Randy Hunt: Notion and Etsy design leader on why the best design teams stay small

Look, you're not going to come here and get some training in career path. This is not about what level you get to. We don't talk about titles or levels internally on this team. You're here to be on the team and make stuff happen. You want to compensate you fairly for doing that. We do great work. We're all going to win together. Like, let's go. This is about building stuff. I think I really like sell that idea and that vision and then do it. In graduate school, Randy Hunt poured his heart and soul into a poster for Milton Glasier's class. It was a picture built entirely from hand lettering that read as an image from across the room and as words up close. Glasier glanced at it and said, "Well, that's not very good." And moved right onto the next student. It's brutal. Randy tells that story fondly. What stayed with him wasn't the sting, but the standard. Keep the floor high and the ceiling keeps rising. He carried that idea from Glasier's studio where he apprenticed. After a career leading design at Etsy, at Grab and Singapore, and until recently at Notion. At Notion, that standard meant a design team smaller than anyone would expect on purpose. Randy argues that limited bandwidth forces a company to prioritize and that great people have little patience for what he calls "the work" around the work. The team doesn't talk about titles or levels. Designers' ship code in the production app, something Randy built teams around at Etsy in 2010, long before design engineer came back into fashion. We also get into what he calls "whole design" which means treating a push notification with the same care as the main dashboard. He explains why hotels and restaurants inspire him as much as any software and traces that back to growing up in your Disney's carefully spaced trash cans in Orlando and to the bowl of fresh fruit that always sat in Milton Glasier's studio. This is Design Better where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology, Jaime Lowellery, and I'm Aaron Walter. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break. Hey, it's Aaron. If you only listen to the podcast, you're missing the best part of Design Better. That's our community. Annual members get access to our private Slack with talented designers and former guests, Brad Frost, Bob Baxley and Meredith Black. Slack members share their work, they trade feedback, and they help each other find jobs. Every other Wednesday, Eli and I meet with members on Zoom for Design Club. We critique work, we do a show and tell, and we talk through career questions with expert guests. Members also get ad free episodes, our weekly newsletters, our full ebook library, and job alerts. All for just $72 a year, which is just $6 a month, and pro tip, most companies will let you expense it. You can learn more and become an annual member at designbetter.com/join. 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And now, back to the show. Randy Hunt, welcome to Design Better. Thanks for having me. Randy, you're someone I've known for a little while now, and we last crossed paths in New York. I think we were at a work and co-function and caught up and chatted. You've got a lot of really interesting experience in your background. We've been at Etsy, you're currently at Notion, and SVA, School of Visual Arts in New York, leading a department there. But let's start from the early days. You actually apprenticed with Milton Glazier before any of these big company chapters that I'm alluding to. What did you learn from that experience that you carry around? You know, I think the parts of Milton Glazier that will endure most is almost him more as his philosopher, and almost like communication philosopher, you know, there's this, how people feel about things, how they respond to things, and how things opt to be, you know, and take away some of those things. The other is maybe the simplicity of the operations there, actually. It's like really lasting cultural impact, incredibly serious body of work, but the whole operation is pretty straightforward. You know, it's a relatively modest studio in its size, Milton very much kind of like creative directed everything, like it is very close to the work, my very much a crafts person. He was very consultative with his clients, and that was something that was really new to me when I was there. You could like hear him on the phone talking with a client and talking through things, and he was a very confident, I would say both thought partner and like business partner to his clients. It's that same kind of almost like communication philosopher thing, but channeled in a very particular way that was really effective, it seemed effective, and I think that definitely helped me round out a perspective on what really explaining or selling design is like. There was a certain flavor of client engagement or a partner engagement that they were very much on the same team in a way, where they had the same goals. Milton was very persuasive because he would have strong conviction about how the work would help achieve the goals. What was he like as a person, and you said that he was also one of your teachers, how did he talk about your work? A lot of these things kind of lured together over time, but then certain things stick out, right? One of the things that sticks out, as I just remember, I didn't even have the context of this assignment, this is a very