# Pasquale D'Silva and Scaling Ideas into Delightful Products by [kirupa](https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under [Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm) [Pasquale D'Silva](https://twitter.com/pasquale) looks at product creation from the inside out, starting with imagination and ending with the hard work of distribution, team building, and staying true to the original spark. The conversation is especially strong on the gap between a clever idea and a product people actually notice. It is a thoughtful guide to turning creative energy into something tangible without sanding off its personality. Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30 A conversation with **Pasquale D'Silva** | 42m ## About this conversation This follow-up conversation with Pasquale D'Silva shifts from broad future talk into the mechanics of making things people care about. His view of product creation feels distinctly designerly in the best sense. He talks about storytelling, flavor, and the ability to pull something from idea space into reality before every implementation detail is settled. That mindset matters because many early products do not fail from lack of effort. They fail because nobody can yet feel what makes them compelling. From there, the episode gets practical about team shape. Pasquale makes a strong case for keeping early groups small and multidisciplinary, with people who can cross boundaries and empathize with one another’s work. The advantage is not just efficiency. It is shared context. When designers understand implementation and engineers respect detail, the product has a much better chance of preserving its original intent instead of becoming a compromise assembled by strangers. Distribution is another standout theme. Pasquale talks about marketing as part of the creative act, not a separate department that arrives later. Cultural hooks, memorable stunts, timing, and the right collaborators can give a strange or ambitious product the lift it needs to be understood. He also draws a useful distinction between commercial success and artistic success, reminding listeners that some work matters because it expands the space of what can be made, even before the market catches up. The later discussion about AI-generated voices, software personality, and being ahead of the moment broadens the frame without losing the product thread. Pasquale keeps returning to the same underlying goal: build things with humanity, build things with play, and if possible build things that last. For founders, designers, and product people who want their work to feel more alive, this episode offers a creative but disciplined way to think about the path from concept to experience. ## What you'll hear about - Early product work depends on helping people feel the idea quickly. - Small multidisciplinary teams preserve momentum and shared context. - Distribution is part of product design, not just promotion after launch. - Artistic success and commercial success do not always arrive together. - Personality can make software feel more humane and memorable. ## Jump to a topic - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=0s) **From idea space to product**: Pasquale sets up the challenge of turning raw imagination into something people can actually touch and understand. - [4:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=240s) **Why designers tell better early stories**: He explains how storytelling and flavor help a product communicate before every practical detail is solved. - [8:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=480s) **Building a small multidisciplinary team**: The conversation turns to the kind of compact team structure that works best for early creative products. - [12:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=720s) **Creating stunts people remember**: Pasquale shares how unusual campaigns and cultural hooks can help a new product break through. - [16:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=960s) **Catching distribution at the right moment**: They discuss the timing, collaborators, and momentum that can turn a niche product into something noticed. - [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1200s) **AI voices and identity questions**: The discussion detours into synthetic media and the strange ethical territory around likeness, voice, and control. - [24:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1440s) **Giving software personality**: Pasquale argues that humane products often feel more like something with character than a sterile machine. - [28:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1680s) **Artistic success versus commercial success**: He reflects on work that matters creatively even when the market does not reward it right away. - [36:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2160s) **When ideas arrive too early**: The conversation explores how genuinely new products can read as culture shock before people are ready for them. - [40:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2410s) **What success looks like**: Pasquale closes by describing success as continued play, fewer distractions, and building something that endures. ## To learn more - [Pasquale's Twitter](https://twitter.com/pasquale) - [Pasquale's TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@psql) - [Pasquale's Website](https://pasquale.cool/) ## Transcript The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors. ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=0s) - Kirupa Hi everybody. The last time I spoke with Pasquale, there were a lot of questions that I wanted to go deeper into, and many of you contacted me letting me know there were questions that you'd like me to go deeper into as well if I ever had a chance to follow up with him. Well, guess what? We're going to follow up right now in a conversation that's going to start in a few moments. This time around, instead of focusing more on the creative impact of artificial intelligence and how all of us who create content will be impacted, I'm going to shift the focus a bit to address some of the questions that we didn't get to before. These all revolve around Pasquale's extremely deep skills as someone who can take an idea and a vision and turn them into products that people love. We're going to talk about all the various things that go into it, all the go-to-market activities that we typically have to follow. It's going to be a really fun chat, so sit back and let's get started. All right, Pasquale, great to catch up with you for round two. The first one was so much fun, and there's so much more that I want to ask, and people have told me they would like me to ask you too, so I figured let's just get you back on the call and do another round-trip around this whole fun conversation. ### [1:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=69s) - Pasquale D'Silva It is good to be back. Thanks for having me. ### [1:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=72s) - Kirupa All right, all right. So one of the things.. In the previous movie chat, we spent a lot of time talking about AI assistance and that whole world, and how it's going to change how creative people build and create things. But there's another angle to you, because that's only one side of what you do. There are other parts of you that are equally fascinating, and that is your journey as an entrepreneur. You're someone who's worked at companies, but then you've started your own company and done all these things. I've always held this assumption, and it could be completely faulty here, that designers make really good CEOs or really good early-stage employees compared to the traditional disciplines you might think about, like product management or developers and so on. So I kind of want to pick your brain on that. Having been through all these things, what do you see as the thing that, first of all, am I correct in my assumption? And second, what do you think makes designers more likely to be better at running companies? Or at least better at building pretty products that people might enjoy and want to use. ### [2:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=133s) - Pasquale D'Silva Oh, wow, that is a good question. I'm not confident if designers are all necessarily the best ones to run companies, but I do think that the perspective they bring is pretty, pretty different to say like your classic engineer type or a business type, because I think the designer- I think a great designer, - is a little more like an artist, and I think artists are really good at articulating the vision, not just by talking about it, but making artifacts that communicate what the what the thing is, or who it's for. And I think when a good artist or designer, which is really also someone that is a communicator, is able to put stuff into a form or out of facts that do communicate the vision, then they can kind of get people behind them and on board right, and with just a little bit of work, even without doing all the technical work underneath, they can create a picture of the thing or concept, the thing. Then people can see that, okay, there's a real idea in their head. They're not talking about vague things, there's a way to thread the needle on, you know, creating the product of the world that the thing, the thing lives in. And I think, like potted design is also. I use design and art like pretty interchangeably, at least just in the way that I operate, like I'm not really a peer designer, like design is just like one thing that I do under maybe a larger umbrella, but, yeah, I mean, I think it just. It's there's a real out to communication and rallying people around that particular vision, and part of that happens in like you know, if I was to borrow a word from the book of Disney, like imagineering, right, it's like imagination and kind of engineering at the same time, and like pulling things out from the idea space into reality. And it's not always practical. Sometimes it's just enough to give people like a sense of the flavor, of the thing and they can put their hands on the electricity of the division, I think. ### [4:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=269s) - Kirupa Gotcha. So I think the storytelling ability that designers have a more natural inclination for, gives them an edge, at least early on, in some of these things. The other thing I was curious about is, you know, maybe I would, maybe it's the wrong people I hang out with. You know, a tough crowd of developers, basically, but I always felt that developers typically- you know, or even me as a product manager- typically focus on, like you know, here's a cool problem, let's see what we can do here, whereas I feel like designers take a more holistic view and say, okay, you know a major part of communicating and you know communicating to other human beings. It's like, what's the human ankle to this? Like you know, would someone really find this interesting? Or is it something that you're just doing because it just happens to be, you know, cool technology in all these areas where it's gonna do something interesting here- Photoshop brush, here- I can't wait to build a company around it. But I've definitely seen cases where, like here's an API that someone created. I have no idea what it does, let's just do something random with it. You know, and I'm like, can I have exactly the level of success based on the thought process you put into all of this? ### [5:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=333s) - Pasquale D'Silva Yeah, you know, honestly, over the years I've found that, the gap between when designers and engineers- if they really are two different types- some are, because some people are only designed, some people only engineer- has sort of smushed together, like culturally. When you do have a good chunk of people who are inside the more insulated bubbles, they work at a traditional software company or maybe they live