Josh Brewer: The untold story of Abstract, fear vs. love, presently perfect with Josh Brewer

What would you want to be remembered for? This is a question I asked Josh Brewer, founder of Abstract, the first version-control platform for Sketch, a popular design tool that overtook Photoshop back around 2015.

In this deeply personal episode of the WORK IN PROGRESS Podcast, Josh recounts the fascinating origin story, tracing all the way back to the chaotic Twitter days. When Abstract launched in 2017, it went from zero to $1M in ARR in just 4 months.

A few nuggets of wisdom:

1. On struggling with self-worth: “I was shown from as far back as I can remember that power came from what you did, or how valuable you were because of what you did ... I was not taught how to cultivate that inner validation, that self-worth... I was deeply dependent on external validation ...  I finally discovered that my heart is where my power lies. When I am truly grounded and anchored in who I am and I’m operating out of my heart, that’s when I am in my power.”
2. On servant leadership: “If you care about the other person as much or more than you care about yourself, then you will naturally be inclined to want to help.”
3. Two principles that he lives by: “We, not me” and “Willing and curious.”
4. Curiosity is the antidote to fear. It’s okay to be afraid, but don’t let fear control you. Create space to examine the fear, to learn from it, not run away from it.
5. “You don't need to be perfect in your life, but always be present in it. The present is the most perfect gift you can have.” (as Josh reflected on Present Perfect)
6. The only failure is failure to learn.
7. Prototyping culture + writing culture = powerful combination to communicate the future.

Transcript

Josh Brewer: 0:00

Perfect is whole and complete. And right now I'm whole and complete. And it was such a profound shift in my brain. I grew up most of my life feeling like I was broken, that something was wrong with me, that I wasn't good enough, that no matter what I did, I just still could never get there.

Peter Wang: 0:29

Welcome to the Work in Progress podcast. I am your host, Peter Wong. Today, we have a deeply personal episode with my friend, Josh Brewer. Josh is a self taught designer, an advisor to many, and best known as the co founder and CEO of Abstract. Abstract was the first version control platform for Sketch, a popular design tool that overtook Photoshop back in 2015. Josh recounts the fascinating origin story, tracing all the way back to the chaotic Twitter days. When Abstract launched in 2017, it went from zero to a million dollars in annual recurring revenue in just four months. Josh shares his reflections on power, self worth. and perfectionism and how overcoming his struggles shaped the principles that he lives by today. Principles such as we, not me, willing and curious. He also shares his definition of success and what he wants to be remembered for. Don't forget to like and subscribe for new episodes full of wisdom from real people. Enjoy the episode. Josh, welcome to the Work in Progress podcast.

Josh Brewer: 1:36

Thanks for having me.

Peter Wang: 1:38

By the way, you have an amazingly curated wall. Is there anything you want to point out that is special to you?

Josh Brewer: 1:45

My wife's an incredibly talented decorator and has a gift for creating and curating a space. There's all kinds of little moments throughout our house. Over time, some of these pieces have served their purpose and migrated out here. Behind my guitar, it's the poster that we made from when we launched. And it's the 10 people in the company at the time signatures from 2017 when we actually officially launched the product into the world. So that's a pretty special one. This right here is the very first flyer from the first concert that a band that I was in ever played. So that one's got a special place in my heart. That right up there is my little brother and I at four and two years old sitting on a log on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, where we grew up. That's one of my wife's very first oil paintings that I absolutely just love. Yeah, a lot of great moments. A couple of pictures of my kids throughout, but it's a fun little space to have around me all the time.

Peter Wang: 3:01

I love that. Similarly, I have a gallery wall next to me, which I curate periodically with our kids. It can be pretty lonely working long hours in the space, and it serves as a reminder of the why

Josh Brewer: 3:19

That's awesome.

Peter Wang: 3:21

Let's talk about your career. You had a long career in the design space across a wide gamut of roles. Your own design studio, principal designer at Twitter, CEO and founder of Abstract, which I used during the Sketch days. And now you're advising and mentoring startups. People know you in the space, but maybe not many know that you didn't come from design originally.

Josh Brewer: 3:49

Yeah. It's funny. I studied art in college did a lot of art as a kid growing up. And so I feel like always had that around me. Late nineties, a friend of mine was in the"new media" Program at the University of Iowa. And he was effectively bridging a little bit of video, a little bit of the online web at the time. It was the first glimpse where I was like, oh. I didn't have enough foresight at that moment to double down. If I could go back, I probably would have moved my focus into that and gone deeper there. But as things would turn out not too long after that, I ended up teaching at a private elementary school who happened to be one of the first Apple lighthouse schools. And 2001, all of our kids got the new iBook that had just come out. You remember the white clamshell. And, I look back on it as one of the most fortuitous moments in my entire career because I had to teach myself a bunch of things. I was responsible for teaching the teachers how to use these tools to teach the kids as well as teaching the kids and realizing very quickly that there was a lot to be desired in the experience of using these tools. At the same time, I also was fortunate to get the opportunity to take on the design of the school's website and I basically dove head first. A lot of credit to Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman and web standards as a concept came along right at a, I think for me a really important moment. And it gave me a perspective on building that I still think serves me to this day. I consumed everything I could possibly get my hands on and just started building. I was really fortunate. It paired the designing with the building of the front end. That ended up being 1 really critical piece to the success in my career is that while I wasn't a programmer or traditional back end engineer I was technical enough, to be able to hold my own in conversations, and I think then work as my career moved on really be a great partner to the engineers and the ability to sit at that intersection where we were all trying to come together to create a great experience, bringing the diverse pieces that ultimately have to come together for that to happen.

Peter Wang: 6:39

Let's go to your upbringing. Everyone's story, how they grow up, shapes how they perceive themselves, how they perceive the world. Can you tell a little bit about your upbringing and how that shaped you?

