Hey everyone. Welcome to On The Block 3. Really excited to have Brooke Ellis here, who is the Design Lead at Block. I'm always blown away at how culturally relevant like Block brands are, especially for financial products. Like the Square and Cash App brands have both really cut through, and I think a lot of that has to do with the strength of our design and just how these products feel to people. I think Brooke and her team are huge components of that. Brooke, thank you for doing this. I'd love to start maybe with just your background. How did you get into design in the first place? What's your career looked like? How did you find yourself at Block? All that would be great to start. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you for that intro too. It's awesome to be here and talk about all this stuff. Yeah. How did I get into design? I think my background is somewhat unconventional. I didn't train to be a designer. I studied and wanted to be a writer, and had just like a childhood and history and upbringing that was all about stories and books and music and culture and humanities. I just got lucky enough to be working when a bunch of people wanted websites, and I figured out how to build and design them. I kind of stumbled into design by way of just being fascinated with what I now know to be brand or storytelling, and how that applies to product and product development. That led me down like a really interesting path. I worked at a lot of places. Ultimately landed in a consultancy called Frog Design, which has been around now I think for almost 50 years. It was a classic industrial design firm, worked with Steve Jobs, designed very early Apple computers. When I joined, I worked there for a number of years. When I joined, we at that stage were basically doing this huge spectrum of design works, really gnarly software projects, connected experience projects with clients like Disney, MagicBand, park experience, software that the staff uses, app that the attendee uses, like all of these incredibly complex parts. That was like a really formative experience for me. It was the first time I could actively connect brand and storytelling with just hardcore product design and development. I went from there to a number of in-house roles. I worked in editorial for a while. I was at Airbnb for a number of years, and then came to Cash App where I worked for, I think, four years before I took on this role overseeing all of the Block brands and all of design. It's a meandering journey, but I think a thing I have always been particularly interested in is the convergence of brand and product development. I think that is by nature of just like the specific experiences I've had, the interests I've had, and it's a huge part of our Block design culture today too, so. Yeah, great. I want to spend a lot of time on Block design culture. Before getting there, you talked a little bit about that in your career trajectory. I would say as an investor prior to coming here, it's probably still true, like the least conception of what design is and what it does. Yeah. Maybe just a level set for people. How would you define what design, like what do you and all the people on your team spend their time doing and thinking about and strategizing about? Yeah. Oh my God, we could talk about this all day. There are a thousand answers to that generally, but the way I like to think about design, and I think how we consider design, if we use that moniker here at Block, is pretty simple. It's just imagining what should exist in the world and making it so, making it real. The art of sort of identifying a need, a problem, a situation, an opportunity, and being able to see that, and then also intuiting how to solve it and in what creative way to solve it, is like really the heart of design, I think, and being a designer. That just means what we're doing all day is like obsessing over the details of the experiences of our products, of our brand that exist, but also largely thinking about what doesn't exist, what should exist, how should it exist. Really like what deserves to exist, especially now with AI and I think the world we're in, like a lot of our brainpower and muscle is orienting around the judgment of what should exist and how to breathe life into it since the process is changing so much. I think it's also worth noting at Block. I think this is unusual and unlike a lot of companies. Our design group encompasses product design and brand creative. One of our key kind of tenets is considering the experience of the customers as one cohesive experience. When you're talking to design or like when you and I are talking about this, we're considering a pretty broad range of touch points and interactions a customer might have with us, and so that's what we're digging into every day. It's like how does this feel? How can it feel better? What doesn't exist and what should exist? And I think classically, like many people think design is surface beauty. It sure is, but definitely here and in the best design forward companies, it's really like the functionality, how it works, how it feels, and why it exists. That's what we do. Yeah. Well, great. You mentioned AI. Probably no conversation can escape that topic at this moment in time, but I want to save that for a second and talk a little bit about just like design principles and strategy at the Block level. What are the principles that you want the design here, or like the design team and just the design of what we ship out to customers, like what are those design principles or what do you live by? What are the constants that you adhere to regardless of the product or the end customer that's going to be receiving the product? Yeah. Tons to say on this too. I will admit I have like spicy takes on principles, which is like we have fundamentally at Block core values, which I think are the like strongest establishment of like what dictates how we work and what we make. I think they're stronger and better than any set of principles that we could kind of develop on top of it. I'm happy to talk through those, you know them as well, but they mean a lot to design, and they actually guide and dictate a lot of how we make decisions on the day-to-day. I can speak to a little bit