Metamuse

In today’s world, apps and their data are tightly coupled—but what if each person could pick and choose their own tool for use in a collaborative project? Geoffrey Litt is a researcher working on this problem at MIT. He joins Mark and Adam to talk about email as the original BYOC case study; how shared protocols enable niche software; whether it’s possible to design software for someone other than yourself; and how to accidentally become an expert. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Geoffrey Litt / @geoffreylitt “teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea” Project Cambria MIT Software Design Group Ink & Switch Human-Computer Interaction Doug Engelbart Superorganizers profile of Geoffrey including Muse screenshots Bring Your Own Client email as one of the first internet protocols Pine, Mutt Superhuman, Front, Tempo not many clients support video in HTML emails tractor attachments and the three-point hitch HTML meta tags for Google and Twitter progress enhancement reverse engineering ad blockers end-user programming aspiring programmer progressing from Livejournal to HTML coding PHP Hubspot, Mailchimp “toolmaker humility” from Balint @ Craft Solid accessibility in collaborative writing VS Code won the text editor wars “ed is the standard text editor” episode on video games Flash, Java servlet Changing Minds Bonnie Nardi ethnographic study of distributed problem-solving in spreadsheets Wildcard

Tech product designers could learn from the immense challenges of designing cities. Devon joins Adam and Mark to share her knowledge and passion on urban design and economics. They discuss how open source communities compare to cities; historical preservation versus growth and change; the messy middle of public and private goods; wi-fi spectrum ownership; and what to do when the neighbor’s new building puts shade on your vegetable garden. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Devon Zuegel / @devonzuegel Order without Design (book) Order Without Design (podcast) episode on Seattle and Berlin urban economics, planning, and design The World Bank Venture funding in 2020 Paris city walls path dependence Miami Art Deco historic protection centrally-planned economy TCP/IP Manhattan street grid plan (1811) Eminent Domain 1960s highway revolts Discretionary Review Berlin rent cap artistocracy San Francisco’s privately-owned public spaces (POPOS) LinkedIn public cafe Sacré-Cœur Basilica La Défense Paris business district biography of Gustave Eiffel first-past-the-post voting seasteading charter cities Special Economic Zone Shenzen electromagnetic spectrum auction Georgism universal basic income air rights Prospectus On Próspera voxel zoning laws in Japan no on-street parking in Tokyo The High Cost of Free Parking A History of Future Cities City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism

Pricing a product is one of the most difficult and high-stakes part of running a software business. Adam, Mark, and Lennart discuss the latest pricing updates for Muse; the pros and cons of selling through the iOS App Store; concerns with subscription payments for software; and why it’s important to be experimental and iterative with your prices. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Lennart Ziburski Potsdam, Germany Ink & Switch essay on the Muse prototype Desktop Neo The Cloudfall Muse pricing idea maze psychology of why most prices end in .99 conversion rate freemium total cost of ownership Things Mars rover software static linking Heroku pricing pricing books: Priceless, Don’t Just Roll the Dice, Pricing on Purpose pricing for the enterprise Notion previous pricing / free tier with 1000 blocks Sublime Text nagware We’ve Always Had Freemium, It’s Called Piracy Muse newsletter where we first asked beta users to weigh in on price

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have transformed how we come to a shared understanding about our world. Tobias has been writing about social media for half a decade. He joins Mark and Adam to discuss velocity and virality in information dissemination; how to train your YouTube algorithm; rage tweeting; and how to improve the internet we all inhabit. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Tobias Rose-Stockwell and his writing MUD TinTin++ techno-optimism clickbait This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit The Social Dilemma The Dark Psychology of Social Networks Jonathan Haidt How to Stop Misinformation Before It Gets Shared Renée DiResta moral psychology algorithmic feeds System 1 and System 2 thinking dopamine hit dunk quote-tweeting The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority How to Disagree moral grandstanding episode on The Information Age the intellectual dark web “The internet is the Freak Liberation Front.” the food pyramid yellow journalism Central Park zoo escape (1874) Great Moon Hoax (1835) Prisoner’s Dilemma Substack Plandemic Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach

Great tools can enable co-creation between humans and computers. Molly Mielke joins Mark and Adam to talk about her thesis on the subject. They discuss product design as a fusion of creative and analytical; how consumer preferences may conflict with the Engelbart/Kay vision of computing; the emerging social norms of collaborative software; and why we should bring back skeuomorphism. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Molly Mielke Whole Earth Catalog and Stewart Brand biopic Abstract Computing History Hub senioritis episode with Andy Matuschak Kid Pix Computers and Creativity The Mother of All Demos TRON Balint Orosz on toolmaker humility episode with Nikolas Klein CVS and Subversion LaTeX Always Has Been meme flow state deep work operational transform, CRDTs Tuckman’s stages of group development the Satir change model Writely skeuomorphism

Probabilistic modeling is useful for answering all kinds of questions, from assessing financial risk to making engineering time estimates. Yet spreadsheets are poor at this job, which is why Taimur and his colleagues are building Casual. Taimur talks with Mark and Adam about ranges as an intuitive way to estimate; the usefulness of Monte Carlo simulations; and the role of math in dating cave paintings. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Taimur Abdaal Casual Not Overthinking Airtable Drake‘s equation line of best fit “not even wrong” Flatland Monte Carlo simulation R closed-form solution RoboCup Slack (management book) queueing theory The Principles of Product Development Flow tail risk expected value gambler’s fallacy distribution shapes e.g. bell curve fan chart Samo Burja of Bismark Analysis meta-analysis preregistered studies confidence interval false positive, false negative onboarding episode A/A testing carcinization combinatorics two-tailed test

Video games are often on the leading edge of technical, design, and social innovation in the software world. Mark and Adam discuss what productivity tools can learn from games including the culture of performance; tools like Twitch and Discord; and end-user programming via scripting and modding. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Seattle cherry blossoms episodes with Rasmus Andersson and Andy.Works Serious Play “death march” in game development developer experience esports Age of Empires II Counter-Strike FEZ; Papers, Please; Baba Is You Core-A Gaming Playing to Win the metagame the Olympics Nvidia frame rate counters Nintendo Switch Makepad code folding Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) Cyberpunk 2077 and everything is securities fraud Duke Nukem Forever No Man’s Sky and launch controversy Mass Effect, Horizon Zero Dawn Muse onboarding scripting, modding, skinning tower defense A Small Matter of Programming My Life as a Night Elf Priest World of Warcraft free-to-play (F2P) games Team Fortress Valve Left 4 Dead Steam Valve employee handbook Candy Crush, Wooga, FarmVille Twitch Justin.tv CGP Grey on Twitch American Truck Simulator Among Us, US congressperson livestreams consumer surplus Discord T90 Zero Punctuation, Girlfriend Reviews Game Maker’s Toolkit Metroid Nintendo Power magazine haptic feedback Batman: Arkham Asylum / detective mode Tetris max-out score four-minute mile speedruns Twitch paid subscriber emotes Myst built in Hypercard Strider, Angband, rougelikes Lucas Pope, Return of the Obra Dinn

Design and engineering polymath Rasmus Andersson joins Mark and Adam to talk about his new project, Playbit. Play as a means of discovery and learning; virtualization as an underexploited technology for making safe playspaces for programming; and whether macOS will still exist in ten years. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Rasmus Andersson @rsms Playbit What counts as a weed? maskros flowers “write access to your entire worldview” Jason Yuan on fidgitability Virginia Postrel on work vs play Rust Roadster in space foam roll “Adamisms” e.g. make it real Hobo Go, Go by Example slow hunch malleable software xorg.conf convention over configuration macOS notarization woes Chrome OS sandboxing GPU time-sharing write once, run anywhere macOS virtualization, Hyper-V, KVM Linux namespaces Ruby gem: bundle root user An app can be a home-cooked meal Replit Dreams The Cathedral and the Bazaar Macromedia Director demoscene, BBS culture MOD trackers Gameboy DJ performance Raspberry Pi flip displays teenage engineering Alfazeta flipdots vendor

When you pay for software, are you paying for the data storage or the interface? Balint is the founder of Craft, a writing app designed for iPad. He chats with Adam and Mark about design conventions for multimodal input; why import/export is so important; and how to have humility about how your product fits into your customer’s life. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Balint Orosz of Craft Budapest: bridges, parliament building, castle Making computers better Skyscanner Markdown Mac Catalyst retina displays homeostasis multimodal input Craft on data ownership Ulysses I/O TestBundle format best of breed Instagram DSLR cameras, RAW format, Lightroom bidirectional links Excel low floor, high ceiling iOS share sheet SVG JSON Visual Studio Code Google Photos going paid churn Small Giants Office 365 revenue via Microsoft 2020 annual report bootstrapping

Agenda is software that encodes an unusual philosophy for note-taking. Alex of Agenda joins Mark and Adam to talk about being an indie developer; note-taking as a technique for calming the mind; and the benefits of community and learning tools socially. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Alexander Griekspoor Agenda easter egg Papers biology wet lab R, Jupyter, Matlab CodeWarrior open loops Parkinson’s law Drew McCormack Agenda community Zettelkasten deep dive on notes tools search engine optimization localizations by Agenda community volunteers authentic marketing “cash cow” business model

