 Take one billion. Why are some of the most interesting products designed in Silicon Valley? In this video you're going to find out. What you're about to see is an excerpt from the Product Breakfast Club podcast where we talk about the difference between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world when it comes to designing products. Hope you enjoy it and if you like these kind of conversations definitely check out the Product Breakfast Club podcast. Love from San Francisco. Silicon Valley. The Val. Sval as we call it here. The Val. I know a lot of people listening to this podcast are listening from the Bay Area. I can see that in the analytics but I also know that most of the people who listen to this are not working in the Bay Area and often when I mention on any of the Instagram posts or YouTube posts when I talk about Silicon Valley there is this general kind of what is it and like what's so special about it and in Germany and I guess a lot of parts of the world there's an anti-silicon valley kind of vibe it's like oh it's just stupid it is a super interesting topic for me having just come back. Yeah you've just been steeped in it you've been up to your chin. Yeah up to my actual chin and I think like I was up to my knees last time because I was just training well-known Silicon Valley companies this time I was deep inside these companies that everyone knows and working on products right and working on what they actually bring to the market and what makes them so special there are a lot of things that are similar to working anywhere else in the world but there are really really really clear differences as well like there are some things that I think they just don't exist especially in Europe because we were in New York as well three weeks ago and there were definitely some things that we chatted about in terms of people being enthusiastic about the brand. Oh yeah yeah yeah. That's like a big difference to Europe where a lot of people are not necessarily super enthusiastic about the brand that they're working for and they're almost cynical they would never say the sentence I'm going to change the world or this project is going to change the world they would never say that with a straight face whereas you're required to say that in the United States 20 times at the beginning of every meeting we will change the world with this but we will change the world we will change the world but maybe I heard the sentence maybe I heard it like three times like this is a product that could change the world this is something that could change the world I know a lot of people will roll their eyes here listening to this you can almost hear the eye rolls yeah but I think there's something in that that makes me super excited that the people working on these products are like they're not just like oh I'm making this new flyout panel on the side here it's like they often have the big picture in mind the way a lot of people don't at other companies from other countries interesting so they're thinking about how this fits into the bigger world of things super often yeah it really is so cheesy to think that you can change the world you're not changing the world with that thing well very few products really do change the world and so many of the things that people say are going to change the world in tech don't and it's a way of sometimes making things sound important that really aren't but they're also something really powerful about being very wholehearted in your work going like all in this is one of the tactics in make time book by make time by make time by sprint is to just like go like all in on the thing to let go of like being cool and like let go of like holding back a little bit or like reserving a little energy and just go for it just go throw yourself into what you're doing you get so much better results when you can do that and you have more energy when you can do that like everything goes better when you can go all in you can't always go all in sometimes there are projects that really suck and like but I always think like if you can't go all in then maybe it's like something you should try to like not be doing like you should try to change the work that you're doing and so yeah I think that it is more culturally acceptable and even encouraged to like be all in on what you're doing here and there's something to that oh I'm getting a coffee and water delivery from my son Flynn oh I'm gonna get oatmeal and just a second this is really the product breakfast club this morning because it's breakfast time here I hadn't even eaten oh you know what actually this is a really good tangent here in episode I think it was episode 39 in New York our first one from New York oh I love that episode was really good that was like my favorite episode we were so good that was like Monday of that week and then episode 41 is like Friday maybe Thursday or Friday I think it was uh just before going into the sprint on Friday morning yeah yeah yeah I had not had coffee that morning and I listened to that episode and I was like is something wrong with the audio because my voice was so slow and this is like and I could almost hear myself like trying to think and you'd like say something I was like like the gears were just turning and I don't know it was some combination of that was an intense week yeah I hadn't had coffee yet anyway it'll be interesting to see I just got coffee I have not had coffee yet this morning we'll see halfway through the episode halfway through the episode this is like a good test we could always have Jason perhaps go back and just speed my speech up a little bit so that it's just normalize please don't do that Jason because remember he's actually doing