Soleio - The rise of designers who ship
Dive Club 🤿30 Loka 2024

Soleio - The rise of designers who ship

As soon as I finished our original interview, I knew I had to have Soleio on as the first repeat guest. He led early design efforts at Facebook and Dropbox. Now he invests in design-driven startups like Figma, Framer, Vercel, etc.

So this week’s episode is all about how designers and startups can succeed in a world where everything is changing. We go deep into:

  • Ideal traits for a founding designer
  • How startups can strategically attack incumbents
  • Why the future belongs to designers who can ship
  • The backstory behind Soleio’s investment in Perplexity
  • A potential future where one designer can service 5+ startups
  • What you can do to invest in your future founder journey today
  • How Soleio approaches the design tooling space as an investor
  • Why we won’t use smartphones the same way 5 years from now
  • a lot more

Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:32 Designers who can ship 11:18 Dealing with the velocity of tech as an investor 13:27 The importance of brand for startups 18:00 Why Soleio beleives we won't be using smartphones the same way in 5 years 34:23 Qualities that Soleio looks for in first-time founders 36:58 How to succeed as a founding designer 44:53 Founders living in the future 55:05 How to invest in your future founder journey today

Jaksot(199)

Why Rive is a big deal for the future of design

Why Rive is a big deal for the future of design

This episode is a deep dive into Rive—the engine powering experiences like Spotify Wrapped, next-gen car dashboards, and so much more.After hearing Luigi and Guido Rosso’s vision for the future of int...

2 Helmi 43min

Best AI Coding Tools for Designers

Best AI Coding Tools for Designers

One of the biggest parts of my design practice is knowing which tool to reach for when coding with AI.There are a lot of options and they’re changing every week 😅So in this episode, I break down:1. T...

28 Tammi 19min

Xavier Jack - How To Vibe Code in 3D

Xavier Jack - How To Vibe Code in 3D

Sometimes you open up a website and it's so good that you're left wondering... how the heck did they pull that off?In this episode the designer of the original Amie website, Xavier Jack (https://x.com...

26 Tammi 45min

Matt Sellers - What a top 1% design portfolio looks like

Matt Sellers - What a top 1% design portfolio looks like

Last month the head of design at Lovable, Nad Chishtie, walked us through the portfolio of one of their recent design hires, Matt Sellers.So today's episode is a behind-the-scenes of what it actually ...

21 Tammi 33min

Stephen Haney - The 2026 AI Design Field Report (tools, process, and what's working)

Stephen Haney - The 2026 AI Design Field Report (tools, process, and what's working)

There's been a heck of a debate around the future of coding and design tools lately... but what's actually happening inside of today's top teams?Where is all this headed and how does the future of our...

19 Tammi 48min

Dessn - Is this the future of AI prototyping?

Dessn - Is this the future of AI prototyping?

Gab and Nim are the co-founders of a startup called Dessn which allows designers to prototype in the context of their production codebase (without any of the setup).So I asked them to hook it up to th...

14 Tammi 34min

Henry Modisett - Inside Perplexity's design culture

Henry Modisett - Inside Perplexity's design culture

Someone asked me recently... if you had to join a design team, who would you want to work for?And my answer was easy... PerplexitySo today's episode with Henry Modisett (https://x.com/henrymodis) (Per...

9 Tammi 47min

Designer's toolkit for Claude Code

Designer's toolkit for Claude Code

Kyle Zantos is leading the new UX Tools Labs where he's responsible for figuring out what matters for new design tools and workflows.As a result, he's pretty quickly become my go-to source as I transi...

7 Tammi 48min