My guest today is Tanner Christensen who is the founder at Shape.co. Interview Video: https://youtu.be/1HPwcA0O4IY In this episode, we discuss the following: - Tanner Christensen bio - Learnings from starting a design podcast - How to blog consistently for 10 years - Why you should not quit your day job to focus completely on your side projects - Benefits of doing side projects - Why quit a side project - Leaving millions of dollars to quit Facebook as a designer - Quitting full time job to focus completely on startup idea - How to figure out what you are not good at - Dealing with public failure - Career paths are not linear - Dealing with financial insecurity when going all in on side projects - Optimizing for interests over compensation in your career - Creating a platform for designers to improve their interviewing skills - Advice for designers who are thinking of quitting - How to get in touch with Tanner Christensen For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show
Tanner Christensen is a curious, multi-disciplinary design leader who is dedicated to helping designers and businesses find the best in each other. He's the founder at Shape.co and previously worked as Head or Design at Gem dot com. Before Gem, Tanner designed software for autonomous vehicles at Lyft, led design of the Atlassian mobile platform, and designed for 2.85 billion people at Facebook. He's a published author, prolific writer, indie app developer, angel investor, podcaster, and more.
INTERVIEW VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/1HPwcA0O4IY
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Namaste and welcome. I am Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA which is a real-life MBA program for designers. You will learn how to launch a side hustle and level up your design careers from the interviews rock star designers.
Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest is Tanner Christensen who is a curious multidisciplinary design leader who's dedicated to helping designers and businesses find the best in each other. He is the founder at Shape and previously worked as head of design at Gem. Before Gem, Tanner designed software for autonomous vehicles at Lyft, led design of the Atlassian mobile platform, and designed for 2.85 billion people at Facebook. He is a published author, prolific writer, indie app developer, angel investor, podcaster, and more.
That is just amazing, Tanner.
Tanner Christensen: There's a lot there, yeah.
Jayneil: You have achieved a lot in a short span of time is what I want to say.
Tanner: Has it been a short amount of time spent? It feels it's been a very long timeม from where I’m sitting.
Jayneil: It's almost when you see from the other side, it's kind of like the grass is greener on the other side kind of thing. I like from where I am and I’m like “Oh my god! He's achieved so much” but then you're like “From my perspective, it's been a long haul.”
Tanner: Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be here.
Jayneil: I was worried yesterday. I was off for the long weekend me and my friends rented a cabin in Broganville, Oklahoma, and we were playing poker and I was shouting so much and my voice was gone yesterday. And so, I was scared in the morning, I was like “I hope my voice comes back for the interview.”
Tanner: Well, you sound great. So, no worries from that side. I do feel okay though. I think that's important.
Jayneil: I do. I think the excitement is driving me forward.
Tanner: I love it. Well, I know you and I have talked for a very long time about recording this and finally here we are some years later.
Jayneil: Two years later. Well, not two years, a little bit less than that.
Tanner: Yeah, it's been a long time but I’m excited. It's been a while I actually took a break from podcasting. For those who know me, I stopped podcasting for a while and finally, I’m catching my breath I feel like and it's time to get back on the train.
Jayneil: Tell me a little bit about it. You started the New Layers Podcast. So, what was your motivation to start the podcast?
Tanner: Yeah. So, New Layer was a podcast that my wife and I, Jasmine Friedl, decided to do after working … we both worked at Facebook. That's where we met each other many, many, many years ago. And her and I just found that some of the conversations we would have over dinner or anything were kind of interesting and we felt so fortunate to be where we were at in our careers, we said “Hey, what if we kind of shared this knowledge in a very casual podcast format with others?” And so, that's kind of where it started is “Let's just try this conversation approach to podcasting and see if we can help others with just sharing our experiences.”
Jayneil: And it got a huge amount of traction. Can you talk about the traction, what was that like for you?
Tanner: Yeah. So, it's funny when you talk about … I’m sure you can speak to this as well. Podcasts are very interesting in that there's not really a lot of analytics around it. There are some tooling but it's hard to really determine where your audience is, repeat listeners, all of those kinds of things. So, a lot of my past projects have done fairly well. We're talking like hundreds of thousands if not millions of users or audience members and New Layer just never reached that level. I think we've got maybe tens of thousands of listeners over the span of a little over a year and even today, people are still messaging us saying “Oh, thanks for this. I love this” but it just never reached that level where I felt it was a hit or a success.
Jayneil: You've had a lot of past successful projects. So, did that mean that this new endeavor you're starting with the New Layers Podcast it had to hit that high? Was that running in your mind?
Tanner: Yeah, to some degree. The way I think about this is if I’m going to invest my time in any project, any endeavor, it has to have some type of reward or payoff or something that makes the contribution, my time worthwhile, right? Because I have a lot of projects going on and if they're not yielding something for me in return, it's really hard to say I’m going to go do this thing. So, for New Layers in particular, we decided that we would give it some time and just see as a casual conversation what could happen. And after about a year two years, both Jasmine and I decided it wasn't really getting the traction we wanted, it was not making us any money, it was not really reaching any top ten lists or anything like that. And so, it felt almost like it was just her and I having a weekly conversation with each other, which we enjoy, but recording it, editing, producing it, it just didn't heal anything at all apart from a few tens of thousands of listeners, if that. And so, it never felt a worthy investment at the time.