A “small giant” is a company that chooses to optimize for mojo instead of growth. Mark and Adam describe how Muse was inspired to follow this path, designing the business model, team makeup, and funding source accordingly. Plus: a digression into tender offers and the fine points of US tax law. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Partnership, freedom, and responsibility Adam Wulf Small Giants S&P 500 Clif Bar, Whole Foods, Union Square Cafe Startup = Growth existence proof Signal, Panic, Vanguard index funds and ETFs Chef’s Table meme stocks Delaware C-corp Harrison Metal career capital revenue-based financing maker vs manager VC Math tender offer stock buyback dividends TrustCommerce growth stocks vs income stocks foundations: Mozilla, Apache, Processing, Wikimedia

Tools for collaboration are changing team culture. Nikolas Klein has been a part of this shift in his academic work and on the product design team at Figma. He joins Mark and Adam to discuss creative collaboration including how guardrails can increase comfort with working collaboratively; changing mindset from “my ideas” to “our ideas”; and screensharing as an intimate act. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Nikolas Klein @nikolasklein time logistics for teams spanning US and Europe Sketch Runner Artifacts Schwäbisch Gmünd / Hochschule für Gestaltung CLUI Shopify design system / Polaris Telescope Figma hypergrowth user redesign of Figma comments sea shanty TikTok remix culture bisociation / Arthur Koestler hammock-driven development Sketching User Experiences OBS Studio ring light Zoom Studio Figma cursor Halloween costumes Designer News reaction to Figma launch people who understand the capabilities of software The Dream Machine

Brand is not just a name or a logo—it’s the character of a company and its products. Adam and Mark discuss the memetic and emotive elements of branding; brand as tribal identity; and Muse brand values like thoughtfulness and curiosity. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Brand New history of the Heinz brand logomark Richard Branson / Virgin Pixar Nike / the Swoosh / Just Do It 37signals Tarsnap Sabaki the Muse newsletter The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding FedEx business biography memetic Notion illustrations by Roman Muradov Cragistlist and brutalist web design proof of work typography of Apple, Inc. packaging design on 99designs Harley-Davidson consumerization of IT and Bring Your Own Device BlackBerry, corporate VPNs administrative legibility

How to prototype advanced gestures; how to organize your Muse boards; and how to spot good ideas. Plus, a peek at the long-term Muse roadmap. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Ferrite listener questions thread Balsamiq, Framer, Origami Studio Make it real infinite canvas memo reductionism spatial reasoning Growing ideas with Andy Matuschak retrospective Paul Buchheit Slow Software self-hosting End-user programming Minecraft redstone MySpace customization Figma plugins

Maps can visualize space, time, biological processes, social graphs, and much more. Anne-Laure of Ness Labs talks with Mark and Adam about the multi-thousand-year history of map-based thinking, and how we can use maps in our own creative work today. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Anne-Laure Le Cunff @anthilemoon winter solstice Algerian food Ness Labs @ness_labs mindful productivity the Dunning-Kruger effect How to Be Idle Thinking in maps Cassiodorus Babylonian map of the world the map is not the territory The Invention of Nature Alexander von Humboldt’s Chimborazo map Disney business process map (1957) Krebs cycle floppy disc save icon D3.js Parametric Press Connected Papers digital object identifier (DOI) babies using touch gestures on magazines heads-up display (HUD) Scapple by Literature and Latte focused mode and diffuse mode / Barbara Oakley affinity maps

Jason Crawford writes about the history of technology and the philosophy of progress. He joins Mark and Adam to talk about technologies like messenger RNA vaccines, nanotech, and supersonic jets. Plus society-level questions like whether we are in a period of stagnation, how we fund maverick ideas, and why we need hubris. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Jason Crawford / The Roots of Progress / @jasoncrawford Fieldbook A Small Matter of Programming We Need a New Science of Progress The Torch of Progress — Ep. 13 with Adam Wiggins The Great Stagnation Bessemer steel process germ theory We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters The Rise and Fall of American Growth and Jason’s summary Where Is My Flying Cars? and Jason’s summary Luddites Victorian-era concept of Progress A Culture of Growth Francis Bacon growth mindset The March of Progress World’s Fair posters phase 3 clinical trials Hardcore History techno-optimism 1927 Charles Lindbergh ticker-tape parade Why haven’t we celebrated any major achievements lately? Academy of Thought and Industry Boom 747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet Concorde

Thinking and creativity require privacy. In this data-intensive age, what does “privacy” mean for a tool for thought? Mark and Adam discuss product decisions in the context of digital privacy for the tech industry and society overall. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes US Supreme Court oral arguments live The Right to Privacy (1890) LiveJournal GDPR Brave, Duck Duck Go, ProtonMail, Fathom Signal, Telegram TLS Clipper Chip Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine Local-first software Open Whisper Systems web of trust Signal contact verification Zoom end-to-end encryption whitepaper PGP telemetry PII cookie warnings browser fingerprinting Tor TikTok iOS 14 clipboard notifications Designing for Pragmatists and Fundamentalists Edward Snowden, Citizenfour Tails The Stasi The Lives of Others

Jason Yuan believes that we all should feel empowered to think about ways to improve our computer's operating system. He joins Mark and Adam to talk about stage design, dreaming big versus delivering practical products, and why software should be fun. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Jason Yuan / @jasonyuandesign Mercury OS MakeSpace Screenotate Omar Rizwan Tyler Angert Repl.it Weiwei Hsu Desktop Neo Artifacts iOS 14 widgets Sketch Orgami Quartz Composer Android launchers Gall’s law the iPod click wheel virtual workspaces Dynamicland Bret Victor spring damping David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet Xanadu philosopher’s stone The Mother of All Demos

Andy.Works believes in design-forward products, as seen in his work on Paper for iPad to a handmade analog clock for his young kids. Mark, Adam, and Andy discuss products as vector for culture; maverick game designers; innovation budgets; and pushing back against the idea of scale in software. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Andy of Andy.Works Andy’s clock project Microsoft Courier Surface Duo FiftyThree Paper Paste No More Boring Apps KPI John Baldessari Muse podcast with Josh Miller user-centered design Frank Lloyd Wright The Guggenheim local maxima Making Movies Playdead / Limbo, Inside Oskar Stålberg / Townscraper Jonathan Blow / Braid Notch / Minecraft Jordan Mechner / Prince of Persia not the user’s fault Choose Boring Technology

It's a new world: many creative professionals can now choose where they live, independent of where their employer is headquartered. Mark and Adam discuss the implications of this. Plus: the magic of Silicon Valley, cities that feed your creative soul, and strategies for making big life decisions. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Emigration and other hedges Stripe relocation incentive and Zapier relocation incentive Y Combinator Amazon HQ2 Stripe Atlas and Firstbase Apple and Ireland tax case Amazon and sales tax collection

Jane Portman of Userlist joins Julia and Adam to share her expertise with onboarding. Why guided tours don't work, the legacy of Clippy, and drip campaigns that are more personal and considerate. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Jane Portman @uibreakfast User Onboarding: The Ultimate Guide for SaaS Founders Userlist Benedikt Deicke Intercom lifecycle messaging Claire Suellentrop, Forget The Funnel UI Breakfast podcast tooltips Inspire, Not Instruct aha moment Clue out-of-box-experience (OOBE) Samuel Hulick, UserOnboard, podcast interview Clippy call to action Val Geisler drip campaign tech touch A/B test or split test Max Seelemann

Josh Miller from The Browser Company joins Mark and Adam to discuss how to make a better web browser in 2020. The conversation ranges from user agency in software to architecture to social capital to end-user programming. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Josh Miller @joshm The Browser Company Branch Nate Parrott Einstein quote beginner’s mind Evan Williams Brownian motion The Roots of Progress Jobs to be Done David Adjaye Museum of African American History and Culture Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) HVAC Bjarke Ingels Abstract A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction Snap S1 Snapcodes Evan Spiegel Norton Commander Electron sociology web browser as Figma canvas CERN and the birth of the web Taxi Magic timing matters / Adam’s Heroku values Robert D. Putnam Bowling Alone Scott Heiferman Greasemonkey Rust

Andy Matuschak joins Mark and Adam to talk about rituals for deep thought, how to develop an inkling over time, and the public goods problem of research. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Andy Matuschak: homepage Twitter Patreon How can we develop transformative tools for thought? Michael Nielsen Bret Victor on representation of thought Quantum Country spaced repetition Anki IDEO iBooks deliberate practice Solitude and Leadership LiquidText evergreen notes exponential backoff Heroku haiku names positivism and existentialism deontological ethics intelligent tutoring systems ALEKS Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Ivan Sutherland / Sketchpad Palladium Magazine mechanical keyboards on Reddit Pricing niche products: Why sell a mechanical keyboard kit for $1,668? tech transfer Genentech and recombinant DNA Dolby Pixar Why does DARPA work?

