Perplexity 的设计文化：通过品牌故事吸引顶尖人才

最近有人问我：“如果必须加入一个设计团队，你想去哪里？”答案对我来说很简单：Perplexity。

Someone asked me recently, "If I had to join a design team, where would I want to work?" And the answer was pretty easy for me. It's Perplexity.

你必须对设计为何重要有战略性的理解。不能只说它重要。你对设计为何重要有什么看法？因为你不能只是说“哦，我们需要一个顶尖设计师”，这显而易见。但如果你说：“我们能击败竞争对手，因为设计会帮助我们做到这一点，我们完全致力于通过营销和产品将设计作为市场武器，我们会以这种方式击败他们。”这对某些人来说将是一个令人兴奋的价值主张。

You have to have a strategic understanding of why design matters. You can't just say that it does. What's your theory as to why design matters? Because you can't just be like, "Oh, we need a crack designer," you know, obviously. But if you said, "We can beat our competition because design will help us do that and we're fully committed to using design as a weapon in the market through marketing, through product, we're going to beat them this way." That's going to be an exciting value proposition to somebody.

那么，到底是什么让他们的设计文化如此特别，他们又在做哪些事情来吸引顶尖人才？

So, what exactly makes their design culture so special and what are the things that they're doing to attract the top tier of talent?

人们不是加入公司，而是加入品牌。世界就是这样运作的。我的意思是，人们在决定他们想成为谁。如果你用品牌讲一个清晰的故事，你就在提供一个能与人们产生共鸣的叙事。

People are not joining the company, they're joining the brand. That's just how the world works. I mean, people are making a decision about who they think they are. If you tell a clear story with your brand, you're providing a narrative that is going to resonate with people.

欢迎来到 Dive Club。我是 Rid，这里是设计师永不停歇学习的地方。本周的嘉宾是 Perplexity 的设计副总裁 Henry Modisett。除了深入探讨他们的设计文化，我们还会了解 Henry 作为设计领导者的幕后历程，因为自我们上次谈话以来，很多事情都变了。

Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Henry Modisett, who's the VP of design at Perplexity. And on top of doing a deep dive into their design culture, we're also going to get a little behind the scenes of Henry's journey as a design leader because a lot has changed since the last time that we talked.

快速增长最困难的部分之一——这当然是一份不可思议的礼物，无论是公司规模还是用户数量等方面的增长——最困难的部分之一就是知道你需要多大程度地改变自己。你有一套工作方式，一套必须坚持的价值观，以及许多需要做出的权衡，这些让你度过了那个时期。然后到了某个节点，你已经有了起色，有了产品市场契合度，有了网络效应，有了指数级增长等等。你也成为了人们工作中依赖来做重要决策的东西。也许那些让你走到这一步的价值观实际上值得重新审视。在创业早期，你真的需要在速度和质量之间做很多权衡——你只想快速发布和学习，快速行动，打破常规等等。当公司变大时，你需要小心，因为你不再只是争取用户，而是留住用户。嗯，你同时要做这两件事。你确实需要开始以不同的方式工作和思考，采用不同的流程，甚至可能招聘不同类型的人。而且很难知道你什么时候已经进入了那个新世界，尤其是当它发生得非常快的时候。过去一年我们经历的变化对我来说是全新的。我们从一家初创公司变成了世界上一个真正的选择，一个人们每天使用的重要应用。这意义深远。所以这就是我最近一直在反思的主要事情，大概在过去一年里：我们是谁，我们需要改变什么——我们如何谈论自己，如何工作，遵循什么流程。

One of the hardest parts about rapid growth, which is like an incredible gift, you know, both growth in terms of company and amount of users and things like that — one of the hardest parts is kind of like knowing to what extent you need to change who you are. There's a way that you work. There's a set of values you have to hold. There's a lot of trade-offs you have to make that get you through that period. And then there's a point where you've got something going, you know, you've got PMF, you've got network effects, you've got exponential growth, whatever. You're also something that people rely on for their job to make important decisions. And maybe those values that got you to that point are actually worth revisiting. When you're early on in your startup, you really need to make a lot of trade-offs around velocity, quality — you want to just ship and learn, move fast, break things, whatever. When you get bigger, you need to be careful because you're not trying to gain a user, you're trying to keep a user. Well, you're trying to do both at the same time. You do need to start to work differently and think differently and have different processes, maybe even hire different types of people. And it's really hard to know when you've shifted into that new world, especially if it's happened really fast. The amount of change that we've experienced in the last year is new to me. We've gone from being a startup to a real choice in the world, an important app that people use every day. And that's profound. And so that's the main thing that I've been trying to reflect on lately, I guess, in the last year: well, who were we, what do we need to change about how we talk about ourselves, how we do the work, what processes we follow.

快速插播一条消息，然后我们继续。告诉你一个有趣的事实：我差一点就进入了 Granola 用户的前 1%。所以当我说我对这个产品爱不释手时，我是认真的。它就是这么好。但在看了他们的年终 Crunched 报告后，我更加尊重这个产品了。我每次谈论设计都会用到 Granola。不知怎的，它完美地为我整理了一切，无论是与 Dive Club 嘉宾聊天、做用户研究，还是跟踪进行中的任务。而 Crunch 给了我一份漂亮的摘要，涵盖了所有关键主题，甚至还有过去一年的一些有趣时刻。这真是一个好产品。所以，如果你还没用 Granola，请访问 dive.club/granola，为你的下一次会议启动它。

Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. Fun fact for you. I'm right on the cusp of the top 1% of Granola users. So when I say I cannot get enough of this product, I mean it. It is that good. But after seeing their end-of-year Crunched report, I have even more respect for this product. I never have a conversation about design without running Granola. And somehow it perfectly organizes all of it for me, whether it's chatting with guests for Dive Club or doing user research or keeping track of tasks for in-flight. And then Crunch gave me this beautiful synopsis of all of the key themes and even some funny moments from the past year. It's just a good product. So, if somehow you're not already using Granola, head to dive.club/granola to spin it up for your next meeting.

又一周，又一个巨大的可爱发布。他们现在有了与 Perplexity、11 Labs、Firecrawl 甚至 Miro 等产品的连接器。所以，你可以构建从网络任何地方拉取实时数据的应用，甚至可能跟你对话。而且简单到只需写一个提示，比如“当用户点击播放时，大声朗读这个页面”。我的意思是，连接器彻底颠覆了你可以用自然语言创造的东西，而且你今天就可以开始。只需访问 dive.club/lovable 开始构建。

Another week, another huge lovable release. They now have connectors with products like Perplexity, 11 Labs, Firecrawl, and even Miro. So, you can build apps that pull live data from anywhere on the web, or maybe even talk to you. And it's as simple as writing a prompt like, "Read this page out loud when users tap play." I mean, connectors totally blow the roof off of what you can create with natural language, and you can start today. Just head to dive.club/lovable to start building.

好了，现在回到正题。我们来谈谈团队规模，当你对比这两个时间点——小团队，你，还有另外几个人。上次我和你谈话时，我想只有你、Fee，可能还有另外两个人。最大的差异在哪里？我们能深入一层吗？当你反思这两个时间点时，你看到的最大变化是什么？

Okay, now on to the episode. We'll get into the size of the team when you kind of put up these two states in time where you have the small team, you, a couple other people. Last time I talked to you, I think it was just you, Fee, and maybe two other people. Where do some of the biggest deltas exist? Can we go one level deeper? What are the biggest changes that you see when you reflect on these two points in time?

第一，我们每天做的事情多得多。第二，我们必须接受这个事实：我们做的事情多得多。做更多事情让我们能够做更专业的事情，比如在我们的创意工作室这边，我们有专门做动态设计和视频制作的人，而这些在过去可能只是一个人兼职做的。工作的深度和具体性都有所增加，而且在品牌方面，我们几乎把所有事情都内部完成了。这让我们能够弄清楚自己是谁，并不断进化、实验和快速前进。在产品方面，有很多并行工作。幸运的是，搜索产品有一个很好的特性：用户来了，他们告诉你他们想要什么，你只需要展示他们要求的东西。从产品角度来看，功能之间几乎没有冲突。如果你做过信息流之类的东西，那到处都是冲突。有很多相互竞争的目标、指标，以及需要在用户方面保持平衡的 UI。它需要感觉平衡。从内部来看，就像有 100 个团队在激烈竞争。所以，我们没有那个问题，说实话这很好。我们可以以一种不会引起问题的方式发布我们的组织架构。看到我们每周能发布多少东西，有多少工作在推进，这很有趣。

One, we're doing a lot more every day. And the second is we have to reconcile the fact that we're doing a lot more every day. The doing more is allowing us to do more specialized things, you know, on our creative studio side of the house where we have people doing motion design and video production and things that maybe were just moonlighted in the past by one person. There's sort of an increase in depth of the work and specificity of the work, and we've pretty much done everything in-house on the brand side of things. It just lets us figure out who we are and evolve it and experiment and go fast. On the product side, there's just a lot of parallelization. I mean, fortunately, there's this wonderful property of a search product where users show up and they tell you what they want and you just have to show them what they ask for. There's very little collision from a product perspective between the features. If you've worked on a feed or something like that, it's all collision all the time. There's a lot of competing goals, competing metrics, UI that needs to balance for the users side of things. It needs to feel balanced. From the internal side of things, it's like 100 teams battling it out. So, we don't have that problem, which is really nice to be honest. We can ship our org chart in a way that really doesn't cause an issue. It's been fun to see how much we can ship every week and how much is getting worked on.