the things that we request we love you Jason oh Jason Jason is the editor of this podcast by the way in case you hear us referring and you could say producer as well he's just everything so Jake what I wanted to go back to so have a little nibble of your oatmeal there or sip of your coffee one of the things that my company has been thinking about for a while is like how do we figure out what our company values are and how do we kind of instill them in new employees and how do we use them as almost like a way to help people to figure out how to solve problems based on values so it's not like every single time a specific challenge comes up that everyone has to solve it from scratch every time but they can be like oh well AJ and Smart is a company that usually does this this and this for example we're a company that doesn't really pursue short-term large amounts of money we generally tried to take it really big hit and profit for long-term revenue or long-term brand equity whatever whatever and I think in Silicon Valley what I noticed with all of the companies that I was at in the last two weeks was their company values were highly visible everywhere you went but in a way that people actually referred to them in a non-cynical way yeah that's interesting yeah I've never seen that anywhere else right because as you were saying that just now honestly you may not believe me now because you already gave away the thing being about values I was thinking you should have some company values yeah but of course company values sounds really like cheesy company values who cares company values they have the potential to be really great and I would say the place that made me believe that is Google like Google the company values were like they were really good and they were opinionated and the people really like thought about them and and would would you know sort of quote them like yeah they had this thing called 10 things we found to be true that was really powerful because it was about things that they had distilled from what worked about the products and so so I can't remember which of these things are like company values and which of them come from 10 things we found to be true but I remember like I know don't be evil is like sort of a motto or whatever yeah yeah like it's a good one people joke about that all the time and Google has gotten so big and it's a really good motto and I've been inside companies where there's not a sense of don't be evil it's not that people are evil but the conversations very quickly become very calculated about the business and you stop treating customers like your friends like humans you know which is really unfortunate and it's not to say that Google's always going to do things perfectly and that they're always not going to be evil but it's a lot better to try but there's 10 things we found to be true was really interesting because it was distilled from what had actually worked so you knew that there was some history behind it you knew it wasn't just hollow it's like this is what has worked for us in the past and it was like if we build products and we start off by thinking about the customer first we don't care about how we're going to make money but first we try to make the best product possible then that focus on the customer ends up being a competitive advantage for us and that was true for them for like it's true for Google itself like the search engine like it did not start off monetized and they tried to make the best thing possible for customers and then they figured out how to make money off of it I can't remember how this was phrased but like it really matters like how fast things are we found that that is true we found that it's true that you should like show how fast things are I don't know if they still consider this one of their things but this used to be on their website publicly you could just find it you said that these things are like things that the company has found to be true in the past and they're almost like codifying them I think that a lot of companies fail including us when we try to make values because you try to make them extremely aspirational it's like you're making them not what your company is but what the executive team wants the company to be and I think that like having values that are just purely aspirational makes people roll their eyes because they're like you know what we're just not like that that isn't what we're like but fuck it will just like ignore it anyway whereas I think a lot of the values that you just mentioned there are values that are based on past successes and that's something that people can get behind a little bit better yeah I found the list it's really easy to find it's 10 things we know to be true now it's going to be true it used to be found it used to be we found getting more hardcore getting more hardcore getting more confident young google is getting quite confident young google number one focus on the user and all else will follow boring number two it's best to do one thing really really well which is pretty funny because they don't do that anymore I don't know today said we do search when I joined the company that was we're really good at search we do these other things are like side projects three fast is better than slow for democracy on the web works five you don't need to be at your desk to need an answer so this was just like talking about like we think mobile is important this is interesting because it's still on their website I would guess that this is like 15 plus years old six you can make money without doing evil seven there's always more information out there eight the need for information crosses all borders nine you can be serious without a suit and ten great