Lisa Enckell joins Mark and Adam to talk about picking a category, aspirational creativity, and the purpose of product launches. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Lisa Enckell Antler episode with Max Schoening Patrick McKenzie on North Star podcast Platform-as-a-Service containerization dynos serverless Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind Points of Parity, Points of Difference purple cow N26 Circles.Life silhouette iPod ads Signaling as a Service hey.com library of Trinity College Dublin The Substance of Style Marie Kondo Marc Benioff “It’s not when people notice you’re there that they pay attention; it’s when they notice you’re still there.” DreamForce, Google I/O Ubuntu release cycle Wrapp 23andMe DNA Day

The rich history of tools for thought stretches back to the 1960s. Adam and Mark talk about how today’s computing, from iPads to Twitch to AI, might help us gain knoweldge and develop novel ideas. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Tools For Thought How can we develop transformative tools for thought? bicycle for the mind Doug Engelbart Alan Kay Vannevar Bush As We May Think the two-step process for developing ideas Roam Research Thinking, Fast and Slow industrial-strength noise-canceling headphones white-noise generators in a Muse email update GPT-3 Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins generative design Twitch Discord

This modern Information Age can make it challenging for a creative professional to keep their focus. At the same time, there are many benefits to being plugged in. Mark and Adam discuss. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age the Information Age The end of mobile The Information Pathology The Slot Machine in Your Pocket digital detox the Industrial Revolution The Rise and Fall of American Growth Thinking About Attention RescueTime Screen Time Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World Center for Humane Technology Gell-Mann Amnesia The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority

Max Schoening of GitHub joins Mark and Adam to talk about principled design, authentic marketing, tools for thought, and more. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Max Schoening @mschoening end-user programming tools for thought SQLite US Library of Congress recommended storage formats Read the Fabulous Manual composability The Twelve-Factor App GitHub Actions ivory tower Trello / card aging Zen of Palm Google Chrome launch comic Things OmniFocus Exponent / Principle Stacks unix / everything is a text stream Overcast Marco Arment free and open podcasts Brave Signal Telegram Fathom Analytics the year of Linux on the desktop flame war khaki pants Daring Fireball Muse email updates no spinners Situated Software

Lachlan Campbell of Hack Club joins Mark and Adam to talk about path from research prototype to released product. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Lachlan Campbell Hack Club interactive media arts at NYU Real web development on iPad Fonts on iPad GoodNotes iA Writer Shortcuts usability tests Minimum Viable Product Notion software release life cycle Gmail beta lasted five years excerpting and wormholes shelf TestFlight The Long Now Steam Early Access Kickstarter Patreon Future Fonts Heroku Labs Gmail Labs iA Writer / Settings

HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) studies how people relate to their digital tools. Mark and Adam discuss their journey into HCI, how others can get into the field, and its influence on Muse. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes You and Your Research The Art and Science of Doing Engineering Stripe Press Human-Computer Interaction Ink & Switch Xerox PARC Microsoft Research MeetAlive: Room-Scale Omni-Directional Display System CHI 2019 proceedings Peripheral Notifications in Large Displays Sensing Posture-Aware Pen+Touch Interactions on Tablets A Small Matter of Programming Strategies in Creative Professionals’ Use of Digital Tools The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff Associative memory Ben Reinhardt and innovation orgs Brett Victor and Dynamicland Andy Matuschak and a new mnemonic medium Johnathon blow and Braid, Jai programming language Rich Hickey’s Hammock Driven Development Dan Luu and Computer latency Martin Kleppmann and Local-First Software

Developing an iPad app with a rich gesture space and unique spatial-zooming visual model is technically challenging. Julia joins Mark and Adam to break down the software engineering behind Muse. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Xcode iOS Simulator Swift Core Data Firebase Zoom privacy issue with Facebook SDK Ruby Postgres Heroku Choose Boring Technology Dataclips Gestures as defined by Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines Shannon Hughes / Detangling Gesture Recognizers The Omni Group GestureVisualization UIGestureRecognizer two-finger scrolling in Muse Muse design goals card-carry maneuver the inbox view hierarchy loading screens open-world games stylus swipe from screen edge to switch tools UIScreenEdgePanGestureRecognizer unix terminal ctrl-C to interrupt a program in unix state machine

The company behind Muse is structured as a small partnership. Mark and Adam talk about why the team wanted this unusual approach and how it's working so far. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Muse is Hiring an Engineering Partner startup employee stock options Netflix Freedom & Responsibility Culture startup founder Starbucks / Howard Shultz Google OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) Salesforce V2MOM (Vison, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures) alignment Management by Peter Drucker expensing exercise window vesting and cliffs dilution vest in peace cap table re-up agency Mad Men professonal services cult of personality Disney company transition after Walt’s death trial project / pilot project indie

Professional tools need a manual to explain how they work, but not all manuals are created equal. Mark and Adam discuss their mutual love of manuals, what makes a manual great, and why we chose video as the primary medium for the Muse Interface Handbook. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes Muse Interface Handbook How to use your Rocket Espresso machine and make beautiful coffee Go by Example Heroku Dev Center Ulysses tutorials Working Copy Users‘ guide GoodNotes how-to guides Procreate Handbook Stripe API Reference unix man pages The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer tacit knowledge The Matrix / I know Kung Fu Building Heroku Add-ons glossary mental model Muse design article Capstone manuscript green screen Looom User Guide RTFM out-of-box experience (OOBE) Bear Notion templates vi

Ideas are foundational for creative and knowledge work. Mark and Adam talk about fodder, making time to ideate, and the value of fresh surroundings. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes ideation House M.D. Where Good Ideas Come from video essays active reading Moleskine Field Notes post-it notes commonplace book OmniGraffle MindNode Google Keep Bear Drafts Shape Up Pocket Dropbox Goodreads Cowen‘s Second Law Slow Software Wiggins‘ Law breadth-first vertical slice state of flow Deep Work academic sabbatical Getting Things Done mindfulness

Muse has a modeless interface with no onscreen toolbars. Mark and Adam talk about the long research journey that led us here. Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes modelessness The Humane Interface administrative debris quasimode tablet platforms command glyphs Muse design article Procreate Paper by FiftyThree Apple Human Interface Guidelines Ink & Switch Surface Studio Surface Dial Google Jamboard Catalyst Xerox PARC Bell Labs Concepts technical pens Looom Teenage Engineering ortho remote Wacom tablets

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I believe, which is that a product that comes with the manual implies it has depth, that it fits together with being a professional tool, where probably the things you want to do with it are things that require skill and take time to learn, even separately from the tool itself. Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse, the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I’m here today with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan. And Mark, how are things today? 00:00:42 - Speaker 2: Doing all right, thanks, Adam. How are you? 00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Doing well, we just had uh the spring weather break here in Berlin, so even though we’re still on home lockdown, uh, going out to enjoy the flowers in bloom and trees, uh, in starting to turn green and the kids out, uh, families out and taking my dog out for a walk. It’s uh it’s a nice break after the the long winter. So I’m very excited about our topic today, and that is manuals. So we just finished, uh, really should say you and Leonard just finished the Muse interface handbook. Put a link to that in the show notes. And I think this is a, a lovely piece of work that sort of shows the command vocabulary gestures that you can, uh, you can use with the Muse application. But the path that we took to get here is maybe an interesting one. I want to tell that story a little bit. When the team started talking about whether we needed some kind of manual or handbook or user’s guide or something like that, it really caused me to go and start reflecting a lot on what I thought makes a good manual. One experience for me that really stuck in my mind was this experience of getting a rocket espresso machine. Do you know these devices? 00:01:49 - Speaker 2: I think I’ve maybe seen it at your place or I know of it, yeah. 00:01:53 - Speaker 1: I think I got this machine around the same time as I also got some other kitchen appliances. Maybe there was like um like a slow cooker, rice cooker thing, and there was a stark contrast where the, the slow cooker came with this. Thin black and white tiny print thing that was like in 8 languages and I had to hunt through to find the English and even then it was. I don’t know, pages of boilerplate about, you know, plugging it into the right socket and don’t take it to the bathtub with you and so on, and just getting to the information I wanted, which was how to use the device to cook things, uh, was quite difficult. The rocket machine by comparison, has this lovely, uh, manual that’s sort of this a full color, it’s bound and the right on the cover it says something along the lines of how to use your machine and and make beautiful coffee. And describing what I want to accomplish as a user and it’s, it’s a quite rich technical manual that covers a lot of, has a lot of depth and certainly I think it has the safety warnings and whatever in the back somewhere, but it really was this inspiring thing that gave me enthusiasm and excitement to uh get using this product versus such a stark contrast to the basically the very sad, uh, manuals that come with uh other kinds of kitchen appliances. So that was, that was a powerful experience for me. What for you Mark makes a good manual? 00:03:16 - Speaker 2: Well, I think your example points to a few things. One is the sense of like impute that you get from actually first seeing the manual. You infer the quality of the product and the experience that you should expect from what you see in the manual. So it’s a very dull, poorly designed, uninspired manual. You might expect the same thing in the product reasonably, whereas if it’s a very, you know, well done, well designed, uh, well thought out, um, piece of work, you might again expect the same thing on the product side. Two products that I have some experience with here. One is go by example, um, which is. On the edge of being a manual, it’s kind of a website, you know, this is the site for learning the Go programming language, uh, but the idea there was to have a very example-based approach to learning. Uh, the Go programming language instead of a very abstract word-based approach. So here you go to the site, it’s basically a series of, of lightly annotated example programs so you can see just exactly how to do it. It’s a show don’t tell situation, which I think is by the way similar to the espresso machine manual you mentioned. You can imagine trying to work an espresso machine just on the basis of text. It’s like pull this lever, then depress that knob and put more water in here. It’s like what does that even mean, right? It’s so much better when you can actually see it i