graphic design assignment, I effectively designed some poster with a lot of hand on lettering, and in fact all of this lettering, this is not a new idea. So if all this lettering was composed in such a way that it too was a larger illustration, so if you looked at it, it was a picture, if you were to walk up close and look at it, it's a bunch of writing, it's kind of the idea, right? And I remember, I worked very, very hard on it, it was a very labor-full kind of idea, and then I remember just pointing to it and being like, "Well, that's not very good." Either you just moved on to the next verse, not as if he was that dismissive all the time to everything, but I think there was truly a kind of like, "We will give time." There's sort of a floor, like a quality floor to the things in which we're going to like give time to. And so in some way that felt almost like a teach to the top of the class kind of behavior or something. I mean, that landed well with me, even though that moment sounds funny and maybe hard, because I've come to appreciate this as maybe many chapters over a professional life. Really good people just thrive being around other really good people. There's other environments, not the only way it can work, of course. But gosh, you just put five or six incredibly good people around each other, especially if they have reasonable control of their, like, ego, you know, I'm like, "Well, yeah, that is the fire." You know, to see people who are incredibly good getting better because of that environment, there's appreciation for like keeping the floor really high so that the ceiling can get higher. I think some of those scenes were planted then. We had Debbie Millman on a while ago, and then she wrote about experience she had in his class where he asked students to write a five-year plan or maybe a 10-year plan. And for her, it was amazing how much of that ended up coming to be. Did you go through that exercise, I'm curious, or did that part of his philosophy influence you? Yeah. Different class was kind of a different purpose. I'm aware of that. I think many people have had a really transformative experience in that vision setting exercise. That kind of exercise in the context of, like, a design education or any kind of professional practice, kind of education, was pretty novel at the time Milton was doing that. These are almost methods that come out of other disciplines of coaching or even therapy, or they're coming out of somewhere else that hadn't at that point seeped their way into something that might feel more common in design practice. So I think it was quite innovative in that way. I think it related probably to some of his personal life. I mean, he had a deep interest in like Eastern religion. And stuff, I don't know if he was really like practicing or not, but in things he would reference the femura he would collect and things like that. So that made its way into, I think, Coward was on the teaching decisions he made. You grew up in Orlando, which is sort of an interesting place for a childhood. And you ended up in New York, which is where you are today. You've also worked in Southeast Asia, like in Singapore. How much does place shape the way that you see design problems? Design always happens in context, so that's what they must. But I think that one is the people of the place. And that's why I always say my strongest factor is like how people behave, what their norms are. That's for the most impactful compasses we think then about design problems or opportunities or solutions. And that's why certain versions of paying attention, you know, whether it's deep ethnographic research and longitudinal studies or just like walking around the world with your eyes is opening. trying to see the world as it is, you know, rather than the way you want it to be. Or the only your parts of it. So I think that's one. The second is I think the aesthetic of a place or the identity of a place. I think has an impact on you, a place like New York draws a lot of people to it because of some characteristics, you know, and things like that. The third I think is then at a very much more personal level is like where do you derive your inspiration and energy from? And I think the physical environments have a huge impact on that. I mean, from your desk set up, you know, to what you see on your morning walk to who you have daily interactions with or something, those things that end up driving personal motivation and inspiration. So I think, you know, location impacts all those things. Design better is brought to you by Masterclass. For years, I treated design reviews like debates, thinking if my rationale was sharp enough, I figured I'd win, but I kept losing to leaders who just didn't like the direction we were heading. Here's what changed that for me. Nobody can hear your argument until they feel heard. So now before I defend anything, I try to identify the concern out loud. It sounds like you're worried that we're gonna push the launch back. 