I don't think people deserve mediocre. Why would you put something mediocre into the world, especially at the nation level? Is that how we respect Americans?
The Airbnb could not have launched years earlier. The internet had to grow up to prepare for Airbnb. I remember we were in the apartment when we were 10 employees. And the early engineer gets a phone call. He goes, 'Oh, hey. Okay, go to the top right.' Yeah. Click where it says profile. No, no, no. Go back to page. No, no, mom. Mom, go back. We all looked at each other and we go, 'Guys, if our moms can't figure out how to use our website, this will never become a mainstream company.'
Now in the government it's different because it's not just moms actually upgraded and we operate the team that has to be grandma friendly. We've come up with not another website, not another way of bureaucracy, but an entirely new front door to the United States. It's called America.gov. We're taking 29,000 entry points and saying let's just make one. It's the front door. You just tell us what you need and we, meaning the government, go get it done for you.
To take that literally, like is it like a Google or ChatGPT style text box?
Yes. One, people don't trust the government, and two, people don't trust AI. How do you increase the likelihood of people really getting the upside of what you're describing?
The first part of your question sounds very familiar to the early days of Airbnb. How are we going to trust that? I don't trust that company, Airbnb. I don't trust that host that's advertising their home on it, their platform. In some ways, there's a parallel of having to navigate through a gap in trust. Good design is when a user actively thinks or says out loud, 'Wow, somebody really put a lot of care into this to make my experience better.'
Welcome to Dialectic episode 59 with Joe Gebbia. Joe is the first chief design officer of the United States and leads the National Design Studio which was created via executive order by President Trump in August 2025. Joe is about a year in and he and his team are leading a modernization of so many of the interfaces and systems that Americans use to access government services. And that includes the recently announced America.gov, a central entry point for accessing information from the government.
America.gov is a chatbot style interface with LLMs under the hood, including Rampart, a privacy preserving openweight model that the NDS developed earlier this year. We talk about that as well as many of the other things the NDS has worked on from Trump RX to Trump accounts to realfood.gov or the new food pyramid as well as the early work Joe did to modernize and speed up the federal retirement application process.
Joe is also the co-founder of Airbnb and Samara. We had a conversation about why design matters, how he thinks about designing for trust, and the scale and stakes of a role that serves every American and that has a ticking time clock associated with it. I hope you enjoy the conversation and are inspired to think boldly about how you might serve others or your country. If you enjoy the conversation, please share it with a friend. I'll also link to America.gov, the transcript, and everything else we discuss in the description.
Before we get into things, I would like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. Notion has become something like a Switzerland in the crazy era of AI that we are in. As new models release constantly and new capabilities and agents are always available, Notion acts as a context and consolidation layer for all of the ways you and your team work with AI and agents by sharing and storing context, skills via the skills API and all the other ways that you work with AI.
Notion can be a command center, a control hub, or simply a resilience layer so that even if you change the AI model or product you're using, your context can come along with you. You can also work with agents right from within Notion, whether that be custom agents that you create there, workers via Notion's developer platform, or tagging other agents you work with across various tools.
OpenAI also just announced that you can sign in with OpenAI right within Notion to use your credits there, and I suspect that will follow for many other services. I don't think the capability ramp on what these tools and agents can do is going to slow down anytime soon. So, it's great to have a single place in my workflow that doesn't change. Notion is that hub where all of my context lives. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.
Now, here is my conversation with Joe Gebbia. Joe Gebbia, thank you for joining me.
Jackson, thanks for having me.
This is an honor. We're here in DC and feel like we're not quite in the middle, but we're close to the middle of this crazy new endeavor of yours. So, I'm excited to talk about it.
We're very much in the middle.
Yes. [laughter] Okay. Okay. I guess we'll get into that. I want to start maybe going a little further back with a quote that is exemplary of one thing I want to talk about which is the storytelling side of your work and your design and your career. This is a quote I think from a conversation with Tim Ferriss in 2018. This is you: 'Design is more than just a product. It's more than just a digital experience. That cushion is 50% foam and 50% story.' What do you mean?
Wow. Well, it was a great lesson early on in my design entrepreneur career. You know, I studied design at Rhode Island School of Design and look, in design school, it's pretty theoretical. You know, you work on an assignment, you make a prototype, and then you move on to the next assignment. And I was always curious, well, what happens next? What's the gap between that prototype you make and the shelf of a store? What is that mysterious black box?
So when I graduated RISD, I decided to demystify it and decode it. A lot of my friends went off to get design jobs and they moved to LA or Brooklyn and I sat in my apartment and spent the next year bringing a product to market so that I could decode this mysterious gap. And I used a design that I had created during my senior year for a seat cushion to sit on during art critiques.
I also called crits where you put your art up on the wall, pin it up, and you spend all day in the art studio going piece by piece critiquing the art. You have to defend yourself as the artist and your classmates and the teacher are all saying, 'Well, why'd you do that? Why does it look that way? I'm confused about that.' And you have to really stand in front of your art and defend it, which is a good skill for later in life.