in a tech heavy city such as San Francisco, where I lived for a few years. It's not only engineers that are guilty of it, designers too, who spend a lot of time inside software companies. And I say software companies because there are software companies that the end user as software people, and so you get this like funny thing where it's like we make software for people who make software, who make people look for people who make software for software, for software, for software for software, and you start to lose track of well, what type of person is using the thing. It's very easy to be inside the bubble and then forget that outside it there's like normies who like have never heard of the word API before. You know, they don't know where like a Docker container is, they've never operated a terminal, and maybe the word AI is like just something that, they've heard in science fiction before. It's I. I used to believe like designers had a bit more of a, an edge or a swing. But after doing it for as long as I have and just seeing that the two edges sort of diffuse into each other, I think they're both kind of in the same, the same bucket, and it really depends on which area of industry you're in. Some people are just very inside the like, how would you kill it? Well, the bubble. And then there are some companies that, you know a little more designed to serve the pop culture and they're less concerned about like, wow, this would be a cool button to throw in here. This API seems like it would be fun to try to come up with the idea. For you know, it's like, when you're in that, in that that bubble method of thinking, there's a lot of trying to create a problem for the thing, like invent a budget problems to justify the thing existing, whereas when you're working with real flesh and blood, like messy people, you can just ask them, like, what's, what problem are you dealing with? And they'll tell you. I think the difference between those types of things is pretty broad, so I don't know if that answers the question. ### [8:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=491s) - Kirupa It does, yeah. What do you think is the ideal makeup of a company in an early stage? Let's say it's a creative endeavor, you're building something that you're passionate about, and you want to scale it up. What makes the ideal makeup? ### [8:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=505s) - Pasquale D'Silva Man. Well, certainly as few people as possible and certainly as many like multi-disciplinary people as possible. I think, people who can, you know, hop between the different tracks of work is great, because they can at least empathize and consider, like, what their other collaborators are going to need to be able to do, even if it's designed with a bit of engineering, like like I'm standing, then they're existing in the real world, and then, like engineers who understand, like, what's important to a designer and won't be annoyed if they're, you know, tapped on the shoulder to implement a detail or add us to understand a little bit of both of those things. But I think all of that like kind of goes out the door if at the top there isn't good Vision, right, I think that the leader, the CEO of the company needs to really be able to express like where everyone is heading, and ideally that's the only thing that they have to do. Like in the projects that I work on, like, eventually I get to a point where I try to fire myself out of the project as quick as possible by hiring people that are way better doing the stuff that I do, so I can go off and, you know, think about more of the future whack, but early on, like I try to do as much of it as possible and in recent months, like really rolled the sleeves up on on engineering myself, I think if you can understand the full stack, then then you know how to you know hire in people who can do the work effectively. ### [9:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=597s) - Kirupa Yeah, no. And one of the things I always liked about all of your various projects- and you know companies start or even a part of- is that you're extremely good at generating hype for the products that you ultimately build. Even in its very early stages I'm like, yeah, I can't wait to try this out. Whereas I look at other products will be other people like, yeah, you know, it's great, I have no interest in it. It's not because the products themselves are not good or not comparable. It's just that your way of getting the message out has been very unique. So can you talk more about that? Like: what is the secrets that one needs to have to generate interest for an early stage product, before it even is ready for prime time? ### [10:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=639s) - Pasquale D'Silva I think a good chunk of it is meme engineering and, funnily enough, there's this fella in the southwest scene who knocked two of the park in a row recently, Nikita via. I don't know if you've seen his, his work around. He, he made an app called gas and then the one before that was- I forget, I think it's Nikita- right, yeah, Nikita beer. Yeah, he sold the company. I think it was called TBH. He sold that to Facebook, correct, had got locked up in a non-compete. He wasn't allowed to like work on another product within the space and then, as soon as that four years elapsed, you just made the app again and sold it to Discord. But at the heart of that, I mean, he was very hardcore in growth, like I don't know if the products were really designed to have longevity, which is a bit different the way that I try to approach things, but there was a lot of engineering on it. Like I'd say, more of the app was about engineering than it like being, I think, maybe on the inside, genius as a, as a product itself, and in that it's like, yeah, it's like meme engineering. How do you create an idea that will replicate what's gonna like have the largest sort of network effects. Can you create something that sort of pops off