why this episode of Hustle is brought to you by designing the best place to find trade of talent. I need help with the project posted on designing and receive free proposals from the best designers, illustrators and animators during the hundreds of companies and startups that have been connected with the perfect creator for the project, go to designing dot com slash hustle and started project today. Welcome back to the hustle podcast today. I'm here with Chris Messina. Chris is currently unemployed. Ah, Recently left Uber he was the developer. Experience lead. Um, for those of you that don't know Chris, he is the founder of our camp. And he was also the person responsible for creating the hashtag, which I I think it's pretty pretty damn cool. Um, what's ah, what's going on with you, Chris? Why don't you say hello in a little bit about yourself?

Sure. Um hey, Mana, I'm just chilling. Um, I appreciate you having me on the show. Um, I think the timing was, you know, barely awesome since we're kicking off 2017 and, um, you know, I'm actually very excited about kind of all sorts of stuff that's going on in the text based design space and so on, you know, But I've been in the tech world for over a decade now. You know, I first came out to the Bay Area in,

like, 2004 and the first project that I worked on was the launch of Fire Fox, basically, you know, So I sort of been in the open source world was one of the first designers on the triple Project, Contributed some stuff to WordPress like, way back in the day, and anyways, have had kind of like a I don't know, it's been an interesting ride both on the outside side. Like I've had my own agency, um, to being inside of your companies, including Google. And, of course,

recently, as you said uber. So here I am on the outside again, thinking about what's next. And, um, you know, I'm excited to sort of, like, chat with you guys about what you guys are saying

out there, too. Yeah, remind me. What was the name of the agency that you owned?

Yes. So, um, you know, it's it's funny. I sort of was doing almost like a kn annual thing for a while. where I started out in 2004 working on fire Fox and then barking post 2005. Then 2006 was citizen Agency, which was the agency. And then we had the first co working spaces in San Francisco, which was citizen space, and we kind of popularize that thing, which, you know now is kind of everywhere. And then in 2007 it was the hash tag. And then, I don't know, 2008 and beyond is kind of a blur, But those were the Social war Social Web wars, I guess back then.

But it's really good to talk to you. It wasn't it wasn't planned. But this season so far, I've been really lucky to talk to a lot of old schoolers, get you and you and Greg Story and Mike Buzzard and several of people. And so I've had a been having a really good time going down memory lane.

Uh, actually, you know, it's funny s o. I worked with Mike Buzzard from Cuban counsel at Google. Actually, we overlap there. Um, I think he and I are getting lunch next week, but, uh, his actually the Cuban Cow Council offices were literally like, right down the street from citizen space. And we worked side by side with each other for, like years and had no idea. So it's kind of ah, great to have that little two bit so that I actually like,

came out here being a super fan of Cuban council on, like, all the stuff they were doing back then, all their pixel designs, like we think this stuff is like, hot and fresh, but like they pioneered it back then with, like, shockwave APS and stuff. Um, Anyways,

Dina won't remember this, but there was a fat where everyone was designing with little, you know, 6 to 9 point pixel fonts. And yeah,

it's amazing. I mean, we got to go back and check it out.

That was I don't know if you know Greg Story, but, um, I try to mention this to a lot. He's been thinking about maybe starting a museum or something of some way to experience

my guy. That has to happen.

Old Web design.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny to, um, I've been I've been listening to, which I guess is another way of saying reading, Ready player one, and that goes way back to the nineties on. So, of course, there needs to be sort of like I don't know if it's gonna be ready. Player two, But, like, you know, the second iteration of that, Um well, it's not that we were doing back in, like, the early two thousands.

So real quick. What were you, What were you, you know, 1997 1999. What were you doing in that time frame?

I was in high school

in high school 20 years ago. Yeah, I graduated in 99. I finish school around the same time. I, um I was getting trying to figure out what to do with this artistic talent, and I had Plus, I was really good drafting and someone talked. Someone told me about multimedia. Um, then has gotta sucked into web design. What? How did you How did you get into that into this field?

Yeah, you know, I mean, it's it's funny, because it was right around that time, like I, um, in high school and actually going all the way back. I, um I was always kind of like a like an artist, Actually, I did a lot more like comic book drawing. I did like pastels and watercolors and all that stuff, but I was also into computers to, you know, the number of times I broke my dad's computer was greater than probably 100. But,

you know, I was super interested in what was going on there. I was into the Web. In fact, uh, you're listening is we'll have to imagine what this looks like. But my dad cleaned out his house last year and they sent me a bunch of old stuff. These are floppy disks

of my old work. Literally

1.4 four. You know, the hardest gets three and half inch floppy disks. I've got probably about 30 of them that have seen my old designs from, like, high school, which is just mind boggling anyways, And so I had to buy. This is gonna be awesome to your listeners. Can't see this either, but this is actually a floppy disk You can plug into your Mac, so it's sort of like way back memory lane. So, anyways, how'd I get into this stuff? Was I I decided that I wanted to merge my artistic interest with my computer interests and right around the time discovered the Web and started creating in my own AOL home page and stuff like that and realize that this would be a great way of bringing everyone together in my high school by creating pages for the clubs. And so I started doing that.