And so in these critiques, they're really long. It's uncomfortable. And, you know, early on in my art school career, I'm sitting on the hardwood floors and it's just so uncomfortable. You know, by hour six, your butt really hurts. And by the end of the day, everyone stood up and walked out of the classroom. And I remember seeing the charcoal dust and the ink that's on the hardwood floors had rubbed off on people's pants and it left a butt print on people. And I'm seeing everyone walk out with a butt print. I look at my own pants and sure enough, I had one, too.
And I was walking back to my dorm room thinking, I've got four more years of these crits. There's got to be a better way to participate in these that's comfortable and keeps you clean. Got back to my dorm room. I sketched that butt print shape on the back of people's pants and I called it CritBuns. It'd be this foam cushion with a handle that, you know, would be affordable for college students and something to sit on during these crits.
And so that was the product. I'd prototyped it in school and then by time I graduated, it had won a competition to be given out to the entire graduating class of mine as a gift from the school. And so I had to figure out how to make, you know, 800 of these cushions in a very short amount of time. It was almost impossible in about four weeks.
And the day after graduation the school gave me the metal mold from the project, it was like $5,000. So I figured my biggest capital expense is out of the way. Let's bring this product to market and figure out how you get a product on the shelf of a store.
And so I learned so much from this. It was kind of like my own grad school in a way where, you know, I was doing everything: the manufacturing, the partnership, the website, the promotion, the sales, the web design, the graphic design, the branding, the packaging. It was all of these things.
All from my bedroom in Providence. And what I learned is, you know, after that summer, I went back to RISD and said, 'Hey, that was great for the graduating class. What if we did this for the incoming freshman class?'
400, you know, fresh students that are going to look for, would love a seat cushion. School loved the idea. Placed my first order. I tacked on my own inventory on top of that and they were distributed to all 400 freshmen. People loved it. Everyone was running on campus with these brightly colored, strangely shaped seat cushions and everybody would be like, 'What is that?' So they really are butt-shaped. I don't know what I was envisioning, but I was kind of envisioning a, I don't know, those typical cushions you see on a bench. They are butt-shaped.
I'll link a picture, but it's amazing.
Anatomically correct. Yes. As we say. And so that was an exciting fall of, this is going back to the year 2005.
And so I had tacked on a few hundred cushions and did the order for myself. And I remember they're in my basement in Providence. And one day I went down to the basement and I'm looking at these boxes of these seat cushions and I realize nobody's coming to this basement to buy them. I have to go out into the world and actually sell these things.
And that was an incredible learning experience of, you know, walking cold into stores, finding the store manager and figuring out what is the right line, how do you frame this the right way to get people excited about it. The first store I walked into was the Brown University bookstore.
And I met with the buyer, sat down, I had a sales sheet I designed, my best shoes, finest dress shirt, and in about 20 seconds of my pitch, she goes, 'I'm not interested.' And got up and walked out of the room. And I was like, 'Oh shit. This is going to be a lot harder than I thought.'
But I remember walking back to my house just a few blocks away and there was this equation that I was reciting in my head that I had heard a previous weekend at an entrepreneurship gathering also at Brown University. I snuck into as a RISD guy and the person talking was about the sales process and he was sharing how rejection is a normal part of sales and some will buy your product, some won't, who cares, move on. And so the equation was SW2 plus WC equals MO: some will, some won't, who cares, move on.
And so I was like walking back to my apartment and thinking, oh man, all right, some are going to love it, some aren't, who cares, I got to move on. And the next store I went to, they didn't buy it. Next store, they didn't buy it. But the fourth store, they did buy the cushion and it made it to the shelf of the store.
I went back later that night after they bought it. I dropped it off and there through the window I could see this cushion on the shelf of the store and I thought, 'Okay, now it's the next biggest story I can get.' And the whole adventure continued from there.
Another big lesson from that was that I would sell this cushion at these fairs for designers where you'd get a small table and like in New York City at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair every May, it's like design week in New York.
And so this website called Designboom would host these tables for young upcoming designers to sell whatever they create. And so I had a table full of CritBuns and I got to interact with people and learn how they thought about the decision-making process. And so I literally over the course of a couple years did a few of these. I saw thousands of people. I observed them of how they came into the product, made a decision about it, and the most fascinating thing I was able to break into five steps.
There's the 'what the hell is that' phase, especially for this product. Yeah. People would see it from across the room and they go, you see the face, they go, 'What is that?' But the design was cool enough to draw them in. They had to know what it was. So they come up to the product.
Next is the touch and feel phase. They squeeze it and they see that soft. That's when the first smile comes in their face. They go, 'Oh.' The next third is the story. They flip it over and on the back of the label, it tells the story of how the product came to be. And you see there, they go like this, very discerning look as they're reading and then they go, 'Oh.' And the second smile comes up as the dots connect about the origin of this product.
Fourth step is the demo phase. They got to see if it actually delivers. Yeah. So, I always had a demo chair ready to go.
Oh, we should have had some ready. Dang. [laughter]
And it's like clockwork. People go look around. They go, 'Oh, demo chair.' They sit the cushion down, they sit on it, and the third smile would come on their face. [laughter]
And so then I'd be sitting there next to them and I learned the most important question you could possibly ask in that moment, which is simply, 'How do you see this product fitting into your life?'
And people would go through, 'Oh my gosh, well, my kids' soccer games, this would be great on the bleachers, or I go camping all the time. I'd love to take this with me. Oh, this would be great for my pregnant wife. Oh, my uncle has sciatica. This would take pressure off the tailbone.' I heard dozens of things I never even imagined it could be used for. And here people are selling it to themselves. They convince themselves why they needed this cushion.
The next question they'd ask is how much is it? That's it. $19.99. And they go, 'Ah, that's it.' I get a sale.
Now, the sixth step is the answer to your question. I would see people sit up from the demo chair. They've got the cushion in their hand. The next person in line would go, 'What's that?' And I would literally just sit there and I'd watch the person tell the story to a stranger that I had just talked to them about or they read on the back and the stranger would go, 'Oh, that's cool.' And they'd grab one and they'd sit down and the whole cycle would repeat.
And it was in this moment I realized that a product is 50% foam, this cushion, and 50% story. People walked away with owning the physical object, but they also own the story.
And it was such an illuminating experience to see that any object you have is just foam. It's just a glass. It's just a pair of shoes. It's just a phone. It's just pixels. Pixels. The other half of that product is the story that you wrap around it.
And the more humorous or enlightening or memorable it is, I think it's as equally as important as the battery life of something or the technical features of something. The story has to match the product, the look and feel and the materials and the capabilities of it. They're not different. And to me, the best products in the world find a way to marry those two things.
What an opening answer. I have a couple of observations. One is you have spent your career since then, since CritBuns, working on things with a little bit more scale. Both a little company called Airbnb and now the US government. Or I shouldn't say the US government, products that probably something to the order of most to every American will use.
And so what that introduces to me is two kind of interesting wrinkles on this idea. One is your ability to give that first person the story right up close, like to hear it from you, is obviously a lot more difficult. And two, the idea that some will like it, some won't, changes a lot. Certainly there are people who don't like Airbnb and prefer hotels, especially your job now.
I would also add that Silicon Valley in general tends to have a view that like maybe it's changing but historically like storytelling doesn't matter that much. Products, great products sell themselves. I don't think Airbnb is necessarily that type of, it sort of became that, but it was definitely not obvious. So, I'm curious how given that kind of initial story, how you think about storytelling, particularly at the scale of products that hundreds of millions of people will use.
I mean, in Airbnb's case, storytelling was essential. There's certainly the origin story which helps people understand why does this thing exist? How should I orientate to this? You know what I've seen over the years is everybody loves a good origin story. They all want to know like what was the genesis? Where did this come from? Why does this exist in the world? They want to know the why.
And I think any great company has a great why story. Nike, eBay, Apple, right? And it's kind of personal, too, even despite the scale. Sure. You know, in my experience, some of those best stories are somebody solving their own problem.
Which is a great way to start a company, by the way, because it's what I used to say is like you're married to the problem. Whatever the personal problem is that you face the frustration every day and you can't stand it anymore, you're going to do something about it. You're not going to wait around anymore for somebody else to fix it. You're going to go be proactive and take this problem head on.
And you know it firsthand. It's personal to you which gives you insights on how to approach it and how to solve it. It also gives founders very personal connection because when it gets really hard and you may want to stop working on it, the people who are personally attached to the problem, I think are the ones that continue through all the ups and downs and reasons to quit.
So with Airbnb, the story was obviously the founding story of Brian and I and the apartment with the air beds. And even to this day, I'll be on social media and there'll be some animation that pops up around the founding of Airbnb and somebody's retelling our story with some AI animation or something where they've interpreted it in some way and they're now promoting it on their own. And so I think it does have one of those qualities of being repeatable.
Yes. Most people have had to pay rent at some point in their life and that's a relatable thing. In some cases, the rent's gone up and people have to figure out, well, how are we going to make that rent check work? Also a relatable thing. And then the ingenuity was, well, what if we rent out this extra space on these temporary air mattresses during this conference? And the idea was born.
Now, the story of Airbnb has evolved beyond the origin. I remember one of our early taglines was 'travel like a human' and that became our story. And it was this idea that instead of the generic mass tourism way of traveling where you're going to wake up in a hotel room that looks very similar to the last one you stayed in in a city where you couldn't tell exactly what part of the world you're in, potentially alone if you're traveling by yourself.
Versus staying in a home that has character and life to it and in most cases feels like the place that you're staying in. You know, it's this idea of giving people their humanness back that they're not just a number moving through a cattle line at the airport to get to some generic hotel that's in a box, sort of lifeless and lacks personality.
We used to have business travelers tell us that they specifically use Airbnb because they'd be on the road like 200 plus days a year and when you wake up in those rooms night after night, you lose a bit of yourself. Yeah. You're nodding your head as if you've experienced this.
I have. I've done the commuting hotel thing. It is a little tough.
Yeah. It can wear you down.
And they stay specifically Airbnbs and specifically not even entire Airbnbs. They stay in private rooms, which means the host is there because it gives them a sense of dignity back that they can wake up and there's a kitchen where they can, you know, make a coffee and put a bagel in the toaster and maybe have a conversation with the host before they head out to the reason they're traveling.
So, that was a very unexpected. I remember that research came in. It was business travelers love staying in private rooms. Wow, this is really interesting. You'd think that they want just the most efficient get me in get me out quickly experience, but the ability, I remember, to do laundry in a laundry machine gave them some semblance of home. Totally. Right.
And so it's like enough of those little things added up where they're willing to pay for our experience versus a hotel. And so there's these different stories that would emerge of in that case 'travel like a human'. Over the years then it became 'belong anywhere', that you could travel anywhere in the world and there was a host waiting for you with a home to welcome you in so that you could go from feeling like an outsider to a foreign city to an insider.
And I had this experience. I remember the very first time I was in Copenhagen many years ago and I got into the Airbnb pretty late at night. It's for a work trip for the company. We were opening our Copenhagen office. That's what it was. I got in really late. I had the whole place to myself.
The host left a note on the table, a welcome note, and said, 'You have to try this coffee place in the morning. If you're jetlagged, this is the place you got to go.' They drew a little map. It's just around the corner. And sure enough, I woke up like 4:30 in the morning, still on East Coast time or West Coast time. And got the key, put on my jacket. It was dead of winter. It was freezing outside.
I step outside. I lock the door. The neighbor, it was like a townhouse. The neighbor next to me was also leaving at that exact same time early in the morning and looks at me and waves. I was like, 'Well, that's such a cool feeling to have. I'm not from here.' There's somebody who lives in this building waving to me. I waved back. It was like, 'Oh, that's a nice feeling. I kind of belong here a little.'
Then I get down the street, get to the corner coffee shop, go down some stairs. There's like a woman with her child and somebody at the counter serving coffee. And I walk in, I feel like, oh man, I'm going to stand out like a sore thumb. I'm not a regular here, you know, American. What am I, not Danish? And I open the door and they just give me the warmest smiles.
And the woman at the counter was so friendly and so nice and it was these little touches that I'm walking back, you know, throughout the course of the day, I've got this metal key to a house in my pocket. You can feel it. It's a different feeling walking around a city with a house key in your pocket than a plastic card.
It's a very different experience. You would never think about it until you felt that though. It's like so subtle.
So subtle. I remember another time I was staying in New York. I come out of the Airbnb and somebody approaches me on the sidewalk and goes, 'Hey, do you know how I get to the L train? I'm trying to find the entrance to the subway.' It's like, 'I don't know. I'm not from here.' But they thought I was.
And that was like, ah, you know, versus walking out of a hotel in the middle of a tourist zone, some downtown city where you stand like a sore thumb. Yes. There's an experience of staying in a home where you get to feel like you belong there. You don't have to feel like an outsider to a foreign place.
And so we say 'belong anywhere'. That's what we're getting at. Feel like an insider instead of an outsider. Why would you use Airbnb or a hotel? It's for that.
Yeah. It's funny. Both of those stories have experience. Like it's not, you're not really talking that much about the product. It's almost all about the experience.
I think that and there's one other input that I think frames a lot of the other stuff I want to talk about which is you've spoken, you gave a great TED talk years ago on designing for trust and I think trust continued to come up kind of over and over again in my preparation as I was thinking about this.
And I think there's something interesting which is when you're designing for trust at scale, there's an old quote you said: 'Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger danger bias.' Yes, it's this kind of fascinating thing that like actually a story of a story of a story told so many times about the founding of Airbnb can get somebody to let a stranger live in their house.
I was thinking about this in terms of the current work like, and people might disagree on to what degree, but I think there's a common narrative that a lot of Americans don't trust each other and certainly that a lot of Americans don't trust the government. And you are now tasked with designing services that every American either gets to use or has to use depending on how they see it and they need to trust you in order to have an experience that hopefully is frictionless or positive or any of these things.
I'm curious how you think about when you can design for trust and when it actually takes, it has to sort of be earned over time and ideally you're doing both of those. But Airbnb to me seems like an amazing story of that where at first it was like what levers can we pull and over time it's like oh yeah obviously you would use an Airbnb but I assume that wasn't instant or obvious.
That was not a norm when we started. In fact, I remember I told my dad about the first three guests that stayed on the air beds and that they were coming and he goes, 'Oh, Joe, I just don't think that's a good idea.'
You know, people would have a knee-jerk reaction when it came to hearing about Airbnb in the early days. They'd be like, 'Wow, what a cool idea. I went to Italy once and I stayed in the home with somebody picking me up at the train station because I didn't have a place to stay and had a local experience.' And other people would be like, 'Are you crazy? How could you stay in the house with a stranger? Stranger danger.'
Literally like internet stranger, by the way.
Yeah. What's interesting is that Airbnb could not have launched years earlier. The internet had to grow up to prepare for Airbnb. Totally. We didn't know this at the time, of course, but I could look back and I could see, oh my god, you needed e-commerce to work, you know, starting in the late 90s where people could trust putting their credit card into the internet, which took some time, by the way. Like my mom didn't trust e-commerce for a pretty long time, like into the mid-2000s.
You needed people being comfortable sharing their location. So Foursquare, that was a big deal when that came out. People were like, 'Whoa, you're sharing your location? You crazy?' People need to be comfortable sharing their photos online. So if you remember Flickr and Facebook in the early days, they were like, 'Whoa, you posted your picture online?' Even real name, by the way, ahead of all those things. I distinctly remember it was like you never use your real name and then Facebook kind of changed it but yeah. Wow.
Facebook changed that and then the dating sites, you know, the early ones, Match.com and OkCupid and the others. Well, you're gonna meet a stranger in person somewhere. And so we needed all these things to stack on each other so that by the time 2008 came around, it's like, okay, it was a stretch, but it wasn't a giant stretch to say, okay, wow, you're going to transact online, share your location with somebody's picture, and go see them in person, and it's their home. That was the 'whoa' moment, right? And so, you know, the timing really worked out.
All right. First of all, you are now in public service. And that's a word that I think to go back to our experience idea feels resonant with being a designer. As far as I understand, you were sort of initially engaged to help out a little bit with DOGE when they first got started. But I'm curious, first of all, what went into that decision, and two, what your relationship to that idea or that word is, particularly at a national scale.
Well, I've been designing websites since I was 14 in my dad's computer in his home office. And I remember the magic of the first time I published my first website. It was on GeoCities and this idea that the thing that I just cobbled together in HTML was now available to the entire world, not just my small town in Georgia where I grew up. And there was something about that where I was deeply hooked. I was like, 'Wow, this is so powerful.'
That you can have this vehicle of ideas and creativity that anybody in the world with a web browser can participate in or view or interact with. And you know, it's incredible from that moment to where I am today to think what an amazing responsibility to get to bring everything I've learned about building great internet products to a part of society that historically hasn't had a lot of investment into, you know, really high standards with regards to user experience.
And that's why I'm doing what I'm doing is I feel very strongly that the United States deserves better. Don't we deserve the best? Why are we okay with subpar, frustrating, aggravating, annoying web experiences when people try to get things done in the government? I'm not okay with this. I don't think others should be okay with this.
It's similar to I remember growing up as a kid in Atlanta. We'd be driving around the city going to a Braves game or something and it became known to me that we'd pass like a really dull gray building and it was a government building. It just somehow became known. No one ever said like, 'Hey, look at that.' It just became known.
And so I think I've certainly grown up with such a low expectation of government websites. You know, they never really are held to the same standard of the private sector. And I think there's something wrong with that. I think it's an injustice to Americans. Why should the American public deserve anything less than the best? And that's why I'm here doing this work with National Design Studio.
What did you learn in the, I don't know exactly how long it was, in the kind of initial engagement and a lot of the work with the retirement kind of process, but I'm curious. DOGE was complicated. I think there were successes, there were things that didn't work. I'm curious what if anything you took from DOGE and what if anything you're kind of doing distinctly differently as you kind of went into properly forming out the NDS and the new role.
When I came into this experience it was only supposed to be 6 months, right? To fix a very... yeah, no kidding. [laughter] Like 18 months later here we are.
I have to give a special thanks to Elon. I wouldn't be where I am today doing this kind of work if he didn't lead the way and attract and bring people like me into the government. And you know, I think he really put his neck out there and made us all take a second look at this idea of working in the government. And so, you know, I'm here thanks to him.
The reason I came in was to fix a very specific broken part of the federal employee experience which is that every year 100,000 federal workers retire. It's one of the great perks and benefits of being a federal employee. And the process with which they go through to retire is stuck in the 1960s and really hasn't changed since the 1970s. That was the last time there was a major improvement made to the retirement experience.
It was all based on paper. It took upwards of six months at times. And I also think this is like an example of an injustice. It's so complicated that federal employees had to go through two required training programs just to learn how to retire from the government, hours long.
It's such a headache. I think the injustice is that these civil servants give us the best years of their working life and then they go to retire to get their benefit and they have to go through freaking obstacles.
Some don't. I learned some put it off because they're like, I don't want to deal with that. So, they stay another year. So, I joked it's a retention program. Yeah. Because it is so frustrating.
And so, I had a chance to dive into this, you know, build a small team around it, some ex-Airbnb engineers and designers and brought in Silicon Valley experience where this problem, by the way, they've been trying to solve it since the Bush administration in 2002. They've had 20 years of contractors trying to crack this code. They spent over 100 million over those 20 years to no avail.
And so I show up and I'm working inside of OPM, Office of Personnel Management. It's basically the HR and benefits department of the government. And suddenly I have to become a quick expert on retirement.
And so just like what we learned at RISD with design and just like what we employed at Airbnb, to truly solve a problem at its deepest level, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the people you're designing for, which is what I did. Yes. So, we spent time talking to recent retirees, upcoming retirees, the HR teams that process them, the payroll teams that process them, so we can really holistically understand the landscape of the problem at a very personal level.
And this is, you know, the old Airbnb playbook. We used to go talk to our hosts, talk to our guests, hold meetups to invite them in so that we could learn about their experience, hear from them face to face about what are the problems that you're facing with our service? What would make it better for you? What do you wish we did that we don't do today?
And so through honing that research approach at Airbnb over 14 years, brought the same spirit into retirement and we learned a lot. People were left in the dark when they went to retire. There was confusion about how to calculate their retirement in the first place. Nobody really knew exactly what the number was going to be.
Like what is the amount of the check that I'm going to get for the rest of my life so I can plan my life, right? I can plan that vacation with my grandkids I've always wanted to do or get the bed and breakfast I always wanted to buy or whatever the thing is.
And you're just, you guys are just interviewing these people.
Yeah. It's the process that I learned at RISD and brought to Airbnb and now we're doing it inside the government.
You could call it user-centered design, or there's a thousand ways to define it. And so we take those learnings and we look at the product and the user flow and say, okay, well, let's simplify this. What's actually required? You know, what's truly a law that needs to be adhered to? And let's create an amazing user experience here and let's do it all online. Why are we using paper in 2025?
Gosh, how is it possible that this process is largely still paper-based? And the reason it took many months is the paper moves by mail. And so one department would get it, fill it out, they'd mail it to some other part of the country so they could fill it out. It would bounce around the country. Why was it so hard to... Could you... Had they tried to like digitize stages of this and there's restrictions around it or...
It was so antiquated. They would get it in the mail, they would scan it, put it on a computer, fill it on the computer, and then print it back out and mail the paper out again.
Gosh. And you guys presumably had to go down this rabbit hole, like, or rabbit trail, like, see every single step.
I remember we, on my second week, we had a couple of career folks who've been in the government for a long time in the room and we mapped out on a whiteboard each of these steps and it looked like some crazy calculus, you know, equation.
The meme with all the strings and...
Yeah, it was that, but the retirement process. And I remember thinking, holy smokes, this is crazy. There's just so many outdated databases and antiquated processes that no one ever really looked at from a high level and said... People just over the years had been solving little tiny pieces but never... they end up cobbled together. Viewed it as viewed and so... we had a couple of the career folks around the table and one of the other guys on the project, we asked the question: how long do you think it would take for us to take one retirement, just one, the basic one, and move it through the system completely digitally, meaning that we never had to print out paper?
It would be manual in that like we'll email...
Yeah, we'll handhold it digitally.
How long do you think it would take for that to work?
And everyone around the room had a, you know, was like, some person said four months, another person said six months. Somebody in the video call said, 'It would probably be a year to figure that out.' And my partner on this and I said, 'Well, what if we did it in a week?' There's an audible gasp in the room. And then they sort of realized we were serious.
And then they started to think, well, what if we were to do it in a week? And everybody got incredibly excited about it. And the remarkable thing about this is that they didn't do it in a week, they did it in four days. And we had for the first time ever a proof point of an entirely digital retirement that involved no printed paper whatsoever. And of course it was a one-off. And of course it was not scalable in that form.
Yeah. You have a seed and something you could point to as a reference. Guys, we did that one. What if we did ten more like that?
And this is the startup process.
This was Airbnb in the early days. This is pretty much any company that you see today if you trace it back to its original...
Exactly. This is, you know, go meet your host in New York City in Airbnb days, take pictures of their place, like do the things that don't scale.
In order to learn what you're going to need to eventually build out the right technology and software to support an all-digital process.
And so that's exactly what happened. It's cool. We, the next couple months, we built the software from the learnings. The career teams that we partnered with, originally very skeptical about our presence, and you know, fairly quickly realized, wow, these guys are here to really help us. They're here to help accelerate what we've always wanted to try to accomplish, which is create a better experience for retirees by making this process way less painful. And they very quickly became, you know, our closest partners. So we did it as one team and I'm really proud to say that by that June we had issued a memo out to the government which stated that all new retirements could only use our software.
And this was all within DOGE?
This is, yes. This is all within...
And so then a year after that, this past June, OPM issued a memo that said there will be no new paper accepted to the storage facility.
Which is a mine in Pennsylvania. You may have heard about they store all this paper. It has to go somewhere. There's a mine in Pennsylvania where they store paper.
Oh, what are we doing there? So much room for activities in the mine now.
Guess they have backups, but wow.
Yeah. And so we've really... and now the process through our software, if you have a basic retirement, it can take you a couple minutes to retire. So I say from six months to six minutes in some cases.
Wow. That's cool. So it was a real success story of what happens when you take government experience and you overlay it with a private sector tech mindset with highly experienced engineers and designers. You can dive in, do the research, understand the needs and the problem set of the actual customer, look at it holistically, prototype, you know, in ways that inform what eventually became, we call it, an online retirement application. And it's a huge success story of that process. That's cool. There's a thread here that is inside a lot of that answer, which is Silicon Valley broadly, not the only place, but Silicon Valley especially is like, yes, like what is possible, we can do it. Yes, that story. And DC, at least from the outside looking in, I think a lot of people would agree, kind of defaults to no, like big committee. I don't know. I heard from somebody that you guys at somebody's birthday party or something had hats that said 'no fake blockers', which maybe exemplifies that. On one hand, that is like the classic what people have heard about DOGE, like crudely, it's bulldozed through things. On the other hand, you are someone who cares deeply about experience and about craft and care and design. And so I would love to hear you talk about kind of the tension between that sort of like speed, scrappiness, how do we just get stuff done, which is clearly a, even if some of the DOGE stuff was left behind, clearly is tremendously valuable in the example you just gave. And understanding that like it isn't a startup, it is the government and certain things are going to take longer and you can't break certain things. You can break some things. That tension makes sense.
It certainly does. I'm reminded of Steve Jobs' quote, 'Real artists ship.'
Fair enough. Fair enough.
There's a ton of tension as a designer. You want to perfect things and make them just so elegant, right? Every pixel and every, you know, every detail. And if you spent your whole time making things perfect, they would never ship. And you know, in this context of a startup, there's always some outside pressure, whether it's just your funding's running out or there's competition or other, that you have to move at lightning speed.
And in this context, there's a different pressure, which is that there's a countdown clock every day. This administration will end, with it, you know, things cycle through. So there's an incredible amount of pressure to move quickly, make smart decisions. We're not cutting corners, obviously, and find that balance between the refinement and the 'we have to ship, get it in the hands of people.' You know, there's, you'll learn a lot, of course, when something's out there in the world. People give you feedback. And so I think to me the line is around what are you proud of? What can you stand behind and say, 'I'm proud of that. I'm not embarrassed by that.'
I was going to say you seem to have a very high bar in basically all aspects of how you think about things. You certainly don't have a mediocre bar and so that default isn't conducive to like moving incredibly fast. And clearly you're... I don't think people deserve mediocre.
Why would you put something mediocre into the world, especially at the nation level?
Is that how we respect Americans? I mean, is that how we show respect? Is that how we say what we value? To me, design is value. And the level of design that a company or a government puts into the world communicates its level of value and of respect to the people receiving that design. So why wouldn't the United States communicate the highest level of respect to the American people when it comes to the products that they have to use, not that they choose to use? It's a captive audience. There's not a lot of places to, you know, enroll for Medicare and to get your Social Security. You know, these are fundamental things that I think the United States can increase its level of design to increase the level of respect that an American feels when they're using these products.
You have this metaphor that I think is really beautiful where you talk about giving an Apple store-like experience to all of these services. And while I think it's a great metaphor, it's also, I have to admit, like the Apple store on some level gets to choose who they serve. The DMV does not. And so in some sense, I'm curious what it's like to go from effectively directly serving customers to the American people are almost less your customer and more like your ultimate boss, but they're also kind of a captive audience and how that changes maybe the approach, how you think about feedback. And maybe I should add the most important point, which is you are serving the widest possible demographic. I mean, maybe you're not serving the whole world, but at least within, it wouldn't shock me that on some level even if Airbnb has more touch points, the US population is a wider and more distinct, or excuse me, wide demographic.
Yeah, it's the widest. And I have said when I started this group, my vision was what if the government was like an Apple store-like experience? And what I mean by that is it's a metaphor. What does the Apple store stand for? Stands for good usability, great design, running on modern software. What if our government had those three qualities? What would that look like? How respected would people feel when they entered a .gov domain into their browser and instead of being met with a confusing interface where they don't know where to start, they were met with something that was easy on the eyes, that exhaled and communicated clearly, and was presented in a way that they actually wanted to engage with, that they could find the thing that they were looking for quickly and easily, versus today's world where it's like a maze. And I think it's incredibly disrespectful that we have people, we just currently have to try to navigate a maze to find what they're looking for. The burden is on the American, right? To figure out the org chart of the government, right? Like which agency do I go to? What's their website? I'm on their website. How do I find the link across a sea of links and buttons to get to the form, to get to the submit button, to get something done in the government? I don't think that's fair. And so we're fixing that.
As I understand it, there's sort of two shapes to the type of work you guys do. One is things that maybe not to a complete degree, but you seem to be relatively owning yourselves, and then the other is like the broad range of partnership across various organizations inside of the government. I would imagine the first one has some perks, which is you own the ship date, you can move super quickly, it's relatively vertically integrated. The second one has a totally different set of constraints. And maybe we can talk about some specifics, but I'm curious what those kind of two modes of working are and how you think about kind of optimizing for success in both of them.
National Design Studio includes software engineers, designers, a few operations folks, research. And there's two tracks of work that we do. The first track, I call it the policy work, where there's a new policy that's created and there needs to be a bridge to the public.
So, how do people touch and feel what this policy is?