但你知道，这一切的后果是，我们需要考虑很多流程上的事情，比如如何协作、如何获取反馈、如何确保一致性。很多原本存在于人们头脑中的东西——无论是设计系统还是代码状态——现在可能都需要被写下来并传达出去。而且，我们该如何以一种现代的方式做到这一点，而不是简单地照搬其他公司的做法。我想更深入地探讨这个“成长”时代的样子。不过，我想先把这个话题放一放，实际上我想了解一下从你一个人到现在 31 个人的过程。在深入探讨细节和背后的策略之前，你能不能快速介绍一下这 31 个人都包括哪些人，以及你是如何看待组织架构的？

But you know the consequence of all that is like there's a lot of process stuff that we need to think about like how do we collaborate and how do we get feedback and how do we ensure consistency and a lot of stuff that was like in people's heads whether it's the design system or the state of the code or whatever now probably needs to be written down and communicated and how do we do that in like a modern way and not just sort of fall back on like what other companies do. I want to go a lot deeper into what this era of growing up looks like. I think I'm going to put a pin in that for a second and I'd actually like to learn a little bit about this process of going from just you to now 31 people. And maybe before we get into the details and the strategy behind it, can you just give some rapid fire context around who all is included in that group of 31 and how do you think about the org structure?

我们设计团队大概有三个子部门。第一个是我们称之为创意工作室的团队，他们负责品牌设计、市场营销等等。任何你看到的非产品类内容都由这个团队负责，比如平面设计、网页设计、动效设计、视频制作。我们为新产品功能做营销，做品牌推广，在全球各国投放广告，所以他们非常忙。我们还会和一些名人合作做营销，比如你可能看到过和刘易斯·汉密尔顿或拉尔多的合作。第二个部门是最小的，是我们的运营团队。这个团队负责让一切保持运转和正常运作，这听起来很抽象但非常重要。正是有了他们，我们才能按时、协调地完成所有创意工作。他们还负责运营我们的周边商店 Perplexity Supply。第三个子部门是产品设计。我大致把它分成三个产品：一个是面向消费者的 Perplexity，一个是面向企业的 Perplexity，另一个是 Comet，也就是我们的浏览器。所有这些产品都存在于你能想到的每一个平台上。实际上还有很多事情要做，还有很多从零到一的机会，同时也有很多东西需要维护和培育。任何正在起作用的东西，我们都需要确保继续推进。所以最终就像我说的，这些事情并不会相互冲突，而是有很多事情在并行推进。

We have, I would say, like three suborgs of the design team. There's, we call it our creative studio. They're doing like brand design, marketing, like whatever. Anything you see that's not the product in that team. They're doing like graphic design, web design, motion design, video production. We're marketing our new features. We're doing brand marketing. We're doing advertising in countries all over the world. So, they're quite busy. We also collaborate with celebrities for some of our marketing stuff. So, like you may see something with like Lewis Hamilton or Laldo. The second org, which is the smallest one, is our operations side. That team just kind of keeps everything running and functional. It's very meta but very important. So that's how we are able to do all of that creative work and do it on time, do it in a coordinated way. It also lets us run our merch store, Perplexity Supply. So that's run by the ops team. The third suborg is product design. I would kind of cut it between like three different products. One is Perplexity the consumer side, one is Perplexity the enterprise side, and then the other is Comet, which is our browser. And all of those exist on like every platform that you can imagine. There's actually a lot to do, a lot to go zero to one on still, but then there's like a lot to maintain and nurture. Anything that may be working, we need to make sure that we keep our foot on the gas. So it ends up being like, like I said, none of this stuff really collides. So there's just a lot of things kind of firing in parallel.

当你这样描述业务覆盖面时，你会发现 31 个人其实相当少。但从招聘角度来看，这确实是一项令人印象深刻的成就，对吧？不仅团队规模达到了这个水平，而且你能达到的质量也令人印象深刻。我想所有听众都会同意，Perplexity 已经牢牢占据了顶级设计人才的地位，这是一个人们想去工作的地方。所以，我想试着逆向分析一下这种成功。也许我们可以回到最初，当你思考想要与什么样的人共事、组织架构可能如何发展时，你能回顾并详细说说你最初的团队建设策略吗？

When you talk about the surface area like that, you start to realize that the number 31 is actually pretty small. But from a hiring standpoint, it's an impressive feat, right? To build a team not only of that size, but the quality that you've been able to reach is impressive. And I think everyone listening would agree that Perplexity is very much so cemented in kind of this top tier of design talent. It's a place that people want to work. So, I'd like to try to reverse engineer that success a little bit if we can. And so maybe we can kind of go back to the beginning when you're thinking about the types of people you want to surround yourselves with, how the org could potentially shake out. Can you just go back and unpack some of your initial team building strategy?

大概有两个方面。一是思考我知道你需要哪些技能来打造品牌和产品。二是要非常深思熟虑且一致地考虑我们需要什么样的人格特质或什么样的人，什么样的典型人物才能度过这个创业时代。你知道，现在我认为我们进入了另一个时代：我们比以前大了很多，如何保持敏捷？但同时，世界上有些人设计过拥有数百万用户的产品，把这种知识带入团队其实很重要。你如何确保一切都能良好运行、良好扩展，并在世界各地的文化中都能适用？这与从零到一非常不同。我们确实试图引入在这方面拥有不同专长的人。在技能方面，创意工作室很简单。我们知道需要制作东西，所以请来知道如何制作这些东西的人。能够内部制作东西很有帮助。比如，我们想制作更好的视频，就请一个知道怎么做的人。这最终是一个相当直接的考虑。产品方面在寻找合适技能上有点挑战，因为我想请来那些能快速处理任何事情的人。我得说，很难找到那种人，也很难找到对 AI 或处理非确定性产品体验有恰到好处知识的人，或者能快速理解并匹配我们问题的人。我们很多更复杂的产品领域，其实受益于那些更懂技术、甚至也会写代码的人。所以，在扩展和匹配技能时，每当我们决定招聘一个人，都会考虑：我们现在真正缺少什么？第一次计算是，只有我一个人，我想雇一个品牌设计师，因为我不太擅长。所以，几乎每次都是：我们今天希望做到但做不到什么？那就加一个能做到的人。你可以一直这样做下去。我们很少会招一个人却不知道他具体要做什么，这样说你能理解吗？我们肯定是从“我们想如何成长”出发的。如果你把设计团队看作能力和知识的组合，那么现在缺少哪一小块可以让我们成长？这有助于让每个新人都感觉是对团队的一个增量补充。我想最后一部分是，我寻找一种典型人物，很大程度上是试图让这个人匹配这家公司。我们在产品开发和软件创造上的价值观，我们做的权衡，我们思考设计的方式，这些都很重要。还有，我们是一家初创公司，我们很拼，我们速度很快。我绝对寻找那些真正想在这种环境中工作的人，因为这与在大公司工作非常不同。一个常见的情况是，不仅仅在设计领域，我们是挑战者，有些人想在这样的公司工作，有些人不想。我们对此非常坦诚。

There's maybe like two parts to it. One is thinking about what skills that I know you would need to build a brand and to build a product. And then the other is just really being kind of thoughtful and consistent about what type of personality or what type of person, what archetype we need to get through this startup era. And you know now there's like a I would say we are in another era of like okay we're we're a lot bigger than we used to be. How do we keep our agility? But also there are people in the world that have designed products that have millions and millions of users and that's actually important knowledge to be able to bring into a team. You know, how do you make sure that everything works well and scales well and works in every culture in the world and things like that. That is very different than zero to one. We really try to bring in a mixture of people that have different expertise in that sense. On the skills side, the creative studio is pretty straightforward. We know we need to make things, so let's bring in people that know how to make that stuff. It helps to just be able to make something in house. It's like, okay, well, we want to make better videos. Let's bring in somebody who knows how to do that. That ends up being a pretty straightforward consideration. Product is a bit of a challenge in finding the right skills because I want to bring in people that can kind of work on anything and do it quickly. I would say it's hard to find that type of person and it's hard to find someone who has just the right amount of knowledge about AI or working on a non-deterministic product experience or is going to get it quickly and try to match that person with the problems we have. Then you know a lot of our more complex product surface areas really benefit from someone who's a little bit more technical and maybe they're even writing code too. So the scaling of that and matching the skills every moment where we've decided to hire somebody that's like a consideration like okay what are we really missing right now. The first calculation ever made was like it was just me and I wanted to hire a brand designer because I didn't do that very well. So kind of like in every moment it's like okay what do we wish we could do that we can't do today let's add a person that can do that. And you know you can pretty much keep doing that forever. It's very rare that we are just like bringing someone in and not really knowing what they would do, if that makes sense. We definitely start very much from like a how do we want to grow. Like if you think of the design team as a combination of capabilities and knowledge, like what is the little point that's missing right now that we could grow on. So that helps like kind of make every new person feel like a really incremental addition to the team. I think the last part I guess is just there's an archetype that I look for and a lot of it is just trying to match somebody to this company. The values that we have on product development and software creation, the trade-offs that we make, the way we think about design. There's that stuff. There's the fact that we are a startup, we're scrappy, and you know, we go fast. And I definitely look for people that really want to work in that environment because it's quite different than working in a really large company. A common thing, not even just in design, but we are the underdog and some people want to work at a company like that and some don't. And we try to be really honest about that.

