M.G. Siegler • #design • May 9, 2025

Just Jony

A couple takeaways from Jony Ive's Stripe Sessions chat

What struck me most about Jony Ive's sit down with Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions 2025 was actually less his design thoughts – though there were plenty of those – but more the tangential topic of team building and culture. It's just not what you might expect the key takeaway to be from such a chat. Then again, designing a team is arguably the most important part of design, at least if you hope to scale it in any way.

Specifically, Ive talks about how presumably both at Apple and now at LoveFrom, that a lot of effort is put into making sure the people working together truly care for one another. And I think his key subtle insight here is that if you have that base layer beneath even just a working relationship, it will ensure that people actually listen to one another. To make sure that people aren't just waiting through another person's thoughts until it's their time to speak.

This sounds almost obvious, but it does feel like a pretty fundamental aspect of corporate culture that can often breed a sort of company cancer. And perhaps Ive is uniquely suited to that point because he's admittedly an extremely shy and introverted person. He noted that one thing that terrifies him is the notion that he's missed amazing ideas that come from the quiet place inside the quiet person in the room.

We live in a world where the loudest voices tend to dominate because they take advantage of any void. Any gap in a conversation is simply an opportunity to speak, even if you have nothing to say. Presumably this has been true throughout most of human history, but corporate culture in particular tends to be built on scaffolding that specifically rewards this behavior.

Ive's remedy for this seems to be doing subtle, human things to tear down such walls. Perhaps literally in the case of inviting team members to each others' houses, and cooking breakfast for one another. Because, as he puts it, "who wants to spend time in a conference room?" Being outside of those bounds allows a mind to wander in different directions, while at the same time gaining some natural empathy for the person into whose home you been invited.

One other key takeaway from his chat was towards the end when Collison asked about the potential harmful side effects of today's technologies. Clearly, this was intentional as Ive notes it's the thing his currently "most preoccupied with".

Ive noted that while during the Industrial Revolution, they had more time to figure out the changes that needed to be made to society in order to accommodate the shifting landscape, today we have no such luxury. And that's clearly never been more true than with everything we're now seeing in AI, where the sheer "rate of change is dangerous". Still, Ive is more hopeful there because he noted that every conversation comes with a discussion about safety. And that wasn't the case with social media, for example.

But Ive is also clearly conflicted about his own role having of course designed the device which is now in billions of pockets, if not hands, at any given moment. He noted that even if there were no ill intentions in the creation of such products, there needs to be some level of responsibility for the outcomes. He's obviously being intentionally vague here, but also clearly hinting at something coming: "The ownership of that has been driving a lot of what I've been working on that I can't talk about at the moment."

An easy read between those lines suggests that whatever new AI product his team at LoveFrom is collaborating on with teams at OpenAI likely aims to solve some level of "smartphone addiction".¹

What such a product might look like is still anyones' guess, but a new type of device re-thought from ground-up to be AI-first would seem like a good bet.

There are a lot of other fun nuggets in the hour-long chat, such as the importance of joy in design – something that has been top of mind, of late – and why design should even matter at "a programmable financial infrastructure conference".

But mainly, nice socks, Jony.

One more thing: this reminded me a bit of a Steve Jobs design talk from forty-something years ago...