as an atom bomb to me? I like products as like an autistic medium, almost in the same way that, like a musician likes to release singles, like music, and you got to think about how to how to Market it, and I'm a big fan of the art of the stunt, like what can you do to bind it into pop culture? It was an app that I was I was working on a few companies ago where, I'm I sort of put a bunch of like cult or religious themes around it, but like light-hearted ones, yeah, and the mascot of the company was like this, all-seeing eye. I remember that yeah, yeah, and it was. The idea was like it's your personal God who, like creates all these beautiful realms for you to hang out in with your friends, and, the feeling was so. The idea was, if I'm, if I'm forming a- you know, a real cult, I gotta have celebrities to endorse it, just like real Cults do. And so I managed to trick Lindsay Lohan into recording a prayer video, to this God, and then we put it. We put it online, as is like sort of an ad, but like not really. We didn't really like mention anything about what the ad was. It was just weird enough, right, whether it was attached to an app and not just in Standalone as like an interesting, strange thing to get people talking that. Then people were like what the frick is this? And they went out of their way to go find like who was, who was behind this. We actually spun up a shell company and, pretended it was a church. So people would like assume that there was like some greater, like Beautiful Mind story behind it. But really it was just get people to come into the, into the app. But by the time they're in it they're already primed to play Within the meme space. You know they were coming in. They were like, oh great, oh God, I'm here to like download the app. Like how do I get, how do I get blessed? You know they would. They don't. They'd almost like succumb to or agreed to play the game. And I think when you can make it like a meme or a game that other people can get in on, they're like more down to spread it as well, because that's a fun place space for them to bring their friends into without them having a great thing from the beginning. So I try to make as many things like that where, like you could imagine the story of someone else showing it or the story of you showing it to a friend would be just a fun, like uplifting thing and that in a way can just be sort of like a little cultural atom bomb type effect to chain reaction. ### [14:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=877s) - Kirupa Yeah, so did you guys lean fully onto the Cameo app, or did you have some other back channel that you were able to use to get her endorsement? ### [14:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=884s) - Pasquale D'Silva Oh, that. I exploited Cameo very early on, before they really stopped you from using it for corporate types of activities. Very quickly they clamped down on it, but she didn't know that she was recording an ad for a fake cult. I told her she was helping us with a video for a friend's stinky little dog named Charlie, and I was able to splice little bits out of the video and put it into a continuous-enough seeming take that people were like, what the heck? She was also just coming back into the scene after taking a bunch of time off. So there's a timing thing with some of those memes too, right? Like, who's the perfect celebrity? What's the perfect topic to carry the thing at the moment? It is random, and creative. So it all worked out, and we saw another first-time, I think, use of celebrities as well. ### [15:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=946s) - Kirupa Because I remember using the Kizi app. I remember seeing Reggie a lot, frequently, which was very appropriate. I think Kizi was a drum-and-music-beats kind of an app, and having a musician who was very talented and likely a YouTuber or something like that made a lot of sense. ### [16:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=961s) - Pasquale D'Silva Yeah, Reggie was incredible to help us with with distribution and he said he's an old old friend of like us and the company. We described him as our company shaman and, you know, as soon as we had the app together, there was a funny sequence of events that happened where we're starting to get some lift on the thing. It was a strange app to be working on amongst the current landscape, the apps at the time, which was social type apps like Facebook and Tumblr and Flickr and all those like Web 2.0 kind of networks where we're in Vogue and we were just making a thing for making music. It was pretty pure, very simple, but, it's like one South by Southwest, ATT and I just had seen this thing. They were like, holy crap, like this is, this is fresh. Apple was like starting to feature Us in the in the Apple Stores. The app was installing every app around the- sorry, every apples right around the country, and so we were starting to get this cool lift and then 18t asked us: would you come to like an installation at South by Southwest? We have like 100k or 200k or whatever, like some pretty crazy amount of money to like do a physical installation. And so in about a week we worked with another hardware company in New York, scrambling together and we built a giant version of Kizi and, there was this funny threading the needle moment where we're like, well, how are we gonna like, how are we gonna attract people to come to this thing at? T really wanted, someone to demonstrate how to use Casey. And Reggie had already been playing around at the app a little bit and so, you know, they kind of knew that he was within our Circle a little bit. We're having some chats back and forth, creative brainstorms, and on that same trip in Austin, we did two things. One was I directed a live-action commercial featuring Reggie to promote the app because he's perfect, right, he can make any sound come out of his body. And then, and then we, had him do a live performance where he stomped around on the