这会让你感到压力还是让你兴奋？这很二元，而且在面试过程中搞清楚这一点很重要。比如，你想处于这个位置吗？你之前跟我提到过，你直接雇佣了每一个人，在招聘过程中非常亲力亲为。那么，当你想到面试——这些与人的对话时，你具体在寻找哪些信号？随着公司规模的扩大，这些信号又是如何演变的？

Does that stress you out or does that fire you up? It's pretty binary and it's important to get that figured out like in the interview process. Like are you do you want to be in this position? Something you mentioned to me earlier was how you've directly hired every single person you've been very hands-on in this hiring process. So when you think about the interviews like these conversations that you're having with people, what are some of the specific signals that you've been looking for and how has that evolved as the company has scaled?

在公司初期，我非常刻意地寻找自己不具备的技能，因为这能提升团队的整体能力。为我的弱点招聘。我在之前的设计团队中学到一点：我们总是雇佣同一类型的人，无论是技能还是产出，因为这在某种程度上让人员配置更容易。如果你认为每个人都有相同的能力，只是水平不同，那人员配置就简单了。但我想要相反的做法，因为我觉得如果每个人都完全不同，我们能做得更多，协作的结果也会更有趣。效果很好，因为团队成员背景各异，自然就互相尊重。有些人来自大公司，有些曾是创始设计师，有些来自代理机构，有些甚至从未在科技行业工作过。我们还有一位来自 NASA 的设计师。我喜欢不同类型的人，因为做事的角度不同，他们能看到不同的东西，思考流程的方式也不同。我特别喜欢和那些曾担任创始设计师的人合作，因为他们理解创业的混乱，不介意缺乏定义。我们在做什么？为什么？没有 PRD，只有想法。我们直接买一笔交易，开始做原型，然后扔掉。得到反馈。他们对模糊性有一种自信，这是创始设计师角色带来的。但就像我说的，我们并不总是需要那种人。现在公司变大了，加入不同类型的人，他们对如何构建公司有截然不同的想法，这很有趣。

So at the beginning of the company, I was very intentionally trying to, like I said, find skills that I don't have because it just increases the output of the team in capability. Hiring for my weaknesses. One thing I learned in previous design teams I've been on, I felt like we always hired the same type of person both in their skill set and the things that they could make, because it kind of does in some ways make it easier to do staffing. If you think of everybody as having the same abilities, maybe just at a different level, it makes staffing easier. But I wanted to take the opposite approach because I just felt like we could do more and have a more interesting outcome from the collaboration if everyone was actually completely different. And it's been nice because there's actually naturally a lot of respect in the team for each other because everyone is so different in their background. There's some people that come from big companies, some from founding designers, some from agencies, some never even worked in tech before and now they are. We have a designer from NASA. I like having different types of people because there's just different perspectives on how to do things and people's eyes spot different things and think about process differently. And I really like working with designers that were founding designers at some point because I just think they get it. They don't mind the chaos of a startup. They don't mind the lack of definition. What are we doing? Why? There's no PRD. Like there's just ideas. Let's just buy a transaction and start mocking stuff up. We'll throw it away. Okay. You got some feedback. There's just a kind of confidence in the ambiguity that I think people that have done that founding designer role carry with them. But like I said before, we don't always need that. And now that we're bigger, it's fun to add different types of people that really do think very differently about how to build a company.

说到不同类型的设计师，这让我想起上次我们谈话时你提到的一件事：你招了一个即将入职的实习生。那么，你在这个人身上看到了什么，让你愿意押注他们，尤其是考虑到他们没有丰富的经验？

Speaking of the different types of designers, it reminds me of something that you mentioned the last time we talked where you said that you brought on an intern that's starting soon. So, what did you see in that person that made you want to take a bet on them, especially given the fact that they don't have this breadth of experience?

在 Kora 的时候，我们几乎只招应届毕业生，也有很多实习生。那些面试最有趣，因为实习生显然什么都不会。你真正要弄清楚的是他们是什么样的人。我最看重的是他们是否有发明或自学的例子。找到完成作业的人很容易，但我想找那些没做作业、反而做了别的事情的人——那些没人要求他们做的事。尤其是面试学生时，最有趣的是那些打破常规、周末自己做了个应用之类的人。没人要求他们做，那不是作业。我喜欢找到这样的人，你只需要一点迹象就可以押注他们。有时你会遇到两种版本：一种知道自己是个新星，最终变得自负，那就不合适；另一种永远不会失去那种饥饿感和谦逊态度，觉得“我还有很多要学”。对后者来说，加入一个满是十年以上经验的人的团队是梦想成真，因为他们能学到很多并吸收。我见过很多这样的例子。我认为招聘是一份可以给予好工作的礼物。我们都得工作，而建立一个团队、创造一份值得拥有和享受的工作，找到合适的人并邀请他们加入，这很了不起。对实习生来说更是如此，因为这能改变他们的职业轨迹。如果你有一家令人兴奋的公司，你从一开始就在塑造他们。这发生在我身上，我觉得在道义上有义务把这种机会给其他人。

So, when I was at Kora, we pretty much only hired new grads and had a lot of interns. Those are the most fun interviews to do because obviously interns don't know how to do anything. So you're really trying to figure out what kind of person they are. The thing that I look for the most is do they have examples of invention or self-learning? Because it's pretty easy to find someone who did their homework. But I want to find someone who didn't do their homework and did something else instead, something that they weren't asked to do. Especially if you're interviewing students, the most interesting student to find is someone who somehow broke the norm and went and made an app on the weekend or something like that. They didn't get asked to do it. It wasn't an assignment. I love finding those people and you only need one little indication then you can take a bet on them. Sometimes you get two versions of that person. They know they're a rising star and it goes to their head eventually, that's not a good fit. And then there are others that I think never let go of that hunger and humble attitude, like okay I have so much to learn. For that person, getting to join a team full of people with 10 plus years of experience is a dream scenario because there's just so much to learn and they absorb it. So I've gotten to see that a lot. I think hiring is a great gift that you can give a good job. We all have to do work and to build a team and a job worth having and a job worth enjoying, to be able to find the right person and invite them to join. It's an incredible thing and I think that's even more amplified for an intern because it can change the trajectory of their career. Obviously you're setting it right off the bat if you have a company that's exciting to work for. It happened to me and I feel morally obligated to be able to give that to other people.

你在这个人身上看到了什么具体的迹象吗？

Was there a specific indication that you saw in this person?

我花了很多时间浏览寻找人才。我总是想留意。我主要还是用 Twitter。我会因为各种原因浏览作品集网站，人们会给我发链接之类的。但就我自己随意浏览而言，还是 Twitter。我找到了这个人的网站，觉得作品集看起来不错。然后我点进去看，发现她还在实习或还在上大学，这让我很兴奋。我想，好吧，我应该联系一下，看看有没有机会。我老是忘记实习的时间安排，每个大学都不一样。所以我就说，嘿，你有兴趣聊聊吗？就这么简单。我想我看到的是，很少有人，尤其是职业生涯早期，能擅长多件事。我很高兴能找到在某个领域很强的人，比如产品思维、视觉设计或技术能力。有时你会找到一个人，不知怎么地就擅长多件事。我其实觉得现在的年轻设计师非常善于利用新工具，他们都能很快学会很多东西。最终就是重复练习，加上反馈。如果你能得到反馈，你就能很快变得很厉害。那些领悟并拥抱这一点的人正在加速学习和成长。这很酷。所以我觉得现在有很多新星。我们得找到那些人。

I do spend a lot of time just browsing looking for people. I always want to keep an eye out. I've been mostly on Twitter still. I end up on portfolio sites for a bunch of different reasons. People send me links and whatever. But in terms of me just blindly browsing, it still is Twitter. I found this person's website and just thought it was a nice looking portfolio. Then I went and looked and saw that she was still an intern or still in college and that was exciting to me. I'm like okay I should just reach out and see if there's any chance. I always forget when internships happen, every college works differently. So hey, do you want to ever be interested in talking? As simple as that. And I guess what I saw was, it's rare to find people, especially early in their career, that are good at multiple things. I'm excited to find someone who seems really strong in one area, like product thinking or visual design or being very technical. Sometimes you find someone who somehow got good at multiple things. And I actually think young designers now are so embracing the new tools that they have that they're all getting good at a lot of things really quickly. Ultimately it's just reps. Reps with feedback. And if you can get feedback, you can get really good really quickly. People are accelerating through their learning and their talent, the ones that get it and are embracing it. It's pretty cool. So I think there's a lot of rising stars right now. We'll have to find those people.

