 I'm Alexis Ohanian. I've started startups, invested in them, and met amazing people using the internet to change the world. Our generation has an opportunity unlike any other. We can create small empires without anyone's permission. Tribeca. Now this neighborhood is better known for celebrity sightings than startups, but right here in the shadow of One World Trade Center, four guys fled a large tech company on the West Coast to move into a tiny studio apartment to build the iOS application that would make people rethink the iPad forever. People think they're not artistic or that they can't create, and one of the most fascinating things for me in creating paper was that, you know, we showed to people this beautiful application which truly you can use it anywhere. I mean, we made it as easy as we could. People look at it and their reaction is, you know, their shoulders drop and then they say, it's like, oh, I can't create. Some people see the blank page and are intimidated by it. They had their handwriting criticized for years, were never able to master things like painting. And so we've actually put a lot of time both on the design side, but a lot of time on the engineering side, trying to figure out how we can create some very smart algorithms, almost guitar hero style that make your drawing and your sketching and your note taking just look great. So this isn't like paint by number? No, I mean, you're still very much in control. But the watercolor itself, you know, it doesn't, you don't wind up with the brown puddle that most people do when they're playing with watercolor. It's a sore subject for me. Yes. It doesn't matter, you know, what your background, what your degree of art skills are, you know, if you put some time into it and you work with the right tool, you can create some amazing things. The one thing that was very clear, I mean, I've worked on productivity tools of one nature, one former nature for probably 12, 13 years. So it's certainly a long term. It's not that I woke up one morning and said, Oh, I want to work on tools. I've been working on tools. And that's kind of that is my passion. And but then sort of the mechanics of starting a company that was that was more of a question around timing. And a couple of things just started moving the right way. I had then you look at, OK, so it did have the space in New York City. Andrew was here. Julian was freelancing at that time. So it was just the right moment. And then we had to go. So you guys you became were you friends first or had you started working together at Microsoft, was it? And then developed a friendship or how'd that go down? That's right. I mean, it's one of those things. How do you make friends? How do you find friends? It's it's it's we all at one point in our lives had worked at Microsoft and we had an intersection there. When I think of great design, there are a lot of companies that I think of before. It's not the first. It's not the first. Help me understand how you all were existing within Microsoft. So there was a small team called Pioneer Studios at Microsoft that was sort of a kind of Skunk Works team there looking at future products. One of the products there was Korea, which was sort of a two screen tablet device. And George, John and myself all worked on that project. And Julian was someone that we knew through other friends. And so when we kind of went our separate ways and came back together for 53, we just kind of tapped on the best people that we knew. By the time we started 53, at last count, I think we've built over 67 products. And, you know, from Kinect to game controllers to Office, a broad range. When you say built, are we talking about like build, ship, like finished, like done? Like concept, done. That's amazing. What was the moment when you were like, all right, you know what? Forget it. I got a comfortable job here. But you know what? I want to go live in a crammed apartment in Tribeca. I had actually already left Microsoft. I was doing some consulting, sort of feeling around, trying to find the right opportunity. I left Microsoft because I just wanted to really, really put something out there that I felt like I connected with my users. I didn't know what that was going to be. I had no idea how I was going to get there. But I just finally threw myself into the unknown and waited to see what would happen. We met late at night at Burning the Midnight Oil. It's the folks in the office, in Seattle, downtown Seattle, working a number of projects. And that's kind of when you start looking up and you look around and just see people that you so deeply respect. These are the folks that I was learning from. And at some point you realize that I could have such a more interesting life if I can spend more time with those folks. And that's when you want to start. For us, that's when we wanted to start a company. Now you guys have obviously taken over a number of floors in this building. But the fact that it started here is special because you leave Microsoft behind. You had moved to New York here in Tribeca. And then you coaxed all of your former coworkers and friends to come camp out in your apartment. The bedroom is over there, right? Yeah. It got a little rough. At 2am sometimes I had to kick out everyone. So how did you convince them to do this? It was more, we had to do it. When you look at Julian, John, Andrew and us, we just wanted to get this started. And you do whatever it takes. And it's New York City, how bad can it get? When you look at what we're doing, which is trying to revolutionize creativity, certainly New York City is probably the most creative city. We are the most creative people in the world. It's