just isn't good enough some of them maybe less impactful than others I focus on the user and also follow it was like hugely sticky people talked about it believed that it's best to do one thing really really well was also that's a really strong one fast is better than slow there's so many times when you make a decision in anything that you do whether it's a company or whatever but you make a decision when you're trying to market something when you're trying to like promote something where you have to consciously make the decision to be honest and fair and I think making the right decision in those cases is actually like important for the long-term health of the business you can whether it's moral or not it's actually like the best thing for the business but the expedient thing to do in the moment is often not to be honest not to be 100% forthcoming 100% clear like if you've worked with a client and you're like okay so should we exaggerate what our relationship was with this client right exaggerate with the results were like the expedient thing in the moment maybe to exaggerate it but in the long term like if the client finds out like how we exaggerated what we did like and and even just the fact that we allow that non-truth to kind of be out there that also like could start to pervade other things that we do totally after reputation like becomes solid by that you know that stuff it does totally matter anyway get a little fired up here and I've only even had one tiny sip of my coffee it's also just I mean I can see it within a jane smart I mean a lot of the company values are not codified not written down but gut feelings based on what people think I might want to happen or my co-founder might want to happen and of course just having it out there and a bit more clearly I think is something just that last two it was actually Tim Tim was also there and in the valley and he was the one who was like it's actually not stupid to have these values now that he saw it working in these companies or at least not necessarily working but it was being used as like a common frame of reference I guess you could say yeah even when everything else is falling apart and no one's aligned on anything at least you can kind of align around okay well this is what the business is about and these are kind of core values and it definitely helped certain decisions get made faster even within the sprint when the decider was able to say the reason I'm choosing this concept and this concept is because we know that the company values are blah blah blah blah blah and I feel like this not only fits with the sprint question sprint goal but I think it's also the thing that fits most closely to our core values and I was like I've never had that happen in a sprint before I just had a weird thought which is I wonder if because in America as you probably noticed America America we don't have as much cultural norms as other countries do and like it's a weakness in many ways of like if you live here there are a lot of things you have to sort of make up from scratch like there are not just the same thing that you do for example in Berlin I feel like I observed in my short time there the summer for example having like a beer with each other in the evening sitting outside seems like a thing friends do they're just talking like people aren't really on their phones they're actually just talking or like in cafes just kind of like let's get together and like kind of talk and hang out I people do that in the United States but it felt like there was more of like everybody was doing it at once kind of a thing or like people being out late in Berlin right like people go out like they do stuff with their friends there's like this norms there are things kind of like this but you go to different countries in Europe you'll see there's a cultural thing that's developed and Berlin's probably not even the best example because it's sort of a weird place and obviously a lot of upheaval there over the last century but if you go to other cities you'll see like oh yeah man there's these traditions people have been doing these things forever there are country-wide traditions religion is like rolled into it right like just it's like oh man there's these big time traditions and in states we have so many people from all over the world it's like relatively new country like we don't have as many cultural norms established and I think that one of the reasons why people might get more into their companies and like these ideas of the principles of the companies is because we kind of long for a culture and like the companies can create this culture that's like it becomes a culture that you live in I live in the Google culture I live in the like whatever culture you know it's like yeah good finally somebody's telling me what to do somebody's giving me some moral guidelines you know yeah somebody's like giving me something to be excited about and that maybe there's something to that I'm not mentioning any of the companies we worked with so I'm just keeping it extremely vague but I was inside a couple of companies which were every time you say company I'm just gonna say yeah I was inside a couple of companies that were in the spotlight all of these companies have been in the spotlight recently over all sorts of things all sorts of like big scandals it was also really interesting to see that from the inside how people were sort of banding together there wasn't like this like horrible vibe of oh my god this company's evil and we should really get out of here or I don't know you know like I was worried that there might be like a really bad vibe around all the bad things that had been happening in the media but generally and something