我们先明确一点，Perplexity 现在确实很吸引人才。但我想跳出这个，跟听众假设性地聊一聊。也许对方是一位创始人，也许是第一位设计师，正面临冷启动问题，没有这种势头。他们应该怎么思考不同的策略，来为设计团队打下基础，至少让他们有潜力达到你现在的水平？

Let's clear that Perplexity is quite a magnet for talent right now. But I kind of want to step outside of that and talk hypothetically to somebody who's listening. Maybe it's a founder, maybe it's a first designer and they're facing a little bit of a cold start problem. They don't have this momentum. How should they think about different strategies for laying the foundation for a design team that would at least give them the potential to reach the level that you're at?

这确实是个难题。有很多初创公司，我也经常被问到这个问题。我觉得自己有个比较通用的答案，但整个过程需要很多品味。我的简单看法是，创业时要想脱颖而出，有很多原因，但最好的方式就是投资品牌和产品，尤其是在公司初期。初创公司初期是什么？就是你凭空想出来的东西。也许你买了个域名，也许融了资，希望有了名字，但它只是你脑子里的一个东西。你没有用户，没有钱，没有收入。然后招聘时，你让别人做一个非常重要的决定。不管公司多大，人们都觉得换工作是一件大事，加入初创公司更是大事。我觉得人们过度考虑风险，像投资人一样想回报。大多数人其实很合格，如果他们合格，他们也知道这就像一场赌博，你永远不知道会发生什么。但你让别人做这个决定，你想让他们对这个决定感觉良好。所以我认为，建立初创公司很大程度上就是站在对方的角度想：他们想要什么感觉？如果你没有设计师，我觉得在找创始设计师时，你能传达的最重要信息是：为什么设计能帮助公司获胜？你对设计重要性的理论是什么？因为你不能只是说“哦，我们需要一个顶尖设计师”，这显然不够。

I mean, it's definitely a hard problem. You know, there's a lot of startups out there and I've actually been asked this a lot. Um, and I feel like I have kind of like a generic answer, but it just requires a lot of taste like throughout the process. But my simple perspective on this is it's important for a lot of reasons when you make a startup to stand out. The best way to stand out is to invest in your brand and your product because especially at the beginning of a company. What is a startup at the beginning? It's just a thing that you made up. You know, maybe you bought a domain, maybe you raised money, hopefully you got a name, but it's like it is a thing that's in your head. You know, you have no users, you have no money, you have no revenue. And then when you're hiring, you're asking people to make a very important decision. I don't care like how big you are. People think that switching jobs is a big deal. And it's like a bigger deal when you're joining a startup. I think people overthink about risk and they try to think like investors like what's the upside. Most people are really are qualified and if they are qualified they know that they are at the same time it's just like a you know it's a gamble and you never know what's going to happen but you're asking people to make this decision and you want to make them feel good about that decision right and so a lot of I think building a startup is just putting your mind on that other person's perspective like what do they want to feel if you have no designers I think the most important message you can convey if you're trying to find a founding designer is like why is design going to help the company win. What's your theory as to why design matters? Cuz you can't just be like, oh, we need a crack designer, you know, obviously.

但如果你说，我们可以通过设计打败竞争对手，我们完全致力于把设计当作市场武器，通过营销和产品来击败他们。这对别人来说就是一个令人兴奋的价值主张。

But if you said like we can beat our competition because design will help us do that and we're like fully committed to like using design as a weapon in the market through marketing, through product. We're going to beat them this way. That's going to be exciting value prop to somebody.

所以你需要深刻理解，在某种程度上，你必须对设计为什么重要有一个战略性的理解，不能只是嘴上说说。这是冷启动时吸引创始设计师并建立团队的关键。我认为这个信息如果不断打磨，会引起很多人的共鸣，但人们也会对非常表面的东西做出反应。年轻的时候我觉得这很傻。我记得 Dropbox 曾被认为是一个很酷的设计工作场所，当时我想：这个产品看起来没什么意思，为什么设计师都那么兴奋地想在那里工作？现在年纪大了，我觉得它比我当时认为的更有趣。而且他们做了一件非常有力的事情：大力投资品牌，这向用户传递了信号——这个东西会更安全、更稳健、更稳定。这是一种质量信号，同时对招聘也非常有效。因为你在传递信号：我们会更努力，在设计上多走一步。我们在表明设计在这里很重要。显然苹果也这么做，而且很有效。所以我认为这是一个非常基本的东西可以模仿：再努力一点，向世界展示你比别人更在乎。你愿意多花点时间、多花点钱，不管怎样，这会产生雪球效应。因为你有一个关于设计如何帮助你获胜的信息，你就能证明你确实在按你说的做。

So there's like a deep understanding that to some extent you have to have a strategic understanding of like why design matters. You can't just say that it does. There's that cold start prompt to get that founding designer and to build a team beyond that. I think that message like will resonate with like a lot of people like if you can keep refining it but people also react to these very superficial things. I think when I was younger I thought it was silly. I remember when Dropbox was considered a cool design place to work and I remember at the time being like it doesn't seem like a very interesting product. Why is everyone so excited to work there as a designer? I think it's more interesting than I gave it credit now that I'm older. But also like they did this really powerful thing which was just investing so heavily in their brand and that that signaled to users that this thing was going to be more secure and robust and stable, right? There's like a quality signaling that's happening, but it also was like tremendously effective for recruiting, right? Because you're signaling that we're going to go and work a little bit harder. We're going to go the extra mile when it comes to design. We're signaling that design matters here. Um, obviously Apple does this too and it really works. And so I think it's like a very basic thing to emulate, you know, just like push a little bit harder, like show the world that you care a little bit more than everyone else. You're willing to whatever it is, like spend a little bit extra time, spend a little bit more money, whatever, because that has a snowball effect because you have a message on why design will help you win. You're able to signal that like you're actually doing what you said you would do.

嘿，快速说一下，让我介绍一下全新的 Dive Talent Network。我亲手聚集了超过一百位我认识的最有才华的设计师和构建者，这样我就可以把他们推荐给我最喜欢的公司。所以，如果你在听这个节目，并且对新机会持开放态度，这个人才网络是匿名的，而且超级无压力。这是一个简单的方式，看看外面有什么机会，而不需要在社交媒体上发帖。所以，如果你有兴趣加入，或者你在寻找下一个员工，请访问 dive.club/talent。

Hey, really quickly, let me tell you about the all-new Dive Talent Network. I've hand assembled over a hundred of the most talented designers and builders that I know so I can recommend them to my favorite companies. So, if you're listening to this and you're open to new opportunities, the talent network is anonymous and super low pressure. It's just an easy way to see what's out there without having to post on social media. So, if you're interested in joining or maybe you're looking for your next hire, head to dive.club/talent.

就说一个个人轶事，很多初创公司联系我，想利用人才网络，每个人都在找创始设计师。我做的第一件事就是点开他们的网站，然后根据网站质量在四秒内做出本能反应。这就是人性。所以，天哪，如果你没有设计师，就花钱请一个好的设计师。

Even just a personal anecdote, I have a lot of startups reach out to me to tap into the talent network and everybody's looking for founding designer and the first thing I do is I click through the website and you make a four-second knee-jerk reaction based off of the quality of the website. You know, that's just like human nature. And so, yeah, gosh, if you don't have a designer, pay a good designer.

完全同意。我觉得这就是一个基本技巧。你必须站在对方的角度想：我想加入一家只会贬低我的公司，还是想加入一家能帮助我成为最好的自己，同时帮助公司成功的公司？我想听你解释为什么设计重要，因为如果设计不重要，最终会暴露出来。而且我也想看到证明。如果你认为设计重要，并且正在努力组建团队，我觉得花钱请一个自由职业者做出很棒的东西，然后说“看，我们在招聘设计师”，这真的很有用。我们关心，我们知道怎么做，我们知道如何交付好的设计。因为我认为，无论你是在招聘第一位设计师还是第五十位，如果产品很漂亮，人们就会想加入这家公司。

Totally. I think that's just like a basic trick. You have to think about that person's perspective. Like, do I want to join a company that's just going to diminish me when I get there, or do I want to join a company that's going to help me be the best version of myself and also help me make the company successful? I want to hear why design matters because it's going to come out in the wash eventually if it doesn't. And I also just want to, you know, show prove it. Like if you think design matters and you're trying to bootstrap a team, I think it really makes a difference if you pay a freelancer to like make something really nice and then be like, boom, we're hiring designers. Like, check it out. We care. We know how to do it. We know how to like ship good design because I think ultimately no matter whether you're hiring your first designer or your 50th, if the product is beautiful, people will want to join the company.