Josh Brewer: 6:51

It's interesting and complicated. I feel really fortunate. I have 2 parents who loved the 3 of us. I have a younger brother and a younger sister. And both of them came from hard situations, broken homes. From the moment they were married decided that they really wanted to not have that thing carry forward. They were very committed to the marriage, to our family to trying to do the best for us. And my mom and dad worked their butts off. I remember my dad, especially when I was younger there were times when he was working two jobs, working 16 hours a day doing whatever he had to to take care of all of us. I've looked back on that a lot with tremendous respect and admiration. As a little kid, you're like, where's my dad? As soon as I became a father my understanding grew immensely and my gratitude for him and for my mom really just continue to unfold. We grew up in a very charismatic Christian environment. There's a lot of pieces of it that for me have been really traumatic and that have taken some real work to look at, accept and do the work to heal, so that I could really own my own life again, that came from my own decisions, my own beliefs, things that I had consciously chosen to adopt versus the things that I was programmed to believe. There was so much community and genuine care for one another in the environments that I grew up in. At the same time, there was some unhealthy, abusive behaviors from the folks in power. A lot of my journey, in the last 10 to 12 years has been wrestling with this idea of power and what it means to have power, what it means to give up power. My startup career, it's been a very powerful and potent environment to learn a lot about myself and about that dynamic in particular. The really cool piece is, each and every one of us have our own power. We each have our power. For a long time I had a, coach who would be like, you step into your power. And I just remember one day being like, dude, fuck you. What are you talking about? It was so like, woo and abstract. The interesting experience for me was, I finally discovered that my heart is where my power lies. When I am truly grounded and anchored in who I am and I'm operating out of my heart, that's when I'm in my power. But it took a really long time to shed a lot of the layers of what I thought I was supposed to do or where I thought my power actually was. I wish I hadn't necessarily have gone through all the things but I wouldn't be this person today if I hadn't. So I'm deeply grateful for that.

Peter Wang: 10:37

That's where wisdom comes from, right? It's not the easy road on which we learn. It's the hard road. Hearing you talk about where is power coming from, I do think that everyone struggles with that. How much agency do I have? How much does the system have in control over me? What is my role in the system? If I want to make a change, how do I start? Is it possible? I still do today.

Josh Brewer: 11:04

100%.

Peter Wang: 11:06

One thing you said resonated with me a lot You said, now that I learned the power comes from my heart, right? When I believe in it's here. Where was power before? Where'd that come from before?

Josh Brewer: 11:19

I would say first, thank you. Very good question. I was shown from as far back as I can remember that power came from what you did, or how valuable you were because of what you did. And so if you could do the right things at the right time, you somehow received the praise or the blessing or the acknowledgement of someone else who had more power. So it always meant that you were beholden to someone else to give you some of their power so that you then could level up for lack of a better way to put it. What I've struggled with for a long time was that I was deeply dependent on external validation, in an unhealthy level. I was not taught or learned how to cultivate that inner validation, that self worth, that self love. In examining my life and looking back, it was very clear to me how much of my entire way of being in the world was dependent on whether or not I was being validated. It puts you into a level of vigilance that's unhealthy, puts you in fight or flight all the time. So you're just threat scanning all the time, trying to figure out, am I doing the right thing? Did I say the right thing? Am I behaving the right? And all this going on unconsciously, and that has been really challenging at times. It has created crippling anxiety in certain moments. I'm really proud that I had the courage to not be a victim of that, but it took a lot of work. It took feedback from people close to me that I really loved and respected to help shine a light on those places and help me start to understand what was happening inside. And I'm just deeply grateful for those folks in my life.

Peter Wang: 13:45

That sounds amazing and also painful at the same time. You were going through this unconsciously. I think about kids today and social media and the like button, the view counts and so on. The world is full of externality, measurements, right? what measurements do you actually care for? What reflects your value? It's a challenging thing ever since social media started and that compounds to even how people look at you, what they say to you, how long did it take to respond to you?

Josh Brewer: 14:21

Yeah.

Peter Wang: 14:22

So much can be read into it. It's very hard to be at peace. Actually, this past weekend, Father's Day. I was letting what was happening really affect how I feel, even though nothing is really happening. I got to a better place yesterday. I was like, okay, I'm in a better place now. It took me a day to get over, right?

Josh Brewer: 14:42

Congratulations.

Peter Wang: 14:44

Thank you.

Josh Brewer: 14:45

Sometimes it takes a lot longer.

Peter Wang: 14:48

Yeah. And I had to apologize, I was crabby. I want to talk about your career alongside this, because you went on to build a successful career, even though you're struggling with these things. How did you become aware of it? How does it affect your work?

Josh Brewer: 15:05

Yeah that's a big one. I really appreciate this question. The thought that came up as soon as you said it is something I've been really thinking about lately. In a strange way, a lot of the things that I grew up in and the way that I learned how to be in the world and the power structure type of stuff weirdly served me better than I would have imagined in tech. There's this strange parallel between the world I was in before and then the world in tech. Part of it was, I understood how to navigate some of these things, even subconsciously. One thing I learned very early on is being that person who helps the person who's in charge is a both rewarding and valuable thing, but it also weirdly has this side effect of you now being in closer proximity to that power that authority. And in some cases it then extends to you. If you think about startups and you think about that world, if you want to be successful, one of the fastest ways you can be successful is find the person in charge and go figure out how to help them. If it's the CEO or it's your boss, if you can find a way to partner with them to support them to understand what they're trying to do and help make that happen, that opens doors. You can do that in a really gross, unhealthy way. Most people can sniff that out. Then there's another way, which is that genuine desire to help. I use this word very carefully, but servant leadership is definitely an incredible philosophy. I also want to be super careful with the word"serving", because both for me and for everyone out there, there's potentially unhealthy connotations to that.

Peter Wang: 17:05

How do you define it for you?

Josh Brewer: 17:08

If you care about the other person as much or more than you care about yourself Then you will naturally be inclined to want to help. Think of it more in a partnership than oh, I'm trying to get this person's approval. Some of my favorite people that I have worked for, I have a hard time saying I worked for them. I worked with them. We happen to have different levels of responsibility or ownership or power or whatever you want to call it, but we were doing it together and that togetherness, that partnership, that's the stuff that I love and I care about and is, I think, core to who I am as a person and how I try to operate in the world.

Peter Wang: 17:57

Right, Because what you're doing is much as for them as for yourself.

Josh Brewer: 18:01

Yes, there was a phrase that we had at Habitat, the incubator that I started and it was we, not me. We, not me. And it was just this really simple phrase, but I would repeat it pretty regularly because it was just a simple way to remember that it's we, not me. If we are successful, I am successful, right? But so are you. We succeed. We fail together. We learn together. And it really is that partnership mentality that I don't think I understood at the time how much it was my own reaction to a dominator power structure type of approach to things, but as time went on, and as I understood more about my own journey became very clear. It was like, oh no, this is about us. This is about we now. You can't do the, we, if you aren't showing up for yourself. There is this important interplay between doing the work, taking care of yourself, learning how to be you that is necessary in the we. The best working relationships I've had are like, you're just shoulder to shoulder. You're in it together, and that's what makes it worth doing.