okay to say that, I think. It's a creative capital of the United States. And so it just made sense for us to be around that. And it's nice, I think, to get a diverse mix of not only tech people, but design folks, art folks, business folks. So I feel like we have a much more balanced environment here. Our market is New York. We create tools where people get paid to think, people have a need to create. That's New York City. There are 3.2 million people who day in day out get paid to work in media, advertising, do consulting. Some of the best attorneys are here, engineers. I mean, it's such a broad, diverse population that have a need to create. And then we were thinking we're building a journal. We should build a journal. But we kept describing it like paper. And at some point, if we call it like paper, why don't we just call it paper? So that was actually two weeks before we launched. I can't tell you. Hitmonk was going to be Bounce Pounce for a week or two, and then a week before launch it becomes Hitmonk, which is still weird, but better. Bounce Pounce. I think you don't want to Google that. No, no you don't. Well, so I couldn't help but notice a little something on your bookshelf that I'd hope you would tell me a little more about. How would your friends at Microsoft react to this, this Apple Design Award? And this is heavy. This is, I could curl this. Yes, so paper won, this is actually one of, and it's for technical achievement and design, sort of a combination of that. And so, you know, first we were App of the Week, then App of the Month, and then we won an Apple Design Award, mainly because paper showed the way how you can use tablets or an iPad for creation. Okay, so this is where it all began, but it's since grown much bigger. Can you, I guess, take me up to the next floor? Let's go, let's go. And how do the rest of the tenants feel about this? You know, we've taken over the building. So they have no say in this, it's just that there's no one else there. This is our empire. This is very cool. So what you're seeing here is actually work by one of our designers, Alan's piece, and it explores the development of one of his pieces. It starts out, he starts drawing a dragon, and then he places this girl onto the dragon. At first it looks like the dragon's taking the girl for a ride. Yeah, she's just sort of chilling on it. She's chilling, right? But then the dragon becomes more fearful as he adds in the color. Yeah. In order to make sure that the dragon knows where it's going, the girl stands up. I like it. And then starts commanding the dragon. So this is really how the creative process works. You sometimes don't really know what element is going to take you forward or really shift the entire dialogue, and it's between all of the elements as you evolve it, right? You really discover what the true meaning of the true story is. And by the end of it, you're riding the dragon. That's if you're lucky. I like that. There's actually been a little bit of a progression in this building. We started the floor below us in George's apartment. Then we filled that space up, moved to this floor, which is essentially just a larger apartment. Where are all the employees, by the way? Well, now we're also on the sixth floor, which is an even larger apartment. But we've sort of worked our way back down here and have a small team here. This is where a lot of our app development happens. And so we've got development going on down here? Yes, we have the iOS development team here. Hi, guys. Hi, guys. This is Alexis. Yeah. Hello. Now, you all have a very interesting balance. You almost have a designer for every developer, which is a pretty rare thing. Is there like a Jets, Sharks sort of dynamic to the office? How do you determine that balance? We try to hire engineers who are design-minded. I mean, if you tried to work at this company and you didn't value design, I think it could be very challenging. You're not going to have a good time. Yeah, because you'll get a lot of challenges dropped on your plate. Like, this is how we'd like the design to be, but the engineering is extremely difficult. And if you're not up to that challenge or you don't see the value in why it should be that way, then you probably won't be happy banging your head on it. Right now, barriers are falling for creation all over, right? To get started, you need the SDK, and you could be building iOS apps in a few months. There are a lot of people out there, myself included, who are like, go build stuff, go launch stuff, go create. Yet, you know, you look at the majority of apps on the App Store, for instance, our apps, most people probably will never get more than a few thousand downloads. For someone watching this who wants to have paper, who wants to have that kind of success, is the lesson, keep launching stuff until it sticks, or, you know what, don't launch that yet. Make sure it's really something great, and then how the hell do you know it's really something great? You know, we're sort of in an environment now where there's so much mediocrity that you really have to produce something amazing, something great to really live above it. And so I do think it's worth kind of hanging on to your idea and spending a little bit more time polishing it to really get it to a point that you feel like it's going to say something new, it's going to tell a new story, and it's just extremely well executed, it's useful, and it can have a nice big impact. So when you told the landlord that you needed the top floor in addition to the other two, was he pretty amenable? Yeah, I think he was happy. I mean, a six-floor walk-up usually doesn't rent that quickly. Good