对，装不出来的。你懂的，我见过有些公司在推特上晒他们的设计系统网站，然后你去看产品，却很糟糕，这并不会让我想加入那家公司。这不是针对任何人，而是针对那种组织瘫痪——我知道很多公司都存在这个问题。很多产品设计得很差，但这跟设计团队无关，如果你明白我的意思的话。其实是别的原因，是组织层面的——组织的运作方式、代码的搭建方式。产品不好有很多原因。设计师和初创公司都那么多，如果大家都找不到匹配，那肯定有问题。我觉得很大程度上在于讲对故事，以及创始人真正理解设计是什么——因为设计不是给树挂装饰品。它是产品策略、品牌策略、公司策略，是这些东西的表达，也是好的产品决策的表达。有意思的是，我很多次不是在评审，而是在帮人解决问题时，我会说：“这不是 UI 问题，这是产品问题。他们得想清楚到底要什么功能。”那会让每个产品都更有信心、更果断地变好。然后如果你有个人能把 UI 做得漂亮，那就没问题了。让公司内化设计是什么以及它如何帮助公司获胜——这是第一步。第二步是通过执行公开传递这个信号，可以是营销网站，可以是产品，最好是两者都有。也可以是品牌投入。我觉得第三步真的必须是品牌投入，因为我真的认为，尤其是在公司初期，人们加入的不是公司，而是品牌。世界就是这样运作的。人们在做一个关于他们是谁的决定。如果你用品牌讲一个清晰的故事，你就提供了一个能与人们产生共鸣的叙事。你知道，Perplexity 的故事是：我们做消费产品，我们关心构建一个能帮你找到可靠信息的答案引擎。我们有点严肃，我们非常深思熟虑。品牌传达出这些东西，吸引特定类型的人。这是有意的。如果你作为初创公司能非常清晰地做到这一点，你就会开始找到一种有凝聚力的文化。

Yeah, you can't fake it. You know, I've seen companies tweet out their design system website and then you go to the product and it's bad, and it doesn't make me want to join the company. This is not a knock against anybody. It's really a knock against organizational paralysis that I know exists at a lot of companies. A lot of products are poorly designed, but it has nothing to do with the design team, if that makes sense. It's really something else. It's organizational—the way organizations work, the way the code is set up. There are a lot of reasons why a product may not be very nice. There are so many designers and so many startups. Something's wrong if everyone's not finding a match, you know? And I think a lot of that is just telling the right story and founders understanding what even design is, because it's not putting ornaments on the tree. It's product strategy, it's brand strategy, it's company strategy, and it's the expression of that stuff and the expression of good product decision-making. It's funny how many times I've been in not a crit, but I'm helping someone solve a problem and I'm just like, 'This is not a UI problem. This is a product problem. They need to make up their mind what feature they want.' That will help every product be better with more confidence and decisiveness. And then if you've got someone that can make nice UI, then you're fine. Getting the company to internalize the idea of what design is and how it's going to help the company win—that's like the first step. The second step is signaling that publicly through execution. It could be the marketing site, could be the product. Hopefully, it's both. Could be investment in brand. I think the third step really has to be investment in brand, because I really think, especially at the beginning of a company, people are not joining the company, they're joining the brand. That's just how the world works. People are making a decision about who they think they are. If you tell a clear story with your brand, you're providing a narrative that is going to resonate with people. You know, the story of Perplexity is: we make consumer products. We care about building an answer engine that helps you find reliable information. We're kind of serious, we're kind of very thoughtful. There are these things that are kind of coming out of the brand that attract a certain type of person. That's intentional. If you can do that very clearly as a startup, you're going to start to find a cohesive culture.

我想换个话题，聊聊你。我知道你在 Kora 有过管理经验，所以这不是你第一次带人，但这确实是一套完全不同的挑战和机遇：一是这种规模，二是你有一张完全空白的画布，可以按照自己的想法去塑造设计。所以在谈具体战术之前，作为领导者，谁激励了你？你从哪里寻找灵感，来决定自己想成为什么样的领导者？

I want to switch and talk about you for a little bit, because I know you had a background as a manager at Kora, so it's not like your first time having people report to you, but this is a totally different set of challenges and opportunities dealing with one, this kind of scale, but also two, just the total blank slate of a design that you get to mold and shape according to whatever the heck you want to do. So before we get into some of the tactical things, who inspires you as a leader? Where did you look to figure out what type of leader you wanted to become?

我觉得自己很幸运，职业生涯里遇到的都是好老板，我认识的人里好像没人能这么说。我的第一个老板是我当 CAP 辅导员时的老师。回想起来，她对我影响很大——就我和她两个人负责 30 个孩子，还要应付家长，那是相当难搞的客户——他们有点吓人，而且非常在意。她的领导风格是一种安静的自信，就像一个真正的老师，能自信地掌控整个房间，自信地调动房间里的能量，她能点燃每个人，让大家行动起来。当有家长因为什么事沮丧地来找她时——她来自佐治亚州——她总是说“用善意杀死他们”之类的话，就是微笑面对，即使对方对她很恶劣。我一直深受启发。那就是纯粹的领导力，我每天看着一个人这样做，因为我不知道她的生活怎么样，她那天是不是累了——那都不重要，对吧？她必须保证所有孩子的安全和兴奋。在我的设计生涯中，我又一直遇到好老板。实习时有几个人在工艺上狠狠推了我一把。其中一个现在就在 Perplexity 工作，叫 Champuri。

I would say I've been fortunate enough in my life to only have good bosses, which I don't think anyone else I've ever met can say. My first boss ever, I was a CAP counselor and she was a teacher. I realized in retrospect how much of an impact that had on me, because it was me and her in charge of 30 kids, dealing with parents too, which is a pretty intense type of customer to have—they're kind of scary and they care a lot. Her leadership style was just this sort of quiet confidence, like a real teacher able to command a room with confidence and command the energy of a room with confidence, and she could light everybody up and get everybody moving. When a parent came in and was frustrated about something, she was from Georgia and she would always just say 'kill them with kindness' or whatever, she was just like smile and whatever, even though they were being really awful to her. I've always been inspired by that. Just pure leadership, me watching someone do that every day, because I don't know what her life was like and whether she was tired that day—it doesn't matter, right? She's got to keep all these kids safe and excited. Within my design career, I again just kept having good bosses. I had a few people when I was doing internships who really pushed me on craft. One of them actually works at Perplexity now. His name is Champuri.

酷，我还不知道呢。

Cool. I didn't know that.

他以前是我的实习导师，现在在我团队里。我很高兴能再次和他共事。有些人就是教会了我如何突破，如果你明白我的意思的话。就像年轻时，你想变得更好，但完全不知道怎么做。如果你能看出自己作品和优秀作品之间的差距，那么只要你肯听，就没问题。如果你看不出差距，那你永远到不了那个水平。在 Kora 时，我有两个老板。其中一个叫 Rebecca Cox，我觉得她是个传奇。她让我看到，在产品设计和流程上，你可以完全不同于其他人的思考方式。在 Google 时，我们搞艺术学校那一套——在 Photoshop 里做 mockup，打印出来贴在板上，大家给反馈。而 Rebecca 会让我们把所有东西都写成代码，建一个原型，发个链接给我，然后她直接使用。那立刻让我豁然开朗。我想，等等，对啊，我们在做软件，它是交互的，有状态和流程。她总是带着一点朋克摇滚的心态，觉得其他人都错了，难道你看不出来吗？这很适合我。我喜欢你不必做别人都在做的事。我觉得那是最重要的。事实上，如果你反着来，哪怕是随意地反着来，那可能就是你的优势。这是我作为领导者一直秉持的——提醒自己：其他人可能都错了。至少考虑一下这个可能性。说实话，这对很多人来说都很令人兴奋——也许还有另一条路。

He was my intern mentor. Now he's on my team. And I'm just so happy to get to work with him again. There are people that just showed me how to push, if that makes sense. Like when you're young, you want to be better. You have no idea how. If you can see the difference between your work and great work, then you're going to be fine as long as you listen. If you can't see the difference, then you're never going to get there. When I was at Kora, I had two bosses. One, her name is Rebecca Cox. I think she's a legend. She showed me you can really think completely differently than everyone else in terms of how to do product design, how to do process stuff. When I was at Google, we did the art school thing—you make mocks in Photoshop and you print it out and you put it on the board and everyone gives feedback. With Rebecca, she would ask us to code everything, build a prototype, send me a link, and I'm going to use it. That immediately just clicked for me. I'm like, wait a second, yeah, we're making software. It's interactive. It's got states and flows. And she just always had this kind of punk rock mentality a little bit of like, everyone else is wrong. Don't you see that? And that works for me. I like that you don't have to do what everyone else is doing. I think that's the most important thing. And actually, in fact, if you do the opposite, even arbitrarily, that might be your advantage. And that's something that I definitely carry through as a leader—just a reminder: everyone else might be wrong. Let's consider that at least. That's exciting for a lot of people, to be honest—the notion that maybe there's another way.