Jayneil: I think the stage at which you are in your career, if you're putting in your time, it seems to me that you have to have some kind of return on whether it’s maybe access, maybe it's money but it's so funny because many, many moons ago or many, many years ago, you started the infamous blog Creative Something, right?
Tanner: Yes.
Jayneil: Do you remember what year was that when you launched it when you pressed the “we’re going live”?
Tanner: I think it was, honestly, January 1st of 2008.
Jayneil: Wow! Oh my god! It's crazy because that's the year I literally enrolled in undergrad.
Tanner: Okay. Well, you're dating me now but that's fine.
Jayneil: No, I’m just messing with you. When you launched that blog, did you have the same level of expectation? My assumption is that that was one of your first project that really went big. So, did you have an expectation or was it something like “Let's just see where this goes”?
Tanner: It was very much the latter. At the time when I launched Creative Something, I had already built and shipped a number of web products which had done reasonably well. I think, at that point, I had actually sold a few of the web apps I had built on my own. And so, I’d seen some level of clue success as an independent developer. And the idea for Creative Something really actually came from … I was working in a design studio, speaking of dating me, a design team inside of Hewlett Packard or HP long ago and I remember being there and everyone was talking about creativity like “We have to introduce creativity to the product. We need to think more creative.” And at the time, I was not naïve but I just didn't know what creativity meant. I didn't know what people were intending to say when they said that word. So, I said “Okay, I want to go figure out what this creativity thing is.” And I was so interested in the web … Tumblr was the big blogging platform at the time … so, I said “I’m going to go learn about creativity and I’m just going to share what I learn and what I think as I go on this journey.” And that was my only intention with the blog was to just share almost a public-facing journal which has really influenced a lot of my thinking these days. I wanted to just spend time understanding what creativity was, how it works, why it matters, all those things and I figured why not just share in a public journal format. And so, that's what I did. For a good 10 years I did that and turns out a lot of other people were very curious about creativity and what that means as well.
Jayneil: Wait. I want to make sure I heard that correctly. 10 years.
Tanner: Yeah, I blogged pretty regularly for a consistent 10 years, yeah.
Jayneil: What is regular for you?
Tanner: Oh my gosh! I can't even remember, honestly. It's been so long. I think I would try to get about three posts every week up. There was, I think, a solid month where I tried to do every single day and it felt I was forcing the writing and I didn't want to do that. That was never the intention. The intention was always just to understand creativity, research some interesting things and share those thoughts. So, I didn't want to force it. And about three posts every week, I think, was standard for me.
Jayneil: That is insane because I’ve tried to do blogging. And at one point, it was even getting one blog post a month was a struggle. So, I’m kind of curious to know what got you going? Was it just like passion project? Was it like “Hey, I’ve got the job at HP, so I don't have to worry about making the ends meet, so I can continue on this?” So, how are you balancing your motivation with the financial needs and expectations from this?
Tanner: Yeah. So, at the time when I started the blog and even well into to maybe four or five years into it, I had zero expectations for any return at all. Again, it was just more of a way for me to kind of share my explorations and I always thought of it as really a public-facing journal, meaning the ultimate value in the blog was for me to have somewhere to look in the future to kind of remind myself of the things I had learned or to inspire myself. Even today, however many years it is now, I often still go to the blog and there's a little random link, if you click that link, it takes you to one of the random posts. And I just … whenever I’m feeling uncertain about myself or uninspired, I can just go back to that public journal, click that link and suddenly new ideas will start to flourish. So, that is ultimately what the goal was. I did have a full paying job throughout that entire time of blogging. Like I said, I wasn't really looking for any financial incentive. I wasn't even looking for really any type of return at all. I just knew I wanted to blog. And when people started replying to my posts or emailing me saying “This is really helpful or interesting,” then I was like “Okay, I’m going to keep doing this because not only is it helping me, it's also apparently inspiring others. And it started bringing people to me to ask questions about creativity.
Jayneil: And you've had hundreds of thousands of views on the blog.
Tanner: Yeah, I think at its peak it was, if I’m remembering correctly, somewhere around 2,50,000 subscribers.
Jayneil: Oh my god! That’s insane.
Tanner: It was mind-blowing to me at the time.
Jayneil: And when somebody reaches that kind of traction, they might wonder “Let me just quit my day job. Let me just go all in on that.” So, what made you say that “You know, I think I’m going to keep the day job while I still continue this on the side?”
Tanner: I wish I had an answer for that. There have been a lot of times in my life where things have gone much better than I expected, much better than I think many people could really hope for. And throughout all those times, whether it was apps I developed or products or the blog, I didn't want to quit my day job. And I think part of the reason for that for me was this famous quote which I cannot remember, so I’m going to slaughter it as best I can, it was something along with the lines of like “The moment you turn your passion into a job, it becomes work.” And I didn't ever want to turn my fun projects into work. I wanted them to stay fun and almost be an outlet for my thinking and my process and my self-development, honestly.
Jayneil: Wow! That is so deep because I’m in a similar boat you. From day one, I didn't think about monetization. And if I were to do this full time, I wonder if I’d lose the joy because then it would be like things become like a chore like “Oh, I got to schedule again.” Right now, there's this excitement because I also just like you have the day job that's know making me not worry about all these things here.