more. There is like the definition of excellence and of design in the way that we work is very hard to capture in like a bullet point list of principles. If it was that easy to capture, like anyone could do it, frankly. There's like really core spiritual tenets to Block that I think speak to what you're asking about. First I'll just say the four corners of Block, which I think Jack must have written years and years ago and still hold. I've been hard pressed to develop additional ones on top of it that don't repeat these core fundamentals. I think they're really incredible. All of them apply to design, but a few of them more than others. The first in the order I consider them is connect the blocks, which is about cohesion, it's about bridging, it's about connected experiences, and of course, like considering our ecosystem and the power of our ecosystem. There is start small, which dictates a lot of our day-to-day decisions. You know this as well, but to me this is like a cultural determination of our investment in learning and experimenting and taking risks, which is very germane to how we design. Like having the permission to kind of like experiment and play and start small with decisions is a huge part of how we get to excellent design. The last two I think are even more critical. Every company is going to have a principle that's like care about the customer centricity, customer experience, and they get a little bit like trite. The third corner is give time back, which I think is like a more boldly stated way of obsessing and centering on the customer. In that it like forces you to make decisions in a certain way. It's like our mission is to give time back. It's the most valuable thing we can give to our customers. We're not in the business of stealing attention or of absorbing customers' attention. That kind of drives and provides a lot of our just obsession with the customer, immersion in the customers' lives. We wouldn't be able to drive great design without that. The last one though is my favorite, and it's to me, however long ago it was written, it's like one of like Jack's prescient moments I feel like, which is give it soul. Which I think in this era and moment we're in, it's like so rich and so good because it's basically like the thing that only hyper creative, real imagination can provide. It's like putting the magic into the experiences and basically not stopping at functional simplicity, but like insisting that we're pushing more into what I consider to be like an emotional experience in our products. I think that has like helped a lot of us in design as so much of our process and industry is completely changing and consolidating, maintain like a belief in what I think will always require like real human creative judgment and human creativity. Give it soul is like probably one of the best design principles, I think, and it's a company-wide principle. On top of that, our brands have strong principles. We have strong character in our brands. I think when I step out of our company and talk to others, it's hard to remember how unusually we believe in our brands, and how much like we invest in the kind of like character of them, and how important that is in everything we're talking about. You basically end up with principles that are an obsession with the customer, a like deep understanding of the ever-changing kind of culture of our brands, and then of course, an understanding of strategy and business, and you basically get to our design principles. That was a long answer, but that's. Yeah, no. I mean, it makes so much sense and a lot of that really resonates with just like everything that I see every day, like especially last one you talked about the experimentation, giving time back, and giving everything soul. Yeah. When we talked to Brad, a couple of weeks ago now, we talked about just how the idea that it's okay to fail and like fail fast and like obviously technology's helping us do that more. Yep. A lot of things, and this probably really resonated in design too, where like a lot of things you'll go down a path and recognize that it's just not worth going down further and you'll have to like retreat and go down a different path. Yeah Sometimes you'll find something that's like the next Cash App, which started at zero and is now a huge part of our business, obviously. Yeah. You'll find like Goose or something. Yeah. Which obviously is really relevant for Brad. Like there's probably so many of those examples where like someone in design just started on something, just kept like pulling the yarn, and all of a sudden there's this massive like innovation that we have that we can present to customers. Yeah. It's such a core part of this company and the culture of all teams. Certainly design, but I think all of our teams, that ability to take those swings and that good ideas come from anywhere. I think it's very much like t he design strategy as you asked about it. If you can kind of equip the creative people on the team with that kind of permission and that kind of cultural currency in the company to take those swings, you get really big javelins you know that get thrown that become like the Cash App. But you also just get these like, some of our most magical kind of moments and product decisions that actually drive so much of our relationship with our customers. You know? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? I know AI is like impossible to not talk a lot about in any- Yeah of these conversations. I'm struck by how easy it is to build stuff now. Mm-hmm. I like vibe, I'm vibe coding like every day, and the design's not very good because I don't know how to do any of that. It's like you can get to a point where it's like solid. Yeah I'm sure people that are 20% or 50% more effective than me can do like something that's way better. We'll transition into AI at some point, but if you think about like the design ethos, we put in everything, and just like how you spend your day, there's a lot of competitors now that could like vibe code a lot of what we do. Mm-hmm. At least try to vibe code it and make it look like a facsimile. If someone tried to do that, like for some of the core functionalities, what specific part of our design approach do you think would be impossible for them to copy? Yeah. People have always sort of copied what we do. It's definitely like the existential question, I think. I think the truth is, besides obviously like our relationship with our customers, like our knowledge of them, our understanding of like the customer behavior, the data we have, like besides all of that, if you just focus on the experience, the like true answer is someone could easily mimic and replicate a lot of the like core systemic foundational guidelines of our UI on any of our brands. I think the answer would be it's never been in our culture or in our design strategy to be static. It's like part of our design system to evolve and reflect the culture of our customers and where they exist and live. Said differently, I think if someone tried to copy us, we would be changing the game like. Yeah The minute later. You know? In like how the kind of experiences are evolving. That's a thing we've always done and have been very equipped to do, and I think it's difficult for a lot of other people to keep pace with. We're constantly evolving and I think our tone and our character and the kind of trust we have through those brands is a near impossible thing to replicate, even if you copy the UI. You know? Yeah. Ultimately, it's the idea that like part of your design philosophy or like how you run the design team, but also just the Block design philosophy is just the constant state of evolution. Like that state of evolving is itself the thing that probably keeps us ahead from a design perspective. Yeah. I think there's always been an investment in that, in this like wheel of change, and in not kind of resting on what's known. Yeah It's like in the fabric of the company, it's in the DNA of the company, generally, and also in how we like make and mold things. We have, of course, like very consistent, strongly held design language fundamentals. You know? It's like we have the sort of functional truths that go into product interfaces as we know them, for example, or brand systems as we know them, that are consistent, that are ours, that are own-able. I see that as kind of like functional design. It's like we have excellence in utility in our design culture. It's like we hold a really high bar on like simple tools that work and simplifying what is complex, bringing legibility and comprehension to things that are complex. We've always done that. I think the thing that's important that we're talking about now is that's where a lot of brands and teams and companies I think stop, and we've never stopped there. We've always been interested in building emotional design in on top of that. You can like build functional design that gets people to use your products. You can also build emotional design interactions that make people love your products, and that combination is what has been so, I think, incredible for these brands long before I got here. That is like the reflection of culture and what's going on that is kind of always changing, and it requires like an incredible investment in creative energy and like customer immersion to kind of always be reflecting back to the customers what's changing. Like a Square dashboard, the fundamentals of that language, even if it is being brought to life in a new kind of hyper-intelligent interface, there's a lot of like really consistent elements of that, but there's these opportunities on top of it that I think is where design and creativity like really comes to bear. Yeah. I think we're the best at that. A few years ago, I got like a Cash App hoodie. This is before I started working here, I got a Cash App hoodie. Yeah. At the time, like unironically, that this is the coolest piece of clothing that I own. Yes. Isn't that amazing? How like a financial brand that has, you know, 59 million monthly actives and like does all these things that could just create like this artifact that I have, that I'm like, "This is the coolest thing I own. Yeah. I mean, I should wear that next time at the next "On The Block.'' Many people have asked about the apparel and like, "Why would you ever do that?" Yeah, it's a very good example of connecting culture to money. You know? Right. I think it ties to also like what you were saying earlier around give time back. Yeah. I know we talked about this at the beginning, but we've built like what I think are some of the most iconic, trusted, cool brands, like not just in financial services, not just in fintech or technology, but like in the world. Yeah. Iconic, trusted, cool are not things that you typically, like, ascribe to financial platforms and financial products. That's right. How do you think we are able to do that? Again, maybe bring in the design element, but also I think that the concept of giving time back is also probably important, which is like the design ethos behind that. Yeah. The thing you're asking about I think is so fascinating. I've thought about it a lot. I think it's good. Okay, this is a little bit of a circle answer, but it will come back to the question. I think it's good to remember, as all great designers do, what is the point of all of this? Our company, Block, has a mission or a purpose that is pretty clear. It's simply economic empowerment, but the strategy that hangs off of that, the choices we've made through these brands and products, that the way that we are choosing to power people into the global economy has a lot to do with just total transformation of systems, standards, and experiences that were woefully under-serving the people, right? In our very core, we're transforming something. It is like a designer's dream where we exist to change something really critically, and there's so much psychology around that, and I think one of the critical initial choices was that to change how people relate to money and finance, there's a lot of emotional and cultural signals that can help people feel ownership and confidence and pride about the products they're using that actually begin to change how they relate to money and finance. That in and of itself is empowering. My kind of analysis is that very early we made the decisions to make the literal transformed products and interfaces of these tools something that was closer to identity and culture than it was