Andrew McClintock: You sent me the “Cult of Done Manifesto” — I love the speed of technology and the speed of the operators that work inside of the industry of technology who move like the speed of light. It's just so different from cultural production.
Soleio: One, thank you for being willing to play ball on a dime because I find that it's more sporting that way. [...] You're sort of saying what you believe to be true. The cultural difference for me I remember experiencing firsthand living in London where there is a little bit of a different cadence. I noticed in my first month there, professionally, people were surprised that I was sending emails back so fast and kind of creating this "the ball is constantly in my court" energy. So I recognize that I think tech is really comfortable with the idea of just kind of getting on with it.
Andrew McClintock: Speed as a moat is important as well. And as an early-stage investor, the speed of you moving is probably extremely important to you being part of some of these transformational companies.
Soleio: I think part of it is that being an investor requires building conviction rapidly. And I hope that founders that interact with me just appreciate that clarity of opinion and that I'm comfortable disposing a bad idea quickly in favor of a better one if the information presents. And that's my general bias — I find that most teams struggle because they lose energy, they lose momentum, and that's often downstream of losing speed, just losing this bias for speed. So clock speed is something that I look for in every team that I back, because I think it's really hard to teach.
Andrew McClintock: Why don't we do a really quick highlight background on yourself, because the audience here is a blend of art, culture, and tech.
Soleio: I started off my career as a music major in undergrad at Duke University and on the side, on nights and weekends, I spent a lot of time on computers making things on the internet. At that era there weren't any real career paths there, and yet the web itself as a medium felt so really ripe with potential. And there was something wonderfully egalitarian about it, just how scale-free it was — something that I found so remarkable. [...] I ended up moving out to California in 2004 as a self-taught designer and developer, in large part because it felt like this was the place where people were making the internet. After moving out here, I met a team down in Palo Alto working on a college-only social network called Facebook. And I figured I'd try that out for one year, and one year became six.
Andrew McClintock: And you were at Dropbox for a little bit as well.
Soleio: Yeah, it was a fun tour of duty. I left Facebook in 2011 and was helping support a variety of startups as an adviser and investor. Dropbox was one of those companies and that spiraled into a full-time job and I was there for two years helping build that group. [...] I was really passionate about design tools and design education when I left Dropbox. I was an early backer of Framer and Figma. I've been really supportive of the design industry at large trying to find ways in which I can support design by making sure that it plays a key role at the most consequential companies.
Andrew McClintock: What do you think about the future of generative UI and UX, and how that's moving more towards not component building, but system building?
Soleio: I've always been a proponent of designers shipping their work. And the advent of these new technologies has blurred the lines on what any individual contributor can actually produce from their computer. The key beneficiary is an archetype I've always held dear: the designer who is really comfortable with being accountable for getting work out the door. Not knowing how to code is no longer an excuse. You now have tools that can build themselves and explain themselves to you with a high degree of precision.
For me, at least originating from my time at Facebook, there is this idea that speed is paramount — and not speed strictly for its own sake but speed as a means of learning quickly. If you ship an idea fast, it is out there in the world. It's learning things. I find that the iteration loop is one of the things that's most wonderful about software, and the tools have never been better. It kind of moves people away from being precious about their ideas, and instead being bold about presenting them, putting them out there. I think it's good for the soul to be more capable than less capable.
Andrew McClintock: You said on your show First of Kind that “Cursor is a spirit guide living inside your VS Code.” How did that sit with you afterwards?
Soleio: It really is ultimately this tool that shortens the path between your ideas and the production of those ideas. What I've always appreciated about Ryo Lu's approach to Cursor and how he talks about it is that it shouldn't feel like a black box. It shouldn't feel like you throw an instruction over the wall and a unit of work comes out the other end. Instead, it should be clear. You should be able to scrutinize it and more importantly understand it. And in my mind that to me is what I find is most akin to a spirit guide. It is that understanding that strengthens the creative process.
Andrew McClintock: That's a good segue into taste. Something you said — the monopoly of humans on taste is overrated.
Soleio: I would happily go on record as saying that humans do not have a monopoly on taste. And I think it's folly to believe that. In my mind, taste is a byproduct of selection. It sort of goes through this Darwinian process in your head, on your computer, with your hands, sometimes with your colleagues. But that process is gated on our waking hours, right? I think the average person underestimates the brute force that these agentic systems will have. [...] When AlphaGo first made its impression on the Go community, what I'll never forget was the visceral reaction they had to its style of play. It opened up their minds to pathways and strategies that they had never previously considered. Independently they described it as alien. But they also embraced this idea that the game of Go is much vaster. There are territories we haven't even stumbled into. And that vastness in my mind is the hidden realm of taste.
Andrew McClintock: Is that sort of what you saw in Wabi, giving users the ability to make their own apps in this ecosystem?
Soleio: The thing with Wabi that I was struck by was this idea — once it was pointed out to me it was dead obvious — that so much software follows an economic logic: any software that deserves to exist has to have this many users, this big a market, etc. And I love this idea of inverting that logic on its head. A total addressable market of one is sufficient. Even if it's just a little doodad that makes one person happy, then so be it. [...] And this basically takes that impulse of "I just need a little touchstone, a little token to give me meaning," and now you can breathe it into life through Wabi and be unapologetic about how personal it is.
Andrew McClintock: Anything that you're super excited about recently?
Soleio: Of late, I've just been really fascinated with the topic of luck. I think that it's one of those topics that the West has fallen adrift from and that most people assign luck as a bad thing — like somebody says "I was really lucky" in almost a guilty way, like an apology. I've come to realize that in a world where people may experience less and less agency as we go through this huge technological shift, I think it's our responsibility to reframe luck — to give people not just a mindset but a geometry for luck, resources for understanding its structure and how to generate good fortune.