value of this huge megaphone, these events they did, just the reach of their voice, and so you could make a product and you didn’t need to worry too much about whether people would see it. You would worry just about making the product good.

I think obviously GitHub having such a far reach and being part of Microsoft empire probably only enhances that as well. It’s not to say that you don’t need to worry about marketing, but it’s more, you don’t need to worry about crickets or people not seeing something good you’ve made. If anything, it’s almost, you tell me what you think, but it’s almost the opposite, which is when your things still early on and you need to just get a few people to test it and not get everyone piling on to it, then, you know, it’s almost you have to work hard to sort of keep it under wraps.

So I do care about kind of the followers and the audience and the kind of the reach for my companies because that’s part of their existence.

For me personally, yeah, like Mark, I would say that’s not something I care about in the sense that it is occasionally useful recruiting is one of the main ones there, or being able to support and promote things my friends and colleagues are doing. So when a friend launches a new Product or you can switch, puts out a new essay or whatever, and I can retweet that or just, you know, do a quote tweet and say this is awesome and get them a little bit more attention than they might have had otherwise, you know, help contribute to that. That feels really good. That’s a nice use of that power. But yeah, it’s not something I want to make go up.

00:31:05 - Speaker 3: I think it’s also the case that as the technology around these social networks advances, the reputational capital becomes more atomized down to the individual, say, tweet. So it used to be back in the day, if you wanted to publish something you need to go to a big newspaper or whatever, a big radio station, and then it was that you need to have a big Facebook page or maybe a big Twitter account, but now you just need the one right TikTok video or the one tweet and it can blow up by itself, and so there’s more weight placed on having something good and valuable to say versus having a stock of reputational capital in the form of a bunch of followers.

00:31:42 - Speaker 2: Hm. Although being known for saying things that people want to hear definitely is a huge amplifier on anything you might say, which is maybe to that fortune cookie point, you can say basically pretty generic platitudes, but if your audience is big enough or you have this reputation where people just care about what you have to say, then, yeah, they’re excited about what would otherwise be a pretty bland statement.

Now the other piece of this on the followers though is I would say that the quality is not the right word. It’s people who are following me for the right reason, and I especially like the mutual follows and maybe the mutual followers thing just kind of takes you back to a little more of the classic social network where you have people who sort of all know each other rather than a publishing form, but I guess I like this thing where you can start to follow someone.

Without necessarily needing that to be two way, but the really high value relationships to me are ones where we follow each other because we’re interested in each other’s work or we share work values or we’ve worked together in the past or we might want to work together in the future, and you can have those little interactions, those little conversations, etc.

But for me, a much smaller number of followers who are people that I really vibe with or have a lot in common with or we just have similar interests and passions.

And I think I saw one effect of this when I transitioned, kind of did a bit of a career pivot, still in creative tools, but you know, went from the kind of developer tools, cloud space to the research world and more of kind of like personal productivity software. And so quite a lot of people who had followed me because I don’t know, they saw me speak at a developer conference and now they’re, why is this guy tweeting about tools for thought? What the hell is that? You know, not that interested. Maybe they don’t unfollow, but they just become kind of a dark. The point of our connection is no longer there, and so maybe the newer fresher followers who are here because of things I’m doing now, and then maybe in turn I follow them because they’re doing similar things, that’s to me where the value is.

00:33:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that you both have pointed out two things that I think are interesting challenges as you like start engaging online.

The first is the cookie cutter problem, and the second is how do you actually allow yourself to evolve? Fortune cookie, not cookie cutter, maybe the same thing. I think the fortune cookie problem is a really interesting one because I think there’s a point where you have a certain amount of reach on Twitter where the algorithm becomes very apparent. You can watch it in real time take hold, and you very subtly understand or maybe subconsciously understand what is going to get likes and what will probably not get likes, and it just breaks your brain, at least I’ll say it breaks my brain because it puts you in this position where You are tempted and also rewarded for oversimplifying, polarizing. Tweeting the hot take, criticizing. Those kinds of things. I think a good example that I learned and in many ways has for me discredited the value of like having a large following in some ways is, I remember when I launched a side project last year, I think. When I tweeted about the staff design project, which was an interview series I did. Maybe 100 people liked the tweet, which is awesome. 100 people checking out my project, fantastic. And then I think the next week I tweeted a screenshot of framer.com, and I said something like, Framer clearly reveres visual design or something like that, and that tweet got 1000 likes. And so that I felt this really deep disconnect between What I thought was valuable and what people seemed to resonate with versus this throwaway screenshot of somebody else’s work that everybody sort of glommed onto and followed me for and all of a sudden I’m like, oh, people are following me because I tweeted a screenshot of somebody else’s work. That doesn’t feel super good. And then to your point, Adam, this idea of almost being locked into a thing you’re supposed to tweet about, I feel is I don’t think I’ve really encountered this yet, but you see other people encounter this where they are the design systems person, they are the accessibility person, and when they try and branch out, it feels particularly hard. Like you can watch them struggle with it. You can watch them try and find their voice because all of a sudden the thing that they’ve become well known for and recognized for and respected for. They’re trying to branch out and are met with crickets, right? Like the design systems person who becomes interested in web 3, that’s a painful transition, like that is an entirely different disconnected audience. And so I think, you know, these ideas connect because You start tweeting things that are your more current modern interests, they’re met with crickets, and you feel the algorithm pushing back against your own personal development, and you think to yourself, well, I like getting likes, I like getting followers. I like that notification dot. Maybe I’ll just keep tweeting about design systems and then you end up with people creating alts, and then you have all these multiple Twitter accounts you’re balancing, and then your life is just These different threads of interests and nothing feels authentic or complete anymore. Maybe that’s OK, maybe that’s how the internet should work. Maybe we should have different accounts for different interests, right? Like we have different networks for different types of communities. Facebook has a different type of connection than a Twitter. Maybe you should have a different Twitter for every kind of interest you have. I don’t know. But yeah, I’ve noticed those sort of tensions in my life, like figuring out what to tweet about and wanting to be real and authentic and true to yourself, while also recognizing as you’re typing, you’re like, uh, I bet if I reworded this to be slightly spicier, more people would like it, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