Giant keezy and he had a microphone that would beam the audio under his face and he was just like the perfect spirit and perfect like distribution for this idea, and it almost felt like, you know, we take bits of feedback from him about like what is what is working or what needs a little polish, so it would make it great for you. And because some of Reggie's tastes tend to make its way into the app, including some samples and stuff from him, some of his autistic Spirit also kind of made its way through it and so that helped push, push it Forward. Right, it was just like supernaturally aligned. It didn't feel like, you know, Michael Phelps doing a soy milk, commercial. That one always weirds me out. I don't know if they still sell at the grocery stores, but for a while they had, Michael Phelps soy milk and all I could think in the back of my head was, oh God, they have milked Michael Phelps- strange brand of Landon, but you know. ### [19:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1148s) - Kirupa Yeah, I know Reggie, and I still remember that because the stars aligned so well on that one: great product, great marketing, and the right person to be right up there talking about it. ### [19:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1159s) - Pasquale D'Silva Yeah, that was truly a special one to do and I definitely keep that in the back of that. I mean, definitely fortunate to have some connects to some, some Heavy Hitters- not everyone has access to, you know, excellent Talent like that. But, you know, I think there's creative ways around it. There's ways to kind of hack the I. I mean, you know, I promise not to get too deep into AI again this time around, but so you know things now where you can pretty much have any movie characters say whatever you want them to say and the facial movements and the mouth movements and so on is on point with the words that are coming out of their mouth, you know, of course, also sounds like them as well. ### [19:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1198s) - Kirupa Yeah, I mean that starts to get in some dicey territory too, because you know you go after someone's like this. We're about to enter a pretty strange era as far as access to White Pig goes. If anyone can, just yeah, you might have seen those right where, like I think, someone tries to recreate, make Tom Cruise do like normal kind of activities by using superimposing his face and body on, like on himself basically, and it almost looks believable like you cannot really tell the difference between like his real Tom Cruise or fake Tom Cruise, or Tropic Thunder Tom Cruise rolling down. ### [20:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1231s) - Pasquale D'Silva Yeah, they,. It was a very popular TikTok account, I think, which was. And then, more famously, there was a. I believe there was a recent Anthony Bourdain documentary where they- they trained a voice model on on his voice and then used AI Anthony Pointe to narrate the documentary. ### [20:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1254s) - Kirupa Wow, that is trippy. Yeah, and I, you know, last night I heard a story. I can't say who the actor is, but, there was a famous voice actor who had passed away recently, was involved in the, let's say, Disney family, and one of my friends, has, who's a fantastic voice actor, has been assisting in training and articulating of an AI model to like, extend the legacy of this character and his and his work. So, you know, times are changing as far as the simulation of these characters and personalities get to almost being Eternal, yeah, man. So yeah, not to go deep into the territory one more time, but getting back to apps and so on, one of my favorite apps that you know you had worked on was the note-taking app. You know, the one that allows you to take notes. Vision, you know, had like a- I'm forgetting the name of it at this point, but it's basically the same list thing, list, exactly like. That was part of my favorite and I used it way, way, way longer than you know. Then I felt like you're probably your metrics, even estimated people to use. It wasn't until, like, Cloud syncing was one of those things I couldn't live without. I was like, okay, I need to do something different, but you know the iconography, the colors is facing, you know all these things goes back to my earlier point about, like you know, having a designer being a core part of this from an early on stage, because you know there are a billion note-taking apps and then every day and Brilliant note-taking ads come back. But for me, thing list was like the one I always thought was a gold standard and like my favorite app that I used because I take notes, all the time. ### [22:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1359s) - Pasquale D'Silva I almost forgot about thing list. That is a that is a vintage one at this point and, that was fun to work on. You know, sometimes taking the weirdo designer animated brain and applying it to slightly more vanilla problems, can unlock some new approaches to making a thing right, like I. I think at the time like there were a bunch of people like doing to-do list apps but we wanted to do something with the people- bit more flavor and yeah, it was nice to make a pretty polished thing. I mean it. I think it was like one of the like the few properties we actually like sold and for not that, not that much money. I think it still existed. I think there's another company that kind of like took over thing list and they maintained it a little bit. I don't know if they even did Cloud sync or anything, but yeah it. You know I spent a lot of time these days inside game engines and still doing animation kind of heavy stuff and 3D things. But and those are those can be like really challenging spaces to be in, because you just the simulation space you have to hold in your mind is a lot. You just kind of put in a different mode, right and but it's all at the end of the day, it's all