that you and I had talked about before generally the people working in these companies genuinely want to fix these problems that people have and genuinely want to be good right and it's just there are some really sticky problems that like obviously you know websites like the Verge see a company doing something bad and they're like the CEO of that company is evil I guess it's just good clickbait but there's absolutely no effort put into thinking about what it is actually like to run a company the Verge has I think right now on the front page it's one of the big two social media companies with a line through it saying that basically this company is wrong oh I want to see this this is on the homepage right now oh they've changed the headline to be less intense this had a more extreme headline a few days ago it's fine to report on this stuff but there is rarely any effort into interviewing employees of these companies and senior positions I guess also these companies don't want to allow them to be interviewed but when they do get interviewed they also get like attacked on the internet I think it's interesting just being inside and seeing the kind of other side of this that these people working in these companies are not like how can we get more people angry and how can we trick more people yeah it's an important perspective this is actually another make time thing we tried really careful to figure out like how should we talk about this because there is a lot of negativity around tech companies and their effect on yeah our attention their effect on whether the information that we consume and it actually is really important too it's an important duty that the press has and that to sort of like push on these guys and like they do have like a ton of real estate they have a ton of money like it's important for people to criticize them actually it's really good that people do there's also a perspective that's important to note which is that these companies and I think generally speaking they are very sincere the people who work there are very sincere in their efforts to try to do the right thing they want to make good products there are sometimes reasons why they can't the companies aren't always motivated by pure sunshine and happiness but generally speaking if you go inside those companies you're gonna find people who want to make the world better and want to bring kind of the future to life and oh here's another delivery oh here comes the oatmeal no one's bringing me shit I don't have a kid yet but uh it's a love heart and a smiley face which says dad twice on it I think it's for me it's for you yeah oh thank you cool thanks Flynn all right so now we're gonna get some chewing sounds folks building these products meanwhile and I think that I hope that in the long term when they're pushed on from the outside that like the result will be more awareness and that they will do the right thing and that they will be like cigarette companies I don't mean to like diss cigarette companies but I will I will diss the cigarette companies sorry if you work at a cigarette company I think you should just get another job they don't believe that the thing is harmful they actually want to find a way to make their products do good for people and so the thing is it gets reduced to this really simple idea of like oh the companies are bad we should punish them or regulate them into submission or like shut it off or whatever and the reality is like just much more nuanced like they're trying to do something good it's hard to come up with these new technologies and things that serve us well and then like we as people using those things also have a responsibility to figure out how to use them in a way that helps that gets the best you saw inside like the folks are generally trying to do the right thing and it's hard it's good for us to hammer on from the outside but I mean it's a mixture of I guess the things that are the same for me going to Silicon Valley is extremely important it's extremely important for me to bring the AJ and smart team to Silicon Valley as regularly as possible because number one the expectations are higher actually for us the companies that bring us in have to the point of unrealistic expectations from us which we actually kind of like because it pushes us really really hard say a little bit more about that what do you mean so many companies that we work for they didn't come to the market as a digital software company in the first place and they're trying to get into that now many of the companies we work for our old businesses that they're just trying to figure out today how do I build these product teams how do I innovate how do I create these huge scalable products that hit the market and just like succeed like crazy it's Europe right I mean they probably started off making like armor or like armor coins absolutely exactly coins holds fashion weapons Birkenstock shoes Birkenstock shoes exactly yeah right what they're looking for from us is obviously to help them figure out their product vision their product strategy and also then potentially design their product help them figure out how to bring it to the market we are obviously like very well suited to do that and it's also not just European companies that's also basically any company even the ones we worked with in New York I would consider those to be a company that they're in a state of transition at the moment right that's like the most common type of company we work with in Silicon Valley they're not in a state of transition they started in this like digital world the majority of people who've worked there right now are digital natives who are I would almost say like product natives they understand