point. Well, this is the top floor. Hey, 53. Hey, everybody. Sorry to distract you while you're busy working. Why do you guys work at a startup, right? Why is this something that you ended up in? I really like the idea of a maker-driven company, and a company where people are really using the software they're making. I thought there was something really special about that. It was really evident in what the customers were making. So I actually picked up paper and started using them day one and was just obsessed. I fell in love, and I was like, these guys get it. They get creation on a tablet. So like, perusing Tumblr and other social media outlets and just seeing what people were making was amazing, and I just wanted to be a part of that. It was a lot of energy coming out of that space. Would you say you're the best artist here? No. Prior to coming here, I worked for a lot of bigger, like, marketing companies, and so I had an opportunity where I was doing some consulting, and I had an opportunity to really look where I wanted to go next, and I wanted to do something that made a difference, as cliche as that might sound. I didn't want to be in a company where it's like, let's chase the next dollar, not really care about the consequences, and this was an absolute perfect fit. See, I know you're serious because you have to wake up every morning and walk up seven flights of stairs to get to your work. Right. And I'm excited to do it. You're excited to do it every time. That's great. When you think about what paper, as it stands right now, is doing for people, the idea at first blush of like, oh, here is an easy, beautiful, wonderful way to create art, seems nice, but it seems like something only a bunch of art students might use, or only a bunch of like, people who already are in a creative mindset would use. How do you think about this application when you're looking at a world of people, many of whom don't even consider themselves remotely artistic, who don't even think about themselves as creators? Why would you want to try to build a product that is automatically going to kind of alienate a majority of people? Well, I mean, the interesting thing is we built paper as sort of that bridge, and so we actually get a lot of people, you know, we get emails almost every week about people that tell us that like, I never thought I could sketch before, you know, until I tried paper. People have never gotten the right and positive in reinforcement. You know, because of SAT scores, because of GPAs, because of reading, writing, people think they know how to read and how to write and how to do math. I don't know many people who write well. I don't. I know a lot of people who can put together a great chicken scratch catch to communicate their idea much more efficiently. An emoticon people know how to use. A smiley face people know how to draw. Describing in words your emotional state, complicated. But people think they know how to do it. Why? Because they grab grades. They got reinforcement. They got certifications. And this is, you know, a much bigger level. When you think about how people communicate, it is visually first. We're visual learners. We fail to educate our population, right? We should all be fluent communicating in images. So when people say I'm not creative, what they're saying is I can't draw or I don't know how to communicate visually. And I say our challenge is to make sure that everyone can, because it's going to transform the level and the quality of our ideas, how we work together, and how we get things done. Now it doesn't matter how beautiful your app is, if no one uses it, it doesn't really matter. The thing about paper that's so interesting is it's not just for artists. In fact, we're going to meet a high school teacher named Brad who's using it to change education. So this is the first thing I did with paper when it first came out. I was just noodling around. And I wanted a quick way to make a little diary of my day. So this actually goes on a Tumblr blog I have called 100% of my time. So what I do is just ten lines, different colors, representing the percentage of my day that's taken up with these things. It's not necessarily time. Sort of like Chinese miles. They're called li. Chinese miles are longer going up than they are going down because it's a measure of distance and effort. So this was actually a travel day. To get somewhere you just sit down for a long time and then all of a sudden you're in a new place. How early of an adopter were you of paper? Did you download it the day it came out? It might have been a couple of days old, but I grabbed it as soon as it came out. I love the tool. I'm not an artist, but I like doodling around and drawing. And I played around with some different apps. So sort of at the low end were something like Adobe Ideas. Very simple tool set, which I like. I like the simplicity, but it was too simple. And then at the other end were things like Sketchbook Pro or something. Incredibly powerful tool sets for professional designers and artists and that kind of thing. But when I was playing with it, the learning curve was really big. And the tool set was so big that by the time you drilled down and got the tool you wanted and came back, I had lost my train of thought or whatever. I don't know how you know, but you look at an app and you go, this is just going to work. There's something in the way it's presented that you just go, okay, it's going to be a simple enough but not too simple tool set that would allow me to just doodle around. If there's one thing that Microsoft taught me, it was a certain irreverence to technology. In ten years there, I saw speech interfaces, gesture