Steve Nash
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Steve: [00:00:00] everything was flying. We won awards. , growth year after year. But then things were slowing down.


CEO would get frustrated at the. Movement of things and try and get more involved which to us felt micromanaging so that point we just said here's what we think the solution is. It wasn't the easiest conversation because his baby And, you're kind of saying, let go of the leads a bit and empower people it worked and that was our step towards product centricity. 

Jeff: Welcome to LaunchPod, the show from LogRocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today, we're talking with Steve Nash, director of product for GumGum, An ad tech platform that matches brands and consumers through AI powered data and media solutions. In this episode, Steve talks about how to tell your CEO he's wrong and not lose your career. The story behind Playground's transition to product centric culture and the pace of innovation and a lock for the team

and why unifying behind Playground as the attention company led to their successful exit and acquisition by GumGum. So here's our conversation with Steve.

Hey Steve. What's up man? Good to have you on the show.

Steve: Hey Jeff. Thanks for having me. [00:01:00] Really great to meet you.

Jeff: Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. It's we've talked online, but it's I'm excited. I think you're our first Australian guest on the show and really stoked to go through some of the cool product stuff you've built throughout your years in ad tech.

This could be fun.

Steve: Sounds good. Yeah. Hopefully first of many Australians. There's a lot of talented Australians.

Jeff: Oh, I know so many Australian founders but let's dive right in because, you're over at a company called gum gum.

But, your road to getting there, you had actually been very early on at an Australian kind of ad tech company called Playground XYZ. You guys grew that up from nothing. But before you got to, that kind of point of acquisition, the road was not all paved in gold and smooth.

You guys, had a quick start and then hit some bumps, but it sounds like the way you solved it was taking a look at it and going, we really need to focus the company on. This view of product and a much more product centric view. Can you maybe just walk us through what was going on?

How'd you grow it? And then [00:02:00] what led to that kind of point of conflict where you had to really take product to the max there?

Steve: it was fun and it was a challenge. And yeah, we started I was the founding employee, first employee tech guy, CEO operations person. And we all hit the ground running building this kind of ad tech platform that was all based on new creative canvases.

Cause at that time it was 2016. The problem was everything was just inherited from desktop. So we had this. I don't cook thing to bring it to life and make it cool and mobile centric. And that all worked. And, we built all this cool stuff. We built all this cool tech. We all had backgrounds in kind of ad tech.

So we knew what we needed to do. And yeah, everything was flying. We won awards. , everyone was rocking and rolling and growth year after year. Team was growing. We're all having fun. Living the dream kind of thing, but then it got to a point where we're hiring more people and things were slowing down.

And then I think what happened was that the CEO would get frustrated at [00:03:00] the. The movement of things and he'd want things to go faster and then try and get more involved and try and get more hands on, which kind of to us felt micromanaging and then we would got our backs up and we were felt micromanaged and Hey, what's going on?

Why isn't this working? And then also the CEO, because we'd grown so much was also. So it wasn't always there. So we'd gone from this point where we're, four guys in a little office to this bigger company, like 30, 40 people. And things just were a bit. At that time I wasn't talking to that many product people. 

I've been involved in UX and, I could code and design and stuff. My background's in design and I'm passionate about design creativity, but , I didn't really have that. Expert level product thinking. And so at that point things are broken and I just remember reaching out to a friend of mine who was my former manager and kind of a mentor.

Steve: And I was explaining to him what was going on and how frustrated I was and all the problems. I always remember it because [00:04:00] it was just like a pivotal moment in kind of the company, but also my career. Where he's like, you need to just know that this is a pretty common thing. Yeah, most startups go to rapid growth and then this thing happens read this book and it was inspired by Marty Kagan.

And yeah, I'd never read it up until that point, even though I was in that sort of role doing that sort of thing. And then when I read it, it was basically a case study of our company and all these little quotes and I sent them to the CTO at the time. We were like, this is what we've got to do. And I was all in on it.

And it seemed like all the answers were there. So that point we just took it to our CEO and said here's what we think the solution is. We sat down, had a discussion about it. It wasn't the easiest conversation because it's that thing like the CEO , it's his baby and he wants to grow it.