computers, right, it's all code, it's all the same kind of stuff underneath, but it's just a very different way to articulate it and it is fun, honestly, to like come back to the slightly more quote-unquote vanilla type problems and be like: well, what if we push it through this lens of the higher order, like thinking, can you, can you make like some of these my typically mundane experiences? Like have a personality or flavor, and I think those things having personality and flavor humanize them and ends up making them more of a Humane experience, instead of us having to become more computer-like and turn ourselves into robots to be able to interact with computers. I think when software becomes more like a being which has a personality, it's a lot more natural to relate to. ### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1500s) - Kirupa Yeah, no, that's, that's so true. You know, I think there was a book called English, called Society of mind. That I think was by, I think, Marvin Minsky. Like detail exactly on this is that you know, the other day. You know we've been trying to make humans behave more like computers and like how we think and program and speak their language. What are we? The other way around, you know what it was the other way around, where, you know, we spoke a Common Language and we trained all the various systems to understand it, a Common Language being so that humans are more relatively, you know, friendly about it. ### [25:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1532s) - Pasquale D'Silva Yeah, I mean, I think even today, code is, it's kind of like learning magic spells. Even if you know how to engineer, to the normal person it's still such a difficult interface and mental play now to put yourself in. Yeah, you're always told to like. You know you want to solve problems and domain you're trying to operate in. You know which means a visual task is best done visually. You know which is why you sell so many direct manipulation and all these things and tools to make it not. Like you know, I'm drawing a rectangle, I'm going to draw a rectangle using a tool that is optimized for drawing rectangles, whereas coding is still very much a case where, if you're drawing a rectangle, you're writing text and not even, like you know, logical texts. It's like bizarre SVG syntax or or maybe even like direct imperative commands on like canvas, right, like literally moving coordinates from one point to another, and I think there's a lot to be done here, even ignoring, like low code, no code- tools that try to abstract away details. But all these abstractions come with limit, you know, whereas you can't do the things you might want to do because you're blocked by the tools ability to represent a visual concept into whatever backend language to be ultimately represented in. Yeah, man, I mean, there's so much to have to wrap your head around, I think, to be able to move the medium of software around in an effective way. It's like a I feel like every day. Is that you know? Mind expansion meme like the Galaxy brand? Exactly, exactly, exactly. ### [27:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1626s) - Kirupa So, getting back to one more point, you know I'm gonna put a spot here, so here are two situations. I'm curious to get your take on what would be the more successful product at the end of it- mediocre product, great distribution. That is, product a, product B, great product, mediocre distribution. What do you think is a greater chance of success? ### [27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1650s) - Pasquale D'Silva Oh well, I think to really answer that question, it comes down to what is the measure of success? If we're talking about making the chat achieve the first one of mediocre product greater distribution, let's show up. I mean, there's so much, so many things in the world- if you just forget, software products just on Earth- that cracked the distribution piece. That's why the world is full of a lot of crap too. Yeah and then a lot of like the. They're really excellent things. Just if that never cracked distribution, you could consider them a commercial failure but maybe artistic success. One of the key examples I push a lot of things to the Disney lens lately because I've just been doing a really deep dive on like the life of them and he's very Upstream of a lot of stuff that I do. Fantasia was, one of his like big, pure autistic Endeavors and what was the name of the Leupold stick was the name of the musical collaborator, I believe, and he wanted together- you know what really wanted to do- an uncompromised, like autistic film, forgetting what would be- he wasn't leaning into what's going to hit it- the biggest in the box office, right, it was like what's going to be the purest expression of the idea, Fantasia. Now everyone knows about it and it did eventually make Disney money. But when the thing came out- I mean there's interviews of him talking about it- commercial failure, artistic success, right, and I guess it comes down to what is what is important at the time. You know, if we really are measuring Disney as an artist- wildly successful with Fantasia, because I think great artists eventually have to work out how to reinet themselves after a while. It's very easy to get stuck in your patterns and then you kind of lose it. You lose your unique perspective because the rest of the world almost kind of catches up. And so Fantasia was one of those reinvention moments for him where he had to really turn a lot of his his Thinking Inside Out to get that, that thumb out, and it certainly inspired a lot of future work. That happened, at the studio. But did it make the studio like a good amount of money? No, it like lost a lot of money, like, and so it didn't have the right distribution. And it also just it. It was too ahead of its time. There's a timing thing on things too. I think, yes, there's a right time for ideas to land and yeah, I think it just really comes down to what's