Peter Wang: 19:27

In it together, this is a phrase of being in the trenches together. It's the feeling, is your boss in the trench with you or is your boss above the trench? In today's age, June 2023, when we talk about system, power structure, those are loaded words. I think we should examine, define carefully and accurately for people. For example the boss does have power over you in a couple different ways, your boss does determine your compensation, whether you have employment or not, what opportunities have. And oftentimes your boss is the person who would, or would not give you a recommendation for the next role outside of the company. So that person holds a lot of power and that's the same when you are the boss, right? So it's awareness of that. You hold that power as well as someone else holds that power over you. The best boss don't hold that power over you, and like you were a teacher, similarly in a way, the teacher sees student success as their success

Josh Brewer: 20:35

Yeah.

Peter Wang: 20:36

and students failure as their failure. Because You were so vigilant, about the feedback you receive, the signals you receive. You're aware of this relationship very quickly. You know who to go to, you know whom you should help with. And that's a positive thing that helped you along

Josh Brewer: 20:55

Yeah,

Peter Wang: 20:56

Along the way, you also recognized that started becoming a dominating thing for you. And you're losing yourself.

Josh Brewer: 21:04

yeah.

Peter Wang: 21:06

Did you know that when you started Abstract?

Josh Brewer: 21:11

I think I had pieces of it. Ironically, in some ways I started therapy right about the time that we started Abstract. Some of these things I understood intuitively, some of them I was starting to have a much more conscious understanding and the God's honest truth is Abstract was like the single greatest, fastest, hardest way to really bring that into focus and really make it front and center and present in my life. To this day, the Abstract journey is probably one of the most profound things I've ever done. I'm deeply grateful for all of the folks who came along on that journey. And it was genuinely a privilege to lead that company and do what we did. And it was not easy.

Peter Wang: 22:07

No company is easy. Maybe you can paint a picture about that phase in design arc.

Josh Brewer: 22:11

Yeah. It was really interesting. Abstract, the roots of it go back to my time at Twitter. We were growing incredibly quickly. I think we went from five to 50 designers in three years. We had two CEOs, three VP of engineering and. Four VPs of product in the three years that I was there,

Peter Wang: 22:38

Wow.

Josh Brewer: 22:40

which is a lot of change. Company was scaling at an epic rate but the reality of it was we were trying to figure out how in the world can we, as the design team, both demonstrate the value we bring to the company, but also make everybody's lives easier by figuring out better ways to collaborate, right? Like our partners and product and engineering. We, at one point, hacked together. Again, back to the we, not me. We had this moment where we were like, okay, we're using Photoshop and you can't collaborate in Photoshop. In fact, you can't even open the same file at the same time, otherwise everything falls apart. And so we started using Subversion to versions control our files.

Peter Wang: 23:22

Oh, wow. subversion.

Josh Brewer: 23:23

subversion. Going way back mostly cuz Git doesn't handle binary files very well at all. So we use subversion and that meant that any team member could check out a file and open it at any given time, but only they could do it. This was the beginning of a shift of these aren't my files, these are our files. Again. We not me, right? This is the roots of that. And it was a shift in consciousness, how we thought about working together. We connected subversion to this internal WordPress install that I had hacked together so that we could start basically having the closest approximation of a commit log. The designers started creating these posts of what they were working on and everyone inside of the company could see it. Because it was on our intranet and all of a sudden PMS were like, yes, engineers were like, wait, this is what you're working on. Okay, hold on timeout. We don't have eight of these APIs that are going to be necessary for this screen that you just designed. Which normally that wouldn't have happened until a month later in a review. Maybe. Odds are it was like three months once engineering starts on it. So again, It was trying to get us into a flow of communication and visibility. That was really the thing behind it. Suffice to say, I left Twitter to go found Habitat, which was the incubator that was about bringing designers and engineers together and creating space for them to do like very hypothesis driven focused exploration. I remember when I left, Mike Davidson, who was the VP of design at the time was like, you should go build this thing and make it a product. And I was like, are you kidding? Because we couldn't see what changed inside of the file. We only knew that the file changed, but if you can't understand what actually changed, it's not actually that helpful. You need the granularity of what exactly changed for it to be really effective. Sometimes the universe is a very kind entity and my technical co founder Kevin Smith, he joined me at Habitat, the incubator. When he came in, we had this long conversation about why don't designers have better workflows? Why don't they have something like what engineers have with git, and it hit this moment where he was like, you're telling me. That if we could figure out how to translate a binary file into a structured format where we can understand what changed, you have an idea of what this thing needs to look like. And I was like, yes, absolutely. But nobody's done that. Google didn't do it. Adobe didn't do it. Dropbox didn't do it. Two weeks later, Kevin comes back with a working prototype. He had disassembled and a Sketch file, turned it into a structured JSON format, put it into a Git repo, built a UI around it so that we could make changes and commit those changes and then merge them back together. And I was like we should spin this out, immediately. And so we did. That was really wild. Habitat lasted for a little over a year and spun two companies out and Abstract was the one that I genuinely felt oh, I'm supposed to do this. I didn't know it, but this was why Habitat existed was to allow me to find this thing. That was how that all took shape, so deeply grateful to Twitter and the experience that we had there and to all my engineering counterparts over the years. I was very grateful to have had a conceptual model and understand the value of annotating your work, making it visible to others and allowing other people to participate in the process way earlier. That was what shaped and formed the whole product and our philosophy for the company as well.

Peter Wang: 27:30

I love that founding story for a couple of reasons. One is you felt the pain yourself, saw a good example of what it could be in a different field, engineering. And you gave yourself space. The question mark in my head is, you left Twitter to start Habitat. That was the space you needed, even though you didn't know at the time. Did you feel constrained by Twitter's single product vision? What was that motivation there?