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With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at MintMobile.com/switch. A upfront payment of $45 per three month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate for three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full turns at MintMobile.com. (gentle music) And now, back to the show. You've led design a lot of places like Etsy, Grab, and Notion. These are companies where design really shapes culture to a large degree. A lot of designers don't necessarily have that situation or luxury or however you want to think about it. What do you think when a designer's to do when the organization doesn't really value them or believe in them the way they might hope that design would be valued? I really struggle to answer this because the first party or statement is something that I've done very intentionally. And as I've sought out opportunities that felt like there would be good conditions under which to do good work. I've been very intentional in kind of my evaluation and like what I choose to invest in. And also the things that I say no to or don't engage with. Those conditions are like, oh, you've been very lucky. I mean, I do feel very lucky and fortunate. But what that means is I haven't really stepped into something where I'm either surprised that design is undervalued or appreciated. Like, you should have a pretty clear eyes on what I'm going into it. Or where it isn't. And I had to really wrestle with it. Now, what's interesting is that maybe Grab as an example was a little different. It really wanted design. It definitely needed it. It was willing to fund it. But I don't think that organizationally it knew what it meant to value it or put it to work well. You know, it's an interesting thing to be like, oh, we've allocated a budget. We've got a plan. I think this is important. And it's another almost like metabolize that. Yeah, you're like, I'll take the food, but I might like take in the nutrients. So maybe that gets closer to your question. I think that working examples of things and strong partnerships speak better than anything else, than trying to have some compelling story or pitch, or like, shape their perception through communication means I'd rather like shape it through the visceral reaction to something being very good. And I think those things are either successful case studies or working partnerships and relationships that are really valuable to see and getting people to speak on your behalf. And rather than saying like, hey, we need design to do this thing. You have someone else who's trusted, influential. It says, hey, I've been working closely with Brandon and his team and it's working this way. And it's good. We shouldn't do more of that. I would look for opportunities to create that kind of momentum or those kind of relationships like ground up more so than to try to like deliver it from the top or something. What makes smaller teams stronger than bigger teams? I think number one is lower communication overhead. So much gets lost in translation and trying to traverse just the layers of an organization. Even if everyone's a great system of mechanics of it that make that challenging. There's a bunch of other stuff that comes in. You know, every person is another set of interests and motivations and challenges and conflicts and things. The other is I think it's easier to hold, shared understanding. You can do more of the work itself rather than the work around the work. Once you start to get to like sort of scaled up things, you gotta do a lot of work around the work. Even tell people what the work is. We have extremely talented people. I have found that they have low tolerance and low patience for bullshit for the work around the work. We should just say the thing, agree on the thing and do the thing, go. When you start to get more people working that way is harder. Not only keep on a design team or cross-functional and things like that. It's good to have those small team experience and be like, okay, how do we protect this energy? Even if we do need to grow or add bigger teams or whatever. But I definitely have a preference for small over big. After doing many permutations of both, I think you may have used the word talent density to describe that. How do you hire for that or set up the right conditions for hiring for that kind of talent density? I mean, what is about clarity of intent and being really clear about that? Meaning this team will be smaller than one might expect by historical reference points or outside reference. That is intentional and that works. There's the bad version of this, which is the team's too small, doesn't have enough bandwidth. They get pushed to kind of the delivery end of a timeline of a project workflow. And you end up in this production engine mode. And that's kind of like a fail state. The other version, I think the better version, this is very much like the notion version. They say actually the constrained bandwidth is a forcing function for prioritization. And therefore the talent dense team, in this case like talent dense design team in the main particular, has a relatively other things that outsized influence on what we do by virtue of being the scarce resource that has critical participation both at the beginning and throughout the making of things. We can only ship as many things as designers can deeply participate in. There's just a natural tendency to want to have more and entropy and all the noise. But back to the other point, we talked about talent dense, reinforces the other aspects of the small team mechanics. You kind of got to get the flywheel going in that direction and then I think it works. This plays then into like hiring and talent and stuff as well because the people with a similar mindset see that and they're like, yes, please. So again, the flywheel kind of moves in that direction, put it in contrast. You know, there's