some tactical utility. It's that decision way back when that introduced elegance and coolness and all that in. It was shocking for so long, that it just completely spun people. I think that's just been in our DNA ever since. When you look at Square, the Square hardware, you can feel that. The degree of quality and what it allowed people, what access it gave people. Cash App, same. I've analyzed this to death. People dress up as Cash App for Halloween. There's some crazy history in there. Again, what we're kind of talking about is if you can get people to relate to money and finance and these tools in the same way they relate to culture, then you've done something that opens up an understanding and a kind of relatability. I think there's magic in that, and I think that's a big part of design and the role design has played in the company. In terms of giving time back, it's really interesting. The decisions that we make and have made to make these topics and these things more accessible and enjoyable naturally circumvent time. It naturally collapses the time it takes to grok and understand or even engage with some of these topics and tools. It is related to that, I think, in an interesting way. I mean, I'm always amazed when you go to a seller and you compare the Square hardware, still to this day, 16 years later, it just looks better. Yeah. I don't know why, and again, that's this design ethos was like there's just something about it that just feels different. Similarly in Cash App, when I'm using that on a day, it just feels more intuitive. It feels cleaner. There's not full app pop-ups that are like, "Hey, you should buy this product from us instead." It's just like, I just want to do the thing. Mm-hmm. I know those are all deliberate design decisions, but it does come back. It's a really good framing. It comes back to giving people time back. Maybe not the Square hardware piece, but the idea of you're in the Cash App to do something, not to get sold something in your face that's super invasive, and I have to click out of it and destroy all that experience. What I would think about that's interesting is there's a kind of a business tension. Mm Where the easy hack is you're like, let's put a full, I don't even know what you'd call it, the full app takeover to upsell this product. You probably see a marginal lift because it's in your face. You're going to drive activity that way, but it's not in the long-term interest of the company or the customers. Yep. How do you think about? There's design ethos, but then there's short-term business performance, long-term business performance, balancing all of those things. Maybe what's the measurement of success for you? Yeah. It's a great question. It is, I think, an incredible tension and tightrope walk that design probably anywhere faces and feels. I think especially now in this era, years ago, there was this trade-off where it's like you needed more time to hit some sort of bar of quality, and there was always this very taut tension between fast, hacky wins and the beautiful long-term vision, and 3, 4 years ago, that was the sort of state of design. If you could push for that longer term thing, you would up-level quality in some way. I think that's pretty fully debunked at this point. I think with the tools we now have at our disposal, we're able to move so much more quickly to realize the bigger, headier design ideas and breathe life in them. It's not as costly to bring to life these sort of design iterations, and we're able to experiment and move with AI so much faster. It's 3 to 4 X'd what we're able to produce. A lot of that tension, just the time tension, I think is actually evaporating, which is fascinating. There is for sure a reality where there's near term, like low-calorie business wins that could feel like a trade on our design values. To like give it soul or give time back, which I think is what you're getting at. We essentially balance those and would fight those if they would come up, but particularly if they betray any sort of value set we have. For the most part, we have such utter alignment across our functions that the customer experience is a strategic differentiator that we're not often in debates about things that betray that quality bar that would get us some near term, low-hanging fruit. We are way more oriented on long-term, durable relationship growth. There are times, just broadly as a designer, where if you want to measure the success of design based on the month of April, it can get tricky. There is a sort of clairvoyance to being a great designer, where it is like, I can see that this is going to ramp over 6-12 months, and the trust that is built is immeasurable by your metric. If you don't invest in this design language rule, that will convey and cue trust and confidence compounding over many months, it will erode the sentiment and the relationship. It's like those things you have to fight for as a designer. We do, and we have. I think actually this is very central to being a design-forward company. It's like why design at Block doesn't report to product or to engineering or to marketing or whatever. It's because there is a balanced set of perspectives. I think if you're good and you're fast enough and you're at the frontier of things, which we try to be, we're generally able to activate on the critical things at a very, very high velocity for customers. If they live up to our values, we'll do those in a day, in two days, and it will help move things forward. It just doesn't come at the cost of our bigger swings. Again, I'm saying that from a moment of where we have all had our heads spun by the ability to move so much fast. I think two years ago, I would've had a different answer. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, we've made it almost 30 minutes without talking a lot about AI, but I do think we should get together next. I feel like there's a couple of things to hit on as it relates to AI. Like one is just aesthetics and just. Yeah How building it feels. Maybe another one is the technology and the tooling, and you're talking about things that used to take days or weeks that can now be done almost instantaneously and just what that does for design. Maybe we could start on the aesthetic side, where so you gave a talk internally, I don't know, six or so months ago, maybe eight months ago now, on taste, and I was just really fascinated by it. Let's spend a few minutes on that. How do you define taste? How AI impacts taste, and what does taste mean to you? How does that infuse your design philosophy and your approach? Yeah. It is such a word right now, too. I think when I gave that talk, too, it was already becoming a catchphrasey word, even whenever that was, September, I think, when I did that. Which is part of why I wanted to speak to it. Now I think it's been chewed to smithereens. Whether the industry's tired of talking about it or not, it's still a real thing. Right Very critical to what we're experiencing. Taste, I think, the way I kind of thought about it and shared in that talk is, it's interesting. It's like taste is just knowing what's good. As a person, everybody has their own taste. It's not some magical thing that only a few people have. It's like you have preferences, you have taste. The point of that talk was to try to begin to understand and articulate the difference between developing your own personal taste and having great taste, and being a taste maker and leading with taste, particularly for a brand. A lot of that conversation was like, how do you develop that? What are the ways that our team develop it? I think really central to my thinking on that is two things. I think having great taste and leading with taste in the work we do is not just about identifying that's good and that's not, though, of course, that's a big part of the job. It's way more uncomfortable than that. It's way more about predicting what is going to resonate with people later, before they know it. That requires such courage. It requires all these things. Again, that's what I talked about in that talk. It means you have to build up this sort of scar tissue around experiencing the world and understanding what's happening in culture. It is not static. It's a thing you have to constantly be paying attention to, and then you have to have the fortitude to kind of chart the course before other people get there. That, I think, is the taste thing that we're talking about in the industry when people are losing their shit about taste. It's like, what is that thing? This is actually, it's related to your very first question. That quality is why I'm kind of like, no set of principles are going to give you that shit. You can't put a poster on the wall that's going to teach you how to do that. It's a real practice. I think generally people in the industry who are poo-poohing that as a differentiator are people who don't have it or who don't understand it. You can call it something different, but that creative judgment. Just the spark of creativity to put something net new out there with the bet that it's going to take hold is like a real art. The reason it's such a topic is just because, obviously, AI is going to make the act of creation so easy that anybody can do it, which is amazing and incredibly exhilarating and empowering. Most people have said for a full year now that great taste is what will kind of bring the bar up and will kind of emerge from the pack. I think that's true, but I think it's always been true. There's always been really weak slop stuff out in the world. It's like there's 100 brands or companies that have like so-so design. It's been the reality, like creative people, not just in design, are able to step above that and put something new out. It's very germane to everything we're talking about, really. I do think it's a learned thing. I do think it's like a muscle you learn. I don't think it's like some God-given ability, and I think most creative, e xcellent creatives and designers have dedicated years to figuring out why that inclination. Yeah. I think one of the slides you had was just all the credit cards that look exactly the same, and they're like. Yeah A cobalt blue, and then it's like. Yeah. Cash Card, anyone can design their own card and. Yeah You can have just different stickers on it and completely different. Yeah Aesthetics depending on the person, and that's. Yep That's a very deliberate design choice. There's also elements to your point of like being a lot of the product. There is a product choice, there's an engineering choice around that. Yeah. It's really cool how aligned the design, like being unique in design, flows through everything that we do. Yeah. It's so true. It's like by functionalizing as a company built of functions and having us as equal players, it really has arranged us and set us up to be pretty fluid across functions. It's like I have product management partners who have incredible design instincts. My design team is manifesting most of the front end of our products because they're engineering now. It's like we're pretty equipped to be fluid across these functions. It's because of the cultural terms around creativity just being so. It's definitely not limited to just design. The Cash Card is still my favorite. There's so many design decisions and product decisions over years and even recently that live up to this, but the Cash App Card is still the most visceral, like just spike the football kind of thing. It's like the perfect example of what we're talking about, and it's the perfect example of giving it soul. Right Don't settle. Just don't stop it with MVP. It drives results. It explicitly has created this monster product there, I believe. I love that story. I think it's one of our best examples. Well, I think it's very analogous to Square, like the first dongle. Right That would be plugged into the headphone jack. People would be like, "What is that?" People take their Cash Card out of their wallet and it's just like, "Whoa. What is that thing? Yeah. It's been foundational to bringing a peer-to-peer network, in its early days, to the fourth largest debit program in the U.S., one of the largest managed service firms in the U.S., and it's just like every time they take the card out, it's just like a conversation piece. Yeah. It's cool. There's more to come there, which will be exciting. We talked a little bit about design aesthetics and AI and how do we avoid the slopification or whatever the term is, of just everything. Talk