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 remembe

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think you can think of writing on the internet as a beacon, as a way to signal yourself to other like-minded people. These pieces of yourself that you put out on the internet, and they allow you to create this that serendipity engine where like-minded people can find you. 00:00:26 - 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 with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. 00:00:39 - Speaker 1: Hey Adam. 00:00:40 - Speaker 2: And joined today by Francesco Di Lorenzo of Typefully. 00:00:44 - Speaker 1: Hi, I’m Mark. Thanks for having me. Hi. 00:00:47 - Speaker 2: And I understand you’ve been learning Portuguese. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I moved to Portugal, that’s been almost a year. I haven’t tried to learn a new language in a while. It has been humbly. And a real challenge. 00:01:00 - Speaker 2: And your native language is Italian, correct? 00:01:03 - Speaker 1: Italian, because they are very similar languages. 00:01:07 - Speaker 2: It’s a little less of a jump than, I don’t know, learning Japanese or something, I would imagine. 00:01:11 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. 00:01:14 - Speaker 2: Well, certainly I can speak to the challenges of immigrant life and obviously there’s the surface things like I don’t know, the food’s different or the, you know, the trains are organized differently, but for sure the language, particularly because that’s so important for official things, right? Working with your bank, filing your taxes, interacting with authorities, and indeed you have a far greater amount of this. Official administrative trivia as an immigrant than you do as a person that was native to the place. So, yeah, for me at least, the language has been a cornerstone, both challenge but also thing to invest in in my immigrant journey. 00:01:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, but more than that, I think it’s even, it’s very important to fit in in a place, you know, just live there, go with your day, only talking with experts like you. So this has been a big motivator for me in trying to learn it. 00:02:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. The reason you go to a place is because you want to be part of it, to integrate, I think is. Even the official word for it, and that doesn’t necessarily mean adopting every custom, but I do think there is a degree to which if you’re an English speaker, either as a first or a second language. You can get pretty far with that, particularly if you’re in tech spheres, you’re in big city, where you have young people that, you know, everyone probably learned English from when they were pretty young, etc. You really can get by with that for a long time if you want, but I think there’s virtue, let’s say, in learning the local language, even aside from the utility. Absolutely. And tell us a little bit about you and about Typefully. 00:02:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m a software engineer by trade, turned in the actor turned CEO of a small company. We make Tali, which started as a small side project to write Twitter, but now as the project and the company scales, we are scaling our ambition with it and are trying to build the general purpose writing up for the internet for creators. 00:03:19 - Speaker 2: And you also come a little bit out of the, you mentioned indie hacker, but also the calm fund world of companies starting small, trying to get to revenue quickly, not necessarily targeting hypergrowth, and folks interested in that can listen to our podcast episode with Tyler from Calm, but you mentioned scaling your ambitions. Was this something where you see a path to the bigger team and the bigger opportunity because of the response to the product? 00:03:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we subscribe to the company mentality and basically we’re trying to build a small team of individual contributors, and each one of us, even the two founders, we work every day on the product, trying to improve it. And yeah, we see this pattern that all great products, most of them are built by very small focused teams. Partly started by very small focused teams, so we won’t keep working this way for as long as we can. 00:04:18 - Speaker 2: And you describe typefully, at least in the moment, as a way to write better tweets and build your Twitter audience. Tell us what does the product do today, and then maybe give us a little hint of what the bigger vision is. 00:04:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. It started as a way to write Twitter trends, right when Twitter threads were starting to become a thing, not right now that they’re been turning into the cringe territory. So it started that way as a way, an easy way better to interfa

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: My experience as a team lead is that if your team is aligned going into a project, you get this incredible execution. It’s fun to do, you know, maybe hard work, but you’re all rowing in the same direction, you’re seeing those results when you put the pieces together, they’re all harmonious. 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 McGrenigan. Hey Adam. So Mark, it’s been snowing recently here in Berlin, quite cold, and of course I need to not only walk a dog 3 times a day, but now take my daughter to Kita, which is kind of a daycare kindergarten thing in the stroller. So spending a lot of time in the cold these days. How do you feel about kind of places with the full 4 seasons, which I think you grew up in the kind of East Coast United States versus the West Coast or perhaps more southernly lifestyle that is Yeah, I’m a huge fan of the Four Seasons, probably because it’s what I grew up with. 00:01:02 - Speaker 2: Actually, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, now I’m in the inland Pacific Northwest, and it’s just beautiful in the winter with the snow on the evergreens, and it’s very quiet and peaceful. I’m a big fan. 00:01:16 - Speaker 1: I certainly find that change of the seasons just keeps life interesting in a way. There’s something about the passage of that day night cycle. And there’s a similar thing with the 360 something days around the sun, and these quarters, essentially, they each have their own distinctive look and feel, right? The blooming flowers of spring, the high sun of the summertime, the rich autumn leaves in the fall, and then winter with it’s cold and snow and people wanting to stay inside and stay warm and cozy. I don’t know, there’s something about that cyclical aspect that works for me somehow. 00:01:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you’re not only enjoying the current season, there’s an element of anticipation for the next one. So now we’re looking forward to, OK, we’ve shoveled the driveway enough times, we’re looking forward to the snow clearing out, and then perhaps it’ll get hot again, but then once it’s 90 degrees and smoky, you’re like, oh man, I can’t wait for the winter when it’s just cold. So around and around it goes. 00:02:15 - Speaker 1: So our topic today is leadership. I thought this would be a fun one because this is something both you and I have spent a lot of time on in our careers. I’ve been in some way or another leading sometimes reluctantly or with some surprise, small teams for over 20 years now. You’ve done quite a bit of that in your career also, and it’s come up a little bit recently in terms of our work on use for teams, in terms of the kinds of people we’re seeing that see the need for this product, we can talk about that. A little bit later, but as always, we like to start with basics. What is leadership? What does that word bring to mind for you? 00:02:51 - Speaker 2: I’d probably say creating an environment where the team achieves success. Now, you can unpack every word in there and it would be a whole podcast in itself, but I think the main idea there is that ultimately you’re accountable for results, that’s why you’re there, and you can’t do it directly, so you have to build the team and create the environment such that it happens. 00:03:13 - Speaker 1: I suspect a lot of people who are successful at being leaders do come to it, not from the perspective of, I just wanted to grow up and be the boss, you know, as a kid I always dreamed of being the one in the corner office or something. I don’t think that happens too much, but rather that you have some end you want to achieve, something you want to do in the world, and in the process of trying to do whatever that thing is, you realize, oh, I can’t do this alone. I need the help of others, and then that leads you to attracting those others to try to help you with that, and that of course leads you into team building and pretty soon you find yourself in this role of a leader. Another piece of your definition here is the team, and I think implicit in that is the assumption that there is a team, right? And that’s not something that comes from nowhere. I mean, maybe you get hired into some kind of leadership or management role and you inherit a team. But at least in my thinking, kind of coming from the more entrepreneurial perspective, or even if you are hired into a role, you’re often expected to build a team. And so essentially the pragmatically we can say hiring, but even more broadly, you can

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It’s very common that you want 3 views. You want a view which is temporal, what is the team working on this week? You want a view that’s personal, what is Mark thinking about right now? What does he want to have at hand. And then there’s a view which is subject base. What is the design of our sync system? And what link cards allow you to do is to have any given thing appear in each of those. 00:00:27 - 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 with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. So a little bit of news from the new product side. We recently released a feature called Linked Cards to everyone and been quite surprised and happy with how useful these have proven to be. It was in beta through the Backstage Pass with our pro members for a few months, but yeah, it just seems so valuable to everyone. We are really happy to launch it broadly, and that’s especially true within the Muse for teams. Context. So we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about the future and our approach, and we’ll talk about some of these use cases that we’ve seen. But of course, we have to start with something philosophical and historical to set the context. So our topic today is linking. So, what comes to mind for you, Mark, when you hear that word? 00:01:26 - Speaker 1: That’s quite a rich set of precedents there. Perhaps the very first thing one thinks of is web links. Although, as we discussed, I don’t think that’s actually the closest case of prior art. Also comes to mind things like citations, but really dialing into linked cards, things like file system sim links, wiki backlinks, the knowledge graphs that you see in emerging knowledge management tools, things like that. 00:01:51 - Speaker 2: To me it’s an interesting topic because it is such a simple idea. It almost seems too simple. It’s just one place or work or piece of information is referencing another place or work or piece of information, but I think there is something very powerful emerges from that. I would say a lot of the current. Sort of tools for thought, excitement or revolution, if you want to call it that, and the productivity software space is largely built on the foundation of linking as a core idea, as well as the web, obviously, hypertext and hyperlinks, even though there’s much more to the web than just the link, that actually is a very foundational piece. And so it’s quite surprising what emerges from that. Yeah, you mentioned citations, be fun maybe to talk about that a little bit more towards the end, but I think that was sort of the original thing is, I don’t know, 1000 years ago, someone is writing a book and they want to reference another book or I don’t know, maybe it’s not even a book, maybe it’s a scroll and you just name it, right? You say the item titled this, maybe you give the author and when it was written as a way to kind of Hopefully unambiguously refer to this thing, and that implies that there is this greater canon of human knowledge, which indeed at some point we started to have a, if not unified, perhaps today you can say it’s a fairly unified sort of sphere of books and videos and newspaper articles and all that sort of thing. But yeah, you go back in history and just a simple idea of referencing another work that is not the one that you’re currently reading implies the larger sphere and indeed then you start to build this network and these connections and this implication of shared knowledge. So again, this one simple idea, just this simple reference of naming another thing from that comes this sort of giant hive mind of all human knowledge. 00:03:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s really important because, as we’ve said many times on the podcast, knowledge is built up in this web. It’s not a linear process. It’s this very messy, organic, incremental growth of knowledge that happens over time, and so things like citations help reify that. 00:04:07 - Speaker 2: And Another piece of prior art that’s more on the technical side is file systems. I think this was probably my first exposure to thinking about links as a first class item. So in Unix you have what’s called the sim link or symbolic link. There’s also hard links, but we don’t necessarily need to get into those. On Windows you have something that are called shortcuts, which I think a lot of people are familiar with just because there’s a little kind of icon that indicates this isn’t the original item, this is a pointer to that item, and you often get that on your desktop, for example. The application doesn&