Tanner: Yeah. How are you balancing that? You're in the thick of it right now.
Jayneil: I think, for me, it was … with so many things in my life, it's embarrassing to admit it, but I’ve started so many things but never followed through on it. That's the feedback my parents would always tell me. So, this time around, I was like “You know what? I just don't like myself being in that place.” I said “Well, if I’m going to start this, I can't stop until I’m you publishing 101 episodes. Then I give myself the permission to quit like “No hard feelings. You did it. You did it for a decent amount of time so you can walk away with honor.” I’m at 64, 65 episodes I’ve recorded do far, so in a good spot, almost a little bit more than halfway. And even though I didn't seek out money, I made it indirectly through partnerships and stuff but a lot of folks were like “Why don't you just go and scale it and do all these things and make it into a business?” And I said that “That's the moment, I think, I’ll lose interest. This is a playground for me to explore and it keeps me sane, so to speak, it gives me an outlet to express my creativity.” So, that's … I don't know if that answered the question.
Tanner: I think it does. Everything you're saying really resonates well with me and I’m sure many, many others. It's hard too because the moment you turn something that's a curiosity into something that is more serious, there are now implications of that and it's no longer a fun project where you can wake up on a weekend and get excited about it. No. it’s like now you have to pay bills with that thing. And if you don't do all of the work that it entails, billing clients or customers, talking with them regularly, making sure you have everything locked away and really, really strong and supported, there's a ton of work that's entailed with making a serious endeavor. If it's a side thing, then it's okay, it doesn't matter if you forget one episode, right? It's totally fine but when you're relying on it, when it's your business, your method of livelihood, it really adds a lot of pressure. Some people do well with that. I think the vast majority of us don't. We can't. It's better to preserve those things as an outlet and a fun thing that we can do on the side. If it makes us money, that's exciting. If not, that's okay too in most cases. The way that I personally think about all of these things, as you said at the beginning here, I’ve done a lot of different things, I always think of them not even as potential businesses, I don't think of them as potential ways to make a livelihood. I think of them as ways of exploring myself and understanding how I do things and how I think and the world around me because so much of our lives is consumption, right? We're consuming content, we're consuming blogs, we're consuming everything and these side projects are just a little way for us to see what creation is like, dabble in that world.
Jayneil: I think, for me, it also keeps me sane in my day job. There are a lot of times where we have our own frustration when you're working in companies, right? You don't have a blank canvas. You deal with a lot of stakeholders. And I was in the spot where my work identity became my own identity and that's a very toxic place to be in. So, having these playgrounds, so to speak, these side projects help me make sure that my creative identity is not the same as the work or the pixels I create at work.
Tanner: Yes, so much that. One of the things that constantly tinkering has taught me is no matter what happens in my professional career, if I get laid off for some reason, I just don't perform, I get fired, I’m going to be fine. I can do a ton of things in my life. I’m not reliant on someone else to give me the opportunity to make a living, right? I have a lot of options in front of me, no matter what, a company or someone else might say. And so, it's really empowering to have experience doing a bunch of small things. Now, I want to be clear here, and I always talk to my friends about this. I’m not a software engineer. I’m not. I am a spaghetti coder which, if you don't know what that means, you basically take a whole bunch of random stuff, you throw it around in code and you get it to work. If a real engineer were to take a look at my code on any of my products which had been downloaded by millions of people, I bet that engineer would cry. They would be like “What are you doing? This is so not optimal. This is wrong” but that's okay. I’m not trying to be an engineer. I’m trying to make … but if I ever wanted to become an engineer, I bet I have a great start, right?
Jayneil: I love the optionality. I think there's something about like it gives you … I think, for me, it definitely helps me sleep better at night. One thing I do worry though is thinking about the day when I might have to sunset the design MBA Podcast or even the thought of that is scary. And it makes me wonder that at the peak of it, you had so many hundred thousand views on the blog, it's going … and I wonder why on earth would you sunset that.
Tanner: Yeah. So, there's a few things here. the first is I think it's really important for us as creators and designers and builders to recognize that stopping something or quitting something is not the same as giving up. Giving up means you're not even trying like you start the race and you do stop for some reason but actually quitting something is a deliberate decision to say “This has fulfilled its purpose” or in my case when it comes to Creative Something, I grew as much as I wanted to grow from that experience and I knew there were other things I wanted to do towards the end of its life about 10 years later after I started it, meaning, for me, I had spent 10 years writing about creativity. I started being noted in actual publications and research journals as a creativity expert. I got the option to fly around the world and talk about creativity to people all over the world and it was really fun and fulfilling but after those years, I decided “You know what? Creativity is interesting but it's not who I want to be.” I feel I had grown enough in that arena. What I wanted to do next was design. I wanted to get back to what I really loved which was design and craft and product design in particular. So, after those 10 years, I said “Well, maybe there's a way I can make this a little bit more of an incentive for me.” So, I started doing things sponsorship deals. I got a book published as a result of the blog. A publishing company reached out to me and printed my first book which was exciting but after a while, just even the financial incentive just didn't pay off. It didn't really get me excited in that area anymore. So, I looked at the blog and I just said “It's time to move on. It's time to focus my attention.” I think that's the key for me. If I were doing anything else at that time, I’d want to dedicate myself 100% to that. And if I was doing Creative Something and something else, I couldn't do that. I couldn't really grow the way as I wanted to if I wasn't focused. So, I decided to leave it be and move on to other things. I think, not even that long ago, I tried to pick it up again. I was like “Maybe I’ll start blogging again. That was really fun.” And there was nothing there. It felt forced. It felt I really wasn't interested. The blog had achieved what it needed to achieve for me.