a little bit about AI from a technological perspective. The data I was pulling together with some folks on your team prior to last earnings, the amount of pull requests, basically production code changes that are being done by designers, has gone parabolic. Yeah. Maybe a year, maybe 18 months ago, it was effectively zero. I forget the numbers now, but the second half of last year, the line started going vertical, and that was even true through the early part of the Q1 before we reported. How is AI as a technology impacting what you do, what your team is capable of and how the design workflow evolves? Yeah. It's such a trip. It's been really incredible. Yeah. Since we reduced the team size, the amount of lines of code that designers have written has even gone up like 250% or something. It's just like an absolute wildfire. It's incredible how fast we're able to move. Yeah, it's interesting. Many product design organizations, with the advent of these tools a year and a half ago, began moving towards code, of course. There is an intimacy with building and code that certainly had a learning curve for I think some contingents of product designers. The most simple way to put it is these tools equipped every designer to just breathe life into things that they formerly had to plan out and hand off to somebody else. The speed and costliness of that process changed so quickly. What's interesting is watching different lenses and different types of designers react differently. A huge majority of our product designers are now empowered to and are able to build full product features, right? They're doing that. We are also kind of like, for a long time, we just realized we could vibe code the roadmap. There's no lack of ideas. It was always just this hedging, careful thing of like, "Well, I have 40 ideas. They're fragile. I can mock up these 10. There's 3 of them I think other people will like. There's 1 of them I could afford to prototype, and then I might be able to hand out to an engineer, and now you can literally build 40 of them and then decide which one feels good. Like that design process of yesterday is completely collapsed. I think that to a designer, it's like the positive way to look at it is like just incredible speed from idea to reality. It's just like your first question. It's like, what does a designer do? They imagine what could exist, and then they make it. It's like that used to take six months. It takes a week. Yeah Exhilarating kind of freedom. There's a lot of the process in design that designers use to control that has been gobbled and will continue to be automated, and that in the industry, is causing and has caused a natural identity crisis. The creative kernel of the idea and the ensurement that the thing at the end is at our bar are still very human qualities, and they are fortunately. Like for Block, we have hired and built a team that index is so high on that creativity that we're basically doing the same thing we were doing. We've just collapsed the middle. There's interesting parallels, like in design, as I said, we're blended brand creative too, and you have the same fascinating experience happening there, where you have creatives who have figured out how to accelerate their own ideas for art and marketing and branding in a very similar way. It's just allowing us to catapult forward with so much, and essentially clear away what was hours of now vanished work, and it's just like the full might of the creative energy is going towards the actual idea and getting it to customers. You asked earlier about measuring design success. We can kind of assess and understand various aspects of design. Like time from idea to customer value is a thing we've talked about, a thing that Jack has talked about. That's obviously changing. We can measure and benchmark how much faster we're moving. You can assess other elements of literally just customer impact, quantity of ideas. There are just so many things. I think if there's one thing I am paying the most attention to it is just like when you can develop ideas this quickly, how much higher does the bar go with those ideas, with how they're realized, right? It's like if you can breathe life into 10 ideas where you used to only be able to do one, you're developing fragile ideas that would have just vanished before, and now they get lifted up. I believe that's actually raising our bar overall because we're not killing things before they should be killed. It's like the most creative time, I think, in a lot of ways, that certainly I've ever been a part of. There's just tactical hardcore things too, that's like we're building, we're developing the front end. Some of our smaller teams, TIDAL, Proto, like Bitkey, those teams, the designers are handling most of the front end. You know, that's an incredible feeling. At the same time, there's engineers who are building and designing products too. Yeah. It's the give time back. We're just trying to move quickly to get incredible things to customers, and we haven't had to lower the bar. I'm continually blown away at just the collapsing of idea to, like, you don't collapse idea from idea to fully ready production thing, but like Yeah idea to prototype, like actually Yeah Someone who can build this can do this in a few days. It's mind-blowing. Yeah. It is. It really is. There's a lot that we're learning to encode into the intelligence that is just going to make the manifestation of those ideas closer and closer to pin. It's like you said, you're vibe coding something, it doesn't feel right, you can tell it might not look right. It's like we're going to get better and better, I think, at atomizing our design standards and languages, and we've already done this. We have tools built across the spectrum of tone and character of our brands, and we're getting closer and closer to it, and it's kind of staggering. Yeah. That's a good word for it. I'm finding I'm putting pull requests into production, or trying to merge a PR, and then Builder Bot or something else will come back and say, "Hey, you should think about doing this PR this way. Yeah. Then I'll bring that into the other AI tool I'm using, and they'll be like, "Yeah, that's actually a good suggestion." I can only imagine in whatever period