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There are a lot of other projects that have very similar models to this dynamic land database, but it definitely pushed me to think a lot more in terms of having state exposed by default, ambiently, and the value of being able to make little quick debugging tools that can piggyback on this global state. That was a super influential model on the way I think about programming and the way I think about debugging, this idea of being able to make really lightweight tools or jigs to help myself as I work. 00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about used product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McCrannigan. Hey, Adam. We’re joined today by Omar Rizwan. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Hi. 00:00:50 - Speaker 2: And Omar, I understand you have a collection of metro cards. 00:00:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I was just looking at this shelf above my desk, and it turns out I have this giant, basically the only thing on the shelf is this giant plastic pencil case that looks like a giant metro card. And so, I think a lot of people do this, but I’ve just started this habit of just filling it every time I get a metro card or transit card from wherever I go. So now there’s like, I don’t know, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of cards in here. It’s pretty full. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: So let’s see, what must you have? It’s certainly a Bay Area transit card, and maybe, I don’t know, an Oyster card from London, or what, uh, you know, does this reflect kind of like a travel log of your places you’ve been? 00:01:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in a way, it’s kind of a nice, I guess we can connect it to one of the themes, which is that there’s like kind of an object for each place. There’s an octopus card from Hong Kong, there’s a card from Paris. It’s sort of like, instead of entries written down in a book, it’s like I have these like little cards that I can kind of pull out and look at. 00:01:50 - Speaker 2: Nice, and then it’s sort of like, I like the idea of keeping it around because it implies you’re gonna be back, right, that you’re a globe trotting, you know, person of the world, and you never know when you’re gonna need to whip out your Hong Kong transit card. 00:02:06 - Speaker 1: I think there’s also something like comical about the like very large metro card, like very large version of anything. It’s like, uh, you know, a prank we used to do in like middle schools. If people left their laptop unattended, we would just go and make the mouse pointer really big and like not do anything else and just like. 00:02:25 - Speaker 2: And you are an independent researcher with a very diverse set of interests, lots of things that overlap with the niche interests that Mark and I, and I think a lot of the listeners have, including end user computing and embodied computing, file systems, vintage computing, and so forth. But why don’t you give us a little bit of a summary of some of the stuff you’ve worked on over the years and where your interests in the computing world lie. 00:02:51 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so my background is mostly, you know, in programming, you know, I learned to program very early, and I sort of got interested in, like, new ways to interact with computers. Like, when I was a teenager, there was all this stuff on, like, building your own multi-touch table, and then I kind of got involved with Brett Victor’s work at Dynamicland, but also did a bunch of other different projects, kind of in that space, and just in general, I’ve always been interested in like, Different ways to interact with computing, both like future looking and also historical, like, what are their operating systems that people have done, what are other interfaces that people have done. And so, that’s my background. 00:03:28 - Speaker 2: And I feel like just looking down your portfolio the right way to describe your list of of projects, your research provocations, perhaps they’re quite varied, but they seem to have in many cases a sense of less of a like, here’s a, I don’t know, a library you’re gonna use or an application you’re gonna use and more of a Almost like an art project element of like, let me make you think a little bit here. For example, one kind of near the top, at least at the moment is hijack your feed, and if I’m not mistaken, this was one you did together with uh Jason Yuan, is that right? Yeah, yeah, who we’ve had on the podcast before as well. And yeah, I feel like that’s as much uh asking questions about social media feeds and the place they fill in our life and how we can

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Everyone gets into a room, you have a brainstorm and out comes the ideas. The reality is so much messier. You have individual to group back again, you’re bouncing around among individuals, you’re bouncing around among different levels of fidelity. The ideas get mutated, even corrupted, if they get passed from person to person. Almost like this pulsating network, right? With all kinds of weird patterns happening is what’s really needed to produce good ideas. So the substrate, the tool needs to embrace that. 00:00:32 - 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 with Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, I’m excited to say that we’ve given a name to the next major release of Muse. We’re calling it Muse for Teens, and we’ve got the Alpha program underway right now. 00:00:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ve had this phase penciled into the master plan for years, and it’s great to see us finally bringing it to fruition. 00:01:05 - Speaker 2: Exactly, yeah, it really is a whole other dimension. I think it’s true of most tools, you know, whether it’s a video editor or a word processor or whatever else that you add some kind of multiplayer collaboration or sharing capability, and it really is a whole new dimension to the tool, but I think that’s doubly so for Muse, which is an ideation space. So, you know, when I’m gonna start a new project, for example, the first thing I’m gonna do is make a board to sit down and essentially get my thoughts together on it. And so here, doing that with a team, when that team is starting a project, well, we’re finding it to be very powerful indeed and sort of almost a multiplier effect on the value of the rest of the product. So it’s a lot of fun. We got a little demo video online, I’ll link that in the show notes, and yeah, we have a couple dozen teams in the Alpha program here, really giving the local first sync and sort of the capabilities, the product of solid pummeling here, or we hope it can. Stand up to everyone’s needs, as well as we continue to just discover what are the most interesting things to add in the collaborative setting. You know, we start with the obvious stuff like comments, for example, but I think there’s a lot of non-obvious stuff that we’ll get to pretty quickly, so. Very exciting stuff and of course I’ll put all the necessary links for that in the show notes, but I thought it would be a great chance to talk about something we’ve mentioned in passing in a number of episodes, which is remote work. So that’s our topic for today and of course the muse team is all remote and part of the reason it’s so salient, I think, is the muse for teams. product as it’s shaping up for us in our internal use, but also with our customers in this alpha here is really seeing the role it can play for especially for remote first team. So there’s a lot of interplay between how we personally think about remote work, I think, and where we’re going to go with the product. 00:02:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s also a very ripe time in the industry with a lot of companies exploring this way of working, basically whether they wanted to or not, because of the pandemic. And you saw a bit of a phase shift over the past few years towards this approach. It’s also notable that you and I have a lot of personal experience with many pieces of the spectrum. We’ve kind of gone, I think, through almost the whole range. And so I’m sure we have a lot of personal things to say about it as well. 00:03:14 - Speaker 2: You know, the timing topic is a funny 11 thing that occurred to me, or if I was a listener of this podcast and I saw it pop up in my feed, I would think, hm, remote work, wasn’t that a hot topic circa 2016? You know, I seem to remember a lot of blog posts and especially medium posts when that was the hot thing. actually right around the same time that I shifted to remote work, which was we started in Switch in 2015, we started that as an all remote research lab, always figured, well, you know, this will work to get started, but once we scale up, you know, we’ll need to get serious or whatever and get an office, and that never happened and I think the remote nature actually unlocked new possibilities for how we could do these research projects and the kinds of people we could bring in. And it turned out to be, in addition to just having these benefits of letting us focus on the business rather than, I don’t know, office leases also seemed to have these other benefits as well. But at least I remember in that time,

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: The importance of solo activity in the ideation process. This is not well supported in existing tools. I think it’s so important that you have a place where you’re just thinking by yourself. That might be because you’re generating the initial ideas that you’re going to bring to the bigger group, or it could be you have some intermediate products from the group and you want to take that back to your private sanctuary and mark it up or sketch it or remix it. 00:00:31 - 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 McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. Mark a book I’ve been reading lately was suggested to me by our mutual colleague Julia is called Exhalation, which is a collection of short stories by Ted Chang, hope I’m pronouncing that right, who I think is best known for writing the book that Arrival was based on, but is a pretty prolific science fiction author in particular short story. Are you familiar with his work? 00:01:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I’ve seen Arrival, but I don’t think I’ve heard of his writing. 00:01:12 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can highly recommend it, and I don’t think Yuli is even a huge sci-fi fan, so that’s why it stood out to me when she recommended it, but it’s really fascinating because I think each story, some of them are really short, just pose sort of a hypothetical universe or hypothetical setup. Where, what if the world was like this, and let’s just explore that philosophically. So one of my favorites in there, which I think also the collection was named after, is about a creature who is essentially what we would consider kind of a robot, but their whole circulatory system and neural system is based on the flow of air. And their whole energy source comes from pressure differentials within their universe, and physicists in their universe have discovered that basically there’s a fixed pressure differential from outside like I don’t know, a bronze sphere or something that contains the entire universe and it’s just kind of like a alternate reality. Posing of a, I’m not even sure way to put it, but it’s fun to read and explore the universe, but it also ends up posing questions about our own world, I think, in the way that only science fiction can. So, yeah, recommend it if you’re looking for something of that nature. 00:02:20 - Speaker 1: Ah, interesting, and that alternate physiology idea reminds me of, I think it’s called Hail Mary, Project Hail Mary, yeah, by Andy Weir, that’s a fun sci-fi book. 00:02:32 - Speaker 2: Hm, I wanna know this one. I’ll put it on my list. Well, there’s a fun little announcement here. The Muse team has started work on a multiplayer or call it a collaborative version of Muse. In the very early stages of that, but this is something you and I have talked about a bunch of times on the podcast, typically when questions of roadmap come up, right? I always think of the Muse master plan as kind of being the step 1 iPad app for thinking, private thinking, step 2, sync to your devices, your different devices, and then step 3 is being able to bring other people into the mix. And step 4 is end user programming, but we’ll save that topic for another day. That match with how you usually think about it. 00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s the master plan. 00:03:16 - Speaker 2: And we wrote a little memo that we’ll talk about in some detail here today, but importantly it links to a survey, just a very short survey where we’re looking for some teams to help us out in, I would call it alpha testing, but really it’s about understanding how teams might work in a setting like this. So of course the Muse mission is to help individuals be more thoughtful through the tool. We’ve done that through our private thinking to date, but if we come into a team or group, I ideation setting where there’s any other person involved, now we kind of have to go back to our early principles and figure out how that fits in. And so one of the things we want to do is work really closely here with teams that have a particular shape. They’re a certain size, they’re working on certain kinds of problems. Problems to help us craft, not just kind of features or whatever on the product, but really understand the best workflows and the best way so we can help, in particular remote first team. So I’ll link to that survey as well as a memo on group ideation here. So naturally our topic today is multiplayer, or I think collaboration is what I historically had called it. Maybe in the local first paper we use the term real-time