I started, like scanning artwork, you know, with like Photoshopped to or whatever it is super slow and always crashing, but, um, built out those pages and then through that ended up working for the first Web design company in New Hampshire, which is where I grew up and, you know, kind of rode the wave of, like, you know, a s p dot net and all this stuff back then, um, and sort of realized the power that Microsoft had over the Internet back then. And so when I had the opportunity after graduating,

this is several years later, um, ended up going out to California, coming to San Francisco, discovering the Mozilla project in open source and realizing, Hey, this is like something is very, very important for the future of, you know, civilization, basically like media needs to be open and free and rideable by everybody and we need a platform that's, uh, not controlled by a single dominant company on. So I went about one about We're working on the launch of the browser

from the, uh sorry. Go ahead, Dana. I know just what you're saying. My open source, Um that's that's interesting from some of your older interviews, it seemed like, um, it was just more like a certain intensity to that whole open source. Like debate back then and then. Kind of what it involved into now is like a couple of years later, it's It's a term that we use often when we talk about transparency in business and when we talk about digital culture in general and, like, do the ledgers like the natural maturity for that subject to reach that point. Or like I know the way it

grew. Yeah, actually, I mean, it's a really good point. I think this is one of the fun things sort of talking about folks who either are new to that history or auras. Well, as folks who have also been in that space at the time, you know, open source was kind of a dirty word. Actually, people who come out to Silicon Valley to like, you know, make their their gold and their riches as often people do in Silicon Valley. And when it happened after the first dot com bust, you know a lot of people who are here just to make money left, you know,

they were like, Well, this is stupid, like no one's going to use the Internet after all. Like, you know, pets dot com sort of died of whatever. And so but there was a bunch of people who were really involved in the technology really believed in the technology believed in the enabling power of the technology. A lot of folks who are libertarians are kind of wanting Thio bring freedom to the Internet. And so it was, I mean, there was almost like a religious kind of

It was almost like like a manifesto, you know, like

a cherry. And working on the Mozilla project was I mean, you wore like, a like a badge of honor. And it's funny, actually, just I think it was yesterday. Mozilla came out with their new brand, and I don't I don't have I mean, it's It's not as bad as like the Gap rebranding that happened a couple years ago. But, um, it it's it's so retro that it kind of actually is like looking backwards as opposed to forwards. And I think that it's kind of unfortunate, because this is such an interesting moment for for the Web as an open platform and for generative ity and for social media and for like, video and rich media on the Web that are mostly being controlled by and built up by what are effectively advertising companies. And so it raises a question as to what is the future of media and who is going to be the shepherd of that going forward?

And what what expectations should young people have about the control and transparency or inspect ability of that media that they encounter? So, for example, like, you know, the other question you asked was like how I get into this stuff? Well, a lot of the way that we used to learn about building for the Web was by viewing source. Of course, a lot of APS now are way more complex, and so it's a little bit harder just, you know, look the source code and figure out how it works because there's so much behavior, so much coating. Um, but if you imagine,

you know, doing or having the same level of access and transparency into a lot of the way that media is produced, whether it's video audio are so on that could actually, you know, enable Ah, younger generation is growing up with this stuff to have the same curiosity and to be able to satisfy their curiosity very quickly by being able to inspect other people's work, learn from it, adapt it, modify it and share it the whole sort of remix culture concept. And I feel like maybe, maybe to your point. A lot of these ideas now have become so commonplace, and it's sort of normal in other words, to share your work in various ways that it doesn't need to be. There doesn't need to be such a strong banner attached to it anymore. But having come from a world where that wasn't the default and that holding on to everything and I mean I get this question a lot about the hashtag when people are like so why don't you patent the hashtag and I'm like,

Well, because that's a stupid idea, like then it would never have taken off, and I would have had to control it and like, sell licenses. And I would've had to get in the way of what I think is ah, fundamental behavioral technology for the Social Web. Um, but of course, that comes out of a mindset of wanting to sort of be able to harness the value of the things that we create and to make money off of those things all the time. And that's not always the best,

Not Olds exactly. Do you take that stance? But apparently Twitter did to mean that the use of the hashtag is used by everyone. They tried. They tried

to trade market and they tried to pretend I so you know, there was a moment there, and I think, you know, it's one of those things where I think they quickly realized that probably just didn't make a lot of sense. But, you know, I mean, Twitter is trying to figure out a way of owning something of value of uniqueness. They wanted, like the hashtag to be synonymous with Twitter. And it is to some degree, but the value of it is actually allowing everyone to contribute to conversation, no matter what platforms they're on and what they're using.