Josh Brewer: 27:59

That is a very good question. I will say it was really twofold. There is a talk that I gave in 2014 called,"We Are Responsible", at a conference called Mind the Product. There was like 400 people in the audience. And really what it was, at Twitter we started to understand that we were shaping behavior. And I wasn't the only one. And so please, for anyone who listens to this, please know, this is just Josh's opinion. I know there are a lot of people on this whole entire spectrum. I was watching things getting increasingly political. I was in a role as the principal designer where I should have had the ability to shape and influence where we were going in a meaningful way. I did, and yet I didn't. The political structure of that organization at the time you have people trying to build their own kingdoms and sabotaging other people and My project is more important than your project. And so I know how to manipulate. Oh, I know one of the board members. So I will get them to say something. I guess I should have not been surprised by, but I was like, what is this? Come on, and maybe it just shows my naivete. But it was increasingly more difficult to see a productive path forward. There was one meeting where they had discovered that people were pulling to refresh like six, seven, eight times when there was no new content. Great. We have built the greatest Pavlovian machine to date. More, more, right? So there was a conversation and it was like, Oh, we could start serving up related content. We could start serving up blah, blah, blah. And you know how that story goes. Eventually we could serve up ads. I was sitting in the room and just thinking to myself, We should put a banner in that just says, please put down your phone and go outside. Stop, please. This is not helpful. And I was a very unpopular minority in that conversation. And when you start getting into micro AB tests about Hey, if we move this button over here, we notice people accidentally hit this spot a lot. So maybe we should put this like button in the spot people accidentally hit. And I was like, you gotta be kidding me. I just can't do that. So that was one half of the equation for me. I didn't want to keep doing the game that I saw unfolding in front of me. And again, just Josh's perspective. The other side of it though, was this deep desire to go build something, to go do something of my own, to take that risk. I remember arrogantly saying if these guys can do it. I've got to at least try, right? When I had started Abstract, I remember thinking about a couple of my CEOs that I had worked for and reached out to them and been like, I really appreciate you and I'm sorry for any of the times I might have been a dick. I did not understand what you were holding. Unless you've been in that seat if you can really, comprehend the weight of what a high growth venture backed CEO is holding at any given moment of any day and it's gnarly. And so I had to go back and be like I'm sorry, and I'm so thankful for what you did do. What was happening for me at the time was I had engineers and designers reaching out to me saying, hey, I'm looking for a co founder, but I don't know how to find one or, I've got an idea, but I don't know how to go raise money. And the irony of this is I had never started my own company and I didn't know how to raise money, but everyone was asking me. I was like this seems like an opportunity to bring really talented people together. My experience is when you put really talented folks together and give them space, either they just go in circles and waste a bunch of time, or they start poking at edges of things and exploring things. And sometimes the stuff that looks like a waste of time isn't at all. In startup land, you're moving 900 miles an hour. We got the clock's ticking and the runway is disappearing.

Peter Wang: 32:32

That's right.

Josh Brewer: 32:32

If you flip that over and you're like, hold on timeout. I have seen this consistently in my personal life, in my career, in multiple companies that I've been a part of at this point. It's like a wave. Right. You need these moments of compression in order to accelerate, but you also need the moments of expansion in order to create enough space for opportunity to arise for new things to get introduced so that as that thing begins to come back together. Things can connect. And I am deeply grateful. The first person who ever invested is a dear friend of mine. His name is Michael Polanski. And I remember his words to me were, look, whether or not you spin successful companies out of this or not, I know you will attract incredibly talented people who care about what they're doing. And that's worth its weight in gold. So here's the check and I was like, holy shit. I still go back to that as one of the most important moments. Somebody believed in me and was willing to take and I deeply believe that was because of who I am and how I operate and the we not me, right? That the chances of success were higher because of how I operate and how I want to work with folks not trying to extract value out of people, but trying to combine, right? To create something greater than the sum of the parts.

Peter Wang: 34:06

It's just so beautiful. You're summing up a lot of realizations from the Twitter days. From political environment, which often comes from a lack of first principles. And oftentimes because they're under tremendous amount of pressure within a VC backed high growth startup model. And when you are under the gun, fear dominates.

Josh Brewer: 34:38

Yes.

Peter Wang: 34:40

and fear would then squeeze out other principles pretty quickly, and therefore starting to have conversations such as, I notice people are tapping on this by accident, let's take advantage of that. Who cares if how long that will last? I can picture you sitting there just wondering, Is this the strategy that we're going forth?

Josh Brewer: 35:00

right.

Peter Wang: 35:01

It's not a strategy. It's a

Josh Brewer: 35:04

Short term tactic at best.

Peter Wang: 35:06

Yeah. To the world of Habitat. You have this ethos about you, where people feel comfortable reach out to you, and knowing that you will be willing to help.

Josh Brewer: 35:17

Yeah,

Peter Wang: 35:17

itself is worth the gold. And that's because you're also making room for people.

Josh Brewer: 35:24

totally.

Peter Wang: 35:26

That's beautiful.

Josh Brewer: 35:27

I really appreciate you saying that that might be probably the best articulation that I've heard. So thank you for saying that, I do deeply want to make room for people. So I appreciate that observation.

Peter Wang: 35:43

That's amazing gift. These days people are ghosting one another more than making time for one another. We need more people like you out there to say, I'm willing to help, even though I don't know how, but I'm willing to invest.

Josh Brewer: 36:00

So it's interesting you just used that word willing because that willing and curious became core values at abstract. And I remember talking to Kevin when we're trying to articulate this set of shared values. Frank our, third co founder as well. The early team, I think everyone operated out of this unspoken way of being. And it took us a while to Step back and try to articulate what that was and it was willing and curious, like those two things together are just such a powerful, potent combination because the willingness meant that you're willing to risk making mistakes. You're willing to like, not be right. You're willing to go do something that you maybe don't even want to do, right? but you're willing in order to see what's going to be there. The curiosity is that thing that holds you in an open enough space, right? You don't get so constricted by that fear that you were describing. That you're making fear based decisions, but instead the curiosity, I think, is like the antidote. That's okay if I am fearful right now, why am I fearful? What's going on behind that? Or hey, we should do this thing. Why should we do this thing? Not in a you're wrong. But a tell me more, right? That kind of curiosity and willingness ended up shaping the culture, the values, and the way that we operated both internally as a team, but externally as a company.

Peter Wang: 37:46

I love that, willing and curious. you just gave me this idea where this episode alone, you've said a lot of great a couple we not me. Willing and curious. We should make art out of them.

Josh Brewer: 38:01

Oh, hell yeah.