00:37:53 - Speaker 2: That’s incredibly interesting.

I mean, those pressures, social pressures have always existed, of course.

I think of if you want to like reinvent yourself a little bit, maybe like your personal style or something about how you present yourself to the world, the best time to do that is when you move to a new town. No one knows the old you and so you can just kind of, you know, change it overnight and not deal with the I know it’s quite pressure, but maybe even if people are not necessarily trying to push you back into what they know you for, but yeah, I think we always feel a sort of pressure to be what we’re known to be rather than what we want to evolve into, and that comes from our environment, friends and family, peer groups, and so on, and that makes personal change even harder than maybe it already is. Now obviously you digitize these natural tendencies which are maybe not great to begin with and make them maybe even more amped up, particularly when the algorithm makes it so visible to you. So that’s very interesting. Actually this is a nice connection back to a concept we talked about in the company brand episode which is there’s what’s known as brand extension. And the general thing is that brand extension is uh basically a pretty bad idea and almost never works. So, you know, for example, Kleenex is known for making facial tissue. If Kleenex makes printer paper, which perhaps is a similar product in the sense of how it’s manufactured, not only is it confusing what the hell is Kleenex printer paper, but you’ve actually destroyed the brand equity of what Kleenex is in the mind of your customer. And the recommendation there is generally make a new brand if you’re truly transitioning to a different market. So maybe that does beg the question of should I have just started a new Twitter account when I was transitioning my career. And again, to me it feels I’m the same person. It feels like a continuous journey that I went through, and I do think there’s this uniting thing that ties togetheroku I can switch and Muse, which is creative tools and helping people, you know, making things to help other people make things. So to me it’s perfectly, perfectly logical and obvious, but maybe there is places where that ends up being sort of a brand extension.

00:40:03 - Speaker 1: I feel like crypto is just the most obvious example to point to where like everybody has their separate crypto brand now, or I mean we could talk about pseudonymity, which is this interesting trend that’s taking shape right now where people want to have.

This alt profile where they can feel safe to talk about this other interest they have, but they know is incredibly polarizing and they don’t want to sort of poison the well of their existing brand by introducing these new topics, right? What do you both think of pseudonymity in this space, maybe even going back to Mark’s point about, I think he called it reputational capital, I think is a really interesting concept that gets associated with, you know, a name, a face, a person, and we’re sort of breaking that a little bit.

00:40:51 - Speaker 2: I think the ability to make multiple profiles and isolate them from each other, have some be private, some more public, maybe one that’s career oriented, one that’s personal, something like that is one of the incredible strengths of the internet, and I pretty strongly, I think Mark Zuckerberg at some point in the early Facebook days said that everyone should have just one personal account, your one person, it should have your real first and last name. And I think that really removes a lot of what makes the internet a pretty special place.

I think it’s a place, particularly, for example, teenagers or younger people who are still figuring things out, they can explore parts of their identity that they’re not sure about yet in this sort of safe but still out in the world way. I think it’s an incredible thing. Now, of course, the ability to make anonymous accounts or relatively little tie to your real world identity is also part of what creates so many problems on the internet. Spam and fraud and abuse and different things like that, but I feel that’s a price worth paying.

00:41:48 - Speaker 1: It feels like there’s this tension, you know, in the old world of forums, every forum you went to, you would sign up and have a separate account and you could kind of build your own identity there that wasn’t linked to your other forum accounts, but now we live in the world of Discord where you are.

Your account, no matter what server you’re accessing. Mark, I’m curious because I know you’re deep in Discord. I’ve always wondered why Discord doesn’t have this concept of bringing a separate identity to every server, even though it’s all wrapped under one login.

And maybe even Twitter has an opportunity to innovate here cause they’re experimenting with a feature called Communities where, you know, your design persona or your development persona or tools for thought persona is just different and as you switch contexts, it should feel very natural to do that and you shouldn’t have to log out of one persona and log back in. It should just be, oh, I’m switching into this space, this mode.

00:42:49 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, in general I’m very bullish on pseudonymity. I think it’s super important to individuals, to people, to citizens, and I think it’s honestly fairly threatening and sometimes problematic to like managers and governors, you know, that kind of group, and so that’s why there’s this constant tension of should you be able to make a synonymous account and generally individuals say yes and people running stuff say no.

Discord is interesting that you mentioned that because I think it is unfortunate that they don’t natively support multiple. Identities, for what it’s worth. I do have multiple disco identities. I think one is for like personal and gaming and one is for work. I forget how exactly it’s split, but I definitely have several. Yeah it’s too bad they don’t support natively.

00:43:31 - Speaker 2: Identity is also a huge topic of interest for me. It’s something I think that the computing slash internet world is