So let's talk about that for a minute. Did you? Did you ever imagine that, you know, you would come into this industry and create something that would be so wildly used around the entire world, they would be blasted on television screens and radio ads. And like, um, what does it feel like to have, um, come up with a concept like that? I mean, I mean, I can't even imagine what? So that's my biggest question I have for you is like, What does it feel like to have, well, great the hashtag? It's always like Chris Messina. And it's, uh it's

funny. I mean, because, like, I mean, I don't I don't feel like it. It changed me that much. Or like it's sort of I mean, it did in that. It's it's very humbling, you know, to see something that you have kind of me first of all, that that there was a lot of skepticism about in the beginning and just feel, you know, some residents with this, this idea that you've come up with and to go through all of the stages of kind of disbelief about it or sort of like, Wow,

this will never work. Or like, you know, when I brought it to Twitter and I like, you know, the day after I proposed it, I went to their offices when it was, like, small and there's no security and, you know, they just sort of said, this is stupid and will never work. As you know, this is an idea for nerds. And I was like, Well, you guys are probably right.

Isn't that what their whole idea was in the first place? You know, the delusions

of grandeur or whatever? I mean, you know, it was it was hard to disagree, given that they'd come from Google. They'd sold a startup like they'd seen the inside of one of these machines and they saw how real users behave. And they're like, you know, we can barely get people to, like, sign into their, you know, their their phone, you know, remember their password like, how are they going to get this weird, esoteric symbol?

Um, you know, and so on. But it's one of those things where simplicity actually is really, really hard to achieve. And so, you know, I've watched a lot of Web communities and also mobile communities more recently. Come out where you have to, like, go to a forum and, like, join it and follow it and post to it and subscribe. And it's a lot of work, you know? And that was kind of what I was anticipating.

That that was not going to make that was not gonna jump the chasm between the desktop worlds where you have, like, a mouse and keyboard to the mobile world where you have partial attention, You've got a fairly restricted keyboard. So I was sort of anticipating that shift on dhe and designing for that moment. You know what I think? A lot of people who were on Twitter in the early days were using Twitter through the Web and just didn't really see how an idea coming out of I R C would actually be relevant to everybody, you know. And I mean literally. It's 10 years ago when that idea first came out. So it's taking a long time for it to really saturate, um, the world,

um, in some. In some cases, it feels like 10 years ago was just yesterday. But but I also sometimes it feels like a 1,000,000 years ago. I remember, uh, when I was working behavior in my boss. When the partners Chris Fay, he I don't know if you know him, but he's okay. I checked this Twitter thing and, like, I would ever want to use that. Like, I don't want that. He just got back from south by Southwest,

and he was really jazzed about it. And I was, You know, at the time I still had a record razor phone, or, uh and I only use it for phone calls. I mean, I didn't really get it, but, you know, I I do remember for a short period of time using twitter on my razor phone. Um, and I guess it is kind of hard to really bring the valuable, you know, talking. What are you doing now, when you were waiting to get to your desktop break? Well, but I mean,

remember to like at the time, the kind of now we have lt like networking didn't exist. Like trying to do anything on the mobile web was atrocious. I mean, the browsers were all black and white. They gave you like this, you know, stripped down text only version. Um, it was just not really a functional world to live in. And so, like the night wishing d s a mess, it was actually kind of both a novel idea. And also when it sort of made sense because you were out on the go and you just have a thought. You want to share it with your friends? It was a super fast delivery mechanism. And everyone,

of course, received these via SMS as well. And so it felt very communal back then. It created a lot of social cohesion. So,

yeah, so do you. We can we can move on. But I'm just curious if you could just summarize what led you to arrive at that proposition. I mean, I know I know a bit of the story, but I don't know if you like. Were you working at Twitter? Where was it? Just an idea. Like summarized how this came about.

Yeah. I mean, the idea for the hashtag. You know, I never worked a twitter. It's sort of one of those funny things where you're like, Oh, like, back when you were working there and everyone ask me that. But I never worked there. I was just early user, and the core idea was again, you know, sort of. In response to those Web forms that I was talking about, we needed a way of grouping or labeling these conversations. We needed a way for people to contribute to a conversation that was ongoing,

as opposed to a conversation just sort of like floating all over the place. And furthermore, in my original proposal, you can actually, like find the Block post. The idea was to kind of take the ability to pop in and out of a channel like an IRC and apply that to Twitter. So if you want to have a conversation, great, like, you know, you can sort of, like tap on a hash tag and then talk about that thing and then pop out and you're done very fast, very low friction and ideally, could be done over a mobile phone. And so

more like a group.

It is a group in sort of an ad hoc disposable group. That was the idea. Um, we needed something that was very easy to do that could be done using your razor phone, for example, and it was very easy for people to learn just by emulating other people. And so that's kind of where it came from. It was like, Let's take this thing from IRC Um, let's let's just plug it into the tweet itself so you can actually remove it. Um And you can put as many tags you want, you know, in your post up to obviously 140 characters and the thing that really I think cemented this, right? I mean, that was like the germ of the idea. And I wrote it up or whatever was that instagram needed away for their photos to be discovered.

Right? This is before machine vision, right? So you don't have or you didn't have deep learning and a I and Earl, And that's all the stuff that we, you know are all buzz word today, you know? So you need two people to label these photos in order to train the system. This is what Flicker was doing like it was asking people to, like add tax or their photos. So, in a similar way, it was like, Well, let's take that idea of tagging photos and just apply it to tweets or, in the case of Instagram,

continue that behavior tagging photos. But just use Hashtags because essentially, you have, like, a photo and you have a caption. And the caption is where the tax could go. And so as a result of that, I think people found a lot of value because they wanted their photos to be seen. They wanted to tag it with, you know, hashtag sunset or hashtag Twerk or, you know, whatever. Um and that's s so I think that once it's once across that chasm that I think it was kind of impossible toe. Take it back.

Oh, that's a That's an awesome story. So Dean has got another question for you Actually wanted to know. Have you seen, um, do you watch Black Mirror? Yes. Have you seen that episode where? Maybe Oh, yes. Okay, maybe spoilers. But, um, they're using a I like a chat. Bott were basically the girl loses her fiance and they use, like,

a I to recreate a neural network for him. And it starts off with him just texting her from the grave, basically. And then, like he calls her, and then they end up making a way to make a robot that looks just like him. And then and, um, like it goes to her house and stuff like, uh, skinned his voicemail and all that sort of stuff too, right? Yeah. I was like his whole social media, his like, everything he ever posted his text messages that people volunteered that.

But then I was reading an article lately that there's a company in Russia that found a way to do something similar, like the girl's best friend died. And I don't know if you read that are cool, but basically it was it was part of the same thing. They skinned like anyone who wanted to protest, participate, like give the text messages, his social media and now, like the bought exists on, like the Luca app. And you can like texting will answer questions about him. Or it'll even say things in his own language that they built this whole complex neural network. And I just wonder, since you worked in bots like what you thought about that?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's great. Great question. I think Luca now has pivoted into something called Replica, which is basically that idea. And so there is this question that's looming. I think for those of us who are in the bots space in the Bach community, you know what? What is a good body, too? What should have bought represent? Is it a service is It's sort of like a branded identity. Is it kind of a way of extending like a TV show, for example, or like a video game? Or is there an opportunity for there to be more personal bots that are essentially a second skin or an extension of yourself?

And then there's two aspects of that, which is what is the inbound interaction that people have with your personal baht? In other words, what can they do with your personal? But how deep can those questions go? And is it possible for your bought to have some sense about the audience or the person that's engaging with your bought? To be able to provide personalized answers? Were responses, right? Like, you know, if I'm talking to my partner like, I'm going to tell her ah, lot more stuff than if I'm talking to a stranger. Well, my bought have the same sort of sense of a person that it's interacting with.

And then on the flip side of that, it's sort of like, you know, what is the process of sharing consciousness with the baht? In other words, if I am talking to my personal but to sort of, you know, be the Wizard of Oz, what does that interaction look like? And what is my bought doing on my behalf? You know what? One of the questions, at least you know. There's a lot of skepticism about bots in general. And of course, I think although 2016 was the year that kind of put bought platforms on the map is what I called the year of conversational commerce.

You know, 2017 and going forward, we're kind of in this point where it's like, Well, bots are over. We tried. It didn't work. They suck and it's like, Okay, well, good. You guys all go away. You know, we've done this before. 2000 for no one was in Silicon Valley. Everyone thought the Internet was dead.

Let's have the serious people who actually like wanted again and do something good. Now show up and start to, like, create really, really transcending experiences And so when it comes to the personal bought opportunity, um, you know anybody who is who has an email account, let's say, and has ever used an auto responder already, basically as a pot. They just don't think of Gmail as kind of a body, but it is really sort of a friend end. That's a very slow way of actually having, you know, inbound messages come in. Google scans them looks for spam,

so it gets rid of a bunch of nonsense and noise and then leaves the signal for you to process and increasing the overtime. You see Google doing more and more things in that inbox, whether it's bubbling up shipping notifications or airline links or receipts or organizing them into different channels, Right? In some ways, you can imagine that is, ah, precursor, a predecessor to what might eventually be kind of like this, this personal assistant that you're looking at, and then on the flip side of that, there is a set of facts or information that you want to make available to the outside world. The question, though, is you know who is interacting with that pot. What kind of information are they interested in.

Is there a way for them to validate their own identities, though again they could get personalized information on. And then what sort of where does it go from there? Now I have a personal baht. It's called the scene about, and it was built, sort of, as the second Gen. After my partner, Esther built her bod called Esther Baht and Esther's, but was kind of designed as a way of having an interactive resume. So she built it on twilio, and you could sort of asking questions, and I would answer questions stupid in my body, we kind of decided to take that to the next level and built on messenger. And it kind of what I like about it is that it captures a bunch of stuff that I publish across the Web,

whether it's on product hunt or medium, or my podcast like this broadcast will be in my body eventually, whether it's like events that I'm gonna be speaking at or, um, even for a while, you could like schedule office hours with me. So it had that kind of like personal system elect. You could get my drink recipes because I tend to drink a lot of cocktails on. And if you connect, this is part of the things I did. Well, as a number, if you connect your uber account to my baht whenever you're driving someplace in a new bird, Hoover will send my bought your destination, and it'll look up my tips on foursquare and my butt will then relay those tips to you. So you know exactly what to do while you're on the way.

So you can imagine a whole army of bots in the world that are your friends or extensions of your friends and are actually tapping into all the vast knowledge that your friends have in a way that's very opportunistic and very contextual and very in the moment. And we aren't that far away from that, really. When you think about all the digital stuff that we're producing, the question is, how do you actually bring that all together in a form that gives each of us a little more control in power over that experience and then can make the best and most interesting and useful stuff available to the right people in the right times and moments?

So is that where your focus is right now, uh is in the in the world of conversational design and bots,

I I would say that, yes, my focus right now is really in the realm of conversational products. And to me, that spans messaging and voice A cz well, as, like other context that you know, you might think of as being more like marketing channels. But I like the privacy that messaging channels afford because it allows people to open up more and to share more of themselves. You know, in a way that you just probably won't see as much on general social media for them or what we might start to see. And we certainly see this, And slack is that bots could be very useful as a presence inside of group channels or conversations. So, for example, if I have a personal but and that but has a presence in my slack channels, not only can it be watching,

observing things that I'm gonna find interesting or relevant based on it's a project that I'm personally working on. But if someone needs information for me, for example, about a file that I'm working on, my botching of the status of that and be able to presuming that you know, you have the permissions relay that information to my team mates when they're looking for that stuff, right? Like there's no reason why I should be in the business of constantly routing information about stuff that the computer would know better than me. And yet I spend so much time. There's so much of my compute power, so to speak, my brain matter compute power. Thinking about answering those questions like, Where did I leave that file? Or like, What's the answer? That or what's that person's phone number, you know?

Yeah. And what about like bots in like a I in general is like decision

support some of that, too. Yeah, so for sure, like to get a good example of this. There's a few APS that have come out. In fact, one. A new version came out just yesterday for the Hemingway editor, and what it does is it's It's sort of like a louse, like, you know, right, whatever you're writing. And then it will give you suggestions on how to improve what you've written well, whether its decision support or whether it's offering in Crete creativity support. You can imagine that there's those types of applications that are actually giving you hints as your you know,

whether it's developing your skills or whether it's actually producing your work. Or, for example, if you want to fact check. I mean, ah, perfect use case of this would be like, you know, to select some statement or argument that you're making and have a body go off and actually like, do the fact checking and say, Well, that's not exactly right or whatever,

Chris, will you? Never Both at Slush and Helsinki. Did you happen to see the? I can't remember the name but the product. But it was a product that was in the HR space that the goal was to help hiring managers to, say, technical hiring, managers of design managers or just HR generals and that matter, like be able to write, like, really well written responses back to high volume applicants on I got it, I got a demo of it, I don't know exactly. I mean, the mechanics of weight worked way over my head, but they demoted for me on a on a Skype call.

They basically start out by saying hello Adam. We're sorry, but the position is filled. And then it's writing like sentences. Ah, above that And it. And it's well, there's a few reasons, like one to make sure that, like not all the applicants are getting like canned responses and to try to be genuine, but also to try. You know, no one's gonna sit there and right, like, 400 you know, unique e mails.

Maybe they do. I don't know those those things. Air, huh? Are pretty interesting to me. I haven't seen. I saw the announcement of Hemingway. Haven't looked at that. I don't know about you guys, but I think the I don't know if it's I don't know how I feel about it yet, but I probably the hardest thing for me is is the decision making power of the decision in the energy it takes to book meetings, you know, So, like, I'm like, just just in one week this week,

I'm trying to book a meeting with someone in Finland and a meeting with someone in Tokyo, and they're sitting times, and you're like that that 4 p.m. That day is like 2 a.m. You know, and then I've tried a lot of these. Ah, assistance, If you will like these body I and clear Yeah, Uh, yeah, there's there's a new one that it's from France that I liked at first until I realized from their customer support that they were still riding a lot of it manually. So, like, I don't know if it's like, it's not really a bottle like I don't know, like I don't know what this

really is. A state of the art man. I mean, like, although, like Clara Labs and I study, I are, you know, moving in directions where it's all automated and where the back and forth and the email is done by, you know, ah ah cause I intelligence. Ah, lot of it still falls back to humans, and humans still have to sort of fill in the blanks when things get very complex, like it's sort of ironic, cause it's a very relatively straightforward data task. Except once you start getting into the space of personal preferences.

So it's like, Oh, well, you know where this person's in this time zone or this person has this schedule or this person's traveling in this way or yeah, the idea and it's amazing, right? Because everything I just described with this personal bought stuff sounds at least to me, you know, fairly tractable. You know, I could sort of imagine going to look at Disney World and having this experience. But in terms of what you're talking about, if we can't even figure out how to do the scheduling stuff right with these thes sort of a I systems, then there's a long way to go before we can actually apply this stuff more generally. Now that said, I mean to switch topics like a little bit,

but I want to say yes, like in that specific context that you're talking about. Um, thes assistance are gonna be super valuable Super relevance. Take away a lot of the logistical crap that again is sort of wasting our brain cycles when we could be using it for more creative orm or interesting types of Endeavour's making. Sort of like the latter. TUNEL leaps that humans are uniquely suited for where his computers have not proven to be super creative. Yet I think the place where this is gonna be the most interesting and the most profound where the rubber meets the road, so to speak is in self driving an automated cars. Right? Because you have to have kind of like that Knight Rider experience where you get in it and you talk to an automated system once presuming these air legal and once people are no longer kind of in a supervisory role, you will be having this conversation with some intelligent agent. That's about helping you get to the place that you want to go in the world or beyond that. I mean, why do we need to address is right. You probably get into a car having an idea for,

like, the experience that you're going for, whether you're going to eat food or where they're gonna go buy something or whether you're meeting a person. All of that, you know, the sort of destination is somewhat arbitrary. It's not 100% arbitrary, but you want to go the movies. Great car. Tell me which theater I should go to, which has the best deal. It's playing something I haven't seen yet. Why does the car don't know that, right? So I think it's super interesting to think about that real world kind of application of this technology and where it's I mean, you already saw,

I'd see, Yes, Alexa is starting toe roll out in a lot of context, including, and cars. That's gonna be one of the big new areas for a lot of design and a lot of service integrations. And so, from a design perspective, if you're like a a young designer thinking about where to go next, I think the conversational space is super ripe for for there to be new breakout successes and new patterns that we've never seen before.

How would you maybe advise someone that's that doesn't have the luxury of, say, being in like a MEChA hub like New York City or San Francisco to get and, you know, to acquire those skills or get into the space and sort of, ah, get going along the path, the future. I mean, I would also add that, um, if we're talking about the future, um, where we're seeing that, like in all cities to the designers out there listening, fewer people are hiring us to make products, and more people are hiring us to design the future.

Um, not necessarily the pickles that get, you know, implemented and shipped in the app store. But you know how you know, helping people like with strategy. So I'm sort of seeing like it's a big thing right now, right? And like Thio have to know Service's I am product design, Web design, mobile design, you know, interaction, design, visual design. And it's kind of do tell Tell me if you believe this, Do you? Do you see that we're sort of entering a sort of exiting a phase of general generalised jealous design skills being needed to an era of back to specialization?

Uh, wow, because they feel like what you just asked was actually the inversion of that conclusion. I thinkit's Yes, Aunt, I wrote a post, Um, maybe in 2015 actually, um, about this idea of like, the full stack employee. And, you know, I guess historically that's been called to get t shaped employees or something like that. But the idea essentially is that to really understand or to be useful, and this is sort of I was kind of reading about myself. It's like I spend so much time looking at so many things,

trying to synthesize so much information. Um, because I'll end up in a conversation with, like, a P M. That's like talking about analytics or staffs or data. And then I'll have another conversation with a U X researcher and they'll have another conversation with back an engineer and then another conversation with system architect. Or then like an exact And you've got to be able to kind of speak their language, right? So that's sort of like language acquisition and concept acquisition. But then you also have to be able to comment on and have inferences about whether the thing that they're saying is like, stupid or not. And so I guess, like, to me that says a couple things like 11 of most important skills. Well,

there's probably two very important skills moving into the future. I think the first is curiosity and cultivating the curiosity across all sorts of different areas is really important. And in fact, there's a really good book that Joe Ito just produced with Jeff how called Whiplash. And it's about how the M I T. Media Lab works and it's got like, 10 rules for the future, and it's I think it's really good. It's really tracks to a lot of experiences that I've had on dhe that's gonna be critical in terms of where we're going. Um, and the other thing is that there are gonna be people who are gonna have to be able to go super deep with certain technologies. Certain ideas, like there's just so much depth now. And I'm one of those people that sort of skims a lot of stuff but doesn't like, You know, I can't code my way out of a shoebox at this point.

Um, but you have to be able to rely on the people who actually understand this stuff deeply. And so the question is, how do you partner with them and how do you build a good relationship with them? And how do you have patients when they're sharing their expertise and their knowledge in their wisdom, when you might be sort of only focused on, like, the big picture and then the other, the other? The point that you were making before, where you're getting less client, we're coming to you to ask you to, let's say, produce an app like I think we are shifting. We're shifting into a world where the primary way that we compute is no longer going to be like confined to glass. You know,

we're going to be having voice based interactions, and that's gonna be the entirety of the experience someone buys and Alexa for, like, their grandmother. And that's how the grandmother axes a bunch of service is, You know,

my mom is blind, and then Alexis is the only way to my mom experiences the Internet, right? Right. Well, I mean, she can do Web searches and stuff like that, but she consumes most content from Alexa. Yeah, alive. It's just like a continuation of all that different interaction points. Yeah, it was pretty game changing for her. I mean, to say the least. Yeah,

yeah. So So, having that, Like, I guess. I guess what that sort of also implies is like, we we as designers have to be very careful about, you know, doing the thing where you you've got a hammer. And so you're just sort of like seeking nails in the world like your job is a designer is to solve the problem. However, that may manifest, and to take advantage of the right tools, channels and technologies that are being built. And we're in this shift, I think, towards simpler technologies,

at least in terms of the user experience or perhaps the way that they encountered them, even though the depth of those technologies are way deeper than they've been before. That's a lot of that complexity that used to exist on the user interface side. I drop down menus and, like stuff like that on the web, is now moving into Maur kind of, um, what I what I consider to be kind of negotiated interfaces where, for example, I talked to a bott, and I kind of tell it roughly what I think I want because I don't have the right language that bought, then corrects me and says, Oh, do you mean this? And then we can go forward as opposed to having me go down a menu tree and putting all the complexity on

me. Yeah, yeah, I see that too, you know, I mean, um, you know, back in the day, I think, even though it wasn't his complex, being a designer meant like hacking things together and making it work and playing with, like, you know, graphical assets and audio in animation and in a in a world where it's it's not just a, you know, a flat interface.

I mean designing for when things go wrong and and reinvigorating our like you said, curiosity and other mediums like writing is fucking important. You know, like being able to write in and talk is important. These these are all design. And, um, yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, it would probably be overwhelming for a young person. I mean, maybe it's not about what could imagine it being pretty overwhelming, like, you know, does that,

you know, I'm not supposed to know everything recorder. I focus, and it is definitely made an impact. I think on how Natalie, I think I've thought about hiring people because as we've seen the move from a lot of production to a lot of ideation and and, ah, in just general design work, you know, our our company has evolved from a mobile design company to a product design company to a digital agency. I mean, a lot of the stuff that we're doing now isn't even digital. It might be an analog. I mean, it's it's really just like you said. I think you said this early design is really just solving a problem with intent.

Um, yeah. Like it's not just about, like the graphical thing. It's all the interaction points across the whole spectrum. So some of it is like the strategy or just thinking about how you want all that too. My work together. So I'm I'm curious. And you have a very interesting background. Do you? Do you identify as a technologist are as a designer, as both I mean, how like, how do you summarize who Christian machine is?