Peter Wang: 38:01

Printable art from these, because they are becoming a collection of cornerstones that anchor you. That's an artifact to have. Good reminders for all of us. Now, talk about Abstract a little bit more, because it sparked from such a great genuine place of, I see a problem, I can see the vision, I have this culture. Now, of course, all startups go through painful aspects of it. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Josh Brewer: 38:35

I will start by saying that for all of the hard things and the painful pieces and the moments I in some ways, I wish I could go back and get a do over. I am so proud of what we built, how we built it. The people who joined us on that adventure whether it was for a short period of time or for the duration of it. The irony of the whole thing is we raised our seed round on Kevin's tech demo. And that means that January 2nd, 2016, we had money in the bank and there were like four or five of us And we had nothing other than a tech demo. So it was like time to get to work. It was game on. We spent the first nine, 10 months, just understanding the needs. We did some deep, work at Habitat prior to spinning it out and at the beginning of the journey really trying to map out and understand the needs of designers and their workflows, especially at scale and these larger teams understanding which key principles translated from a solo person by themselves, all the way up to hundreds and hundreds of people working together. And started building. As soon as we had something that we ourselves were using picked up the phone and called a few friends and said, Hey, can you know, can I show you something and get some feedback? And we showed a few people and they had some really great questions that sent us back to the drawing board in a couple of places and iterate and deeply grateful because that core team, we believed in shipping. Like we, at the core, every person in that core first team, it was about shipping and iterating. We know some stuff, we know that we don't know all the stuff now. How do we close that gap? And so by the end of the year, we had launched a private alpha. We were so fortunate to have, I think both the attention of the design community and the trust of some folks really like go with us and it also was that like, it was a moment in time, like 2015, 2016 sketch had replaced Photoshop as the tool, but every I'm not joking you, I had a call with a team that had scheduled hours with the file that they were working on.

Peter Wang: 41:12

Wow.

Josh Brewer: 41:12

would work on it from nine to noon, somebody else would work on it from noon to three and then somebody else would work on it from three to six. And I was like, what world are we living in? Are you kidding me? So there was like deep motivation fast forward, our private alpha was amazing. We had some phenomenal teams in there. Shopify, Spotify, the Microsoft outlook team. Lending home was one of our first teams compass. Like we had a few folks that were like early, early in.

Peter Wang: 41:47

Jim.

Josh Brewer: 41:47

just dozens and dozens more amazing teams that came in and gave us constant feedback. And so we just, we had about six, seven months of just in this alpha iterating every single week. And the cool part was a lot of the stuff that we had roadmap was absolutely the stuff they wanted us to build. And there were like nuances as we went along that kind of shaped and molded. I'm super proud of the fact that we did have a very clear vision and yes, some of the details had to get refined, but we knew where we were going. We were incredibly fortunate. We launched in 2017 and we went from zero to a million in ARR in four or five months. Just mind melting, like to the point where I asked my dear friend Aditya to go back and rerun the numbers because I was just like, I don't believe you. Are you serious right now? And he was like, no, I'm dead serious. Look and so we're staring at the numbers and we're like. Oh. We had 15 people at that time and we were serving some of the largest corporations in the world and being like we got to figure out how we're going to survive.

Peter Wang: 43:04

Scale this when you look at the numbers, it just screams product market fit,

Josh Brewer: 43:08

Yes,

Peter Wang: 43:09

That's what it says to you. Did you then raise another, did you

Josh Brewer: 43:11

We, did. We had a preemptive series a right before we launched. The team over at Amplify heard about us, spent months getting to know me and the product and the team talking to customers. And they were like, look, we don't need revenue data. Your usage and the companies that you have in your private alpha are like, absolutely. Please let us write this check. And so that allowed me to add a few more people and know that we had plenty of runway going into the next year and a little beyond. And then. We hit that 1 million ARR really quickly. We had projections that like, there was a good chance we could get to three by the end of the year. And so we raised another round in the spring team was about 30 at that point. And then by the end of the year, I think we hit about 4. 2 by the end of the year. And the company was like, 65 people. So like we grew really quickly. Our company was remote from the very beginning. We had a core team in San Francisco, but one of the founders was in New York. We had a few engineers on the East coast and both Kevin and I had done remote several times in our career and deeply believed in the ability to find really great talent elsewhere. And so we were we scaled all those pieces up and continue to just have this amazing opportunity. I think if you really get down to it, the thing that really changed was in the end of 2019 going into 2020, Figma had actually become not just usable, but scalable, like it was performant enough, they had built enough great features that like, you could move off of sketch and not be sacrificing and it was fast enough, finally. And we really saw that it was pretty clear that the multiplayer browser based experience. Was a evolution of the asynchronous collaboration that we had enabled. Unfortunately we weren't able to work with them and find a way to build something together. And so we ended up building a second product that deeply integrated with Figma and behind all of it though, was still the same mission because even in Figma to this day You don't know what's going on in there. You don't know what changed. You don't know who did what, when you can figure it out, but honestly, most of the people I talk to are like, they create other artifacts as a way to, to do that. And I'm like, so in some ways we went back, but in other ways we did, we had a huge leap forward. And those core problems of collaboration, of accountability of. One of the things I really wanted for designers was like, Hey, for you to be able to look at all the work you've done and actually show people what you did, like that, I feel like that's important. I've also since then come to grips with the fact that digital design is very ephemeral. Products are ephemeral. The designs today that get implemented most likely won't be there in a year or two. Some semblance of it might, but it's just this constant evolution of things. Some of my gripes were like, I just let go of them. It was like, okay, you know what if people can still get the job done and people are able to communicate and collaborate in a way that is effective. I don't actually care how that gets done. It's a very interesting spot that we find ourselves in as a profession, as an industry. I think the. The AI piece that's coming now is just at such an early stage. But I remember conversations Kevin and I had in 2017, 2018, where we were like the amount of data that we're sitting on about what types of things changed, what got approved, what didn't get approved, what patterns people are using. We're like, we have a decent data set here. Maybe we should in some ways I wish we would have. Had enough foresight, but we had 900 other fires going. That was like, not nearly as important, but I think there's gonna be a world where a lot of the tedious, automatable things get automated and I'm here for that. Absolutely. I still don't think that AI is going to be able to think for us and design at the end of the day is critically, analyzing the information in front of you, understanding the connections between things, understanding intent, understanding how one action impacts an entire system, right? And who knows, maybe I'll be wrong and it can totally do all of it for us. And we get to go take naps in the field. But I still think we got a long way to go and it means hopefully more designers cultivating more empathy, more understanding, more I think system thinking in order for us to continue to build products that actually help and serve the people using them.