another version of building and growing a team that almost looks like it's education. It's almost like this is a uplifting. talent development, bring less experienced youthful energy early career, often in larger numbers up, and you have mentoring, education, career progress, et cetera, by design, not can be done well. And you can have like a hierarchy that you can imagine the shape of can totally work. And I think we've seen very successful organizations do good jobs with enough nice legacies. But what happens then is there's a lot of work around the work to make that work well. There's your real like train offs there, and when you kind of assume that your team operates in a way without needing those things in the same explicit way, look, you're not going to come here and get some like training in career path. We don't talk about like titles or levels internally on this team. You're here to be on the team and like make stuff happen. We do great work. Like, let's go. I think you're really like sell that idea and that vision and then do it. I mean, that's the other part part. You're like, the other conditions around the team work such that that's true, meaning like the product organization at notion, the engineering organization, have been around this approach to doing the design practice and are for the most part very willing collaborators and accepting of that approach. If you don't have this isolated only in like a pocket of the organization, then try to interface with other people. It becomes very frictional because it's not the default way. It's not entirely unique to notion, but I wouldn't argue that it's somewhat rare. The idea of talent density is like, no, people latch onto these terms and circulate them around. I'm sure you can find 50 job descriptions today for some role that's open and they would say, we're a talent dance team, which I think they just mean they want to have people are good in the team small, but I just described a bunch of other stuff about those conditions that make it properly dense. When you have a talented, small, very capable team like that that's empowered, what are the top reasons why people leave? One is truly like next chapter of career and this is typically because they've accomplished a number of things before and then in the context, if you imagine like a notion or something, this sort of becomes the apex version of that version of their professional experience. It's kind of, okay, they've been designed to have a company, lots of good stuff, maybe they've found a small company that was acquired. We acquired them, you know, like, okay, they're doing this. This version of the role and it's like, okay, because they're so experienced, they're pretty deep in their career, but great at being close to the work, so executing and building. The way they reach a chapter change, you're like, okay, I've kind of done that for 20 years. There's another chapter. So this mode of working isn't like, now do that next chapter thing inside this organization. Like, now this organization kind of has one mode. I think another one I have seen, not so much in motion, but I think you lose conviction about the vision of the thing. And some other environments, I think there's more resiliency around something like that, because there's these other, like, culture ones, you're like, I'm learning so much, right? I feel indebted to this team because I'm mentoring them, you know, and that experience is meaningful to me. I want to continue that even if this other part is, I don't know, on the downswing for me or something in terms of its relevance or meaning. I think often in this talent, it's teams where you've attracted people who are like, vision got it. Let's go. It's pretty singular. You know, and so if the singular thing that you had to buy in a momentum on changes, you can feel like, I don't buy it anymore, you know, it's almost like a strategy vision misalignment. And then I would say the other is, like, when they see the opportunity to, like, build from zero builders and makers, that's why they're so good, and then sometimes people just have the itch to be like, all right, I got to do it from the ground again. So of those three reasons, only one of them is one that you really have some control over. Are there things that you've learned as a leader that tend to improve your ability to retain that talent density and those great team players? The experience of making things, getting it out the world and have people like it, is very sticky. It's like you reduce the friction around that as much as possible. Part of that is that limit the work around the work kind of thing. The other is give people both agency and responsibility. Again, these require experienced practitioners and gathering and trust them. You can just do things, but also when you do things, you're like, have a ownership sense about the thing you've done. You don't turn off great stuff and be like, have fun company, you know? And I think that when you maintain those conditions for quite some time, it's very extremely satisfying to people wake up and you're like, okay, let's do the sport today. It's kind of like pro level sports, but it's like, okay, let's do it. You put in the reps and you get this stuff out in the world and you get the like dopamine hit and you're like, okay, let's go. And then maybe it didn't land the way you thought or something's not sticking. Like wake up the next day and make it better. And I think that's like extremely helpful to allow people to have a space to initiate, drive, push through, get out the work, and then allow them to, and maybe it's like enjoy having the responsibility of making the stuff successful. What's changing around the parts of the product design process that a designer might own just given how all the tools are changing so quickly? So to get some context, Aaron and I have been building some internal tools using things like cloud code and it's pretty amazing what you can spin up. And in fact, right now we're using one of the tools that Aaron largely built to help run this interview. And we can imagine making this into sort of a consumer or public pacing product. But we haven't yet achieved that scale right now. It's just, I mean, I'm curious how this plugs into a company like Notion where you may have hundreds of thousands or millions of users and how does the role change, how does the process change with the tools right now? One part that I think is changing in some organizations, but hasn't changed all that much inside Notion, which is just the designer is being more technical and also shipping more code in the production application, really working in the production application. The reason I say hasn't changed much in Notion is we are working that way before coding agents and tools, just the flavor and shape of the team. Yeah, in fact, most of the teams may core skill set or close to their core skill set and preferred way of working would may be as well described by what is now a reemerging term of like design engineer or something. For years, I would just call it person a designer, increasingly I start calling the team a software design team. Actually, you know, like, okay, we understand how software is made and built and we're designing for software, the very technical, I think that's changing in lots of organizations or you see pushes for that to change, you know, design Twitter. That's the rage right here in like AI design conversation, everybody's doing that. But there are pockets of the profession that I think I've really been thinking and working that way for a long time. I very confidently talked about how long we've been doing that, you know, as a building a team that did exactly that, you know, at Etsy in like 2010, but I don't say that in the sense of like, oh, we were early or ahead or anything like that more that it's hard for me to imagine building a software product without doing that. It just always felt like the way even though I know there are many other people I do it other ways. It just makes sense to me and so we build teams around that idea, but I think that's changing in lots of places where even people who have not built that way are like, the seems like it's kind of the thing that maybe we should be doing so they're coming at it from another angle and then skill sets are changing, maybe they built a team with a different profile. The other is aspects of customer insights, aspects of positioning, aspects of even like go-to-market coms are also closer and more available to the designers. In the same way that lots of things are kind of blurry and edges, you know, if your product marketing team makes some skills that you can use with your AI agents, you can now quickly tap into some of the best practices from your product marketing team along the way of building your product experience, you know, and so this is a more integral way of working. I think that we've been able to dramatically reduce the amount of ineffective research and by that I mean research that has sort of done well from a research practice standpoint, but struggles to make its way into really impacting the product work in part because some of the kinds of insights of the things you might want or need are fairly light, they might be derived out of a pretty heavy process, but the insight is important, but maybe sometimes simple. And at this point, we can kind of ask these inside agents and like research agents that have access to all the context of historical research that people have done about the thing you're working on with a customer you're designing the thing for, what's been done before, why didn't it work? What did we learn about? Are there any customer interviews about this? And so a designer can quickly get some meaningful input in their process, kind of in real time, right? And she kind of, oh, I'm about to work on this. I wonder, I'm working with this thing. I feel kind of stuck. Have we ever talked to customers about this thing? But it used to be like a very slow process as the research team in Slack, oh, that person doesn't work here anymore. Oh, yeah, we never did finish that research repository that everybody wanted to like, you know, and you're like, now that's just kind of sitting there, you know, available. And I think that's allowed the designer to pull as much of that into their working process as they want more easily. It's actually what it used to be like when I think some designers were hesitant about the idea of touching code, but in attempts to do things like maybe I'm going to just build the front-end like handcode this, they also came to better appreciate the craft of what their engineering partners do. I think we're seeing a similar thing happen, actually, at least I'm like, I don't know, healthy cultures or organizations where you also respect craft. I get a UX writer, a team of one, we have no writer for, I mean, basically ever until maybe you're going to have for two years, you know, with the view that like well-rounded designers could deliver that kind of work, we chose to like invest in someone specializing in that, which is somewhat out of the common mode that they should, but their first job was to like make this UX writing agent so they can scale themselves in best practices, kind of self-healing, they kind of like are able to monitor and observe the recommendations of the agent's giving so they can also kind of tune it, you know, and help it improve. And fairly quickly, I mean, within like two months or something, we're getting a lot of feedback. This is my favorite agent. You know, I mean, for people all around the company, you're like, this is my favorite agent. You're super helpful. Also, it helped me understand what this person does. And I have a better idea of when to reach out to them to work on something. And there's something interesting happening there about what the kind of guidance that deliverable is and like sometimes when you need to get deep in it, the fact that you've done some other runs yourself at that same time. kind of work gives you an appreciation for the serious pros. So this is sort of shifting a little bit over to a more creative process and how it influences design and design work. A few years ago, we had Jonathan Heffler on the show, the typographer, and he talked about hospitality as being important to the way that he approached work. And it's interesting it sounds like you have maybe a similar philosophy as idea that a good design kind of makes sure everybody's cared for. When did that idea come to you? Maybe you could talk a little bit more about it. I think I probably started internalized and things like that, even from almost like my child and days growing up in Orlando. I didn't think about this at the time, but in hindsight, I think Disney and the theme parks really influenced me a bunch. It was very lucky to live in proximity to that, so we would go and experience those things. I think I love just how wholly done they were. And as I understand how and why that is over time, and I go, okay, wow, the rigor around how frequently garbage cans are placed such that it reduces the amount of likelihood of garbage on the ground. It's all kind of service, design, systems thinking, preempting the possibilities of aberrant human behavior or anticipating need out of existence. And those things are like, wow, that's really powerful. The other I would say it may be a more intimate level, but no less important, it actually goes back probably the leisure experience. Funny I didn't think that would come up, but there would always be like a bowl of fruit in the studio. Sometimes fruit and cheese would get delivered on like Thursday afternoon, and it sounds very like domestic and home-like and orange is very inviting. But the gift of fresh fruit or something is really powerful. It looks beautiful, it tastes great, it's nature beats us every time. I think that gesture of like introducing that to someone's kind of day or life is really meaningful. I think the other is sort of increasingly over time, you know, it has to do with urban environments you live in and like from time to time, maybe increasing them you start on, it's like restaurants are in hotels or something like that. You know, are there attached to hotels, find dining experiences, you start to encounter you travel a bunch, you go through airports, you start to see all these mechanics of how dealing with people work in these situations, see patterns of the ones that do it well and the ones that don't. And I find that very inspiring is kind of wholly considered experiences that have to do with like logistics and operations, but they're also very much about dealing. The hospitality experience you're kind of like hotels and dining are just incredible design experiences from inspiration from the environment. Yeah. Architecture matters, programming of the space matters, lighting matters. The typography on the menu sets the tone, you know, there's like all of these things that happen in those environments that are just really complete. I find it extremely inspiring. You also have this notion of whole design, it's an important part of the way that you see the work. Does that relate to how you think about hospitality or is that a different approach to design altogether? No, no, I think they're very much related. I mean, in a simple sense, like I think the whole design is really, this aspiration was pursued of literally trying to design like all of the things, it's just like every single touch point, every single angle, you know, to these professional lenses, somebody call that service design, or somebody look at that and just say it's really good brand work. I've worked a lot inside technology companies, so certainly like a software product is usually like the center point of a bunch of those touch points. But I think the example is an often work really, you know, the three lines between how people you discover a product or feature in social, what happens when you get a functional or kind of like service email from an experience, or a push notification that pulls you back into like the core digital experience. Those are all incredible product touch points, but also like brand touch points. Treating all of that is like the full canvas, you know, push notification isn't a thing to tell you about the thing. It's just as much of the design opportunity as a core screen