important. I think that he wouldn't have like done I, since he wouldn't have like done Fantasia another way. You know, that's like one of those notches in the belt: you want to like, you want to keep. Okay, the stuff you learn, getting to work on a project like that uncompromised, is invaluable, even though it costs millions of dollars. ### [30:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1843s) - Kirupa Yeah, and I think that's something you always hear about from a lot of creatives who are creating shows for Netflix, specifically saying that Netflix gives them more freedom to do what they want to do, which may or may not work out. I don't know how it works out now, given that they're being more constrained in funding things. But at least a few years ago, it was typically the case where, if you had an idea that was unproven but you were passionate about it, there was a platform that would be willing to support it. Have you seen Midnight Gospel? Have you heard of it? Have you heard it? I have not. Let's see if I heard of it. ### [31:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1875s) - Pasquale D'Silva I have not. Let's see if I've heard of it. You know, I'm a visual person, so I might have seen the artwork on it. I've seen the trailer. I've seen the cover art for it. Yes, I've not seen it, though. So the fellow behind it is a man by the name of Pendleton Ward, and his most famous creation is Adventure Time, which I'm sure you've heard of, right? ### [31:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1901s) - Kirupa Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. ### [31:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=1902s) - Pasquale D'Silva And it did very well for Cartoon Network because it was, I think, one of the most popular properties at the time, and it ran for quite a number of seasons. It puts his head in it and it's this like futuristic via simulator and it's very psychedelic and he beams into the bodies of these characters and they go on this stupid lucid, fluid trippy Adventure. Every time he puts his head inside the machine and, the amount of tea towel, you can just tell that they were just having fun with it and not worrying about well, we need to be economic. Oh, this shot like doesn't make sense here, this would be expensive. Now it's just a sense of wow, they just let him play and create whatever we want. I mean, I'm sure it's probably like have x million dollars and just go to town and just tone it in whenever the thing's complete. I would guess that it was probably something like that. If you have this feeling of, well, this is not a, like a true commercial product, while Netflix, you know, is Distributing it. I don't think he was trying to make something that would punch in the same class as Adventure Time that. But anyway, I highly recommend checking out Midnight Gospel because you watch it and you're like, okay, there's no way. If this was put in front of a contemporary, like modern audience just on one of the main channels or Cartoon Network, people would get it. They'd be like this is from another planet. But I do think that Midnight Gospel, in maybe 10 years or 20 years, when I think the world itself becomes more psychedelic, with psychedelia making its right into the population like, like psychedelic mushrooms and all the other things that are becoming legalized, I think, like you'll, it'll probably be a bit more of a cultural Awakening and then they'll be ready to receive an idea like that and I'll just be like that. It'd almost be like a classic to be like. Oh yeah, of course, these ideas we think about already. But you know, artists are often out ahead of the rest of the pack, but it's very sensitive types of people and so they often get ideas beamed into their head before everyone else. And I think another part of the job is like working out one, two. They get to choose when to release it amongst the rest of the folks who are both artists and non-autists, you know. ### [34:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2084s) - Kirupa Yeah, no. I think my point earlier about timing is such a core part of anything that we typically do, but even for an artist specifically. I read a lot of articles and books, so it's hard for me to keep track of what I read and when, but there was a great article I was reading a short while ago talking about how, if you took an automotive design from today, something cutting-edge, and you took it back 20 or 30 years.. It had been like: this is garbage, which is absolutely awful. We're gonna do whatever. We think the future, what 2022, might look like and look very different, even though if you look at it today, we're like: wait, that looks like something from a Jetson. It's really terrible. And there's something that came out of it which is really like. Sometimes ideas are so far ahead that, even if it is good, the timing of when it's introduced has to play a big role, because a great idea introduced way too early could not only sabotage that idea from that moment, it couldn't potentially sour that idea from ever becoming a reality. And then an idea that came out of it was clippy. You know the old Microsoft Office, oh yeah, where you know it gave you text-based assistance on, contextually, on what you were doing at the time- execution- there's a lot to be desired, but that pretty much stopped any kind of discussion on space for so long, until the people who era probably remember it anymore. Like you know, you and I are probably the only people right now on this planet who are talking about it and remember it. You know, at this very moment, whereas for many other things it's still part of the Zeitgeist, and so that always struck with me. You know, when I have an interesting idea and I'm like, okay, people are like this idea. Now, is it because my presentation of the idea was bad or the idea is just too far ahead of its time? ### [36:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2186s) - Pasquale D'Silva Yeah, I