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I think every platform kind of has this tipping point where you start to see like, hey, this feature, this product is getting a lot of traction, and people building on any platform should realize they are doing R&D for the primary platform at all times. Every feature you release, every experience you have is an opportunity for the original platform to be like, hey, that’s a great idea. 00:00:29 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Us is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac. But 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 Adam Wulf. 00:00:43 - Speaker 2: Hey, everyone. And joined today by Joe Watkin. 00:00:47 - Speaker 1: Hey folks, great to be here. 00:00:49 - Speaker 2: And Joe, you have an interesting background with creative tools including GitHub and Abstract, you’ve had your own startup doing calendar slackbots and other calendaring things, but before we talk about all that, I’m very interested in your side project ballot share. Can you tell us about that? 00:01:06 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. Ballot share is a is a labor of love. It’s much less of a business than a fun project, and it really just centers around helping people get more information when they’re about to vote. And so, People usually want to vote for one or two things when they hit a ballot, but it’s all of the minutia stuff that people don’t really have a really good sense of what to vote for or who to vote for on really local issues, but those are the stuff that really, you know, impacts them. And so Ballot share is just a site where you can see who’s endorsed things all the way down the ballot to like your local city ballot initiatives. And you can also create your own endorsement around things that you think are important and share that with friends. So the most common use case we see is people say, oh, like I have a friend who’s really plugged into education, so maybe I could ask them who to vote for for the school board president. And so they send you their endorsement and you kind of see it in a grid where you can kind of compare all of the endorsements that you want to compare. It was built for the last election cycle and we’re hoping to revive it again for the midterms. 00:02:14 - Speaker 2: I really like that idea of a sort of using your trust network if that’s the right way to put it. Maybe we get some of this implicitly, you know, there’s people I follow usually like substack where they do political analysis and to some extent I’m sort of trusting if I’ve come to trust that their analysis is good in some cases it’s that I’m reading their analysis and better understanding the issue, but in some cases it’s that I go, OK, this person. Seems to be pro this thing and I basically trust them, so therefore, I’m gonna kind of outsource that decision a little bit, especially for, as you said, all these finer details and local things that maybe you can’t deeply research each and every item. So it feels like it’s naturally what people do anyways. So as a tool to help you kind of reach that. 00:02:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. A lot of people end up making like Excel sheets and then sending them around. And it’s actually kind of funny, we noticed that it’s not just wanting to know who endorsed it, it’s who is against certain things. So when you see like, hey, this group is against it, you’re like, that’s surprising, why? And sometimes it takes like, hey, of the 10 ballot initiatives, 6 seem like everyone is in agreement, but then like maybe 3 are kind of like up in the air. And so you, those are the ones that you personally investigate. So it kind of just puts more time to the ones that you think are actually worth the the decision to make sure you get it right. 00:03:36 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about your background. 00:03:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’ve done a lot of work in the tech space, but it’s not always specifically on the tech side. So my background is I came into tech via sales actually. So I was hired at GitHub as one of the first technical minded sales people, and GitHub was a very weird beast where there were no managers and you kind of like had to understand how to do a pull request to like even do anything in the company. So, I originally did Git Up sales, focused on the enterprise clients, but switched over to BD at GitHub, maybe my 2nd or 3rd year, as just a hugely undervalued piece of the business. 00:04:16 - Speaker 2: And I’ll briefly unpack that BD stands for business development, which I think itself is probably not a super well, in my experience, it’s not even a super well understood title slash function, so ma

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It’s part of the foundational history of sketch of like facing this enormous monopolistic late 2000s Adobe, and now that the sketch success and define the category in the market, which then in turn attract more players and then because we chose a different path in the business and in growth, now there’s new juggernauts again. 00:00:27 - 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 and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. 00:00:41 - Speaker 1: Hey, Adam. 00:00:42 - Speaker 2: And joined today by our guest, Paolo Pereira of Sketch. 00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Hello, Adam, Mark. 00:00:48 - Speaker 2: And a topic we’ve spoken about a number of times is YouTube and its importance for learning skills in the modern world, but Paolo, I understand that you’ve found a way to sort of escape nature through YouTube. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that is true. I’ve taken to watching camping and bush crafting and canoeing videos on YouTube. It’s someone that’s never done a lot of outdoor stuff, it is actually surprisingly relaxing. 00:01:15 - Speaker 2: One that I’m familiar with is this channel Primitive Technology where this fellow goes into the woods and builds, I don’t know, a hut or something using whatever he finds around sticks, mud, rocks, and of course the entire time doesn’t say a word, but it sort of has this meditative quality while at the same time you’re watching someone who is great at their craft do something that maybe you didn’t know how it was done. 00:01:42 - Speaker 1: I’m also a big fan of in that vein, there’s a Japanese woodworker who goes by Ishitani furniture and also the same thing, it does not say a single words and it’s just like long shots of him doing things over and over. And also, it does help that his furniture is absolutely beautiful, but the meditative aspect to it is a big part of the appeal to me. 00:02:06 - Speaker 2: And tell us a little bit about your background. 00:02:09 - Speaker 1: So, I have been a lifelong website maker from being an lobbyist when I was 14, then to being a student in university for software engineering, then on to a job, and I’ve mostly been a freelancer most of my career. 00:02:29 - Speaker 2: And I noticed looking at your portfolio from that kind of earlier time, a lot of your websites seems like you were specialized on event websites and especially design forward design focused events so I could only imagine those clients were enjoyable to work with, or at least the subject matter was close to your heart. 00:02:47 - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, absolutely. That was for mostly XOXO and my friend Andy and his friend Andy put together and also uh building and other events that my friend Andy organized and of course it was a big pleasure because he didn’t have to sell the value of, of putting effort into the design and also then the people that looked at the work were more appreciative of it, which is, I mean, it’s always good when that happens, when there’s an appreciation from both the client and the audience about the work that you do. 00:03:16 - Speaker 2: And then what brought you the sketch? 00:03:19 - Speaker 1: So it was also in that capacity as designer and developer, web designer, and web developer specifically. I joined in late 2019 after a project had ended, I wasn’t really sure what to do. And in retrospect, I could see that I was a bit bored of like, you know, starting a project from scratch every time, which is very good things going for it, but you know, as you know, you can only see the things that you didn’t get to do right after your ship and the problem with working on small freelance projects like that is well, you rarely get a chance to fix those, so they are going to live there just staring at you in perpetuity. So I joined Sketch in the marketing team as a hybrid designer and developer. You know, what was at the time a very small marketing team, so like to get to do, you know, the things that I like to do, which is have a handy design and development and a broad perspective of the website. But now in a situation where, you know, I didn’t have to do everything and there were much more competent people doing all the things that I didn’t like to do or frankly was not very good at, right? So we had great people doing. I can design illustration, you know, video production, copywriting, strategy, and it was great to be in that situation and I perform my strengths and other people bring their strengths and the end result is also much better for it. 00:04:46 - Speaker 2: And maybe it’s worth briefly here mentioning what sketch is. I think of it