when you log into the dashboard. That's all one thing. It makes all the word very fun to me too, it's a playground. So you're a fan of music and a musician yourself, is that right? Yep. And while back you had this dream of doing a documentary on Rick Rubin, who Aaron and I are both fans of as well, what were you seeing back then in 2013, as is before he had written his book on creative process that I've influenced or felt relevant to what you're doing? Today, Rick Rubin has got like very much like celebrity status and people reference all the time. You're like, oh, that's the Rick Rubin of this and you're like, I don't think it is actually at all. I just understand maybe how this person shows up in the world, but sure. They set it with a calm tone or the guidance was thing, but directionally correct and you liked it. Cool. Okay. You know, like sure. And in fact, I remain quite a fan and appreciate what he's doing today for the most part of quite a lot. So that's not the discredit of that. But when drew me to his work in a funny way, kind of like back to it, I think I didn't realize that I was like a fan of so much music that involved in until later. And I think that's probably just like late night Wikipedia diving as I still like to do. I mean, I love the depths of any of that stuff. Like I can spend two hours reading about the mergers and acquisitions that led to, you know, the Woolworth grocery store chain in Australia or something. It's like collecting baseball cards in your kid or something and it's like, it's information. I enjoy that a lot when it comes to like music production, just like other creative practices. It's like, who was the director of photography on the music video at the hotel? Well, at one point, I just like ended up going to Rick Rubin, deep list in discography. And anyone should go read that. It's better than the article that comes up somewhere every three months. It's like, did you know Rick Rubin produced Slayer and Run DMC and now look at his podcast. All of that's true, but it skips across the surface of so much work that he did actually helped some really incredible artists at late stage points in their career when they worked not as appreciated. I mean, probably the most iconic versions of this is the work he's done with like Johnny Cash. But also later wallflowers to block Sabbath came to him in this moment like Metallica did a couple of records. At moments when people maybe feel like they've peaked and I think that's really interesting. And some of that work is phenomenal. I mean, the Johnny Cash stuff for sure is incredible. I think a lot of people are critical of the Metallica records. I think there are as bad as people make about the music, but they're maybe not as great as someone would hope to be. What I think is also interesting is just the genre of hopping and it's sort of all over the place. I mean, he's masterfully put things together more than once. It's Johnny Cash doing the nine-inch nails cover, hurt than just like, well, tear your heart open. It's extremely powerful, you know, but it's like the Aerosmith run DMC thing that really was a major vector introducing hip-hop culture to non-urban people. You know, just like you're like rock music fan, you know, like that kind of mode has happened several times over, which I think is cool. There's a little bit of a playbook there, but it's a very durable playbook because it's always different. You know, I've put in like, you know, different things together. I like that a lot. I also like that even throughout all of that work, there were some real like durable relationships and stuff. He's pretty much produced everything. The Red Hat Chili Peppers have put out from blanchering their sex magic on and there's a lot of good material in there. And I think that's really interesting because they clearly have like a relationship, you know, like deep, durable relationship was like chapters of lives happened across like that much making. I just think there's a lot of interesting things in there. And I like that he seems to really appreciate and respect that creativity is an important part of the human experience. You know, and so if you kind of create environments or situations that respect that or nurture that, but that's like a good set of conditions, I find that very motivating. You got to design key pieces of the IPO for Etsy, which presumably was a very educational experience. What was your role there and what did you take away from that? I loved that work so much. It was so interesting. I mean, I really was showing up as like the creative director of that role or that work. They actually had a wonderful creative director. It was running our brand team. I'd brought in and I'm truly a Hoffman. She's awesome. I mean, she does all the global creative for OpenAI now. I mean, for anyone who hasn't been close to one of these processor experience, when you limit the audience, you know, who is aware of it and participates in it for a whole bunch of reasons, and we needed to sort of like peel off a team and focus on this work. So the approach we took is like, Julie, I kept running all the brand stuff, kept everything moving great, like the real actual business. And I kind of stepped in and pulled one designer off the team that I was able to like work really directly with and then house team and then brought in one outside agency for some key pieces of it at a point and a couple of others in and led us to the vision of our