think it can often read as culture shock to the people who are not quite ready for it yet. If you imagine a weird futuristic flying car being dropped in right now, it's just too much for some people to wrap their heads around, because it's challenging so many of their assumptions and base principles at a given time, right? ### [36:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2219s) - Kirupa Yeah, I do. The Cyber truck as an example of this, you know, just first introduced. You know some people were like this is hideous, absolutely awful. Some people are like the greatest thing ever- and most of the people probably played the Halo video games where it remind them of the war Target, like, oh, there's like a warthog, I gotta have it right now. But then two years later now I was like yeah, that totally makes sense. And then we see like other competing card companies doing equally blocky kind of looking things. They're just like yeah, it's just part of the norm and no one remembers at that time how much backlash and so on that came out of this whole thing. But also part of me is like doesn't really matter. You know, the product is compelling and the vision of it. I don't think it's actually out something and it's actually outside of the hands of people have used it. But their Vision was so compelling that it was able to overcome so much of the negativity and the headwinds at that point. ### [37:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2269s) - Pasquale D'Silva Yeah, I mean, I think that's just underlying, like mechanic that is still built into our like monkey brains, which is for better it was, because it's probably a defense mechanism, the fear of new things, right, and then you can see the alien. It's like something from an outer tribe. It's like gonna challenge everything. You want to throw stones at it or smash it into a million pieces, yeah, and like it definitely didn't hurt. I definitely hasn't heard that. You know, Elon also happens to be like doing SpaceX, and so she's like: wait, you know. So your mind is like having two ends here. It's like wait, he he's it has a vision and the team around it to take Rockets up and land the rocket back down again, and yet he gives us this. There's something wrong with me, right? You know I'm the one who's not able to see this, because why would someone like that, you know, lead us in the wrong path, the wrong design? So there's a cult of personality angle that plays a large role in this as well. Whereas it was one thing, it's like some random person came with a cyber truck, versus here's the person behind SpaceX and Tesla in general, and you know other endeavors, I think, the flamethrower, you know basically doing this. So I think those are all like goes back to the early series of like building hype and all the various factors that kind of go into it. Yeah, I mean, I think it definitely is a Visionary, as like I mean it is crazy to look at, obviously, the ethics he's made- sending to space, setting up infrastructure and then being a huge troll on on Twitter- and then you have to somehow hold all of that in your head and make a like binary evaluation of Rocket Man good or Rocket Man bad. It's just way more complex than that. Yeah, we've got like a very complex president who, has a Godly amount of resources twiddling his finger and you know our, our simulations and we had stuff to happen. But yeah, man, it's. It's been a real roller coaster to watch. ### [40:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2401s) - Kirupa Yeah, yeah. So you know one thing. You know we're getting close to like the end of our time here. Then when I you know check, ask one question: what does success mean for you? You know you've done a lot of really interesting things in my 20 years that I've known you and they've all been very, very different in some cases. You know that's a common theme of that. You know you have an idea that you want to get out to the world. But beyond that, you know what motivates you. What are your plan? What are you 10 years from now? What do you? What does success for you look like? ### [40:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2429s) - Pasquale D'Silva I think that's two things. One is I wouldn't hope I can just continue, continue doing what I get to do every day. A lot of it is play and a lot of it's the really have the privilege of being an artist. Ideally, I'm just doing as much of that as possible and no other distractions. But the second is it'd be great to really build something that that lasts, and I don't know exactly what the form of that is. Some of it might be like like the feeling of Legacy, you know if the same reason people have kids and whatnot and they want to continue on their lineage. But, I just think in a world of technology and software, we've just normalized working on things that are incredibly ephemeral and, the idea of making something or creating something that lasts longer than a few years to me is such an exotic or out there idea. If we just consider what culture is today. The attention spans are so short. But working on something that could really span a lifetime or a decent chunk of a lifetime, it's really really appealing to me because you get people to have a different relationship to the thing. It's less about the quick little Hits and The Dumping spikes and more like this is a thing that I hold with me or carry in my life, or an experience, so an idea. It'd be cool to create a thing that is that that meaningful sometime, but, not in a rush to do it. I think it'll happen, naturally, but yeah, that would. That would be it. Some build something that lasts and, continue getting it, just create out all the time. ### [42:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2541s) - Kirupa Yeah, no, that's a great answer there. ### [42:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiszALzlS30&t=2544s) - Pasquale D'Silva Thanks, man. [Browse all Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm).