Letters.

You named the transition the company is in: from a promise product to a reliable tool. That's the sentence the whole audit argument turns on. The browser-with-agent-tabs image is the other one I haven't put down. That isn't a feature, it's a category claim, and it composes with the multiplayer problem you described as currently terrible. The hard work in this phase isn't building more. It's building the muscle to choose what doesn't ship, and to retire bets that looked right and aren't. Pushback welcome. The kind that sharpens the read, not the kind that softens it.

Thanks for the walkthrough. The valuation gave shape to what's already unlocked. The 99% framing gave shape to what's left. Hearing them in the same half hour is the cleanest version of the bet I've heard from anyone at the company. It also told me where a design leader earns their keep here. The 1% is what the rest of the company sprints to capture. The 99% is the bar that has to hold while everything else moves. That's not a roadmap, it's a posture, and it changes who you hire and how you spend the first ninety days. The Stockholm half was the surprise. I learned later you've lived with Jet Li and worked with Jack Ma, and I'd love to hear those stories sometime.

You told me the work was the compound effect of smart people working close together, and reinventing how building works as AI changes everything. The harder half of that sentence is the first one. The model already solved how. The unsolved part is what to build, and why, without slowing the engine that makes the abundance possible. That's a tightrope, not a roadmap. It needs intuition, judgment, and the willingness to kill a bet the moment the value you thought was there fails to bear out.

Two things from our conversation stayed with me. The first: design as the translation layer between business voice and user voice. Most teams don't have that layer. They have two parallel monologues and call the seam "alignment." The second: the current vision is too broad, and "enabling a new class of founders" is the sharper version. Those are the same problem. A vision that broad can't be translated, because there's nothing specific on either side of the seam. Abundance makes that worse, not better. When the team can ship anything, a vague vision generates noise at scale. The first thing I'd want to do together is write the sharper sentence, not design the artifact downstream of it.

Thanks for the conversation, and for the follow-up that turned a process into a real read on the company. You walked me through the leveling, the Monday debrief, the team going from where it is to twenty by year-end. And you did it without a single line that felt like recruiting. That tone is itself a culture signal. Whatever the Monday debrief turns up, the bar you set for that first conversation is something I'll carry into how I run my own.

There's a thread from our conversation I want to come back to. I told it from the conclusion forward and skipped the premise, so here it is in the order it should have been said.

You named it: the constraint isn't ideas, it's discrimination. When the team can build anything, the work shifts to choosing what's worth building, holding the line on why, and being honest the moment a bet stops earning its keep. You also said senior hires need IC energy. That the trust-fall culture rewards leaders who still touch the work. That's the version of leadership I've been growing into for two years. Less calendar, more craft, hiring as the highest-stakes design surface I own. Twelve-month frame, dream team, design as moat: I read that as a single sentence, not three goals. Happy to share the hiring loop I've been running at Maven if it's useful, regardless of where this lands.

The travel, the welcome at the door, the tour, the steady check-ins, the babysitter you found when the hotel couldn't, so my wife could make the Friday dinner. None of that was on the agenda for the role. You did it anyway, and you did it with warmth and care.

Your line about being an enabler, not a gatekeeper, is the line that made me write this. It's easy to confuse those two things and think you're picking craft over speed. I think it's picking control over reach. When the constraint is no longer "can we build it" but "should we, and what shape should it take," design's job becomes the filter. The judgment about which bets to run and which to retire.

The trade you named is the same one I'm running. Passenger versus driver. The reason it's worth making isn't speed, it's that at this scale judgment shows up in the work in days, not quarters. What I want our partnership to focus on first is the misalignment you flagged. Engineering scaling fast, design and product under-resourced. The fix isn't symmetry of headcount, it's making sure design and product aren't the rate limit on what engineering wants to ship next. That's a system problem, not a hiring one. The other thing I'm sitting with from our conversation is the Google overlap. The shape of the problems you and I both worked on there is closer to what Lovable is becoming than it is to where most AI-native companies are heading. That's worth something.

Thanks for the half hour. The transplant view is exactly what I needed to bring back to my partner, Liz, and you delivered it without performing it. Most people in your seat answer the question they expected, not the one you asked. You did the opposite. Comparing notes on the energy of the business and what it took to operate inside it made the read on Lovable land in a frame I already trusted. I leave the conversation more excited about an ambitious, driven environment and team. Whatever happens with the role, glad to know there's another NYC expat in Stockholm who can help ground the move in NYC terms.