Joe Gebbia
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First of Kind · Joe Gebbia: Designer-in-Chief
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Can Government Websites Look Beautiful?
Joe Gebbia says government websites can look beautiful, and people should be able to feel proud that America leads in how government works and how government presents itself. Government websites do not have to look bad. The gray drab building he learned to treat as official, from driving around as a kid, is a fake norm.
The building where they are sitting shows another standard: care of detail and craft that people are still appreciating over a hundred years later. Websites do not have to last that long. In the moment, someone should feel that somebody cared about what is in front of them, and put the time, attention, and investment into making a task easier and saving time.
He wants, deca
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What Kind of Designers Is the National Design Studio Hiring?
Joe Gebbia says the National Design Studio is looking for hardcore product user experience design at the core. Government processes are gnarly, and retirement is a small version of the kind of flow the studio has to turn into something much simpler and easier to navigate.
Only a couple of seats are on the team. He has 12 to 15 jerseys to give out, so each person needs range, whether in motion design, typography, design systems, or visual design, and must handle really complex user experience flows.
Social Security is by far the largest user base of any product the government offers. 200 million plus people have some connection to a Social Security card, a Social Security account, or a bene
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How Did Airbnb Build Trust Between Strangers?
Joe Gebbia says design was the conduit for the Olympic-sized trust Airbnb had to build between two people who had never met, and he thinks the company succeeded over competitors over time because the people at the core were designers.
The early pitch asked people to take pictures of a home, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, the most intimate parts of a home, and post the pictures publicly online for strangers to look at and book a stay. The pitch to VCs was improbable. The product had to let comfort develop and let a connection develop between people in the brand or between people and their hosts.
Competitors were plentiful, and each tried to angle the others out. The others were marke
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Why Do Government Websites Still Have Operating Hours?
Joe Gebbia says some government websites still have operating hours and turn off at a certain time of day because they have to update in the background. The same nation produces XAI and OpenAI, and he is not okay with sites that go dark for updates. He wants to be proud of how the nation presents itself to the world and to the people who live here. The talent and the technology are already here.
The path he describes is America by Design, the presidential initiative President Trump created to continue what started in the 70s, go bigger than President Nixon, reimagine the digital surface of the United States government, and upgrade it to 2025 standards. The goal is to attract the best talent
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How Did Federal Retirement Drop to 60 Seconds?
Joe Gebbia says a basic federal retirement dropped from six months on paper to 60 seconds when the Online Retirement Application, called ORA, launched on August 1st and every new retirement in the federal government started flowing through that software with no new paper.
The federal government has 2.3 million employees and 100,000 retire every year. He jokes the old paper process is like a retention program. People miss a signature field or a checkbox, learn about it only at the end, months later, and have to start over, so some stay another year and wait for a digital solution. Work started from a prototype called Julie. The next 20 people had basic retirements because they worked for one
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Why Does Federal Retirement Still Take Six Months?
Joe Gebbia says it can take up to six months to retire from the federal government because the process still runs on paper. For decades, going back to the 1960s, federal employees have retired with paper forms and paper applications. The process has not changed since the 1970s, and the time it takes has not changed in about four decades. Federal employees must do online trainings just to figure out how they retire. After 30 plus years or 40 plus years as a civil servant, the exit is an obstacle course before the benefit they deserve.
In February an invitation arrived to fix that digital problem, with six months to try. A small team from Silicon Valley and industry set out to make the proces