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Pricing is uniquely susceptible to getting gridlocked. Everyone has opinions about pricing, as they can and should. It tends to be an emotional topic. There usually is not a team or a person whose full time job it is to do pricing, unlike product design or product engineering, and it often takes more effort than you think or realize. 00:00:25 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse, the company, and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, and my colleague Leonard Zaburski. Hi. And Leonard, you are a longtime member of the Muse team, you are the design powerhouse behind all the lovely things that people I think are familiar with, but it’s your first time on the podcast here, so maybe you could just quickly tell us about your background, what was your journey that brought you to Muse. 00:01:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I started about 2 years ago with MS and I actually came from studying interface design in Potsdam near Berlin here and just had done some freelancing, basically found out that wasn’t really for me and was looking for something else. So I saw that I can switch design memo you posted about news. And yeah, we kind of started working together and sort of just worked on going from a prototype into a real product. 00:01:26 - Speaker 2: Yeah, if I’m not mistaken, maybe Mark originally found you through two works you published. One is Desktop Neo, which is sort of a rethinking of desktop operating systems for kind of more modern productivity, which obviously is quite on point for us. Then you have another done one called the Cloudfall, which I think is a bit more about consumer data, how apps could potentially in a hypothetical world kind of give users more control over their data and privacy while also giving you a lot of the benefits of the aggregation. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes. 00:02:01 - Speaker 1: The other side of the origin story is whenever I’m working on a hard problem, I like to search for the prior art on it to see what other people have done and to learn from that. And so back in the early days of Muse, when we were thinking about the core design problems, I went into DuckDuckGo and typed like direct manipulation touch interface, and one of the very best things I saw was the work Mener had done like, oh man, we got to email this guy and see if we can get him to come work with us and one thing led to another. 00:02:27 - Speaker 2: That’s right, I think it was actually really good timing. You had just read the Ink & Switch piece on the Muse Studio for ideas at that point, still very much a research prototype, we were still thinking about even whether to try to commercialize it, so it was maybe hot on your mind, so the timing was very good. 00:02:44 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I was actually really surprised after I published both of those essays, like how much feedback you can get and how well it actually works to basically publish something where you’re working on exactly the thing you’re interested in, which maybe, you know, isn’t something that a lot of people are interested in, but sort of the more niche it is, the more feedback you get from the people that also care about the same sort of stuff. And so it actually works out really well to find sort of the people you want to work with. 00:03:11 - Speaker 2: Exactly right. Find your tribe by that weird thing that only you and 20 other people in the world care about, and if you publish that and put it on the internet, you can all kind of find each other. So our topic today is pricing, and this is a big one for a lot of reasons. So Muse just launched new pricing, we kind of call it pricing V2 internally, and just really briefly, you know, I’ll link the new pricing page and we’re gonna write a memo on it, that sort of thing, but basically we’re going from having one price, which was $100 a year, to two tiers of membership, a pro plan that remains $100 but then kind of a starter plan that’s $40 and then you can also pay for those on a monthly basis, so you can potentially get started for $4 a month. And we’ll talk a little bit more about our journey there, but I think for me one of the most important framings on this is that pricing is incredibly important. It’s really important to your business. The stakes are very high, right, the right price and you can make a successful business, the wrong price either too low or too high, and you can basically fail. And furthermore, in my experience on this, because I’ve been involved in a number of teams setting prices for products, there’s no real playbook. I feel like almost any other type of product developm

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Rather than giving someone this hermetically sealed box, can we use an analogy like build a beautiful Lego set for them and hand it to them, where if they like it just as it is, that’s fine. And if they want to add one Lego right there, it’s not a big deal. They sort of see the composition of how this thing was made, they have a little bit of flexibility to tweak it because it’s made out of parts they understand. 00:00:24 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. This podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. I’m joined by Jeffrey Litt. 00:00:40 - Speaker 1: Hello, hello. It’s good to be here. 00:00:41 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, one thing I’m thinking about these days in raising my young child is growing up in a multilingual household, since both of her parents are from two different countries and we’re living in a third country. I know you grew up in a multilingual household as an adult, what are your reflections on that experience? 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so my mom’s Japanese and I grew up sort of half my childhood in the US, half in Japan, and when I was a kid, my mom sort of forced me and my brother to learn Japanese when we were in the US and I was just thinking about how I’m so grateful now that she sort of overrode our preferences as children, and that now I have some proficiency in the language and so raising kids is complicated. 00:01:20 - Speaker 2: There is going to be, I can see this already at this young age, and I think if it gets only more so as children get more agency naturally with age, which is parents do know better. They’re just older and wiser and know how the world works and At the same time, a kid needs to find their own way, and authoritarian upbringing doesn’t sound particularly like a good way to blossom as a person. So finding that balance between what’s prescribed by parents, you’ll thank me when you’re older. In this case, literally so versus let a kid find their own path. I think that’s an ongoing philosophical moral dilemma. 00:01:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, especially for something as difficult as learning a language. You know, I do think with whether it’s sports or music or these skills that take a lot of time to master, I’ve also been grateful that my parents helped me learn to love Japanese and build some of that motivation, whether that’s from visits to Japan to hang out there as a kid. I tend to believe that the goal of education at a young age isn’t primarily to transfer the skill. It’s to, as they say, light that fire that eventually keeps learning going, and to this day. I’m practicing my Japanese trying to keep it up, and so I think that’s an important balance this track too. 00:02:31 - Speaker 2: What’s that saying? If you want to set sail on a boat you’re building, you don’t teach someone to build a boat, you teach them to yearn for the ocean. 00:02:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I think there’s a lot of that at play. 00:02:43 - Speaker 2: So Jeffrey, I’ve been wanting to get you on the podcast for a while here. We got the chance to work together on the Cambria project at Ik and Switch last year, but I’d love to hear just a little bit about your background, how you came to be doing this work in the tools for Though and independent research space. 00:02:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m currently doing a PhD at MIT in computer science. I’m in a lab called the Software Design Group, led by my advisor Daniel Jackson. And at the highest level, the questions I’m trying to explore are how do we empower more people to kind of take full advantage of the medium of computing? I think it’s very ironic that we’ve invented this infinitely flexible thing called software, and most of the way that we use it ends up being a small group of people, make some stuff and throw it over a wall, and everyone else uses it. And I’m just interested in new approaches to building software that changed that dynamic. But before coming into this academic side of things, a lot of my thinking on this area actually came from working in startups and shipping real software to people. If you had asked me 5 years ago, are you gonna be doing a PhD, I would have laughed at you and said, you know, no, I’m not that kind of academically minded person. But over my time in startups, I got really interested in these topics and I decided that Rather than go try to start a company or something, the academic environment offers a certain amount of freedom from the need to ship real software immediately, the need to make money immediately, tha

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You start with some seeds of an idea. Basically, it might be some sketches or a picture of a whiteboard you took or a voice memo, and what you want to end up with is, say, an essay, and there’s several steps to the creative process. And one of the things that’s exciting about the new text feature plus blocks is you can see it as a trellis for that growth. 00:00:23 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. Mark, I’m pleased to report that Metause has broken into the top 200 charts on the technology category in Apple Podcasts. It’s a per country breakdown. I’ve been using a little thing called PO status that essentially sort of charts your position over time. Some countries were there pretty consistently, other places like Germany where I live, we kind of pop in and out at the whims of the algorithm essentially. That was quite surprising to me in a lot of ways, cause I just still think of this as, you know, me and you were having a chat sometimes with guests, just people we like to hang out with and seeing our logo alongside these what I consider to be kind of giants of the podcasting world like Cortex and Accidental tech and so on is kind of a thrill actually. 00:01:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I continued to be really pleasantly surprised by the reception we get to the podcast. It’s actually just at a family event about a week ago, and people would come to me and say, Mark, hey, it’s great to see you. By the way, I love the podcast, like, whoa, OK, I didn’t know you were listening to that, but that’s cool. So yeah, it’s been fun. 00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah, and I also want to maybe make a little request. First of all, a huge thanks to all the people who have tweet recommendations or a lot of folks tell me that they do more kind of in person. Reminds me a little bit of our episode on social media where we talked about something going viral slowly kind of through word of mouth, sort of the ideal thing, and I think there’s a little bit of that here, which is great. But actually, if you haven’t had the chance to recommend us, you can actually help by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. They make it a little hard to do, but if you go to the new podcast page and go to the Apple Podcasts, I’ll link that in the show notes. You scroll down to the bottom, I think you can tap write a review if you’re on your iPhone. I’m sure Spotify has a similar thing. We only have a few reviews. In a lot of countries, sometimes none, so even just taking a moment to drop in a star review in one sentence of what you think you like hearing these weird guys talk about, if nothing else, will soothe my vanity. So our topic today is text. Now that word even is so rich for me and many of the reasons I got into computing and tools for thought, and so on. The impetus here is we’re just now releasing into beta for all our pro members a text blocks feature, so essentially changing our text cards today, which are kind of these Post-it notes things, pretty basic, to something that is a little more inspired by the notion Rome craft world of things. And maybe we’ll describe a little more of that vision later, but of course I always like to start with the absolute fundamentals. So Mark, I have to ask you, what is text, and I mean not the dictionary definition, but what comes to mind for you with that word. 00:03:11 - Speaker 1: Well I’ll give you a very marked philosophical answer, which I’m sure we’ll hear echoes of in the rest of this conversation. Now, if you think about conveying information, there’s sort of a necessarily most primitive form, which is a string of 0 and 1’s, you know, you can’t reduce the dimensionality beyond a line and you can’t reduce the base beyond two, right, or else you have no information. And then in the case of human acceptable information, it’s perhaps a string of human readable characters. So in some sense it’s the most basic fundamental primitive way to communicate information. So that’s one of the reasons why I think it comes up so often in Tools for Thought, but we’ll talk more about that throughout the podcast. 00:03:51 - Speaker 2: For me, the word text, I think, makes me think of plain text or files that end in .txt and for a very long time, that was my whole knowledge management system was a folder full of text files. Maybe at some point I did mark down or something like that, but plain text is just one of the most fundamental formats on a computer. It’s how code is usually represented, it’s a very durable and long-ter

