The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:24:12 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[00:24:12] S2: Mhmm. [00:24:13] S1: And it's very tempting to go broad for many because it's nice and ego flattering in some ways. But actually, we always choose to go deep for fewer, and you get much more product love from a fewer number of people. [00:24:25] S2: Yeah. I I I like to think that Evernote is never going to be as popular as Apple Notes. But at the end of one's life, I think an an Evernote user will remember their experience in Evernote if we've made it delightful enough. And I don't think an Apple Notes user will will care much about it. Not not not because it's a bad product. It's just not as relevant. [00:24:45] S1: Do you compare yourself to others? And how do you advise product leaders to think about competition? [00:24:50] S2: I think you should focus on your customers, to be honest. Unless you're, like, getting started. So you don't have a customer base, and you need to win people's hearts, and you need to win them over. If you're... Already have an existing an existing customer base, I think your number one job is just to make sure that they love being on that on that product. Unless you have some crazy insight for, by doing this, I could 10x my user base. It's very hard. It's very rare. I think you should focus a lot on your customers. [00:25:19] S1: You said, hey. We we get Figma mock ups and then we'll show them to customers. Is the way that you're doing design testing changing in a world of AI? And if so, how?
00:25:19 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:25:19] S1: You said, hey. We we get Figma mock ups and then we'll show them to customers. Is the way that you're doing design testing changing in a world of AI? And if so, how? [00:25:31] S2: When I was working on Evernote, I still am a lot, but but when I was focusing only on Evernote, we didn't have lovable cursor and these tools. And so we were building designs, and we were showing them to people. And we were asking questions like, by looking at this, how would you use it? Now we can build prototypes. And even if they are rough, we can put them in the hands of people, and we can just, like, ask and use it, and and we'll observe. It's kind of different. Like, peep... People tell you that they would do something, and then in reality, when they have a prototype on their computer, they would do something different. So it's it's closer to to the truth. [00:26:10] S1: I'm intrigued. Do you do Figma and Figma make? Do you replace that with a Lovable build? Do you actually just go straight Cursor and Anthropic and Claw code? What does that usage on stack look like? [00:26:23] S2: It depends a lot on the team and the project. Each team decides their own stack, and we don't impose anything. [00:26:30] S1: What do they look like that's different then? If you take one that's, say, Evernote, what is Evernote? And then take a WeTransfer. What is a WeTransfer?
00:26:30 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:26:30] S1: What do they look like that's different then? If you take one that's, say, Evernote, what is Evernote? And then take a WeTransfer. What is a WeTransfer? [00:26:38] S2: Yeah. So on WeTransfer, we have used Lovable quite a bit. We use Cloud Code a lot to build prototypes. On Evernote, I think we use Figma a lot still just because it's easier to use the components that we already have to make it look like it's actually the same the same app. It... It's it's a bit more complex product, so it's harder to give the context to an LLM to build things that are... That look very close to the original one. [00:27:03] S1: Do you think we are going to skip the design phase in the future of product build outs and move straight to prototyping in these more VibeCode tools?
00:27:03 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:27:03] S1: Do you think we are going to skip the design phase in the future of product build outs and move straight to prototyping in these more VibeCode tools? [00:27:11] S2: I I think so, to be honest. I think that the role of a designer will be as important as it is today, maybe even more. But I think that the tools that we use will evolve. And so you you won't work on pixels and then code, but you will likely merge the two things. I remember that when I got started with web development very early, like when I was in high school, I wouldn't have a design that I would try to implement. I just have, like, HTML code and CSS, and I will try to tweak it to reach my results. It was a very manual process, but it it was all contained inside the the code editor. Right? I think that in the future, it's going to look like that, where you are acting on the code and tweaking the code because it's so cheap and fast that you're just, like, tweaking the actual thing instead of creating an obstruction and then trying to apply it in the code. [00:28:01] S1: How does the proportion of designers to engineers change over time with AI?
00:28:01 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:28:01] S1: How does the proportion of designers to engineers change over time with AI? [00:28:08] S2: It's evolving so rapidly that I don't know how it plays out in term... In terms of team organization. If I had to, like, come up with an answer right now, I would say that it's going to make designers faster, and you can try more things. So today, we have a backlog of a 100 ideas, and we know that we can only try 10 of them in a few months. You know? I think that we'll reach a point where we can actually try 20, 30, 40, 50, both because people will be faster, but also because the manual work to actually implement those prototypes will be much shorter. So, yeah, I I I think this means that the designer who won't work necessarily on Figma as they do today in the future we'll work on building these prototypes and and and coming up with these ideas, and they'll do it more and faster. [00:28:57] S1: That's fascinating to hear actually how you use different tools across different teams. If we progress that along one stage, we have the idea, We have the prototyping and the putting in
00:28:57 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:28:57] S1: That's fascinating to hear actually how you use different tools across different teams. If we progress that along one stage, we have the idea, We have the prototyping and the putting in [00:29:07] S2: the hands of customers. We then have the I'm actually gonna build it. How does the build process look for you internally? Usually is, let's try to close the gap between the prototype and something that is production ready. Because the prototype, if you did it well, it's inexpensive. And so it means that it lacks a lot of the things that that make it production ready. It's basically a probe to some extent. We we call it a probe. It's a piece of software that is built to demonstrate that one metric is x or y, and that's the... Its only job. And so when people interact with it, they give you the answer, but it's not ready to be plugged into the broader product. And so this way, you can get your answer, but then in order to be able to plug it to the to the broader product, you need to do some work. [00:29:59] S1: Do you think it's important to ship fast and be imperfect or to make sure that that gap between prototype, which is a probe, to fully beautiful product is seamless and complete? [00:30:12] S2: I don't adhere to one of the two schools of thought. I think speed matters when you're trying things and you're trying to find your way and you're you're probing the the area around you, but then it's all about polish when you actually need to build something that that millions of people use. You cannot half ass an experience.