Yeah. What's the interface? The literal how do I access the benefits of that policy? So a couple examples, one would be the new food pyramid and dietary guidelines. So USDA had a 200-page PDF and they came to us and said, how can you help us communicate these new guidelines to the nation? And so we got to work and we worked with them and came up with the new food pyramid and then the website realfood.gov that tells a story and educates people about what these new guidelines are. Then there's Trump Accounts. Incredible policy where every newborn gets $1,000 into a bank account. And it's in that account until the child turns 18. They can take it out or keep it in at that time, but it grows interest alongside the stock market. And so a kid grows up with the ability to learn about finances and about investing, about compound interest, about the stock market, about capitalism. And so what's the way that a parent and child can interface with this cool policy and this gift from the Treasury? Well, we made the app and the website and did the storytelling around it so that people have on their phone. They can see their child's account growing over time. They can see the balance. They can see the stocks that the fund is invested in on behalf of the child.
TrumpRx, amazing policy. For decades, Americans have been overpaying for prescription drugs and basically subsidizing drug prices for the rest of first-world countries. Meaning in Canada, you can buy the same drugs in the United States, but you'd pay ten times more in the US than you would in Canada. Exact same drug. Every president has tried to battle the pharmaceutical companies to level the playing field. They call it most-favored-nation pricing. And President Trump in this term was the first one to successfully bring drug prices down for the first time, I think, in many, many decades. And so how do people experience this policy? Well, TrumpRx.gov is that we built the website. It's incredibly intelligent. It connects to, you know, hundreds of pharmaceutical companies to bring in real-time drug pricing. It allows people to find the drug they're looking for and have access to the coupon to show the pharmacist at the counter where they get the TrumpRx price. And to date, this launched in February, so this couple months, Americans have already saved $700 million.
That's crazy. Like if you were a startup building an app that within six months of launching, seven months, you would have, you know, transactions or booking value of $700 million, can you... that like that never happens.
So the same is true with Trump Accounts. We had, there's over seven million accounts that have been created for kids and over a billion dollars of contributions.
Separate from the $1,000 per child.
A billion extra dollars put into this by parents and family members and companies. That launched January 6. We're barely six weeks out from the launch. What other app has a startup built like that in such a short period of time can achieve that kind of scale? It's profound.
For either of those two examples, are you guys also acting like a startup that's in charge of growth and ramping up those numbers? Are those handed off to another organization within the government? Typically like a Silicon Valley company would be like have all these dashboards on how many kids are signed up, how do we get from 60% to 80% whatever. And it'd be totally reasonable if that's outside of the jurisdiction, but I'm curious how that works.
Well, there's agencies that handle... we're doing this on behalf of agencies. So for that one, it's HHS.
Right. It's in that domain under Dr. Oz.
Maybe there might even be a product team there eventually that's maintaining.
Oh, yeah. There already are.
So Trump Accounts is in the Treasury.
So, you know, we're this complement to these...
But also kind of ignition in some of these cases.
Yeah, we're initial lift. We help give these things shape and I think set them up on a trajectory that the teams in those agencies run with. And we still help out with things, of course, they come.
You're way more zero to one. The goal, the success in the NDS in many ways is about zero to one for at least on the new initiative side of things. How can we get them going?
That's where we seem to be needed the most. That's where we were asked to step in the most.
And we're happy to do that. You know, I think it's been really interesting to see how building these kind of products inside the government, the least likely place, can get scale so quickly. And it's actually become my number one recruiting line when I'm talking to designers and engineers.
We got a lot of users baked in or potential users.
Yeah. They're like, 'Why would I join the government? I'm not thinking about the government.' I go, 'Well, first of all, I wasn't either. Nobody on our team was thinking about the government at all. It wasn't on anybody's career plans whatsoever.' And you know, they'll tell me the other options they're thinking about, going to that startup, I'm sure it'll be fine and you'll get an experience and you'll get to scale eventually if you're lucky. What if day one you started here, you shipped an update to fix a product and you had an installed user base of 340 million people?' And they go, 'I never thought about it like that.'
Yeah, it's almost like, not burden, but it's almost like it's heavy when you think about it that way. Like the potential energy there is high.
Of course, I tell people come here if you want responsibility for that.
Like come here if you're excited by that scale.
And you're excited to ship at the highest standards to, you know, exceed the expectations of what the nation's received so far. The other thing I tell really talented software engineers and designers is that those 340 million people include your parents, your aunts and uncles, your grandparents, your siblings, your friends, your co-workers. You literally get to design for everybody in your life.
Yeah, because that's who we get to design for. It's cool. You said there was... you started talking about the policy side, new policy side. Was there a second component or maybe to follow up on my kind of the other side of my question, which is as I understand a huge part of the work too is just helping other existing government services, organizations, whatever, modernize even if it isn't a new product.
So the US has changed a lot since our founding 250 years ago. We've gone from the quill to the microchip, from the cannon to the drone, from President Washington to President Trump. And despite 250 years of extraordinary progress, the greatest unrealized opportunity of our nation is the citizen experience. And how do people experience the government today? It's through 29,000 .gov websites.
Oh yeah, they try not to.
Basically, when I started this role, it was somewhere in the magnitude of 25 or 26,000. It just keeps going up.
And at some point in history, people used to walk into government buildings to access the government. And when they did, the lobbies were beautifully designed. The investment from the government to have an incredible citizen experience is still visible because the lobbies are around. You can walk into them around DC. Beautiful marble floors.