And, you're saying, let go of the leads a bit and kind of empower people and all that sort of thing. So it's not the easiest conversation but it was one that [00:05:00] they're open to. And we all got behind it, I put some decks together and talked about it to the team and then we gave it a go.

In like a, like the thing that he always recommends, like a little kind of a little tests kind of team and then roll it out to the wider team. And yeah, it worked and that was our step towards product centricity. 

Jeff: I'm curious as much as the details of, the actual movement of product centricity, you brought up The actual conversation cause it's one thing to be a CEO it's another thing to be the founder, CEO, and now having the team come to you and basically say, this isn't working.

How do you go about having that kind of conversation with, a CEO and basically say you're holding on too tight or, in some cases, maybe it's not tight enough. But in this case, it was tight. But how would you recommend if someone else was going to go and talk to, a founder CEO like that?

How do you make it not a bad conversation?

Steve: Yeah, that's really interesting.

Jeff: you on the spot here.

Steve: nah, that's awesome., he's the type of person , that is like in the trenches [00:06:00] and has these kind of. conversation like, let's go to war. Like we need to do this together and fight, fight.

And so we, we were all in it together. The pivotal moment for me was someone. Sat across the table from me and said you're the CEO's pencil. You need to change that.

Otherwise it's never going to work. And so I knew for me I had to have this conversation regardless. Because otherwise there wouldn't be a career for me here. Or it would be very challenging moving forward. So I knew I had to do it and I knew it wouldn't be the most comfortable thing in the world.

The best way to do it, to answer your question is what I did. I knew I had a closer relationship with the CTO at the time and I tested it with him. I was like, Hey look at all this stuff. I think this is our answer and you bounce the idea off of these other people and also to my team.

The thing I believe in as well is it's all based on kind of trust and being in the weeds with your team and they were feeding up these [00:07:00] frustrations and at the time they were just building things that they were told to build and they were You know, I asked, why are we doing it?

And they don't know. And they're just like I was told to do it. I don't know. And then, I had this kind of these people who are senior in the company who think it should happen. And then also my team who are frustrated and dunno what's happening. And then all the data and evidence to say, look, I think if we make this change.

I think there's a path forward and we've got all this evidence. What do you think? And he is a CEO of a business that's his baby, but he was open to it and then we did move forward and it's not just drop everything and do everything completely differently. It's let's test the waters.

Let's try some things. I'm going to. Give you a little bit of autonomy now she and over to you and then yeah we slowly made momentum and started getting a little bit of trust and making sure, then I go to the team and say this worked, but we've got to, we've got to send it back.

We've got to make sure that we're not given this thing and we just , make the CEO kind of think this didn't work. So we [00:08:00] have to live up to our end of the bargain and deliver on, things that are , valuable, feasible, viable for the business. I think that was the key buy in and data.

Jeff: It sounds like it's, gained buy in first from the kind of all the stakeholders who can be a part of it. Cause if you're going to have that conversation, make sure other people agree with you, I guess is a big part, but go in and like you said, I think it's important that you recognized where, your CEO is coming from, which is, this is something, he founded and it's his baby and no one likes their baby being called ugly.

So how do you come in and. So you said you want to have a rational discussion like, Hey, this is going to really help the business move forward. This is going to help these business objectives that we're maybe not totally optimized on right now.

And frame it that way, but also then give like a taste of success, right? Here's, come in with a process of here's how we can roll it out in a small testable way. Let's see if it works. Let's see if it does what we think it's going to do. Show a path to proving it out before you fully commit.

and then I love that. You actually brought it home, though, with we have to deliver it actually has to do what we're [00:09:00] saying is going to do. And we have to prove that it's not just, hot air and people complaining, but we have to show that by changing this, we're going to do better. So in the end, it's promise show a way to test that promise, roll it out more and scale it and then fulfill the promise.

And then You know, I think very few CEOs that are really great are going to be mad in the end if you make their business better.

Steve: Yeah, exactly. 

Jeff: So you guys came to this more product centric focus, which allowed you to, focus more on, the business outcomes and the big picture stuff you were trying to solve and gave.

The team a little bit more ownership over the pieces they were driving a little bit more, empowerment, I think might be what Marty Kagan would call it to go and get the pieces done. They need what did that lead to? Like, where did that take you guys over the next bit of time after that?