那种朋克摇滚的心态有没有影响你，并最终塑造了 Perplexity 的设计实践？

Are there ways that that punk rock mentality has rubbed off on you and ultimately shaped the practice of design at Perplexity?

当然有。我是说，我确实认为她在如何做软件这件事上是百分之百正确的。

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do think she was 100% right on how to make software.

用静态图像工具来制作软件毫无意义。从第一性原理出发，我们确实强烈偏向原型，设计团队也写很多代码等等。另一个观点是，你必须痴迷于事物如何运作，而不是它们看起来怎样。这是 Quora 作为产品设计思维的核心。结果是，Quora 的很多东西看起来并不好看，但构建得非常深思熟虑。我们搭建了一些很棒的系统，学到了很多关于产品构建——真正的产品构建。我的意思是，构建社交网络就是这样。社交网络完全由其运作方式定义。看看 Twitter，推文字数完全改变了人们的行为。即使字符限制相同，不同语言的每个字符信息密度不同，就会产生不同的行为。当 Twitter 有字符长度限制时，英语用户的行为与日语用户完全不同，只是因为字符包含的信息不同。这就是社交网络。你必须做大量决策：它如何运作？所以，我认为这种理念深深烙印在我身上，这与设计只是漂亮的按钮、动画和挑选颜色截然不同，而是真正构建一个能引发行为的交互式事物。Quora 更像城市规划，这是一件很棒的事情——能够构建一个社交网络。实际上，大多数设计师都没有机会这样做。没有多少社交网络能达到两百万用户。所以，这很大程度上影响了我，不仅是我们如何工作，还有这种心态：我们需要完全调整工作方式以适应要解决的问题。不存在通用的设计流程。有问题，有人弄清楚软件如何运作，他们需要遵循任何能帮助他们做到这一点的流程。我很喜欢这个想法：我们的工作方式有意义，苹果的工作方式也有意义，这没关系。这只是对正在解决的问题的适应。在 Perplexity，我们实际上在解决许多不同类型的问题，需要采用不同的方法。我们做的一些事情更像苹果，一些更像 Quora。能够识别出哪个是哪个非常有价值。这是我最近一直在思考的事情。作为设计师，显然在输出中有创造力，但在我职业生涯中，我比以往任何时候都更在过程中发现创造力的机会。甚至退后一步思考如何解决这个问题，我拥有的选择比以往任何时候都多。对选择哪条路径保持创造力非常令人振奋，我感觉这种创造力在过去一年里呈指数级增长。

Using a static image tool to make software doesn't make any sense. First principles. We do have a strong bias towards prototypes and a lot of design team codes and things like that. The other thing is just this perspective that you have to be obsessed with how things work more than what they look like. That is very Quora as a product design mindset. Consequences. A lot of Quora stuff didn't look very good, but it was so thoughtfully constructed. We built some amazing systems. We learned a lot about product building, real product building. I mean that's what building a social network is. A social network is only defined by how it works. If you look at Twitter, tweet length completely changes how people behave. Even with the same character limit, you have different information density per character in different languages, and then you get different behavior. When Twitter had its character length limit, English usage was behaviorally totally different than Japanese, just because the characters had different information in them. That's what a social network is. You have to make a ton of decisions. How does it work? So anyways, I think having that drilled into me, which is so different than design being nice buttons and animations and picking colors, getting into actually building an interactive thing that led to behavior. Quora really was more like urban planning, which was an amazing thing to get to build a social network. Actually, most designers have not gotten to do that. There are not that many social networks that have ever gotten like two million users. So a lot of that has influenced me, not only how we had to work, but just the mindset that we need to completely adapt the way we're working to the problem we're solving. There is not a design process that is a universal concept. There are problems, and there are people who figure out how the software works, and they need to follow whatever process is going to help them do that. I just love the idea that the way we were working made sense, but the way Apple was working also made sense, and it doesn't matter. It's just an adaptation to the problems we're working on. At Perplexity, we are solving so many different types of problems and need to put on different approaches. Some stuff we're doing is much more Apple, some of it's much more Quora. Being able to identify which one is which is really valuable. That's something I've been thinking a lot about recently. As a designer, obviously there's creativity in the output whenever you are making, but more so than any point in my career, I'm finding so many opportunities for creativity in the process. Even stepping back and thinking about how do I want to attack this problem, there are way more options at my disposal than I've ever felt before. Being creative about which path I want to take is really energizing, and I feel like it's just exponentially increased even in the last year.

我在 Quora 的最后一位领导是 David Cole，他让我们都开始思考游戏设计实际上是最有用的参考。有一个叫做“机制、动态和美学”的框架，是用于决策的游戏设计框架。他引导我们关注这个，因为它作为思考构建社交网络的方式感觉更有用。这很令人兴奋，就像发现“哦，这里还有另一个房间，我们可以完全不同的方式思考设计”。我们做设计已经足够久，知道挑选颜色、字体和按钮只是为了帮助让社交网络更好。这些东西真的只是交互层，甚至不需要太多创新，因为人们只需要点击和阅读。我从那段经历中得到的主要信息是，我接触到了真正以不同方式思考的人，并且他们善于教会团队其他成员以不同方式思考。这与许多设计团队的环境非常不同，在那里可能有一位主管只是推动大家对齐框、调整间距。这是一个完全不同的工作环境。两者都有价值，我们在 Perplexity 也试图两者兼有。但我接触到的多样化的人以及他们思考设计的方式对我非常有益。

The final leader that I worked under at Quora was David Cole, and he was getting us all to think about game design as actually the most useful reference. There's this framework called mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics that is a game design framework for making decisions. He was tuning us all into that because it really felt much more useful as a way to think about building a social network. That was exciting, just being exposed to it, like, 'Oh, there's a whole other room over here where we get to think about design completely differently.' We've been doing it enough to know that picking colors and fonts and buttons was just about helping make the social network better. That stuff really is just the interactive layer, and it's not even one that you want to innovate on very much because people just need to click stuff and read stuff. My broad message from that experience was just that I got exposed to people who are truly thinking differently and good at teaching the rest of the team to think differently. That's a very different environment to be in than I think a lot of design teams maybe, where there's a director who's just pushing everyone to line up their boxes, fix the spacing. It is a completely different working environment. Both are valuable, and we try to have both happening at Perplexity. But the diversity of people that I've been exposed to and their way of thinking about design has served me very well.

我与你关联的一个特质是，你是一个倾向于亲力亲为的领导者，内心是一个创造者。话虽如此，如果你在快速扩张，看到不断扩大的产品面和完整的产品套件，不可能一直亲力亲为。所以，我相信你在分配时间上有些挣扎。你能谈谈你如何考虑时间投入，以及在哪些方面深入细节是有意义的吗？

Something I associate with you is being a leader who is prone to just keeping hands in the clay and you're a maker at heart. That being said, if you're scaling at a rate and seeing this expanding surface area and a full product suite, it's impossible to have your hands in the clay at all times. So, there's an allocation decision that I'm sure you're wrestling with a little bit. Can you talk a bit about how you think about where to invest your time and where does it make sense to really get into the details?

我相信，要成为一名优秀的设计师，过程必须艰难。你需要做很多决策，并且要为自己的决策负责。我真的希望团队中的每个人都要面对这一点，因为这会让他们变得更好。我希望每个人都拥有很大的自主权、很大的责任感，因此从我这里和公司那里获得很大的信任去解决问题，因为如果你每天都要做很多艰难的决定，你会成为更好的设计师。对组织来说，最好的做法就是我把每个人都扔进深水区，但给他们一个在需要时请求支援的方式。因为另一种选择，我认为，是把每个人都当作我大脑的工具。如果我总是进去指挥每个人，那可能无法规模化，而且也会阻碍其他人的成长。团队里很多人在许多不同方面都比我强，所以我想让他们成为最好的自己。因此，我思考这一切的方式是，我希望大量并行工作以非常独立的方式进行，即使我不存在，一切也应该正常运转。我非常关心建立一个自我运转的团队和文化，而不是让我成为任何事情的必需品。这很难做到，但比我一直手动推动每个人要好得多。我努力确保每个人不会感到被完全抛弃之类的。

Something I believe is that to be a good designer, it needs to be hard. You need to make a lot of decisions and you need to own those decisions. I really want everyone on the team to just have to deal with that because it's going to make them better. I want everyone to have a lot of ownership, a lot of accountability, therefore a lot of trust from me and from the company to figure it out, because if you have to make a lot of hard decisions every day, you're going to become a better designer. It is the best thing for the org, for me to just throw everyone in the deep end, but give them a way to ask for backup if they need it. Because the alternative, I think, is using everyone as a tool for my brain. If I go in and start directing everybody all the time, that probably doesn't scale well, but it also prevents growth from everyone else. A lot of people on the team are much better than me at a lot of different things, so I want to let them be the best versions of themselves. So the way that I think about all of this is I want a lot of parallel work happening in a very independent way, and I should be able to not exist and it should all still be working. I care a lot about building a self-functioning team and a culture more than me being required for anything to work. Now this is hard to do, but it's got so much more upside than one where I'm manually pushing everybody all the time. I try to make sure that everyone isn't feeling like they're completely abandoned or anything.