Jayneil: I think I’m trying to think of analogy I really love chocolate ice cream. Chocolate is my favorite flavor, especially if it's Belgian or Dutch chocolate. So, once in a blue moon I would love it and then … but let's say you're “Hey, Jayneil, I’m going to treat you to Belgian chocolate ice cream 30 days in a row.” Now, I love it, man. I love this ice cream. I can eat it every day putting aside all the crazy sugar intake it is but I feel on the 30th day I’m going to be like “I think I’ve hit some kind of peak or saturation with this flavor” and it almost sounds to me that regardless of the success and access and opportunities it was bringing, I mean, there's only so much one can be saying writing about the same topic for 10 years.
Tanner: Okay, I disagree with that point. In fact, I have a blog post from back in the day that I did for an SEO company called Moz. They were called SEO Moz at the time. And I think the blog post was called ‘How to Blog About Anything’ or something like that. And in that kind of article, I talk about my approach to even writing today, which is if you want to write about something or create content around something, there is an infinite amount of content that you could create. The trick is to get curious and to use a different formula essentially to come up with those topics. So, I think if I wanted to, I could write about creativity my entire life every single day and never repeat subjects. I think that's just the lens that you have to take on those things. So, I think that analogy is good. What I would use as an analogy for something like this podcast or Creative Something or New Layers is a really great pair of shoes, like a really expensive , nice, maybe one in the world kind of pair of shoes, right? You can do two things with that pair of shoes. You can put them on a wall and stare at them and defeat the purpose of having them but maybe you enjoy looking at them. The other thing you can do is you can wear them. And over time, for some of us, over time you're going to outwear them or you're going to wear them down and you're going to realize it's time for a different pair of shoes. It's inevitable, right? Because you put them to good use, they served you well, they helped you get to where you want to go, they may be attracted some attention, whatever your desire is right? But over time, they do wear down, your tastes change, you're trying to do something else. And so, you need a different pair of shoes. And so, I think, that's maybe more apt for how at least I think about things like projects. It's just you outgrow them.
Jayneil: I love that analogy. And I kind of wonder … you said that the financial incentive’s also not that maybe appealing to you at some point but what if, let's say, financially you even made more than your day job or some other avenues? Would that, just that number, force you to go through the phase where you've outlived the shoes, like you said, you've outlived them, you're wanting to do other stuff but then there's this big financial payoff? So, do you think it would have forced you to stay in that or …
Tanner: No, I don't think so. The reason I can so confidently say that is because if we go back to the question “What got you started in the blog?”, for example, it was always my own development. I wanted to learn things. And so, over time, I did learn those things and it had nothing to do with money. Even if I was making a million dollars a year from the blog, at some point, for me personally, I feel like it would have lost its value. No amount of money is worth me hating my day-to-day or feeling like I’m a slave to something else than what I long for, right? I’m very privileged to say this. I want to recognize that. I do have the skills and the network and all those things that equate to privilege to be able to say this. Not everyone has that but for me personally, it isn't about money. It is about that development and scratching that itch. So, in an example like the blog, if someone were to come to me and say “We'll give you a million dollars to do this blog,” I would probably say “I’ll take that a million dollars. I’ll sell the blog to someone else and I’m going to go do whatever else next I want to do,” right? Because it's never been about the money.
Jayneil: So, the exploring. Wow! So, it's almost like you have the golden handcuffs and something like it's … financially, these things are designed to make you stay at the company, right? I mean, you worked in so many Bay Area companies and all that, you have all this stock that you leave on the table but for us creative people, it's more than just the money. It's about that expression. And it makes me kind of wonder about the similar journey you also encountered recently which is you … you are an IC designer, you worked at Facebook, you worked a Lyft, you also led design from then I see at Atlassian and then it Lyft. From that point, you get this opportunity to become the head of design at Gem, right?
Tanner: Yeah.
Jayneil: And that is an opportunity that so many people, so many designers, on behalf of them if I were to say candidly, they would be like “Oh my god! Tanner's made it. He is the head of design at a hypergrowth startup.” I mean a lot of people want to be there and not to mention the doors that will open after that but I believe you are about to embark on a new chapter from that position as well. Is that correct?
Tanner: That's exactly right. I’m laughing a little bit because when I look at my career in hindsight, I can't help but focus on everything that feels like a misstep or feels like a mistake. So, I want to come back to my current situation but when I rewind time, man, leaving Facebook was really hard because …
Jayneil: Why?
Tanner: I mean, honestly, there was millions of dollars that I was leaving on the table to leave, right?
Jayneil: Oh my god!