Well, um uh, that's what it was like, Sort of, um, is it, uh, the master of none thing? Anyways, that's what I probably most identify with it. But now, like I think I definitely think of myself as a designer. I feel like about my product guy, because I I love product. I love thinking about product that solve people's problems. And I love seeing the various ways that people actually approach, asking questions,

you know, of the world and then proposing solutions. I mean, this is why I'm such an avid product on person. It's because these are these air deeper than hypotheses. These are things that people have actually brought to market and leave is the right solution to any number of problems. And, you know, I tend to see a lot of patterns, and I tend to see sort of like stuff that reappears over and over again. And that's really, really useful for my process to kind of get a sense for where things were going and what's working and what's not. And what are the same ideas that you see over and over again? And it's like, Why doesn't it work? And it's like,

Well, there's, ah fundamental disconnect between perhaps the inspiration or the insight that that product designer had with a set of behaviors that exists in the world that you can tap into. In other words, you know, every now and then I see these acts that are all about kind of planning your night out or like finding things to do. That is like the perennial one that's been trying to be sold for like the last decade, and they rarely seem to take off or catch on because of the social density that you need to make something like that work as well as the concentration of people that need to be using it on a regular basis. Right? So So that's, I think, one of the challenges there. So anyways, I guess the way that I think of myself is as a designer, product person, communicator,

certainly a technologist. But I was trained to design, so, you know, I kind of kind of fall back to that.

Uh, So what's next for you just left over How

long has been, uh, it's a week

today. Oh,

man. Maybe 22 weeks today. Yeah,

s So what? What is next? I mean, um, you advise startups, you have your hands in a lot of places. Like, what do you What do you think is next for you? Uh,

you know, it's funny. Um, I've been very fortunate throughout, like my career on dso I feel, you know, hashtag blessed in a lot of ways. Sorry had to do that. Um, and, uh, as a result of kind of having these opportunities come my way, I've been less having choosy or less intentional about saying, you know, this is actually what I am good at. These are the things that I am, perhaps still have room to grow into.

And so I want to be I think a lot more thoughtful to be like, actually, this is the best use of me and my talents and my super talents relative to all the other things that I could do. So I haven't had any shortage of inbound interest, thankfully, since I left Uber. But I also know that there's probably a very specific kind of roll out there either that I create or that I work with someone else to figure out. That allows me to do what I do best. And it's funny way started out talking about Mike Buzzard, and he'll appreciate us talking about him since he's something of a private person. Um, but, you know, he got to Google and he was kind of an odd shaped person, and I find that I tend to be a notch a person that places that I go. But he carved out a role for himself in recruiting and hiring and figuring out how to bring in designers.

That I feel like is like the perfect sweet spot for him. Um, and I see the work that he's done and the transition that he sort of made at Google, and it's powerful. So in some ways, I guess, you know, maybe a parting thought for the designers listening, you know, start out fairly broad and agnostic about the kind of stuff that you get involved with, like, solve a lot of problems, get a lot of experiences. The other thing I forgot to mention before there was two things that I was gonna say one was curiosity. The other thing is about finding focus, being able to turn everything off on that's gonna get increasingly hard because we've growth hacked the shit out of all these products.

And so they're all vying for your attention, but figure out how to focus for some period of time during the weekend days. And then over time, I think become more opinionated about knowing yourself, knowing what your capabilities are and seek out those roles that are really going to give you that opportunity to both stretch and grow yourself a cz Wells be supported. I think I didn't do that as much as perhaps looking back now, I would have liked to have done. And now I'm in a position where I'm starting to, like, really wantto find that thing that works really well for me.

I can relate to that. Um, I had to I had to figure that out a lot. You know, we went year the growing company in hiring people and stuff like that. It took me a while to figure it out. But, I mean, I think like you, I think I've finally figured out, like, at least what my I I understand my sweet spot. And I also understand my shape, and and, um, that's gonna limitations. Well,

Chris, uh, I really appreciate you taking time out of your scheduled to talk with us. It's pleasure to talk with you. We've run into each other a couple of times now, and we even hung out together. But I think this is the most we've talked, and so we gotta change. We're gonna change that. We gotta hang out sometime. Um, come to Austin. Well, are you gonna Are you gonna be coming this way in march?

You're too self by. I will be. It's out by. Yeah, for sure. All right,

well, maybe you can help by the Yeah, our party of the dribble party or something. I mean, we can, uh, get me invites, man. Yeah, that sounds good. So how did people find you on the Interwebs?

Sure. So, um you know, I've got christmas sina dot me. I've got Chris Messina on Twitter, and you can talk to my bought at m dot me slash Messina baht. M e S s i n a b e a t

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