但说实话，我大部分工作就是确保每个人都能成功，四处走动，确保他们有所需的资源，鼓励他们继续前进。我带来一种信心，让大家倾向于持续行动。这很难，自然有些人我互动得没那么多，因为情况不同，但我希望团队像一台机器，无需我干预就能运转。

But yeah, most of my job is just trying to set everybody up for success and just floating around making sure that they have what they need and encouraging them to just keep going. You know, there's like a confidence that I bring that just biases everyone to keep moving. So it's hard, naturally there are people that I don't interact with as much as others because of what's happening, but I want the team to be like a machine that operates without my intervention.

这让我想起你之前说过的话——在一家正在 Scaling（规模扩张）的公司工作，增长曲线几乎一直向右上角延伸，无论如何都是这样。因此，你没法做特别精确的实验，因为数据最终不会下降，除非你观察极微观的层面。所以，要果断决策，你不能完全依赖数据，我猜你得凭直觉。那么，设计师如何锻炼这种能力？比如以实习生为例，你会如何培养他们，希望他们不仅变得果断，还能做出基本正确的决定？

It reminds me of something else that you said to me earlier where you talked about how when you're working at a company that is scaling, the graph pretty much just keeps going up and to the right, no matter what. As a result, it's not like you can run these really accurate experiments because the graph is never really going down at the end of the day unless you're looking at a super micro level. So, in order to be decisive, you can't really just rely on what the data says. You kind of got to go with your gut, I'm assuming. So, how does a designer grow that muscle? And maybe using the intern as a hypothetical, like what are some of the ways that you would either invest in that person or hope to see them grow in their not only ability to be decisive but to hopefully make primarily correct decisions.

这很难，因为最终它很主观，对吧？什么是对的？是因为用户用得更多了，还是因为你从没听到任何负面反馈？真的很难，因为有太多权衡。我认为最重要的是永远不要卡住，不要停滞。因为如果你持续行动，持续做出你能做的最佳决策和最佳权衡，你总可以下周再回顾。永远不要失去交付和果断决策的能力。我觉得犯错没关系。我干这行够久了，知道我们不可能永远知道答案。我们做不到。

It's tough because ultimately it is quite subjective, right? What is correct? Is it because people use the product more, or is it that you never heard any negative feedback from anybody? It's really tough because there are so many trade-offs. I think the most important thing is just never getting stuck, never stalling. Because you could, if you're constantly moving, constantly just making the best decision you can, the best trade-offs you can, you can always revisit something next week. Never losing the muscles around shipping and being decisive. I think it's fine to be wrong. I've been doing this enough to know that we just don't know all the time. We can't.

我认为优秀的设计师是能够快速审视可能性空间，做出平衡权衡的决策，然后继续前进的人。这对组织的价值远大于那些回到绘图板再探索 50 个想法的人。你不太可能因此得到好得多的结果，反而可能错过了同时发布三样东西的机会。

And I think what makes a good designer is someone who is able to survey the possibility space quickly and just make a decision that balances the trade-offs and keep going. That ends up being much more valuable to the organization than someone who goes back to the drawing board and explores 50 more ideas. It's unlikely that you're going to end up somewhere that much better, and instead maybe you could have launched three more things in the meantime.

我认为有些工作是可以衡量的。我们会在可能的时候做 A/B 测试，当我们认为它有帮助时。但很多事情我们就是直接做决定，果断更好。公司有一种围绕果断和清晰的文化价值观。

I think some work can be measured. We do A/B test things when we can, when we think it's going to help. There's a lot of things we just make decisions on, and it's just better to be decisive. There's a kind of cultural value of the company around decisiveness and clarity.

好，我们来深入聊聊文化。你之前用了“成长”这个词，我想展开说说这对你意味着什么。我猜你们的运作方式非常灵活。你招来了有经验的人，并给予他们高度自主权。但另一方面，有没有某些行为或协作方式是你特别强调的，从而在 Perplexity 的设计运作中形成了一定结构？

Yeah, let's dig into the culture a little bit. You used the phrase 'growing up' earlier, so I kind of want to unpack what fits into that bucket for you. My assumption is that there's a lot of fluidity in terms of how you all operate. You've brought in people who are experienced who are given this level of autonomy. On the flip side though, are there certain behaviors or methods of collaboration that you really push for that do kind of form this level of structure in terms of how design operates at Perplexity?

我不想落入其他公司的习惯。也许它们是对的，但我们知道那些做法的后果。比如我们知道结构化周三设计评审的后果：你得等到周三才能得到反馈，而且反馈带有表演性质。我知道那会怎样。所以为什么不试试别的？我宁愿发现其他模式的后果，也许我们能找到折中有效的方法。这是有史以来竞争最激烈的软件市场，我们必须寻找任何竞争方式。因此，我认为每件常规的事情都应该被挑战，因为也许你能找到不同的工作方式、不同的思维方式，从而从每个人身上解锁更多潜力。这是我组建团队时一直秉持的心态：我们必须找到自己的优势，找到任何我们能利用的优势，因为设计团队必须帮助公司成功。而人们喜欢这样，对吧？他们想听到这些。他们很兴奋能换种方式，尝试不同的东西。我的意思是，每个人都知道其他公司常规流程的弊端，所以让我们尝试不同的东西。我有点这种心态：尽可能保持有机，看看会涌现出什么。所以我对此相当实验性，看到什么有效、什么无效、什么会崩溃，然后我们尝试将那些似乎有效的东西正式化，这很酷。

I don't want to just fall into the habits that other companies have. Maybe they're right, but we know the consequences of those. Like we know the consequences of structured Wednesday design crits. It means you wait till Wednesday to get feedback. It means there's a performative nature to giving that feedback. I know the consequences of that. So why don't we try something else? I would rather find out the consequences of some other model, and maybe we find something that works in the middle. This is the most competitive software market ever, and we have to look for any way to compete. I think therefore every normal thing should be challenged, because maybe you find a different way to work, a different way to think, and a way to unlock a little bit more from everybody. That's always been my mindset going into building this team: we got to find our edge, we got to find any advantage we can, because the design team has to help make this company successful. And people love that, right? They want to hear that. They're excited to switch it up, to try different things. I mean, everybody knows what doesn't work about the average process at other companies, so let's try different things. I kind of have this mindset of let's just keep it as organic as possible and just see what emerges. So, I'm pretty experimental with it, and it's cool to see what works, what doesn't work, what breaks, and then we try to formalize things that do seem like they're working.

有没有出现一些具体的运营优势？

Are there specific operational edges that have emerged?

我确实认为，我们拥抱完全有机的勇气和反馈，帮助我们快速前进。总的来说，我认为将敏捷和速度作为设计团队最重要的价值观。这是一个独特的说法。这比其他任何东西都重要，因为它让人不舒服。那质量呢？我宁愿你反过来想，对吧？假设最重要的事情是快速前进，那么如何维持质量就是后续问题。我认为这种心态帮助公司以所需的速度前进，因为很多公司我认为是被设计团队拖慢的。我不想让这成为我的问题。所以这很重要。我们做的一些事情，比如拥抱非常技术性的设计师，让他们在产品需要改变时直接去改。所以很多流程的缺失是一种优势，但也可能成为劣势，因为它会导致潜在的混乱、本应更好协作的项目、设计系统问题等等。这就像一个持续的谜题，总是要确保一切运转良好。

I do think our embrace of fully organic grit and feedback has helped us move very quickly. I think just in general embracing agility and velocity as the most important values for the design team. That's like a unique thing to say. That's more important than anything else, because that makes people uncomfortable. What about quality? I would rather you can flip it, right? Let's just say the most important thing is to go fast, and therefore how do we maintain quality as a follow-up on that. I think just that mindset has helped us keep the company going at the pace that it needs to go, because a lot of companies I think are slowed down by the design team. I don't want to have that on my list. So that's like a big thing. There are certain things we do, like embracing very technical designers to just go and change the product when it needs to get changed. So there's a lot of lack of process that's been an advantage, but it can be a disadvantage too, because it leads to potential messiness, projects that should be collaborating better, design system problems, things like that. It's like a constant puzzle always to try to make sure that things are working well.