Tanner: There was the stock options which when … I left Facebook, for what it's worth, I think, the stock was 80 dollars or something. And a few months ago, it was like 300, 400 dollars. It was a lot of money but I left to see what being more of a formal IC leader kind of would be like and what that could do for my career. And then I went to Atlassian which is a phenomenal company and I learned it wasn't really right for me for various reasons. So, then I had to change jobs again and I felt like “Wow! I should not have joined that previous company. I should have stayed at Facebook.” And then I joined Lyft to work on autonomous vehicles, super innovative exciting space. Undoubtedly, I learned a ton, had a lot of impact, met some incredible people but then I realized autonomous vehicles is a really long product cycle, it's like 10 to 20 to 30 years when what I was used to in my own projects and working at Facebook was like you turn a product around in a week and you get billions of people to use it. I don't want to wait 10 to 20 years for my work to do anything. Eventually, I did end up at Gem where I was really fortunate to be their first design hire to build out the design function there, connect with incredible people on a really powerful product. The business is doing phenomenally well, just incredibly well but I realized that there was an opportunity for me to do something that I really was curious about and really passionate about which is helping designers find jobs and helping businesses build processes to hire those designers. And I had spent my whole life working on these side projects, never really fully committing to them, right? And for the first time in my life I feel like I can make that investment, I can make that leap. So, leaving Gem behind, leaving that great world where I had learned a ton, leaving that behind and doing something else to learn something else. And so, I think that's a trend in my entire career is I’m very driven to learn a lot of things that I don't know and to take risks. I’m someone who … I dropped out of high school when I was young.
Jayneil: Oh my god!
Tanner: So, I know … yeah, I didn't go to school. I’m self-taught.
Jayneil: No way!
Tanner: It's true. I think part of that for me is that I kind of recognize I’m not very smart. There's a ton of things I just don't know about the world.
Jayneil: I’m …
Tanner: Why do you say that?
Jayneil: Well, because I … I mean, I don't have a degree from the United States, man. I came from India from a college that nobody even knows about. I think when my parents decided to have two kids, I feel all the brain went to my younger brother. Si, he went to Ivy League and super smart in the context of education and books and I’m more of … I feel more like street smart like I make it up in hustle and other avenues rather than … if you put me in a standardized testing and stuff that or give me 30 minutes with Figma, I’ll create something that's award-winning, I’m not that guy.
Tanner: Okay, okay. There's something here though which is how do know you're not that guy. How did you learn that?
Jayneil: That's a very good question. I think a lot of it was putting myself in those shoes and then working with people who are like that. So, for example, when you're hanging out with designers who are really good visually and stuff and how they operate like initially, let's say, you're delusionally telling yourself “I can do this. I can do that,” you try to but let's say me and you go for a run, using the shoe analogy, and you've been preparing for marathons for so many years and stuff. So, when, obviously, I try to run with you, I’ll see some difference. So, whatever bubble I have in my head is going to get shattered and reality is going to sink in like “Okay, this is what it means to run with someone who's pro, who's been practicing a lot.” So, I think that's where I recognize that “Hey, there's all these designers who are even better than me visually,” just focusing on that part, “But there's other areas I think I’m good at.” And then also there's this whole aspect of what you gravitate towards. That's how I personally recognize that “Hey, I don't think I’m really book smart but then I’m street smart.” And also feedback from other people that you trust.
Tanner: Yeah, I love it. I think you're spot on. You hinted at this a little bit but it's worth calling attention to. People are smart in different ways, right? We all have different characteristics of our knowledge and how we use that knowledge. And I think that's really what it is, is like “I’m just very aware that how much of the world operates is not an area that I’m really strong in. What I am strong in however is being scrappy and having grit and being willing to embarrass myself or make a failure, even publicly in many cases.” Because I’ve done it enough, sometimes on accident, sometimes intentionally, I’ve done it enough to know that those mistakes those failures those missteps, it just doesn't matter. Most of the time people really don't care. And these days with the news cycle and the technology cycle, things are moving so fast, by the time you make a mistake, people have already forgotten about it. So, for all of my successes, for example, that I’ve had in my career, I’ve had hundreds of failures, some very publicly, and it just doesn't matter like hardy anyone knows who I am, hardly anyone knows what I was up to 10 years ago. I can use that.
Jayneil: When you say a public failure, what comes to mind for you?
Tanner: Oh my gosh! Let me think of a few. I don't know. Just look at my Twitter feed. I feel like most … not most of the things … I feel like a lot of the things that I share, for example, on Twitter or LinkedIn, I’m a prolific sharer, I like to post my thoughts and things often, a year later I’ll look back at some of those things and be like “What was I even saying? That's so wrong. It's so misrepresented.” So, when we talk about public missteps, I’d say those are probably the most obvious ones. Just go to my feed and you're going to find something in there that's questionable but I don't stop doing it and I don't shield away from those missteps because at least in the social media realm, the way I think about it and the way I actually publicly talk about it, is my job is not to convince you that I’m right. My job is not to convince anyone that I’m doing the best thing or that you should pay me money to do something or anything like that. My job is to create, to not be a consumer but to put things out into the world. And when you do that, two things happen. The first is you get feedback. You mentioned this in the way that you learn or the way that you kind of observed about that stuff. You get feedback. People cannot help but consume and then respond. And so, you're going to get responses and you're going to learn from those responses. And then the second thing is people will find you inevitably from the things you put into the world. And those people who find you are going to fall into one of two audiences. One is they just they don't care, they're going to disagree with you, whatever but the second audience are people who like you or who want to know the things that you're kind of putting into the world and they want to understand your exploration and your perception. And so, the more you create, the more likely you are to draw in that audience, which then, you know, feeds back into the first point. You're going to get more feedback, good and bad and constructive. And over time, you build what we call a network or an audience and you can now leverage that audience to learn even more. So, long story short, when I think about making those mistakes and things like that, I don't really think of them in terms of mistakes necessarily. I think it's just I’m exploring and sometimes the exploration yields something that's not super positive but there's always a shining silver lining.