Steve: Yeah. , it was the rocket fuel like I needed for me just to drive my next part of the career. And like me feeling like confident that there's a strong home here and I can do some cool stuff. And then as I was telling my [00:10:00] teams, I could see them being excited about it and them wanting more.

And then like just the makeup of the team and the structure of the business at the time we had lots of really cool opportunities so like it's ad tech, and you probably know like ad tech when someone puts an RFP out or a brief they don't want the thing that they bought last time.

They want something new. So there's always this demand for something new. And then that turns into an opportunity for kind of us as product people to say, Hey let's like build something I didn't ask for. That's the best way we can prove it. Like, we got this look at this thing that the sellers love.

And that's what we embarked on doing. And there's a, the number of these little, like we made little bets and and yeah, that, that was one way of proving that trust that, we can make these bets. The sales team loved them. They add to the value of the business and their types of the vision . I try to attend the sales meetings as much as I can, like after all that product centricity, trying to listen to the customers, the sales team was a conduit to the customers [00:11:00] and that, that's the best way of doing it. And also ad tech and ad sales.

It's a lot of, it's relationship driven. So trying to look for the signals in conversations and stuff , but what happened in 2020, I think when COVID hit us brands got really conservative and they stopped spending on weird and wonderful things like we had a playground.

And they wanted to focus on the kind of standard, like social media and the tried and true things. And then I would go to these meetings and everyone would have their camera off and I wasn't even sure if they were even there. And at the time we had one of our bets that someone had pitched was like it wasn't for COVID, but they hated the idea of us, like our design team making these really cool ads that are like games.

And then someone like squishes it into a gif and then they resize and it's all wonky. And then we're in a meeting and nobody even sees it or plays with it. You don't even get the fun part. So we had this idea of building our own presentation system.

As the seller's talking about one of our [00:12:00] products, we actually deliver it to the person's phone.

And that's cool because like we, the problem was they weren't engaged. We send them to their phone and they're playing with it. They test our products, they're having fun and we know they're actually on the app because we get to see the analytics and it wasn't a huge Kind of pivot or anything but it was just one of those cool little things we did that, uh, push this to, to know, like the, there's the extra level where the CEO can let us do our thing he can rely on us to deliver.

to our sales team and he could focus on the next thing and a broader vision. And we were working towards this attention kind of piece. Yeah. A little bit there was really cool. And I still use it today and present and people find it amazing. And it's like, they say, it's I've never attended a presentation like this is so interactive and fun and it turns into revenue.

Those are the little things help to develop that trust because every business always gets that [00:13:00] point where it's like revenues dropped, what are our 10 strategies and it's not just product that has the answers there, right? Like it's marketing and all these different parts of the business and they will have to have an answer.

I always wanted to go in with an answer and things that I wanted to make rather than try and get told to make things. So that framework really helped us. Pull that together. Oh.

Jeff: I feel like we could have an entire episode just focused on this story right now. Because there's just so many layers to it, to unpack one, this is a direct outcome of, if you had been in the kind of old paradigm there of the CEO telling everyone exactly what to do and people going, I don't know why we're doing it.

We're just, we're doing it. Cause we're told to do it. Probably no way. That would have gotten done because he wasn't in that meeting or those set of meetings. I'm sure he has a great vision and you know at some point or some level You want a ceo who knows what products should be doing for some set of the big picture stuff?

Because you need that vision to run the company correctly. But there is [00:14:00] also these kind of other pieces that maybe There isn't view into, so you need that level of autonomy to be able to react and go,, I was in the situation, I saw this and I see a way we can bring a better path forward.

And you had the autonomy to do that. But beyond that, I also just love as a product leader, you're on customer calls. I've worked in ad tech back in the day and advertising and, , you're not just diagnosing, Oh, no one cares about the new feature we launched or something, or you're not telling them about the new feature launch, but you're sitting there going, I see a problem that we can solve through a solution that we can bring forward.

And we had a dinner two nights ago in Austin in Texas, and we had, Uh, g who does way and his wife as an A and they just published a book on product, but one of the big conversations I had with as an A who's a very successful CPO and in her own right was it's kind of idea that there is like product management and then there is product thinking the same way, like design thing, he became very popular.