of time where there's also a design layer on top of that's- Yeah like, "Hey, that technically works, but it would be better designed if you bring in this library or whatever. Yeah That gets it even further down the line of bringing it to you or the rest of Inner Council or Jack of like, "How does this feel to you?" Then just collapsing it further. Yeah. We had a whole heady conversation on the design side, which is the degree to which many of us will become builders and will be doing exactly what you just described. Many of us will become essentially editors. Which has always been an aspect of what design and creative is. It's interesting to think about that. People will become both, but there is this critical role of pulling cohesion together and curating and editing things in this world when you kind of imagine where we'll get in the next year. That's crazy. Again, that requires human creative judgment. Yeah. It's just at either end. Yeah. Maybe last topic for AI is just bringing this to our customers, which is probably the most important, and ultimately the thing that matters more than any of the way that we're building. Jack has talked a ton about proactive intelligence. Yeah. Like when we talk to investors, we talk a lot about that. Any time we're talking about what we're doing for customers, like the idea of proactive intelligence is front and center in what we'll ship soon in ManagerBot and MoneyBot. Can you talk about the design challenge of embedding a product with proactive intelligence and maybe even talk more generally that there's probably a lot of people that, they wouldn't even know what to ask. Yeah The AI, or they wouldn't even know what to do with it. Just talk about the design challenge of bringing this new type of product into the world and how we're thinking about doing that. Yeah. It's also really incredible to watch unfolding. When we're talking about proactive intelligence and we're actively, of course, building that and shipping it to customers right now, like literally today, aspects of it. But the whole conception we have around the UI or the interface that designers have been working within for years and years, it just drifts. It's like "The Matrix." It's like the walls are not the walls. It's like you have to rearrange your understanding of the whole thing. The challenges for design, if you can kind of leap there, the challenges for design go from perfecting an experience inside of this container with this static navigation and, like, I know this button is there, and you go into this space where the proactive intelligence is dynamic, it is changing constantly, and what you're designing for is character and cues and tone. It's like you're basically designing the system and how it will manifest, how it will interface with the customer. It's not like your grandfather's interface kind of thing. It's like a completely different world. It's, again, another test of those core design tenets and, like, can you give something soul when it's not the frame you're used to? Yeah If you're really good, you can. Yeah. It's like, if you really think about how is the system engaging proactively with the customer, how is it interacting back and forth? How does it manifest in the screen? Is there a screen? Is this something? It's like you start to question all these things. The design challenge is all of that. More specifically, literally right now, where we are still in the sort of like, you're talking about MoneyBot, you're still in this current-day understanding of Cash App, but we're at the very edge of it being fully dynamic. The team was just telling me earlier, we might have had an idea we built, and we would maybe A/B test something, or we would put a couple manifestations out. Right now they're testing more than a dozen manifestations because it's just like, it's not going to be one, you guys. We have to watch how it behaves proactively. There's a bunch of other interesting stuff. As always and forever, there's like, how is trust conveyed through what feels like a relationship? I think that's going to be one of the headiest things. Are we imprisoned in this chat paradigm or not, as a society, I think is like the big question. I don't know the answer. I don't think anybody knows the answer. To me, it is a classic existential design question, which is like, have we just gotten comfortable with this back and forth and there's something bigger? Who's going to discover that and invent that? Is this sort of back-and-forth communication thing actually the limit of our human kind of engagement with these things, and that's what we need to be optimizing for? I don't know. That is a fascinating conundrum, and I think it's a designer's paradise in some ways, to try to think about it. It feels like then there's maybe a spectrum, but there's probably three way stations. One is in the past, there's a box, and then you design the UI on the box. Yep. Now this is a chat interface. There's way more dynamism there, but it's still an interface that you're designing on top of because it's chat instead of a box. Yep. There's something even further afield where it's like maybe the chat goes away, the box goes away, and it's just you're designing something in the ether, and it's just there is no boundary around it. It's hard to wrap my head around. Yeah. I feel like that's ultimately the vision of where we want to get to for ManagerBot and MoneyBot is like. Yeah You don't just stop at the chat interface. There's something beyond that is more intuitive and native and that doesn't pull things out of you. It pushes things to you. Yeah. Exactly. I don't think we know the answer, but an easier way to grok it is there's language and the language models and that communication back and forth. What the team's playing with is, obviously, there is, I'll just call it art. There are elements, componentry, visuals, mechanisms that manifest as well that aren't just letters and words. It's like basically we're designing for a dynamic system that can compose anything that is relevant to any customer in our brand language, is a technical feat. Whether you know it's going to draw an incredible data visualization or it's God knows what else, or it's just going to use text, the challenge is how do