Pony

SF needs a redesign. Urgently. The energy here is something else. A city built by builders, for builders, and everyone is right at the front of tech. Then you look up ... - Dark background. - Purple gradient. - White logo, white headline. - Repeat. Nine companies, one billboard. I get it. Folks are focused on building the tech, not the design. But shipping is getting easier every month, and investors won't ask what you built, they'll ask how much traction you've got. Traction comes from distribution, and distribution starts with not looking like the hundred others doing exactly the same thing. Which makes it a huge opportunity for whoever's brave enough to say something different... #SanFrancisco #SF #AI

Stop being a tile. I run a studio. We use AI every day. It makes us faster and better and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And still, most mornings I open my phone and feel a bit sick. Not because of the tools. Because of the people on the other side of them. Designers, writers, engineers. Good ones. Posting into the void, wondering what they’re for now. I don’t have a clean answer. I want to say that up front. I’m not the guy on stage telling you it’s all fine if you just learn to prompt. I’m confused too. Some days I’m thrilled. Some days it just hurts. But I keep coming back to one thing. We already ran this experiment. Six years ago, we all went remote and got reduced to a tile on a screen. Same box, same size, muted until it was our turn. The lesson wasn’t that remote is bad. It was what happens when all you are is the box and the file inside it. When you’re only the thing you hand over, you are a thing. Swappable. Comparable. Rankable. That’s what AI does to the deliverable. It turns the output into a tile. Cheap, fast, and good enough to fool you. That’s the dangerous part. It’s not bad work. It’s convincing work, done in seconds, for free, all night, without complaining. If your whole worth is the file you hand over, that’s who you’re up against now. So the question stops being “what can I make.” Everyone can make now. It becomes “who actually wants me around.” That’s the part the machine can’t touch. It can write the email. It can’t be the person your client phones at 11pm when the launch is on fire. It can draft the strategy. It can’t read someone’s face and see they’re scared and need a different conversation than the one they asked for. It can be trusted to generate. It can’t be trusted. It can’t be on the hook. It can’t care, and people feel the difference. So here’s what I believe. The skill now is relationships. Not as a soft add-on to the real work. As the real work. We’re going back to something old. The thing that mattered most fifty years ago. Knowing people. Being able to make someone trust you. For a few decades we hid behind output, because it was scarce and slow. That window is closing. The value moves to who knows you, and what they know you for. Not “I deliver logos” or “I write code.” A point of view. A name that walks into the room before you do. People who trust you, who get you, who feel you get them. That’s the asset now. And it doesn’t switch on the day you need it. You can’t download trust. You can’t buy back ten years of being someone people believe in. It builds slowly, by showing up. So the people grinding output right now, staying invisible to stay efficient, are spending the one thing that’s about to matter most. I think about my kid, ten years old. What I want him to double down on isn’t a skill a machine will flatten in five years. School won’t teach it to him either. It’s the stuff that happens at playtime. The friendships. The reading of people. The talking. Kids spend most of the day sitting quiet in a classroom, when the real learning is out in the playground. We had it backwards the whole time. So if I have anything useful to offer, it’s small. Look at how you describe yourself. How you behave. How you communicate. Don’t stay quiet. Don’t be just the outcome. Be the person who sells the outcome. Then ask the harder one: who would take my call, vouch for me, back me on instinct? And what have I done for that list this month? If the answer is nothing, that’s the work now. Not more output. That. I won’t pretend there’s room for everyone in this. There isn’t, and saying otherwise would be a lie. But the people who come through it find something better than a job. They get to be useful to real people, and known for who they are, not what they make. That’s where the purpose is, on the other side of all this. Not in out-producing the robots. In the part they were never going to want anyway. We’re all in this one together. That part I’m sure about.

Talent is overrated. Talent is a compliment we pay to work we didn’t see being made. We see the finished thing. We don’t see the sweat behind it. The ugly first attempts, the late nights, the years of figuring it out. So we call it a gift. Then we do the same to ourselves, the other way round. I’m the creative one. I’m not a numbers person. I could never code. We say these things like they’re facts about our bodies. Most of them come from one bad teacher or one ugly first try, years ago. We never checked again. For a long time, the labels made sense. They made you easy to hire, easy to bill, easy to promote. The deeper you went into your label, the more you got paid. So we started to believe the label was who we are. It was just how we got paid. Then learning got free. When I taught myself web design, the only useful resource I could find was Lynda.com. A paid library of video tutorials, later bought by LinkedIn. That was the only door, and you paid to walk through it. Today you need nothing. No money, no permission, no degree. AI will sit with you at two in the morning and answer your most embarrassing questions without judging you. If you want to learn something, the only real cost is your evenings. Which means one skill now matters more than every other. The skill of figuring it out. Sitting with something you don’t know how to do, staying there, and finding a way through. It sounds too basic to call a skill. It’s underneath every skill you’ve ever built. I saw this clearly over the past few months. We’ve been hiring a senior designer, and I’ve read through hundreds of applications. Two extremes keep showing up. Young designers with barely any portfolio, applying with genuinely poor work. Being at the start is fine. Everyone starts rough. But the best studios in the world publish everything they do, for free. You can study their work for hours and learn more than any course will teach you. The work in my inbox tells me nobody looked. And on the other side, very experienced designers. Fifteen, twenty years in. Big names on the CV. The work is genuinely good. But it hasn’t moved in a decade. Somewhere along the way, they stopped being hungry to figure things out. Comfort does that. It arrives quietly and looks like success. Different people, same missing piece. And that should be encouraging, because the missing piece can be trained. Figuring it out works like a muscle. It doesn’t care how old you are or how senior your title is. It fades when you stop and it comes back when you start again. The juniors can start today. The seniors can start again today. The muscle holds no grudges. So train it on purpose. Study the best work in the open. Pick one piece you admire and pull it apart until you understand every choice in it. Ask AI the questions you’d be embarrassed to ask a person. They cost nothing now. And pick the one thing you’ve spent years saying you’re bad at. Give it two honest weeks. Through all of it, be kind to yourself. Don’t stand over your own shoulder grading every attempt. You try, you learn, you adjust, you try again. That’s the whole loop. Nobody figures anything out while busy judging themselves for not knowing it yet. You’ll be clumsy at first. Good. Clumsy means the muscle is working. Because the real training is bigger than any single skill. It’s teaching your mind to stop thinking in labels at all. The UX person. The motion person. The business person. The strategy person. Those walls are melting, and they won’t come back. What’s growing on the other side is a different kind of creative. Someone who moves between disciplines instead of living inside one only. Someone who can orchestrate, adapt and evolve with whatever comes next. Nothing about you is fixed. That was the whole misunderstanding. Keep figuring it out. Stef.