Peter Wang: 48:57

That's a very good segue because my mind is zooming out to the world of design as you were talking about the journey of Abstract. That was a very pivotal moment. Sketch to Figma. And there's a few other tools in between right? That I can't even think of the name now. One star with a Z. The other one, sorry. Zeppelin.

Josh Brewer: 49:18

yeah, doing some of the handoff stuff for developers as well.

Peter Wang: 49:23

And there was another company that was, people will, we will upload our. onto the web through that, it was pretty

Josh Brewer: 49:30

Envision.

Peter Wang: 49:32

InVision, oh my

Josh Brewer: 49:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Wang: 49:34

They missed the boat on that one. they were the dominant tool. could have.

Josh Brewer: 49:39

They could have owned it all.

Peter Wang: 49:41

I was using InVision a lot. That was, like Figma today, Could have been InVision, If

Josh Brewer: 49:49

Definitely.

Peter Wang: 49:50

that down the route. They had pieces of it.

Josh Brewer: 49:52

Yeah.

Peter Wang: 49:53

Product strategy wise, Do you build for the future? Yeah. a leap or do you incrementally, right? There's two different strategies to consider. But let's talk about design overall. You talked to a lot of designers today, companies whether through a venture fund or yourself advising them. What do you usually see as pitfalls? What is your advice to people?

Josh Brewer: 50:15

That's a, it's a good one. I think the interesting bit is that my advisory journey has definitely shifted over the years. Early on in my career, it was definitely like design and product and I would come in and I would sit down and examine what they were doing, talk about different ways that they could accomplish their goals. So it's very tactical design and product related stuff. As time went on, I spent more and more time talking to folks about how to build design teams, how to bring design forward as part of the leadership, as part of how you think about building your company and your product. Then I'd say for the last four or five years, most of my advisory work has been less design and much more about the founder journey, interpersonal dynamics, but always ironically with this undercurrent of design behind it. I'll look at teams that have the inklings of product market fit, but really need to take that next leap in the user experience, the user journey, the overall, brand as well, right? How does design express itself in service of the business and its goals? Sometimes that's supporting the design leadership Sometimes if they're early enough, like the one designer that's there, sitting down and being a sounding board for them and offering feedback or advice connecting them to other talent that's out there, that type of stuff. I will say that from where I'm sitting and again, I. Would be very open to somebody sharing other information to counter this. There's a little part of me that feels like I'm a little bummed because it feels like design, like part of what I was doing with Abstract was trying to allow the rest of the organization to observe what we were doing to see firsthand, the value of design, how design works the way that we iterate, the way that we consider multiple perspectives, how we finally arrive at a decision and then go build that thing. All as a way of saying that design should be part of the decision making process, it should have a seat at the table, which is funny because I remember saying at one point even my kid in a high chair has a seat at the table. So let's not get too excited about this. You can still be a baby throwing food around and have a seat at the table.

Peter Wang: 52:52

chair, okay, that's not, that's a different kind of chair.

Josh Brewer: 52:54

Okay, fair play, but you could even be in a chair and still making a mess. There are some amazing companies out there where design has become a central part of their success, and I am deeply grateful for that. I still see and hear so much of the same energy that I saw 10, 12, 15 years ago, where design is a service. Get out of the way. I'll call you when I need you. Come fix this thing make this look prettier, just a very like transactional experience. And it's a long tail, right? Just as there are companies that are like design is core to how the entire thing operates, there's the other end of that as well. I just have to be mindful that it's not evenly distributed. I think one of the challenges for designers everywhere is understanding how businesses operate, understanding the goals and the needs of the business. What drives those things? Trying to get your head around dynamics of funding cycles and what's happening in the larger macro environment and not taking everything so personally that it's like an attack on design, but that like design is one piece of this incredibly complex dimensional machine, right? The more you understand the levers that are being pushed and pulled in how the overarching business operates, the more likely you are able to contribute in a meaningful way beyond just the pixels. The Pixels are important because they help everyone else visualize a future that isn't here yet, right? It's a way of seeing a shared future, and aligning on how we might go about getting there, I think is an incredibly important job, but it's also not the only thing.

Peter Wang: 54:59

That's true. There's A lot to unpack here. You mentioned about how designers should be more systems thinking, which ties to that in this complicated system, there's a lot of inputs, outputs, factors at play, and most of them, unless you have an incredible leader who is articulating the pieces, um, are implicit. Designers are often, in my own experience, in the dark. It could be the product strategy. It could be there's not enough budget to do user research so they are couple degrees away from the users. They're now using quantitative data to determine behavior, to infer intent. And, depending on the pressure the company is in, right? Design becomes service often because they want to build something, can you help me make it happen? But the reverse, reverse meaning designers, engineers, the different disciplines, data scientists, they think differently, conceptualize differently, their toolkits are different. One thing that I have tried at BuzzFeed, I call it the prototyping culture,

Josh Brewer: 56:13

Yes.

Peter Wang: 56:15

right? There's writing culture, which I would credit Amazon for bringing that to focus which is really important to

Josh Brewer: 56:20

Yes.

Peter Wang: 56:21

the narrative and so on. The prototype culture, I feel it's such a great complement

Josh Brewer: 56:27

Yes.

Peter Wang: 56:28

As a medium, I've seen, for example, BuzzFeed, many documents. It's an incredible writing culture. However, not everybody is a reader.

Josh Brewer: 56:40

Yep.

Peter Wang: 56:41

everybody is a writer. And especially novel concepts, writing alone does not translate. Doesn't tell the story. I think when Jeff Bezos started it, he often asked for a mock.

Josh Brewer: 56:54

Mm hmm.

Peter Wang: 56:54

Like, That's actually, I think that's through telephone. It's it's missing in this writing culture. What does it look like? What does it feel like? That's key. The same paragraph comes out completely differently. Feels completely differently.