we enable this system to do this in a way that still honors our brand and our relationship. Sure With our customers and builds trust with them. We have so much of the power and capability of this company to do this in a way that we think no one else can, and it's like we have to keep the bar on the actual experience high too. It's wild. It's like the most- Yeah exciting and crazy, I think, thing I've encountered. Well, I also think it's amazing that you think about like, well, okay, in the old version of Square Cash App, you kind of know what the customer's going to do with it because it's like, okay, we're going to put this tile here and this tile here and this button here. Right Maybe this button will fit better there, and like we'll do A/B testing and, or what have you. Now it's like if you do proactive intelligence right, you actually don't know what the customer- Yeah is going to do with it. Like how do you have design principles and design ethos and, again, to your point, keep it within brand guardrails or whatever, like when you don't actually know what the customer will do with it. I can imagine that's a pretty fun challenge. It's such a fun challenge. We have, for example, there's tone of voice that comes through these things, and it's like yesterday we would've had a team of writers who were determining messaging and content flow and word choice. Now we have trained the intelligence here at Block on our standards, our tone of voice, our grammar, our how these brands kind of, how they should present themselves through language. Yeah. Model design is another way of saying it, and it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn close. It's like the way. Yeah It kind of sounds. It's like there's things like that as examples. It's like there are principles and standards and a kind of encoding of the spirit of the tone of voice that we have baked in that are kind of part of the build. We're just kind of working through all the elements of the design experience to figure that out. Again, we'll never not be looping back to retrain and edit, and we'll never not be throwing new kind of firecrackers in. I believe. I think that's the way we stay human and creative and- Yeah or Jack calls that the edge of the model. It's like if the world model is the center, it's like we will exist, our craft must exist kind of at the edge of that gobstopper of a thing. It's like we will be there kind of throwing these things in and keeping that creative bar. Yeah, it's wild. Yeah. It is fascinating times. Yeah. All right. I had a couple final questions to wrap up, just to kind of. Okay Maybe I'll start with what are the one or two things that you think Block does better than anyone else in the world? Oh, man. I think the entirety of this conversation is a good example of what I think Block does better than anyone in the world. I think there are few companies, this is a designer's perspective, there's few companies on this planet that have the kind of bravery and interest and permission built to pursue the quality of the experience being a strategic advantage like this, and I think we're among them, if not at the top of them. It's why I work here, and it's why I think we have the most incredible design talent here because it's a thing we do and it's a thing we do well, and I think that it's not just like a written kind of priority. It's like in the genome of the company. I think Block does risk-taking and challenging assumptions better than certainly any company I've engaged or interacted with, and I've yet to find a parallel. It's like core to everything we do that we can push, you know? Yeah. Like test that status quo, and that's related to almost everything we talk about, so I think that's probably what it is. Yeah. Maybe on the flip side of that, what are one or two things you think we can do better? I always think in these like yin yangs, but I think there's an Achilles heel there. It's actually very interesting and related to AI, but I think what we can do better has always been the time it takes to wrap the rate of change we embrace into stories and communicate it. I think we could be better at sharing the intricacies of what we're doing with the world. I think we could be better at pacing with what we do, even internally. The rate of change and our adaptability is so high. When I'm recruiting people, I always say, "If you want a predictable status quo, do not talk to this company." That is not how we move and how we thrive. I think there's counter effects to that. What's interesting is that I think with this central intelligence that's growing, a lot of the clarity and cascading of information and storytelling will increasingly be accessible and automated. It's like there's a world where our weak point, which I think we can do better on, communication, messaging externally and internally, gets kind of automated and taken care of in a big way. Anyway, that would be my take on it. The rate of change is fast and it's hard to stop and really share as cleanly as possible. Yeah What we're doing. Well, I feel like one of the core, I don't even know if Jack would say it this way, one of the core strategies of the business is just constantly embracing change. Yes. Challenging yourself. That's a hard thing to communicate because when I think about my role, like here's a box that we exist in, and we'll always exist in this box. That's not going to change. Versus the whole point is to change. Yeah. That's all. It's happening all the time. Yeah. Working here, and I think working for Jack, it's like an exercise in personal transformation. If you can succeed here, I just think it's like the cream of the crop in terms of absolute learning. Yeah. It's like you're just constantly learning. I've revised opinions I've held for so long at this company, and to me, that is the most magical thing. It's like where your mind is going to be constantly changing, and it's incredible. I think that's why we're able to make the kind of things we are. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's a great spot to end it. Brooke, thanks so much for doing this. It was great talking with you. Yeah. I'll see everyone who's listening the next time. Thank you all for joining. Thanks, Matt. Thanks everyone.