When It’s Not the Idea, It’s the Way It Shows Up

Grand Central Station -1am

Something I’ve been thinking about is how easily a great idea can get lost in translation. I was out with a founder friend the other night, and he was running into a wall trying to integrate AI into his business.

His teams weren’t on the same page about how to use it, and they didn’t believe his proposal would meaningfully improve operations.

My first thought was that this wasn’t an AI problem. It was a user experience problem. He showed me the prototype, an application that integrated Claude into a sales and lead generation console.

It was immediately clear: the tool was just too busy and difficult to use. As a designer, I could see he had a design issue. If the application just looked and flowed right, it would make perfect sense to his team.

We were supposed to go see The Mommyheads, a band we both love on the Lower East Side. Instead, we found an outside table at a nearby restaurant and, working from my phone, built a new prototype on the fly. We missed the show, (sorry Adam!) but we nailed the application over five hours. We were the last to leave the restaurant, and I got home around 2 am. Grand Central Station is actually even more spectacular when it’s empty by the way. I haven’t taken the 1:07 am train in a while.

That’s founder life, isn’t it? It’s so satisfying because I know what it’s like to be in that seat. When you create things, you can get lonely in the process, doing things in a vacuum. You can’t always see the forest for the trees. When that happens, the team around you slows down because they can’t see the plan. Your vision needs to show up in a way they can see, feel, and use.