Josh Brewer: 57:11

And it's interesting because that connection between the writing and the prototyping. Is something that I've witnessed if the writing is clear, thoughtful and, I'll go so far as to say detailed, and it doesn't need to be verbose, but it gets at the core pieces that creates a the environment, I think, for that prototype. To come to life in a way that's a faster and be way more valuable because you have a story which were wired for then when you go experience it, you're contrasting it with that and it either totally blows that away and you're like, holy shit. This is 10 times better than I could have hoped. Or it's wow, that really doesn't feel like what I thought it was going to feel like. So to me, those two things together are probably some of the most powerful ways for an organization to operate. I'm heavy in the prototype camp. I remember a board meeting in 20, late 2018 where our board was asking like, where's design going? Where's the future? Kevin and I both were convinced that within five years, static mock-ups wouldn't exist. That every deliverable would be a functional prototype. It's five years later. We're still not there, but that's okay. Directionally, I think we're headed there.

Peter Wang: 58:44

I think part is tooling, part is culture.

Josh Brewer: 58:47

Back at Twitter and this would have been like 2012 probably. We built an internal prototyping framework. So it's just HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and we use mustache to, for all the templating stuff. We had one of the engineers hook it up so that we could pipe in anyone's real data to populate the thing because we were doing user testing and showing people these mocks that were like prototyping, but it was like fake shit that we made up and they just wouldn't connect with it. And then it was like, timeout. We need their data to be in here so that they feel connected to it. And then they're going to tell us whether or not it works right. They need to feel connection first. And then they can articulate whether or not the mechanics of it. Are doing what they needed to do. So we started sending Dick and the other execs links to these prototypes on their phone. They would sit on their phone and play with the prototype before they ever got to the meeting. And when we got to meetings, it was like, this is awesome. This is awesome. What the hell was this? Like it was like the level of clarity in those was wild.

Peter Wang: 1:00:00

Prototyping cuts away a lot of the time, the churn sitting in a meeting and discussing. If you want to do it, show us. Prototyping culture can shorten not only decision time, but the quality of decisions. It's something worth pushing forward. We started out talking about your journey starting teacher, to getting into design. We talked about your upbringing, and how that external validation has helped you in your career, but in the meantime, thank has also prevented you from realizing the power within. We talked about how your experience at Twitter let you to Habitat, which led you to Abstract and how the founding of Figma and how that parallel products and different strategies and so on in a very critical phase of our design world changed your trajectory for Abstract, right? And now today you are spending more time talking to founders, not just designers, helping them navigate a very complicated world. There's a couple questions, the first one is not lightning round, but then I'll go to lightning round.

Josh Brewer: 1:01:25

Okay, cool.

Peter Wang: 1:01:26

Are there certain principles that are important to you? actually you mentioned two already, we not me is one. Willing and curious. Any other principles you feel are cornerstones for you?

Josh Brewer: 1:01:38

This is a good question. I wish I had like my list and maybe you're inspiring me to sit down and try to externalize some of these things and put them on paper. One interesting concepts I heard, someone was framing everything as either fear or love. If you reduce anything that you've got going on in your being down. It's either a fear based or a love based thing, right? I have spent years trying to unpack that to use it almost as like a litmus test in my own self. What kind of energy is in my response to this thing and using that to actively because honest to God, startup land is, there's just fear all the time. It's just constant anxiety, right? Is this going to live or die? So it's basically survival mode all the time. At a like exponential level, it feels and so being able to discern, Oh, in this moment. I'm operating out of fear or this person who's sharing this thing with me right now where are they coming from? What's the like texture of the energy that's coming? Oh, okay. are both sitting in fear. How can we dissolve that? Maybe we can't dissolve it. Maybe the best we can do is really acknowledge and accept it and create space for that to be there and not to push it away, not bury it, not ignore it or pretend like it's not there, but instead to make space for it. And then have a healthier relationship to it. And maybe that goes to the other side. How can I bring love? I don't mean oh, lovey dovey, like hearts and shit. Like love, care, compassion. How can I bring that into whatever I'm doing into whatever conversation I'm having? That's been a journey. That's not a oh, I'm there and I'm done. And but it's a strong, principle for navigating life.

Peter Wang: 1:04:06

What you remind me is. It maybe goes back to the external validation piece. When you're so vigilant about external validation, your fear is not getting that. Because you're expecting it. You want it, you need it. You crave it. So there's a lot of fear in there. Two is, every fear has probably it's like a two sides of a coin. you're running away from something, or you're running towards something. Discover are you running towards? I remember in our earlier conversation we had, you've said something along the lines of, What do you care enough or what do you love enough to do something about it? That's, pulling you, right? The push and pull relationship. And that's powerful. There was an experiment, a mouse, where they put a cheese in front, which is like pulling them forward, there's something behind them, something they're afraid of, and they were measuring how much force is the mouse pulling forward, to get away from the fear, and toward the cheese,

Josh Brewer: 1:05:09

Yep.

Peter Wang: 1:05:10

with or without the fear, right? The mouse was pulling the hardest when there's both fear and cheese at the same time. Like something to run towards and something to run away from. Which resonated a lot with me, thinking actually, in the absence of fear, it's not good. We get too comfortable.

Josh Brewer: 1:05:27

And if I look back on all of this, fear can be an incredible teacher,

Peter Wang: 1:05:35

Mhm.

Josh Brewer: 1:05:35

but it requires creating space. It requires intentionality to like actually look at it objectively. And so creating practices in your life where you can create enough space where like you're not directly attached to that fear or you haven't absorbed and become that fear, creating that space to be able to say okay, sometimes fear is really fucking good. It keeps you alive. and other times it's a giant warning sign. If you stop and pay attention, you can learn, and it may allow you to take a different course where you avoid something really painful. Or it may reflect something to you that you are maybe unwilling to look at. So taking that moment to really make space for it, I think it's huge. I think I used to operate more, out of the get it out. And now I'm really in a place of no it's, just part of the experience. It's okay to be afraid, but it's not okay to let fear control you. It's about making enough space and accepting the things that are happening without becoming fully identified with them.

Peter Wang: 1:06:53

Right, right, Not becoming you. You actually remind me of a technique, label your thoughts,

Josh Brewer: 1:06:59

Yep.

Peter Wang: 1:07:00

Don't judge it, it's okay, here's a fear, recognizing and label it, that was a fear

Josh Brewer: 1:07:05

Such a powerful practice.

Peter Wang: 1:07:08

One other thing you said before was about the concept of perfection.

Josh Brewer: 1:07:14

Yes, that's

Peter Wang: 1:07:15

I feel like that might be worthwhile digging into.