launch day experience. But there's a lot of components of this. So basically, we designed all of the materials around us on document. So it's a really like a business performance, financial performance, but also a brand storytelling communication moment. It's expressive, but it's also like data is, it's also just like get the facts right. And you kind of do live versions of these, basically we were like building decks and presentations for like an in-person roadshow, maybe like a video roadshow of this thing. That has a bunch of like motion graphics animation, I mean, interesting things kind of happening in it. Everything I just described, you can go to the SEC website and end up seeing versions of all of it. And then also like the launch day of the moment you've become a public list of companies often like a huge marketing moment for people. We ended up choosing the list on NASDAQ for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons was that at the time NASDAQ was still like in Times Square and New York Stock Exchange was on Wall Street. It was like dumb, dumb. We were like, when you imagine seeing that see like out in the world like this for the first time, is it on Wall Street or is it like at the crossroads of the world and this kind of like wild environment that's like for the masses, you know, I was like, oh yeah, this is like a Times Square brand. And we took over this wedge in the center of Times Square and brought in Etsy sellers from all around the world, shut down the street overnight, bring in some semi trucks, built up this whole marketplace overnight. So then by the time we were like preparing for a market stupid in the morning or being launch events happening in the building, there's a Etsy marketplace like live happening on the street. Those sort of representative like the full breadth of what Etsy hadn't offered. That was so fun. You know, like you kind of like work in secrecy or like it's all multimodal. There's just so much delivery happening. And I really enjoyed for a little stint of it as probably going and working from the Goldman Sachs office two days a week. So I just got to be like really around the launch team constantly. This is as we're shaping the messaging and these row show content and stuff. I mean, because our leadership team or CEO and CFO believed in and trusted design and we're just great partners, I'm actually invited us straight into the process and we just work on it side by side with everyone and it was, give me a lot of appreciation for what really happens in those moments too. Really cool work. I was able to apply a little bit of that later when, like, Grab became like a listed company and this is a different process. It was like a spack merger and all this stuff. But I was able to bring someone by lived experience to help us make some confident decisions more quickly about vendors to use things to do and not do and stuff like that. And it was fun to yet to apply those lessons later. I'm a big fan of Etsy and I know it's changed a lot over the years but I still go to it for, I've gotten into Halloween costumes actually behind me right now. You could see probably a sort of a Spartan helmet back there on my butt shelf. And my daughter saw the Odyssey before I did she's like, "Dad, you should be a Odysseus." Like, okay, I could get into that and so I've gone way overboard but yeah, I like to build parts myself but I'm not going to make a helmet. So there's some really talented crafts people on it so it's just totally pretty cool. Well, as we get close to the end here, you have described yourself as a designer and artist, author, musician, of all the things you've done and then you make what's giving you the most joy or what's most inspired you lately. The most joy is very twofold. One, it comes back to this idea of kind of like the whole design. I think whenever I've participated in something, whether it's something I've directly craft in myself where like really leading a team towards something where we've really handled all of the touch points like really well, I just find that so fun and rewarding. It feels like you're really contributing something to culture and like this isn't the moment where it gets like lasting and like really, really impactful. I love that so much and then at a much more intimate level, just the emergent, natched energy and collaboration of a good jam with some people, just two or three people making some music together. That feels really, really good because like straight to my heart for sure. What are you watching, listening, reading right now that's got you excited or looking at things a little differently? I am reading a book. It's interesting. It's not the most exciting read, but the facts of it are interesting. It's like the history of Jose Cuervo, the person. But by doing so, you're kind of learning about the history of the entire like tequila industry, which is very much related to a lot of like political changes in shifts in Mexico and the relationship between Mexico and America and like train lines and business deals, and it's great. Randy, where can people learn more about you and the work that you're doing these days? I mean, my website and me, I'm pretty much anything social as well as just Randy J. Hunt. Fantastic. Randy, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, you bet. It was a treat. This episode was produced by Eli Wollery and me, Aaron Walter. 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