everything about products there's nothing you can really say to in any way get a reaction someone being like oh you know about growth and blah blah like think of a shit they know all that stuff already they're also like it's a highly highly highly competitive market there in the Bay Area it's bubbling up like very intensely motivated people who work a lot and work a lot on their education and it's like a combination of that makes them have extremely high expectations of an external company coming in to help them what the fuck are we doing going into these companies you know like this external company from Berlin Silicon Valley doesn't really care about Europe right it's not like a super interesting maybe just if you want to go and like not really work anymore but in terms of like level of innovation all of this kind of stuff I think Silicon Valley would see Europe as like a second-class citizen and so for us going over there it really really first of all we all get really nervous like everyone in AJ and smarts like oh god like they're after booking us we have to do it and it just like it makes us look at a lot of our systems it makes us look at the skill sets we have it also gives us huge confidence and excitement boost when we manage to deliver something that excites them right I'm always shocked when these clients are like oh my god I can't believe you guys did that and then they rebook us so going over there for us as a European company and I would honestly recommend this for anybody not having visited the bay area before it's completely contagious enthusiasm for the product like product as a topic everyone knows everything about products there you just meet a random person on the street and they'll talk about monthly active users or something right you'll be like stop talking to me like monthly active users monthly active may use motherfucker it's an extremely mature product environment that's it that's the difference and I think there's not so many places in the world where also like the types of companies which you don't find anywhere else right here and even in New York even in Austin like places like that you will find startups who have that level of product maturity but they also don't have billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of market capital so they also don't have the same size of problems that these Silicon Valley companies have so these Silicon Valley companies have giant market capitalization and high level of product maturity it's just very different it's very intense and super fun I feel like I learn a lot every time and I feel like I'm challenged a lot every time I'm there and it's the same feeling for the team they all come back like wrecked and totally drained but like excited about being in this industry well one thing that's I think kind of cool about it is there's all this cool stuff that happens inside some of these companies and in Silicon Valley and it would kind of be cool to share that the things that they've learned to like Robin Hood to steal from the rich and give to the not rich and you know like in a way like part of the idea with sharing the design sprint was like let's share the best techniques because a lot of the design sprint stuff was kind of boiled by sprint was kind of boiled down from the way Google worked like some of the things I thought about the culture were the best and trying to kind of formula that and I think that similarly like when you guys work with companies in Silicon Valley you can maybe like bring some of the things that you see that work well and of course not everything works well but bring some of those things that work really well to other places you know because working in both environments it's actually pretty rare are there that many folks you can work with who have the experience of doing both we're the only one by AJ and smart and I mean actually the other thing I was going to say is there was a few things I thought of one is like I think it would be interesting for you to talk about how you started that because you know you're actually like you're running this agency in Berlin now okay sure you've got these clients in California but like it's not an obvious growth path that's true it's like Berlin to Silicon Valley I think for me honestly the reason AJ and smart works in Silicon Valley is because I wanted that to happen for me it felt like a way to highly differentiate AJ and smart from other agencies would be having clients from Silicon Valley working on well known products and I thought that there wouldn't be much point trying to compete just like within Berlin or within Germany or something like that and I was always excited about it and I don't know I wanted to like expand my product knowledge and all of that kind of stuff and the first client we had was actually Udacity that the company that makes all the kind of cool courses this was like a relatively long amount of work to get that client the very very first Silicon Valley client it took a while for us to be able to make that happen how did you make the first contact Berlin and San Francisco does not overlap that not not at all except for this podcast really this is the only connection point you know I'm a bit of a schemer and I've talked about this before I've heard that you were so like usually first thing as I said I wanted it I wanted American clients that was my first target you gotta want those American clients I wanted those American clients I wanted more than anybody what got me wanting American clients was going to this conference called 99 U in New York and the level of discussion here is something like I want to be more involved people were excited about what they were doing people loved their job designers were just they knew so much more than me and I was like fuck I want to know this I want to have this level and two years before maybe three years before I'd met this guy called Dustin in a another conference the reason I met him was because I decided to skip the conference because it was so boring and I was hanging out at a bar with Michael having a drink and this guy was there with his laptop we're in Germany and this guy was clearly not German he was Canadian he was like are you dude supposed to be at the conference too and I was like yeah but it sucks and so we chatted with this guy for a while and he was like traveling around the world and his dream was to move to Silicon Valley and I was like fuck you know that would be really amazing so he visited me a couple of times on his digital nomad world trip and I was just always like really nice and friendly and you know always a very accommodating hanging out with him and stuff wow that must have been hard for you I know man I was always like you know letting me use our workspace as well at AJ and smart because I was like also we don't have so many connections to the western hemisphere whatever it's called finally I saw that he got a job at this company called Udacity I contacted him because I saw that Udacity was based in the Bay Area and I was like is there like anything in there that you could see that a company like us could do and it took approximately one and a half years of on and off conversations with him and with his superiors and with other people in the company doing one or two free things as well just to kind of prove that a company from Berlin is worth bothering to even talk to actually the reason I was coming to San Francisco if you remember was because I was coming to speak at the Udacity conference and that was then the first time I actually went to Silicon Valley and that was the door opener that was like the beginning of it was working with them then we did a sprint with them maybe three months later so this is interesting because that was you came to do that talk in that conference like early 2017 right yeah February 2017 we're in 2018 this is not like a decade ago no not long ago like a year and a half ago so it's a really long burn to thinking about that idea and then getting your foot in the door so to speak I spend so long on these things man as soon as I got really into the design sprint when's the 99 you conference about six years ago I think six years ago okay slow burn to that Udacity connection but then since then yeah and then obviously like I'm very aware that like I never think about okay we're doing this project now obviously we have to do a good job but my goal here is to make sure that I'm really making good connections with these people and they see that I'm a person who's reliable and can make them more successful so I made really good connections and good friends with a lot of people working at Udacity and because of those connections I now have one of the big clients which I think would have been basically impossible to get to without that connection because we're too far away it's just like it's that we're just too far away and the other big Silicon Valley company that we're working with is because of you as well so the second door opening was meeting you it wasn't like a side thing oh I'll meet Jake when I'm over in San Francisco there was like a big initiative within AJ and Smart to figure out how to get GV and you to somehow somehow be connected with AJ and Smart but we didn't know we just knew like for us GV was the only company we thought was doing design well because we're really like specific and blunt about the way we work and we were like okay if we want to model ourselves off anybody it's like GV the way they talk about themselves and the kind of process stuff and so GV was definitely like the only company we had when we were like benchmarking and thinking about where we wanted to go even though we didn't even bother thinking about any of the investment stuff which is the main part of it GV without the money yeah GV with no money that's AJ and Smart okay and also no investing and none of that other stuff and since then obviously you know we've been doing a lot of work together you have connected me with loads of companies my connections at Udacity have connected me with loads of companies and then those companies spread and also super important people forget that people leave companies all the time right so don't be a piece of s*** that's just so important like yeah that's a big deal I mean that is a big big deal hey everybody welcome back to this podcast listen one thing that I need to give you some context on is that I've been sitting in this room now it's a different we're doing the outro is in a different location we're crazy here at AJ and Smart it's so hot in this room that I've gone completely insane so I can't even I can't even do the simple sentences that I'm supposed to be doing but look if you liked this snippet from the podcast I guess this is what it is make sure you just check out the real podcast it's actually called Jake and Jonathan now it used to be called the product breakfast club if you want like kind of every Monday podcast kind of that kind of stuff and I actually can't think so here's the thing right we have so much we have so much content coming out all over the place it's even hard to keep up subscribe to this channel for videos every Tuesday subscribe to the podcast Jake and Jonathan for episodes every Monday check out our Instagram at AJ smart design Monday to Friday videos of behind the scenes of this agency and just believe in yourself that's all I ask I thought that would go more towards the camera bye bye everybody