Jayneil: And you mentioned this … you just said that “Hey, I prefer to be a little bit more scrappy” and that is a little bit different from what the rest of the world expects to kind of go in the standardized path, right? A lot of people, friends that we know, people in your life say you want to follow a standardized path. So, from the outside, person looking into your career, I see “Oh my god! Tanner's the head of design at Gem. Maybe he sticks along longer, the next step might be something from there you go to become the chief design officer at a Fortune 100 company.” I’m thinking in terms of standardized paths like how people graduate towards that. So, is it wrong not to want a standardized path? Is there a universe where you could see yourself still sticking it out there and going the standardized path or you're like “You know what? This is the way I am and this is the way I’m going to play my game.”
Tanner: Wow! What a question!
Jayneil: I know it's loaded. I didn't think about it.
Tanner: Here's what I think is really funny about that. There is really no such thing as that linear path. No matter what we tell ourselves or what books and movies or our parents tell us, there is no linear path. I think that the “linear path” is something that we see in hindsight and it's a story we tell ourselves no matter what. So, some examples I can share with you, I’ll start with my own story here. If 20 years ago … I’m really old for what it's worth … if 20 years ago you had found young Tanner and said “Hey, this is where you're going to be,” I couldn't even fathom how I got here. It makes no sense to me. One of my first jobs straight out of high school was in consumer market research. That's where I worked for many, many years. And from there I went to online marketing because I thought there was some kind of connection there. In fact, the majority of my career to date has nothing to do with design. It is all in online marketing and SEO. In hindsight however, I can create a narrative around my past experience to say that consumer research job got me to think about how I engage with people and the questions we ask them and how to glean insights. My experience in online marketing exposed me to the tech stack that search engines use and how we build these websites and how to build content that captivates audiences. And so, now when it comes to design, I can take both those lenses, research and interesting content, and apply it to my design but I had no idea that was going to be the case when I was doing those jobs. I had no idea at all. So, I think the linear path for many people is not really linear. A lot of the friends I know, they went to school for things that … they're lawyers. They went to school for law and then they graduated and realized “Actually, product design is interesting. I’m going to go do that instead.” What is the linear path there? There is no linear path. The path is only in hindsight that we see it linearly. Otherwise, we're all just kind of living in this moment trying to make the best decisions.
Jayneil: Path meaning like from someone looking in, you're like “Oh, he could just stay there and then eventually become the chief design officer.” And then you also mentioned that you wanted to do this step because you now want to, for the first time, focus in on the side project because previously you had the day jobs and you had the side projects going all in parallel. So, then one wonders why not keep that going the same way as it worked before? Why now decide to go all in on one?
Tanner: Yeah. You're right. For not necessarily a linear path but a stereotypical or maybe cliché even career path would be to go from like head of design to design director, VP of design, chief design officer, maybe skipping some of those steps. That's certainly a pathway. Again, I think it just depends on what an individual wants to do. For me personally, this was an exploration again in learning about myself and my capabilities as a manager, as a functional leader in a company. It's the first startup I’ve ever worked at, which was extremely eye-opening. And I think that actually is the reason that this is the right time for me to go off and do my own business with Shape because I’ve been at a startup, I’ve connected with a ton of incredible people, the board of directors is phenomenal there. Nick and Steve, the co-founders, the CEO, CTO there at Gem, they've taught me an incredible amount and I’ve realized through my experience there “Okay, here's how a startup operates and here's what you can do to make it successful.” And now, there's a bunch of other things that have fallen in place for me in my life where I’m saying “Okay, I’m going to take those lessons and see if I can apply them, see what I can do.” And in some ways, that's also a very “linear path.” If you look out in the world. I know a ton of people who have gone from head of design or even first designer at a startup and then left to do their own thing. And so, is that a normal path? It can be, right?
Jayneil: Yeah. It's funny you say that because literally the episode I released today is with Jessica Koh who was the head of design at Opendoor and now is a founder at Playbook. So, it's amazing.
Tanner: Yeah. And she's phenomenal by the way. If listeners have not heard that podcast yet, I was listening it to today actually, I highly recommend. I really enjoyed that.
Jayneil: Thank you. Now, I got to ask you in terms of … to me, it seems there's a theme that I’m seeing in your career which is … and it's helping me understand also because at every point, you have kind of prioritized your own development over just pure financial outcomes whether it was leaving millions of dollars at Facebook, whether or not we're the same craftsman, somebody could say just stay at head of design at Gem and then skip some ladders, become the VP of design or Chief Design Officer but you said “Hey, this is an area where I feel I have an inkling I can learn more. The shoes have worn out. Time to get the next pair of shoes. Let's go on another trail” and you're doing that but then I kind of wonder in this one, you're actually going all in on this one. So, one has to wonder what about financial security? You may not have the day job that's coming in. So, how are you dealing with that whole thing because usually for creators, when they go all in on one, they're like “Well, what about the money?”
Tanner: Yeah, yeah. It's we were saying earlier, it becomes work. The moment that my last paycheck comes in … I’m rolling off of the business right now … the moment that last paycheck comes in, that's it, right? There is nothing else really. I am again very privileged and fortunate where I have a great wife who's doing well right now in her own career and if we really need to we have some savings and things that but one of the things I’ve learned over the years through my experiments is I can make money. Especially with the internet, you can launch a website overnight these days, maybe stick some ads on it, you can start an email list for no money and charge people six bucks to subscribe. And if you just get a handful of people to subscribe to you to listen to what you have to say, you can pay rent, right? You can pay your mortgage or whatever you need to do. And so, I’ve been making things online for very, very long, over 20 years now and I’ve seen just how “easy” it can be to get money. And with that said, because I’ve spent so long developing myself, my skill set and my network, I feel I could just flip a switch at some point and people would be like “Yeah, Tanner, we're going to support you. You're giving us a lot of great content. You're helping us with this product, whatever else you've been doing over the years. We'll pay you 2 dollars,” right? And if a few thousand people are going to pay you 2 dollars which is a coffee for most people, I’m going to be okay. So, the way that I’m approaching it to be really clear here, everything I’m saying is super privileged, it's almost ridiculously so. I know that a lot of people cannot do what I’m saying. That's not the point. The point is there are opportunities and the internet has made it really, not effortless, but much easier than it's ever been in history to find an audience, to find some revenue streams, to get a few extra dollars. Gumroad is super popular still. There's Patreon. There's Fiverr. There are a lot of ways to build income if you're willing to put in the work if you can put in the work. And so, for me personally, I’m going to take three months and see if I can get this thing off the ground and start making a decent amount of money to at least support the business and see if I can really help designers and businesses find each other because that's what I really care about. And if it doesn't work out, I can go join Fiverr, I can go be a designer on Upwork, I can go get another job. It's not the end of the world and it's not going to ruin my career. And if anything, it's going to help me as with everything else I’ve done in my career. It's going to give me exposure to things I’ve never done before, bolster my skill set, expose me to new ways of thinking and I can just take that knowledge to whatever I do next if it doesn't work out.
Jayneil: I am going to make my parents listen to this episode. Let me tell you what I mean by that. Because a lot of times like when we are sitting at the dinner table and they will be “Oh, you're making this much money at your day job and so and so at Amazon or Apple or Facebook make this much. What if you join there?” Now, I am very much … I know that if I were to join any of these companies, I would probably double my comp at a minimum, just talking to other designer friends, but I keep telling them “What I like is the work balance I have right now, which lets me hustle and interview amazing people like you and build those relationships and learn.” It's like I’m pursuing my real life MBA through the podcast and just meeting these … so, that's important to me. And I think hearing you talk about your journey just gave me that therapy which is like you got to follow your intuition and stuff and it's not just about following the standardized path about just go and join a fan company and just make the bankers … me and you seem to be definitely in a way creative weird people that don't want to follow that typical standardized path.
Tanner: Yeah. So, I talk to a lot of designers, I do consulting here and there and one of the things that often comes up is “Tanner, should I go get this other job that I know I’ll make double the salary? It’s little bit less in responsibility. It's at a company that I don't really like. I don't like their brand but man, that money is going to change my life,” right? I always tell them “Yes, that money will change your life but at what cost? What do you really want? Are you looking for that money, the financial incentive or is there something else that you want to do with that money? In your case, I suspect very similar to my own, if I had a billion dollars, you’d be doing exactly what I’m doing right now, I’d be talking to you on the podcast. It changes nothing.
Jayneil: Yes.
Tanner: And in some cases, you mentioned earlier, it leads to handcuffs, the golden handcuffs where you've got this desire to do something else but “Man, that money is really nice and it's really hard to fight.” So, again, I think it all comes back to what are you really trying to get, how are you trying to grow, what are your interests. If you optimize for those things, the rewards will come but you got to really focus on what you want and what you need. For me, that's personal development, it's exploration, it's creativity and curiosity, and if I can, helping others. And I’ve found, if anything, in my entire career, if I can do those things, the financial stuff, it comes.
Jayneil: You're so on point because even as I think about … there's two fears that I have with that. One is if I were to join some place with that insane amount of money, I think I’ll lose all this desire to do stuff on the side because you're like “Oh, it's all that money.” I mean, it's a crazy somebody telling you like “Oh, I’m kind of scared to join these big companies because I’ll lose that itch that I have to continue hustling on these side things.” And I don't know, I personally don't want that. I think like you, I also view that you can always go and get it. I feel like I always go and join that company if need be and I think, in your case, you're like “I can always go and get another job and turn the light bulb on” but this thing that you're doing right now with Shape, that opportunity is now and you feel like you have to seize it. Can you talk about that? Can you talk about what you're doing next with Shape or is it too early still to talk about it?