Josh Brewer: 1:07:17

a, so this is a we were talking about principles. This is my evolving experience. I definitely grew up with a perfectionist tendency. I was exceedingly hard on myself when I wasn't able to achieve or attain a level of, I won't even call it perfection, but just like a level that you thought you should have been able to. I remember the very first therapist I ever worked with, he was like, I'm not going to label you a perfectionist. First of all, that's a terrible label to put on anyone. Second of all, You have perfectionist tendencies. So do a lot of people. It was just this grounding, normalizing moment. And I was really fortunate. I read a book called Present Perfect. And there was this one moment in it where it talks about the word perfection. The root, I think it's probably the Latin or whatever actually means whole or complete. Which is like, when I say it out loud, it's yeah, I guess perfect things are whole and complete, but somehow perfection is even past that. When I think of the root of the mentality and the energy and the philosophy behind the early humans who were conceiving of that, is this notion of perfect is whole and complete. And right now I'm whole and complete. And it was such a profound shift in my brain. I grew up most of my life feeling like I was broken, that something was wrong with me, that I wasn't good enough, that no matter what I did, I just still could never get there. And this allowed me to detach in a meaningful way and look at it and say okay, maybe in this moment, because all we actually have is this exact moment right now, Josh and Peter, I'm not missing anything, not lacking. I am whole and complete. I have all kinds of stuff going on. I've had health issues for years. I've had blah, blah, blah, blah. All these things that you could say are broken. But the truth is, I am whole and complete and I am here, right now. And that allowed me to set down so much weight, so much fear, so much striving and start to love the person I encountered with all of the quote unquote flaws. I don't know. Do we look at a tree and be like, oh, that tree is not whole. It's not complete. Oh, that flower. Definitely not perfect. Because one of its pedals bent. You don't do that. You look at it and you're like, wow, what a beautiful thing because it is what it is. And the more I have learned how to be in that place. I think it's made me a healthier human. It's made me more peaceful. But I also think that it's had a profound impact in my relationships, in my marriage, in my relationship with my kids, how I show up with my friends and people I work with. It's like a constant yeah, but what if we're all, what if we're Okay. What if we're okay? And in being okay, I still might need your help. I still might need to be supported or held up or I might need to be comforted or I might need to be corrected. It doesn't make me less. Doesn't make me broken. Doesn't make me unlovable. It actually just makes me human.

Peter Wang: 1:11:14

Yeah, the word human sums it a lot because there is no such thing as perfect in the sense, like a whole life is perfect, or you are the perfect human being, right? The Bible talks about God as the only thing that's perfect ever, right? Being broken means you're a human because we are flawed. But flawed doesn't mean you're not presently perfect. I love that because present in this moment, not the totality of everything. In this moment. And actually if you look at moment by moment, that's how you make a difference.

Josh Brewer: 1:11:50

that's it.

Peter Wang: 1:11:50

Right? And just listening to you, I feel a lot lighter.

Josh Brewer: 1:11:54

Ah, that's

Peter Wang: 1:11:55

Because in this moment, we're, this is what we're meant to be doing, and we're doing the right thing right now.

Josh Brewer: 1:12:00

Yeah.

Peter Wang: 1:12:01

And people should remind themselves that. Stress and anxiety comes from when I think of the future, I say, Oh, how do I get there? The problems, the impending,

Josh Brewer: 1:12:10

Yeah.

Peter Wang: 1:12:12

Real or not real. Rational or irrational. And that's what builds up in our minds. And forgetting the moment.

Josh Brewer: 1:12:18

Yes. Totally.

Peter Wang: 1:12:19

Presently perfect, it's not something we're trying to perfect as a concept. But it's something that we should be reminded of. So a few quick lightning round questions. How do you define success?

Josh Brewer: 1:12:32

How do I define success? There's the external measures of success that we have culturally and societally. But when I really bring it down to okay, for me what, is success? It's setting a goal or having a vision for something. Or an even an intention for something and then actually doing something about it. That's success. Now, I may totally accomplish what I set out to do and I crush it and it's awesome. Or it might go sideways, but the fact that I did something. I took the energy and initiative and I went and tried. I put my will behind this thing. I think I've learned that's more of the true success. Maybe the other way to do it is like the inverse of this. Anyone who worked with me at Abstract would probably say one of my mantras was, the only failure is a failure to learn. So we're going to make mistakes all day every day. Especially you're building products. You're working with humans You're going to make mistakes. That doesn't mean that you are a failure, and it doesn't mean that you didn't succeed. But if I don't learn from those things, then that's the inverse of success. It's like I both didn't do the thing I wanted to do, and then I didn't learn anything from it. That's, definitely the inverse of success for me.

Peter Wang: 1:13:57

I see. So I'm hearing success has much closer relationship to learning than purely outcome. Maybe the best case would be combination of learning and outcome. Okay. next question. In three words, how do you describe yourself?

Josh Brewer: 1:14:13

It's funny cause I think I mentioned to you the first time we talked my bio on socials for a long, time was husband, father, friend. which I think is very true and I think was me trying to say to the world I'm not just the CEO of Abstract or the principal designer or what blah, blah, blah. These things are actually, if you want to know me, these are way more of the route. I think even then, those are still labels. And I think I would describe myself as. Loving, creative and growing.

Peter Wang: 1:15:00

Loving, creative, and growing, loving, creative, and growing, It's almost like starting from the root.

Josh Brewer: 1:15:08

They're, verbs.

Peter Wang: 1:15:10

Yeah. It shows progression too. That's cool. Okay last question. would you like to be remembered?

Josh Brewer: 1:15:18

Oh, that's a,

Peter Wang: 1:15:21

It's a big one.

Josh Brewer: 1:15:22

yeah. My great hope would be that if people remembered me at all, they would remember that I tried my best to show up, to be present with them and for them. I would hope that they would remember that I chose to learn how to love myself and to take care of myself and to grow as a person in order to support them, love them, provide for them, partner with them, be in relationship with them. And the acknowledgement of that deepened the connection that we then shared.

Peter Wang: 1:16:10

Josh, thank you. Thank

Josh Brewer: 1:16:13

man.

Peter Wang: 1:16:13

honor. For this conversation.

Josh Brewer: 1:16:15

Ditto. This has been definitely one of the coolest conversations I've had in a while.