The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
00:30:12 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[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. [00:30:29] S1: Do you feel that product difference in terms of behavior very much when you are working on a product like Evernote, millions every day, versus a much smaller user base with maybe a less frequent usage? [00:30:42] S2: Well, for sure. You you feel more responsibility. You feel... You also feel like you stand on the shoulder of... Shoulders of giants in in some sense. You know? Like, sometimes I talk to Phil Levin, who was leading Evernote a few years ago, and I don't feel like shipping bad stuff on Evernote just because it's always been such a... An important product and and built in such a caring way that just by comparison, I I don't want to be... I want Bending Spoons to have the name of those who are releasing subpar experiences. I want us to have a good threshold for quality. [00:31:14] S1: So when we have that quality and then we decide launch time. Okay? Gotta release this. What have been your biggest lessons on how to do product launches or feature launch as well?
00:31:24 · Federico Simionato
[00:31:24] S2: When you want to deliver a lot of things to people who need them, I think it's important to show that you are every week delivering useful improvements. So instead of doing a large and fancy launch, you try to do it in a way that feels like, yeah, every week I'm getting something new. You know? It it it really convinces people that you're in for the long run, that you are doing stuff that matters, and especially that even if this week nothing gets built that's specifically useful to me, since I've been here for a while, I know that Evernote updates every week. And so I know that at some point, something will be built that is for me, that I that I need and and I use. Instead, when you want to innovate and you want to to try to, like, do a step change in the way people use the product, then it's important to be very considerate and very clear with communications. So for instance, let's talk about examples. When we build collapsible sections on on Evernote or the slash command menu, these are utility tools that make your product more ergonomic, more polished, more useful. You don't need to be flashy about this. You you don't need to, like, do a huge launch and and to merge them together and to wait six months. You you need them to put them in the hands of customers as soon as possible so that they can start getting utility out of it. Next week, we are announcing Evernote v 11, and it's going to be a significant change compared to what Evernote is today. It's mostly a reflection of all the work that went through in the last three years, but it's also containing three advanced AI features that are not available on Evernote today. And when you do that, it's important instead to, like, kind of make a mess a little bit. Not to necessarily be unpolished, but, like, try to be noisy about it so that as many people as possible see that some drastically new functionality is landing on the product.