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I view my job here is to essentially aggregate this group of entrepreneurs that a lot of the world is overlooking, aggregate them in some way, listen to them, and then build what they want. 00:00:19 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product. It’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and our guest Tyler Trius of the Calm Fund. Hey guys. And one thing we talk about on this podcast with surprising frequency is cities and in particular that remote work and all these lovely cloud tools make it possible for knowledge workers such as ourselves to choose where we want to live based on quality of life rather than where your employer happens to be. And Tyler, I know you live in Mexico City. Tell me about that decision. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Mexico City is great. The decision is not that interesting. I’ve been working remotely and building remote companies for probably the last 10 years. I spent a lot of time as a digital nomad and then kind of like a slow mad, sort of, you know, slowly traveling to different places. But Mexico City, we’re here because my wife works for the State Department and she’s got a job at the embassy. So since I’ve been running what we used to call Earnest Capital, and now the call company fund. I’ve been sort of just tagging along with my wife. We were in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro. We launched it. We’re there for about 2 years and now we’re here in Mexico City. So the decision wasn’t really mine to come here, but I will say I’m very, very pleased to be here. It’s an awesome city. It’s really becoming like the hub of pretty much everything to do with startups up and down Latin America, amazing food, awesome weather, pretty unbeatable quality of life. I’m not gonna lie. So folks should definitely come down and visit us. We throw a conference here and hoping to see a bunch more entrepreneurs down here. So, yeah, it’s good. 00:02:04 - Speaker 2: Interesting, I guess I just assumed because I’ve just visited Mexico City once, we did an I can switch summit there, but I found it such a lovely place. I could very much imagine a person who was working remotely and has any choice they want might well choose it. But you actually highlight another good benefit of remote work, which is then you can go where your partner needs to go for their employment. So I know that it can be a source of great contention in relationships, long term relationships, when it turns out that one person’s school or work needs take them one place and another person needs to go to the other place and someone has to decide who’s gonna make the sacrifice. So here you’re not faced with that decision. 00:02:41 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we see that all the time. Obviously now knowing a bunch of people living the foreign service life and it is a big source of tension. Yeah, I mean it’s phenomenal to have sort of built this company in a way that’s fully distributed from day one. So it’s like I tell people when we moved from Brazil to Mexico, if I didn’t tell my team, they wouldn’t have noticed basically, which is, you know, super helpful. The one thing I think remote work hasn’t quite solved it is time zones. 00:03:09 - Speaker 2: That’s the last frontier, you know, that’s definitely a challenge for us between Europe and West Coast US although again, you have kind of a nice benefit of being fairly central, at least among those western places. 00:03:19 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Mexico City is hard to beat. I mean, I think if you’re able to work remotely, you should seriously come and check it out and give it a shot. It’s really a world class city, just as easy to get anywhere, like if you’re sort of US centric, it’s as easy to get to New York or LA as it is from anywhere else in the country inside the US. Yeah, super good amenities, everything just works hard to beat. 00:03:41 - Speaker 2: Nice. Well, before this turns into a veiled advertisement from the Mexico City Tourism Board, we can transition to hearing a bit about your background and especially what is the alm fund. 00:03:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the Cound some folks may have heard of us as Earnest Capital, who recently rebranded this year or so, same exact company, same people, same idea. Really, it’s one of those scratch your own itch companies, essentially my kind of personal history involved. Experiencing kind of both sides of the venture capital and bootstrapped world kind of communities, at one point in my life, you know, had a business that I was working on. It was sort of a clean tech software business in a t

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: It was important for us that people be able to reach this level of partnership, which again is a group of peers, even if they weren’t there at the founding of the company. 00:00:21 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use a software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins. I’m here with my colleague Mark McGranahan, and Mark, I know that, uh, we have to get creative with our hobbies here in this time of staying home. Uh, what have you been doing in regards to your piano lessons? 00:00:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I usually take lessons at my teacher’s house here in Seattle, but now we’re going all remote. And we actually did this once, uh, last year during some snowstorms here, which shut Seattle down, and then I just like propped my iPhone up on my desk and we did our best, uh, but now that I have a little bit more experience with this podcast and with other AV stuff, trying to do a better setup, so. Um, used a, a real mic to record and we set up multiple camera angles with my laptop video and my iPhone camera, and that’s worked pretty well. And then I think the next experiment will be actually plugging the digital output for my, for my digital piano kind of directly into an audio interface. As well as getting a vocal mic and hopefully that will improve the kind of the piano sound quality that she hears on the other side. 00:01:35 - Speaker 2: Well, excuse to play with. 00:01:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a big factor. 00:01:40 - Speaker 2: We’ve got our summit next week as well, which we’re doing all virtual we meet in person for that, so we’re also going to Try to get a little creative. I guess the whole world is is doing that to some degree. 00:01:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, on the flip side of this, as a company, we have a lot of experience with remote, so this hasn’t been too big of a change for us. I’m talking to, uh, for example, people who are elementary school teachers and I just, I can’t even imagine. 00:02:01 - Speaker 2: So the topic we wanted to talk about today was hiring an engineering partner and maybe the Muse partnership model more generally. So I’ll link in the show notes to the job description we’ve got on the web. Beautiful design there done by our colleague Leonard. But, um, I think you wrote most of this, Mark, and, and I wanted to quote from the, the opener a little bit and, and maybe you can expand on this or explain it, uh, further. So the the page says this role is on our partner track, meaning that it has a high level of freedom and responsibility while earning a significant stake in the business. So, can you, uh, can you tell us what does it mean to be an engineering partner as opposed to, say, a soft software engineer as a regular employee. 00:02:45 - Speaker 1: So, our partnership model is, we have a very small team, all of whom are intentionally peers, including the founders, and who are treated more like owners than employees. So, in practice, I would say a partner is In between a typical startup employee and the kind of sole founder of a bootstrapped in the startup, it’s kind of in between. 00:03:08 - Speaker 2: And by typical startup employee here we talk about in the early days when it’s a small team, people have a lot of impact, I guess, on the, on the company because there’s just not that many of them, and option grants are common, which is sort of an option to buy company stock in the future if it does become valuable, uh, but at the same time, they don’t really get a lot of visibility into, say, the financials of the business. 00:03:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the typical model is you have the founders who are there when the company is incorporated and they get the vast majority of the equity and they have very outsized responsibility and decision making ability and and freedom and flexibility, and then you hire employees and starting with employee 1 and definitely on from there, they’re kind of a second and lower tier of staff by design. And what we want with the partnership is more of a model where those Team members are all peers, uh, in terms of the day to day work, in terms of their freedom and responsibility, and also in terms of their equity ownership in the business. 00:04:08 - Speaker 2: And just to make it concrete here, we’ve got 4 partners right now. So there’s Yumi and Yulia, with sort of the 3, that got started last year. Leonard joined us not too long after. So we’re a partnership of 4 right now, and we have maybe some contractors and things we’ve worked with, but for the For the most part, it’s really those 4. We&rsq

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: I really wish there are more ways in which we can let our personality and just the little bits of life that we’ve experienced ourselves come through online. It seems like nowadays a lot of the larger sites that we spend time on have all taken an approach for good reasons to in some way flatten our voices to make everything look the same. 00:00:27 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGrenigan. Hey Adam. I’m joined today by Wei Wei Xu of Sprout. Hello. And one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast for some reason is cities. Weiwei, you’re in Shanghai right now, and what’s the transit situation like? How do you get around town? 00:00:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I live a little bit outside of the downtown area, so it takes about 30 minutes by walking to get to the metro station and. Shared bikes are really common over here, so it’s super convenient to get around with shared bikes, but I also got my hands on to one of these one wheel electric scooter lately and I’ve been a big fan of skateboarding since I was a kid. I’ve tried all kinds of boards, so I thought it’s just super slick to try scooting around on one of these electric scooters and That’s what I’ve been doing lately. 00:01:34 - Speaker 2: And in practice, do you end up in the bike lane? Do you go on the sidewalks? I feel like one of the challenges with the scooter micro mobility thing is that you sort of don’t have a great place to go. You’re sort of a little slow for the bike lane, but certainly probably too fast for the sidewalk. 00:01:50 - Speaker 1: It’s definitely something that everybody’s still trying to figure out, especially here, the policy here is a lot more strict and electric scooters are meant to be a toy, something that you play with in parks and in closed communities rather than on the street, so. It’s kind of like softly allowed on pedestrian walkways and not really on the bike lanes, but bike lanes over here are super protected and they are not right next to cars like in a lot of the cities I’ve been to in America, so either way, I feel pretty safe, but whether it is legal or not is kind of a different question. 00:02:30 - Speaker 2: Yeah, protected bike lanes or something I I’m a big fan of as a person who gets around mainly by bike, although even there when you talk about legal gray areas and new technologies that sit sort of in between the e-bike thing, which has gotten pretty huge, but then that also seems to challenge, OK, now you can go really fast and with not a lot of effort with this motorized thing that at this point is almost like a low powered motorcycle or something like that, but you get to ride in the bike lane, that feels a little weird, yeah, so. Technology that sits on these in between spaces then ends up forcing a change in not only policy but also just social norms and expectations. 00:03:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I find these in between spaces really fascinating and that could be in the transportation world. I grew up with a mixed cultural background and so, Dwelling in the in between spaces of that has also been something that I grew up struggling with and have now sort of surrendered to in some way, but those in between spaces are something that’s really beautiful and also sometimes really confusing. 00:03:38 - Speaker 2: Makes sense, but also presents opportunity because you have perspective that no one else has, right? Yeah. And once you tell us a little bit about your background. You’ve done some very interesting academic work as well as all sorts of, I feel you’re all over in the kind of tools for thought, independent research, next generation computing space. 00:03:57 - Speaker 1: I would say that I’ve been on this journey of learning more about myself and I’m still trying to figure out who I am and what I’m trying to do. Perhaps this is what most people do, but I was lucky enough to study interaction design, that was a fairly new program in the school I attended and through that process, I was introduced to the history of personal computing and That whole genre, that whole world and being layered into that got me really, really curious about what it took to get us to where we are nowadays and also where are we headed and I started looking for places where they’re thinking about the future and thinking about alternative paths that haven’t really been explored or illuminated in different ways and That led to working at and also spending a lot of time at this research group called Dynamicland and I’ve also been sort of being in a part of the creativ