And. Almost every function can use product thinking. And this is one of those cases where, maybe it wasn't product management, but it's product thinking, where you looked at it when there's a better [00:15:00] way to solve this problem of people being a little bored and not engaged in presentations. And we can solve the big business picture, which is we want to sell Solutions to customers, right? 

I love that, you saw the big picture problem, not the small picture problem of we want to sell stuff and to do that, we need to not just make a better feature.

Jeff: We need to make a better way to show them the feature. So you kind of identified this and said, we're going to do this. We're going to show you the aha moment before we even build the feet, before, aside from the feature itself.

You have a case where that worked really well or what did that allow you to post that?

Steve: in terms of the presentation system in terms of what we were able to deliver for the company like the whole team was taking it out and having great times and it was all fun and stuff. And for me personally it was my entry point into kind of almost selling these things myself.

I'm a big believer in storytelling and stuff. I wouldn't say. Like I, I use this tool and present and I like to tell the story of our products so I can know what [00:16:00] we should be pitching and then hear what's coming back and ask those questions.

So it's not just listening, but also telling that story. And then even to the point where the sellers here like like me to do it. And they say it has more authenticity cause you're not a salesperson, you're a product person. And I'm also really passionate about it, so it works. But yeah for the product team that like all of those things together, like we've got the products that work. We've got a tool that kind of makes 'em more exciting and interesting. I always remember from one of our sales people, which is I'm so glad you made this Nashie.

This is we're an attention company and our decks command attention now, that's perfect. And it was that like, it was the, it was like turning the volume up on our brand and in a different way. And yeah it's that thing that you were saying like, our CEO wasn't expecting that or thinking that but that autonomy and those bets led us to that thinking and doing that thing.

And yeah, he had more time to work on other things and he's a kind of product person as well in a way, and we could build multiple products. [00:17:00] And then it was something I gave autonomy to one of my team members to do one of my PMs. And so I was stoked because she actually delivered the whole thing and did like all this storytelling stuff.

Jeff: Like we always talk about it with our team and they did the Steve jobs, one more thing. And they presented this thing to me and I'm like, wow. And so I think if I'm excited. Our sales team is excited, like the whole thing's going to go great. And yeah, it all started from that thing of just, . Give us a little bit of more autonomy team gets excited. Let's make some bets. And then the team's like in control of their destiny and they're passionate and they're focused and they want to build things in their spare time for the company, which is like, pretty cool. If you can get it to that point. 

You crystallized it really there in just a couple of words. We're an attention company and now our decks even, draw attention, right? Like if you're a design firm and your website looks like trash. Why would anyone ever hire you?

Jeff: If you are saying, what your company does is we [00:18:00] build solutions that command attention for you, but yet you're sitting there with a deck that everyone's falling asleep during and you're not really selling the proof that like, no, we know how to draw attention.

So why, would they believe you , on the feature side? , but by just crystallizing it that simply, everyone has the clear mission now of what you do. And now, like you said, it was, you had a member of your team who was able to do that. And maybe your team was able to do something else.

And I always joke with the folks here, half joke, half serious. With the folks here at log rocket about, we want to be very crystal clear about what we're trying to accomplish. We want to be very crystal clear about why your part ladders up to that. And it's not because, I want to be super nice and, consensus driven, everything like that.

I think there's times sometimes you can't be consensus driven, but what we need to do is we can't live in a world where it's three executives thinking about the big problems and everyone else just being like you said, the pencil, because then you only have three, somewhat hopefully intelligent people thinking about something we're going to do so much better if we have 20, 30, 40, a hundred intelligent people thinking about these [00:19:00] problems and being able to bring solutions.

It's selfishly. I want everyone doing 

Steve: Yeah, totally. It's like missionaries versus mercenaries, right? You want them thinking about it before they go to bed and like walking in had this big idea. Like we had a guy who always came in and said, I had a big idea in the shower and that was his way. He started his day and it's just once you got that stuff, like that's the rocket fuel because you're getting work after hours kind of thing.

So yeah, I really love that. 

Jeff: Shower ideas. That's my favorite ideas. This is more about me than reality. But but so you know, you guys built this and then seems like another thing that kind of came out of this just better crystallization of what everyone's mission here was was this idea of the attention tracking for https: otter.

ai Where you guys are now, which is a part of gum gum, I guess let's roll back real quick. What problem was it set up to solve? Like, how'd you guys come to this and why was this the solution? And then how did this lead to, where y'all are now?

Cool tech, by the way, like everything you guys, as I went through and got ready for this episode, you, there's so much cool stuff [00:20:00] you've built. I could just nerd out with you for a couple hours on this. So unfortunately we're not going to do that. But but people should check this stuff out. It's pretty neat.

Even just academically for a marketer.

Steve: Yeah. And it's a really cool space. . So I guess the problem was like metrics at the time, like viewability. And click through rates. We built these canvases that were all really awesome, but that kind of didn't really hit those metrics, but it's because like they were old and they were built for different purposes and that sort of thing.

And so attention was developed to understand like people actually looking at the ad. Versus you can put it down the corner and it's viewable, but are people looking at it? Probably not. So it's that metric that's a better proxy for outcomes basically. And then yeah, we had this signal and people loved it.

And it was a big part of our company and that was, again, the CEO had time to develop that vision. And we split off and we had an attention business and he was able to drive that. And then I was looking at it from the creative angle our ads are highly interactive and people can just scroll right past [00:21:00] them or leave them in view or play with them because we came up with this kind of mechanic of a measuring the stay in play.

And so if you're as interesting, people are going to stay in play. If it's not, people scroll past and then we map it out on a graph. And when we started doing that, like we, we saw really interesting things. Like we could see visually this ad versus that ad. And my favorite one is a little bit.

Wild. It's like this one campaign. Same ad, same targeting, everything the same, but there was a, there was an image that was different and one of them was an image of a family and one of them was an image of a woman in a bikini and I, you can guess which way this is going, but people stayed and played on the woman with the bikini and We all know that this kind of concept in advertising works, right?

Sex sells basically but to visualize it and see it. What was super interesting and then it got us like I wasn't sure if that's a really that appropriate to share with advertise, but the, when I showed it to people, they were like, this is really [00:22:00] interesting because it's, it talks to not just attention and people looking at things, but what's the sort of attention we want to be getting as a brand.

So

Jeff: what kind of attention do you really want there?

Steve: Yeah, exactly. If you put if you make things flash or do these sorts of things, yeah, you can get attention, but isn't the attention you want. So that's what was really great for me because we built out this platform. Our teams and then we get all these insights and then that's the kind of rocket fuel for creative because we're not just talking about creative in isolation.

Isn't this like fun and interesting? It's look at the data, like people like this more than that. as a designer, like it backs up all the stuff you think about, like people like things that are like. Moving and people are, eyes are drawn to things, contrast, spacing, things that are like fewer words, attract more attention, lots of words, lose attention.

People love looking at people and all those sorts of things. So it's the most wonderful tool for our teams because [00:23:00] we can start using that data , to learn stuff. . And again, this is like all one of those bets that we just wanted to go a little bit deeper on that problem.

And someone developed this in their spare time and then it's turned into a full product. And now we take that to market and present it and share it with people.

Jeff: What I know this led to something else, but I just want to plug in what I love about this is like eye tracking and attention tracking existed at that point, right? But there's more to it than just.

The raw data itself for being able to see like the average is like where people looked it's. How do you connect that to actionable things that people can do, right? Like they looked at the woman in bikini over the family, but is that really the attention you want and Brandon gave. Your customers, the ability to make not just raw data decisions, but actually outcome based or decision based or business kind of focused KPI decisions about what are the things we really want to do and what do we want to achieve?

And they were able to have that conversation. It reminds me a lot of kind of [00:24:00] how we've looked to evolve LogRocket here, which is, we do session replay and analytics, and we've done that for since 2016, but the problem has always been. You might have, deal with a ton of high volume customers over in that tech space and it's, you can have millions of sessions a month and sure you have the data, but what are you gonna do?

Watch. 100, 000 sessions and manually map it out. And so that's where we realize the real benefit is not in the session itself. That's the raw underpinning, but it's how do you bring those insights forward the same way, right? What were they doing? Why were they paying attention?

You could say, Oh, it's the bikini versus the family. But do we really want them looking at the bikini? Is that who we want to be? Similarly, like you can have, their analytics tools before that showed you all your funnel drop from here to here of these four steps. But why? And maybe you could go watch, a hundred sessions, a thousand sessions and figure it out somewhat.

But, we built a tool that was able to watch those sessions for you and analyze the user flows and what was happening behind the scenes and use AI to pull out the salient and say, you have a bunch of people who are confused [00:25:00] because they're going around. They can't figure out what to click.

You should fix that at this step. You have, this is just physically broken, right? Like sometimes you just can't pick a shoe size on your site, but it's picking those few things out that you can focus on. And it tells you the things you need to pay attention to. Versus having to go watch a hundred thousand sessions.

It's surfacing insights and right. It comes back to, same thing you guys were looking at is how do we solve these customer problems, right? It's product thinking about the problem of people don't want to just see heat mapping on their ads. They don't want to just see a hundred thousand, 10 million sessions a month.

They want to know what does it mean? And you guys were able to surface that. This way through the ad tech, which is fantastic. I would love to know this data about, ads I'm running. Cause that would be so incredibly helpful.

Steve: Yeah. Run some ads with gum gum and we can do it.

Jeff: Yeah. Maybe that, that's benefit of hosting this thing is once in a while you run into something like I should be using your thing. So beyond that though, beyond this being a fantastic kind of. Tech move forward and ability to give your customers a lot more value. It sounds like it queued you guys up for the next thing, which, it leads to where [00:26:00] you are now, which is Playground was acquired by gum gum, which is an American based company, right?

Steve: Yeah. Gum Gum had a a contextual business and they were big in kind of high impact creative and yeah they love this attention sort of stuff and. Yeah. The idea and where we're going today is a product called the graph, which again, to solve the customer problem of at right place, but knowing people where people look at it all under the one roof, that data can tell those insights and give people guidance that.

Helps them with their spending in ways that they can't today. So listening to the internet and then also listening to how people respond. So how things like log rocket seeing those nuances and visualizing them and making it like returning insights to the brand.

And, this is about you, but this is what happens. And then letting them feel like they're making decisions and. And at the end of the day the kind of buyer just wants to feel like they've learned something, they've done something and how it's gone up. And yeah, like I think we do the same sorts of things.

The [00:27:00] thing I love about kind of LogRocket and SUSE solutions like that is that it's often the smallest thing that makes a big difference and it's a lot of it's kind of design based. And that's the thing that always I love, like the difference between function and kind of success is often the execution.

And I feel like all of these tools and stuff you guys are making and this sort of stuff is about getting. After that level where you can measure that and you can give insights on that and 

Jeff: Well, 

Steve: people.

Jeff: this is something think is really interesting to talk about. And I think it's an area you found interesting historically as well. How do you create things with her design view and have that kind of taste? to create things where it's laid out in an intuitive way that people can use it well, that people are going to come to the outcome that you want them to whether it be, you're delivering ads that, you don't want to be associated with sex sells.

So the bikini is not the right thing, even if it's going to draw more attention or you're buying shoes and we're able to say on an e commerce [00:28:00] site, people are confused and they're just clicking around a lot because they don't know what to do. That's not a technical problem. That's a like. Design taste problem of how do you create environments where people can easily figure out what you want them to do and take the data you want them and have the outcome you want.

And this is something I'm always so curious about. And you do have a design background. So maybe I can ask you what is your view on this? There's taste and it's so important to designing great products, great experiences, great, all of this great ad ads and ad copy as well. And ad visuals. What is the heart of taste , do you think taste is something we can all learn? Is it. Something maybe intuitive or, 

Steve: I love this. , people are drawn to different things and view things different ways. But , I always start with the Steve Jobs quote, like design is how it works basically. And it's kind of everything. And it's beautiful when you don't notice it and it's so wonderful that you just slip right through it and that's what we aim for.

But that is the most difficult thing. Sometimes, especially if you're trying to deliver new things because you're trying to disrupt things, but [00:29:00] make it intuitive. That's pretty hard building another shopping cart. You just make it you just borrow a stencil and do it, do the same thing and everybody will flow through.