Tanner: Yeah, I’m still trying to figure it out a little bit here. The gist of it is this. Over my entire career in design, so many, many years now, I’ve talked with tons and tons of designers. And what I’ve realized or what I’ve heard consistently is even though there is ample resources to help designers learn their craft, visual design, product strategy, interaction design, even to some degree prototyping, communication, that stuff, there's really not a lot of resources out there for designers on how to interview, how to present your work effectively. And so, I’m going to go create or I am creating a platform that can bring designers together and help them learn how to really talk about their craft and their work in a way that hopefully gets them that next job no matter what that job is. Additionally, I’m doing the kind of other side of that coin where in my experience working at Gem as their head of design, I had to build a design interviewing process from scratch. And what I learned is there's really not a lot of resources out there to help founders build design leveling rubrics or interviewing processes like what does that process look like, should you do a design exercise or not, when should you do that, how do you evaluate a designer's chops, right? So, I’m going to take both of those two sides of the coin around design interviews and create a platform to bring those people together, teach them how to do those things and hopefully create opportunities on both sides.
Jayneil: Oh my god! I absolutely love that. Woo! It's just like I’m just getting so inspired listening to you just going after the next thing that you feel like your heart belongs to and just seizing that without always putting down to a number. And it's that creative spirit that if I were to call it something like that, protecting that is something I’m very passionate about, making sure that I don't kill it in the process of just chasing money.
Tanner: Yeah. The way I think about this, and you can tell your parents this, is this investment outside of working at like a fang, outside of making millions of millions of dollars, it's an investment in yourself. And when you learn these skills, when you have this track record of being someone who builds things, well, that's where the money really is. If you can prove to the world that you can create things, things that no one else is creating or doing, that is valuable because any company is going to want to hire someone you. Any company is going to want to say “This guy or a woman or whatever can go and create things from nothing and they're kind of motivated and they're curious and they know how to get things done.” You can't teach that. They don't teach that in school, right? And so, if it doesn't work out, someone's going to hire you and they're going to pay you well.
Jayneil: I feel so good just hearing that. So, let me ask you this. For any of the designers that have side projects out there, they're stuck in this dilemma that “I’ve got the side project and I’ve got my identity tied to it, right? It's not necessarily paying my bills but I said I was going to start it and I’m doing it but my heart's not in it anymore and I feel quitting.” What would you tell them?
Tanner: Remind yourself why you started in the first place. Go back to that. And if you don't know, take some time to figure it out. I remember when I stopped doing the Creative Something blog after 10 years, I really was afraid that my identity was wrapped up in this blog. I was like “that creativity guy”, right? and I felt I was abandoning a version of myself and I was really afraid that no one would follow me, I would lose hundreds of thousands of followers online because I was shifting gears to design to not be about creativity. And what I found was, again, my whole reason for doing anything is to try to understand things and to experiment and that was my identity. My identity was not the blog. My identity wasn't even a subject. My identity is detached from both of those things. And it turns out when you're honest with yourself like that and when you go out into the world and say “Hey, I’m moving on,” a lot of people will appreciate that. And, yeah, you'll lose people and you'll lose some energy and you'll have hard days for sure but at the end of the day, there's something else there. And if you know what that is, it's not so scary anymore and you can even tell people about that thing. And as a result of that, you'll get more of people following you and a better audience and they'll care just as much about the previous thing you were doing because it's you. It’s you're the product, you're the thing, right?
Jayneil: If I think about the question, you just said to ask yourself why you started in the first place, what is your identity, when I think about the podcast and this endeavor, coming back to my fear, I think what I like about it is more than just growth or anything else, it's just being able to meet awesome people like you and that's the part that keeps me going. That's why I don't see an end date necessarily or quitting because it's like “Oh my god! You get to meet all these awesome people and this is an amazing way that opens up doors for you.” That's what keeps me going, that curiosity to learn from other people's mental models. You are many steps ahead of me in many ways and I can always listen back to this episode. And for me, it's about building those relationships, I feel like, where I can always shoot you an email be like “Hey, Tanner, just wanted your thought on that” because you don't always have books for these kinds of things. It's in the making. So … I don't know ... for me, that's the why that keeps me going and I still haven't thought about the day when I quit.
Tanner: And that's great. Why would you? Why would you think about the end date? It'll inevitably come, maybe 40 years from now or whatever, but the thing that will never go away, will never end is what you've gained as a result of this endeavor. You as a human being, as an individual, literally you're the substance of your brain, the neurons will have been forever changed and shaped because of this. And so, as long as you're locked into that drive, that connection, that relationship building, that inspiration, you're going to be fine. And look at you giving that back to the world as well, right? There's got to be something there where it's not only you that's changing, it's me, it's your guests, it's listeners. We're all changing because of you, because of this thing that you're willing to spend a little bit of your time on. That's pretty powerful, I think.
Jayneil: Thank you so much, Tanner. How can listeners find you or contact you?
Tanner: Yeah, pretty easy. I’m just TannerC.com or just google me. You'll find all of my various endeavors out there.
Jayneil: Gotcha! Thank you so much, Tanner, for coming on the show. This has been phenomenal blast.
Tanner: Yeah, this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for your time and for that fun conversation. I appreciate it.
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