interfaces, multiple operating systems, mobile phone operating systems, multiple programming models. I mean, they keep trying. I mean, they see technology as completely malleable. And what you gain from that is really this understanding of appreciation that, yeah, technology is malleable. The most important thing is understanding what do you want to do with it? How should it look like? And for us, there was technologies there to help people create. That's what it's for. And that became such a focusing point. Anything that doesn't help you create, get rid of it. It shouldn't be there. Clock? No. You don't need a clock while you're creating. Battery meter? Don't need it. So it's what do you really need to get going? And you need beautiful tools that work because beauty gives you meaning while you're creating. We think that beauty is very important to ideas. You have to be able to elevate your idea. The first thing you see is when you try and capture an idea, if it looks bad, it just sets it off on the wrong tone and it kind of kills the idea. They're very fragile things, ideas. Your students, are they, because they're coming at it without a lot of the biases and sort of, I don't know, the inertia that comes with the way things ought to be, how do you think this is going to make them when it comes to storytelling as well as just sort of how they process ideas? Well, it's interesting. I think the kids want to, by the time they get to high school where I teach, all of that's gone. If you want to see all of that expressing themselves that way. I teach a philosophy course and I'll often give the kids two apparently separate ideas and get them to try and find the connection. If you think linearly, it's almost impossible to do. You really have to bust out of your usual thinking. It was in the middle of class and these are bright kids. We're a university prep school and kids go to Harvard and Stanford and all this kind of stuff. They just weren't thinking. I remember just literally banging my head on the desk and I said, for goodness sakes you guys, would you just think for a second? One of the students, top girl in the school kind of kid, said, Mr. O.C., we don't have time to think. We just need you to give us the answers so we can get them down and we can get our sixes and sevens so we can get into the university. We don't have time to think. Yeah, and they're gaming the system. We need the marks to get to the universities we want to get to. Wow, that's how they're thinking about education. So when you give them a tool that allows them to just think, you give people a blank page and they often just, I say go make something, and they go, well, tell us what you want us to make. So they're not used to that. You give any kid a piece of paper and a crayon and they'll scribble on it. And we've got to teach them how to draw and make notes and lay out the page and all the rest of it. And I'm finding with these technologies that I think are kind of liberating technologies, students at first are not used to using them. They want to go, where does the necessary information? So you give them something like this and say, sketch note it. Don't worry about the trivial data. We can look that up later. Let's capture the things we don't know or the things we find really exciting and use that to drive something. That's really foreign to the kids. And it's really big structures that force kids into that kind of envelope, where the big structure is I need to get to university, which means I need my GPA to be four point something. So if I'm going to play around with this, I'm taking a risk with my grades. So you need to create the space that allows them to do that too. Once it gets going though, every time I've given kids that, I've been blown away by what they can do. They surprise me every time. I would describe the application today to an investor and they would hear you're putting watercolor in it and they would go bonkers. Because they love watercolor? No, because they wanted PowerPoint export. There's like, export to PowerPoint in there. I mean, it's one of those things. There is no one if you ask them, do you need watercolor? And they're going to say like, no. But you do. It's a beautiful thing. All of a sudden you're getting a new skill. You can think in color. You can express it in color. Color is meaningful. It's the choice between a red and a blue tie. That stuff matters. It's just because you had a bad experience in art school when you were six or seven. But that need to be expressive is pervasive. So I mean, these are certain things where you just can't listen to people. You need to hear a little bit further. When they say, no, don't do watercolor, go do PowerPoint, you're seeing a deeper need and fear emerge. Which is like, I can't access this thing. And that is an opportunity. It's like, okay, this is good. You called my idea crazy. I'm going to do it. I mean, you need that. If people don't call your ideas crazy or silly, then you're not working on the right thing. Building a product is hard. That's why I'm always telling founders, as soon as it's good enough, ship it. Now these four guys basically got an education while they were at Microsoft in taking an idea and launching a product. They did it time and time again, but they couldn't build the product that they wanted until they left and started their own company. It's fitting that they would go on to create an app that allows anyone with an iPad to just get started creating beautiful things. And I want to live in a world where when someone sees a blank canvas, they're not intimidated, they're inspired. Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com MacMechs