你几次谈到反馈的重要性和流动性，但能具体说说在实践中是什么样子吗？比如 Perplexity 的设计师们是如何获得反馈的？

You talked about the importance and also the fluidity of feedback a few different times, but can you shine a light on what does it actually look like in practice? Like how do designers at Perplexity get feedback?

团队里有人对你做的东西有大量背景了解，也有人了解得少。我让每个人都思考：你什么时候需要反馈？什么时候反馈对你真正有用？因为有时反馈在开头和结尾极其重要，中间反而不常需要，有时则根本不重要。所以如果你一直想着“我对这件事负责，我对成功和质量负责，我独自在这里，必须自己搞定”，那你的思路就很清晰。但你有很多电话可以打——随时可以求助或寻求反馈。然后大家就会相应地使用它。所以经常会有“现在有人能一起琢磨这个吗？”这样的信息，面对面或线上都有。这就像一种日常的有机过程，取决于项目状态和协作情况，可能持续 20 分钟，也可能 2 小时。真的就看情况而定。我觉得就这么简单。但只有当人们觉得这是他们自己的决定时，它才有效。

So there are people that maybe have a lot of context where you're working on and people with less. I ask everyone to just think: when do you need feedback? When is it actually useful to you? Because sometimes feedback is extremely important at the beginning, at the end, not often in the middle, and sometimes it's not important at all. So if you're always thinking like 'I'm responsible for this thing, I'm responsible for the success, the quality, I'm out here on my own, I have to figure this out,' that's clear to you. But you've got plenty of phones to ring if you want—you can call for help or feedback at any moment. Then people just use it accordingly. So there's a lot of 'Is anyone around right now to jam on this?' That kind of messaging happens in person, happens online. It's just a sort of daily organic process depending on the state of the project, people collaborating, and it could go on for 20 minutes or 2 hours. It really just depends on what's going on. It's kind of as simple as that, I think. But it only works when people feel like it's their decision.

是的。我喜欢这种一切最终都回归到主人翁意识和果断决策的理念。

Yeah. I like that everything kind of always keeps coming back to ownership and being decisive.

一切都必须保持一致，对吧？我不能一边总是告诉别人该做什么，一边又要求他们去获取反馈。我需要让大家知道，反馈是他们自己应该使用的工具。

Everything has to be consistent, right? Like I can't just be like telling people what to do all the time, but then I have to tell them to get feedback. I need people to know that that's the tool they're supposed to use themselves.

在你离开之前，我想把视角拉远，反思一下设计团队的未来以及这一切的走向。当你思考那些潜在的未来结果时，有没有一些你正在积极避免的未来设计团队版本？你又在做些什么来成功引导团队？

Before I let you go, I want to zoom out and kind of reflect on the future of the design team and where this is all headed. And when you think about those potential future outcomes, are there versions of the future design team that you're actively trying to avoid? And what are you doing to navigate the team successfully?

我的意思是，最重要的是我希望产品始终出色，并且始终快速迭代。随着团队和公司规模变大，这变得越来越难，因为我们必须小心。我们不想搞砸事情。我们要确保遵循良好的工程实践和设计系统实践，不制定太多设计系统规则，而是制定刚好足够的规则，让人们能够果断决策。规模扩张带来了很多挑战，你完全能理解为什么公司会以它们的方式发展。就像我说的，我一直在尽可能频繁地反思：我需要改变我的价值观吗？我是一个初创公司设计师吗？因为那是我真正了解的全部。我能领导一个 50 人的设计团队吗？因为到了某个点，我甚至没有任何参考。我在倾听团队认为他们需要什么，并试图为他们构建这些。但我喜欢这个挑战，我觉得我能解决。如果别人能做到，为什么我不能？

I mean, the big thing is like I want the product to be great always, and I want it to be evolving quickly always. That gets harder and harder as you become bigger—design team, company, whatever—because we have to be careful. We don't want to break stuff. We want to make sure that we're following good engineering practices, following good design system practices, not creating too many rules of the design system, but creating just enough that people can be decisive. There's a lot of challenges that come with scale, and you can totally see why companies have evolved the way that they do. Like I said, I've definitely been trying to reflect as often as possible: do I need to change my values? Am I a startup designer? Because that's all I really know. Can I lead a 50-person design team? Because there's a point where I don't even have anything to reference. I'm listening to my team on what they think they need and trying to construct it for them. But I like that challenge and I think I can figure it out. If other people can, why not me?

我喜欢这种心态。“如果别人能做到，为什么我不能？”最近我脑子里一直有一句很好的体育名言：“压力是一种特权。”如果你处于这个位置，能站在这里本身就是一份礼物，对吧？而困难其实是一件美妙的事情。那句话是“压力是特权，冠军会调整。”我想是比利·简说的，她是一位网球运动员。我喜欢这句话。如果你要承受那种压力，不如充分利用它。当你个人处于未知领域时，很难知道该怎么做；没有多少人能给出好建议，但你至少可以了解他们过去做了什么，然后综合出你应该做什么。关键是，世界上有很多组织可以学习——无论是公司，还是电影工作室的运作方式，军队的架构方式。人类如何组织的例子太多了，有很多东西可以学。

I love that mentality. 'If other people can, why not me?' There's a really good sports phrase: 'Pressure is a privilege' that's been in my head lately. If I'm in this position, that's a gift to be in this spot, right? And the fact that it's hard is actually a wonderful thing. The quote is like 'Pressure is a privilege and champions adjust.' I think it's Billy Jean, she's a tennis player. I love that. If you're going to have that pressure, you might as well make the most of it. It's hard to know when you're in uncharted territory personally; not many people can give good advice, but you can at least get their perspective on what they did in the past and then you can kind of create a composite of what you should do. The thing is, there's a lot of organizations in the world to learn from—whether it's companies or the way a movie studio works, the way the military is set up. There are so many examples of how humans are organized, so plenty to learn from.

是的。你让我意识到存在这样一个光谱：一端是你想清楚你想要什么形状，然后去实现它；另一端是你更被动一些，可能更强调把握团队的需求和自然涌现的行为。作为领导者，你可能确实需要有意地决定自己在这个光谱上的位置。当我雇佣一位优秀的领导者时，感觉他们知道一些我不知道的关于宇宙的事情。这可能只是我的想象，但为一个感觉他们知道些什么的人工作很有趣——他们知道该做什么，知道接下来会发生什么，他们有计划，而且充满自信。这很特别。我从过去的上级那里一直感受到这一点，我也想传达这种感觉。所以你不能走上前说“我不知道接下来会发生什么”。你不能表现出那种不确定，但我觉得展示谦逊也很重要，对吧？所以我通过咨询每个人的意见来做到这一点。

Yeah. You're making me realize there's kind of this spectrum where on one end you kind of figure out what shape you want this to take and you make it happen, and on the other you are a little bit more reactive and maybe placing a greater emphasis on just having a pulse on what the team is asking for, what behaviors are naturally emerging. And as a leader, maybe you actually feel like you kind of have to be intentional about where you want to fit on that spectrum. When I've hired a good leader, it feels like they know something about the universe that I don't know. And it may be all in my head, but it's fun to work for somebody where it just feels like they know something—they know what to do, they know what's going to happen next, they have a plan, and there's a confidence. There's something about that. And I always felt that from the people that I worked for in the past, and I want to convey that. So you can't go up and be like 'I don't know what's going to happen next.' You can't show that, but I think it's also important to show humility, right? And so I try to do that by consulting everybody.

你觉得自己知道一些关于宇宙的事情吗？

Do you feel like you know something about the universe?

我当然知道。

Of course I do.

好的，感谢你来做客，给我们介绍了正在发生的所有事情、进展的速度、你作为领导者的成长，甚至设计团队的状况。我想很多听众都仰慕你们所做的一切，感谢你今天与我们分享。

Well, I appreciate you coming on and giving us an update on all of the things that are happening, the pace at which it's happening, how you're growing as a leader, even the state of the design team. I think a lot of people listening to this look up to everything that you all are doing and I appreciate you sharing it with us today.

谢谢邀请。

Thanks for having me.

在你离开之前，我想花一分钟介绍一下我最喜欢的产品，因为我经常被问到我的工具栈。Framer 是我建网站的工具。Genway 是我做研究的方式。Granola 是我在评审时记笔记的工具。Jitter 是我为设计做动画的工具。Lovable 是我用代码实现想法的工具。Mobin 是我寻找设计灵感的工具。Paper 是我像创意人一样设计的工具。而 Raycast 是我每一步的快捷方式。我亲自挑选了这些公司，这样我才能全职做这些节目。所以，支持这个节目的首要方式就是去看看它们。你可以在 dive.comclub/partners 找到完整列表。

Before I let you go, I want to take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now, I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full-time. So, by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at dive.comclub/partners.