But when you're doing new things, that's when it's crazy. And that's like I was reading yesterday. I don't know the story of notion. They had their background where they built their app. Like it was a guy that was really wanted to build an app about doing brain dumps.

And it was like feature driven but it didn't work. And then they all moved to Japan and they lived in Kyoto and they lived a life of very simple very simple life. And then the whole app is just about simplicity. I remove everything on the interface and let people communicate. And that was the, one of the key things that made it successful, Airbnb, like same sort of thing all of these kind of design based kind of founders or when people inject design into things and the taste factor, like it makes things not just beautiful, but wonderful and functional and different, like Airbnb, maybe.

It looks like nothing else out there. And I think that's the design thing. And that's why [00:30:00] it's so unique and wonderful. And yeah, I don't think that is something you can learn when we hire designers good at it or, not, you can learn tools and stuff, but if you don't have that design sense, it's not there.

And that's what I think is like so exciting moving forward because with AI and all this stuff and everyone's going to be making lots of stuff really fast. But having that design sense and having that taste is what's going to make your to do app stand out over someone else's to do app or things like that.

Jeff: , I heard it put once that taste is at some level, the ability to know that something's going to do well before you put it out and before you test it and before you have people use it , cause that applies much more than just like at some level, I think some people think like taste might be like, your picture or how you laid out your website or how you laid out your app, but it's so much more that if you think about design and taste is design thinking, it's how do you lay out a process?

How do you lay out the entire experience? In a way that like you as a business, you're an attention company, how do you lay out an experience that's going to [00:31:00] gain you the attention you need throughout your ad sales, right? So the taste of knowing let's make this interactive because the aha moment we need to have in their hand or taste is how do you enable your customers to use tools that you've provided to get, whatever their ad is out in a way that's going to drive attention for them.

That's really interesting that, at some level you think taste is it's just intuitive into the brain.

Steve: It's hard to define, but yeah, it really separates things and it's how we deliver those, and what we always try to focus on is like a surprise and delight moment. People don't expect it, but it's intuitive and they go through with it and they enjoy it.

And if you can deliver that on top of whatever function the app's trying to do then I think that's what success is. And yeah it's really interesting space design just generally, like I really love meaning designers or just experiencing things visually. Like the. Visual medium is just in terms of kind of apps and technology colors and how people think about problems and [00:32:00] display them in unique ways and how they solve them and make it so seamless and intuitive.

I, I don't know if you've used granola, that's my newest thing. And it's just. Just the most amazingly simple app. And , it was just so intuitive and it was in my system and done. And it just part of my workflow. And it was like, I don't even know how I like live without this. And it's just so simple.

And then it's not full of imagery or anything, but it's just. Beautifully simple and I love it.

Jeff: I guess it comes down to probably like, how do you have taste and taste is probably a little variable because it's, , how do you know how to create something that's going to resonate for the people you're trying to, build for? And it might be what is going to be in good taste for one persona group is going to be actually a really bad experience for others. 

Maybe taste is a little mobile as you move around and move through those sets. But I will say, I like the idea of surprise and delight. And one thing that surprised and delighted me was as, as we prefer this, just how much there was in the ad tech world and how much, you guys had like developed and changing some [00:33:00] cool stories that we're able to go through.

Jeff: I recognize I can't steal your whole day to talk about all this stuff. This has been a real blast, man. Hopefully we can have you back on some day, rehash some more stuff, talk more about taste. Cause I think there's a lot we didn't go into, but it's been a real blast having you on here. I know you said you like to talk to designers and all those folks.

Is there a good place for people to reach out to you? I know we met on LinkedIn. Is that the best spot?

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Steve national LinkedIn, not the basketball guy.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Not the basketball player, just the visionary product leader. And and but it was great having you on that. Thank you so much for joining and hopefully we can do this again.

Steve: yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for the time. And yeah, I'd really love to meet anyone interested in design and products. Yeah, please do hit me up. I'm in New York now from Australia missing some friends. So yeah, if you're around, I'd love to buy your beer.

Jeff: Nice. That's a pretty good offer. All right. Next time I'll in New York, I'll let you know. All right, Steve. Great to have you on. Thanks, man.

Steve: Thanks so much, Jeff. Speak soon.