FOUNDERS & FRIENDS PODCAST

With Scott Orn

A Startup Podcast by Kruze Consulting

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Scott Orn

Scott Orn, CFA

Jeff Smith of Facebook on Giving Back to the Design Community

Posted on: 10/30/2016

Jeff Smith

Jeff Smith

Product Designer - Facebook


Jeff Smith of Facebook - Podcast Summary

Jeff Smith of Facebook joins us to discuss Facebook.Design, the company’s initiative that gives back to the design community with free GUI tools and much more to come. Jeff’s career has come full circle as he broke into the design industry by leveraging similar open source GUI tools - Teehan & Lax’s GUI’s. Facebook.Design is an excellent example of a successful team and company giving back to the rest of the world. You can read more about Jeff & Team’s Work and Facebook.Design here.

Jeff Smith of Facebook - Podcast Transcript

Scott: Welcome to Founders and Friends podcast with Scott Orn of Kruze Consulting, and I have a very special guest today, Jeff Smith of Facebook- welcome Jeff.
Jeff: Hey, thanks for having me.
Scott: So you wrote a really thoughtful and awesome post, by the way, we’ve been friends for like three or four years?
Jeff: Yes.
Scott: And, we actually don’t work together anymore, we used to work at Thoughtbot together, so I am missing your face all the time. You wrote this awesome post on Medium about Facebook and Facebook design, and I was reading it, and I was like, “this is so amazing”, like you were talking about all the mentors you had in the past, and how you are using Facebook design to do your own mentoring of the design community, so I wanted to have you on the podcast. So, maybe just start by talking about your background, how you got into design?
Jeff: Yeah, It’s funny, in the tech team you have a lot of non traditional designers or people who have come out of programs that weren’t like focused on design, so for me, I came out of school studying philosophy, and then got into the tech team through entrepreneurship so I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had also studied fine art early on in my education and I have kind of come full circle now to a place where I both integrate entrepreneurship and building products with my design sensibilities, and I found that to be a really great mix. But yeah, it’s pretty remarkable how people like myself have come out of really nothing and moved into design.
Scott: It’s all hard work. How does philosophy feed into a design, how does that all come together?
Jeff: Yeah, it’s funny, I don’t really know. I think for me, I looked at going into an art program, so with design specifications and product design, a lot of these design programs aren’t really made in such way that they really support what we were trying to do with product design. And so I went to a fine art program and then immediately bailed on it because it was just too rigid, and didn’t have the kind of flexibility that I would want in my career and what I was doing with my life. I think for me that that’s always been kind of a defining characteristic of who I am, somebody who kind of wants to have their finger on the pulse of a number of different things. And yeah, product design is kind of a perfect match for that, so in many ways I don’t think you five years ago or ten years ago would have been able- five years ago yeah, but ten years ago I would not have been able to say this is what I would be doing, but yeah Silicone Valley I guess pulled me out here like it does a lot of people.
Scott: Yeah, so maybe talk about where people can read the post and where they can find the post?
Jeff: Sure, so the post was mainly about- so I am a designer at Facebook, and one of the things that have really impressed me while being at Facebook is the ability to just move fast, and kind of carve out your own niche and this post was really my trying to express both what it is at Facebook to be able to do that and kind of self-define your own path of growth there, but also nod at all the people who have before me given me the opportunities that I’ve had, both with my current manager but also the people who took without really any sort of incentive took time out of their day to meet with the guy who is, who knew nothing and was nobody for coffee and to give me guidance. And so it’s that paying forward that I think is so critical to our own growth, both as professionals now, like it obviously pays off to invest in those people because they ultimately become the people that you work with, you know, ten years down the road, but how important it is for those people who were coming out to really have those opportunities and those conversations.
Scott: So, you had some amazing stories in that post, as you talked about one of your first bosses, and how did you go from like zero to design, as you talked about pulling down web files and taking graphics apart, like talking about that a little bit.
Jeff: Yeah, so the post really, so my manager, I think I should start with my manager, my manager right now he is really pretty well known for having started a design agency up in Canada that was then acquired by Facebook, and they came to [00:04:17] [indiscernible] in large part because they had released these open source files, essentially for designers to be able to build IOS components and screens that were basically mapped to what you had within IOS. And, that was something, for me when I first learned how to design especially for mobile, that I really leaned on pretty heavily.
Scott: Like those exact files?
Jeff: Those exact files.
Scott: Oh I didn’t even know that.
Jeff: Yeah, so literally this firm put these file up on the internet and then people across the entire globe downloaded this stuff and used it to make apps, and it’s really a valuable resource when it comes to both learning how to design and how to think about mobile best practices, and also just moving quickly. And so it’s amazing now, and I kind of go into that within the post how I for my very first client didn’t really know what I was doing and I oversold my skills when it comes to mobile design and-
Scott: Nothing wrong with that.
Jeff: Yeah, exactly.
Scott: A man has got to start somewhere.
Jeff: The entrepreneur like “go get her” kind of attitude. And it was those resources that enabled me to be able to do that; and so you fast forward to today, and I actually happen stantially work for that guy who produces those files and it was his partner who found my portfolio on the web, I still don’t know how that exactly happened, but he is the one who referred me, and I was able to take that and really pay forward. I literally am managing and helping put together these files that people across the globe can download- and it really is one of those things I have almost no doubt that some number of years down the line I’ll have a conversation with somebody who’ll say I used those.
Scott: It’s like the cosmic force. I didn’t realize it was the same people that put that out.
Jeff: Yeah. Same people. Within, and you don’t even have to mention their names because they are so tightly associated with their previous agency within the design scene.
Scott: So, this podcast, it’s a little bit of what you are talking about actually, like this is why we do this, at Kruze Consulting we want to get a lot of entrepreneurial information out there and show people that entrepreneurs and people in design and finance are just like everybody else, they are real human beings, they took a leap somewhere and now they are kicking butt, and everyone can do this. So, walk the aspirational designers through like pulling down those files to like your first job, or your second job; how did you teach yourself all this stuff, because you are really a self thought guy?
Jeff: Yeah, I think it’s really important, it’s interesting being on this podcast because I’m a designer first of all, so I am not an entrepreneur, I am a designer who works at a large company, and in some ways I don’t really align with what your listeners may be about, at a surface level, but I think all the qualities that really make somebody grow internally at a company like Facebook or successful in building their company, or being able to like build themselves up and learn on their own are really roughly the same skills and it’s just being able to see an opportunity and move quickly on it, and not I think you’ve put it this way, but not really ask for permission, just go and do it. And so for me, that’s always been the case, I mean, I came to San Francisco without a job, not really knowing anything about tech, just knowing that I was really into building things and potentially getting into the tech scene and entrepreneurship, and through that just throwing myself in, taking that big leap, that leap forced me to learn on my own, and so I guess necessity like forced me-
Scott: It’s like jumping in the middle of a deep end of a swimming pool, right?
Jeff: Exactly, yeah, a necessity forced me to learn how to design, and I think that it’s really deeply embedded in my DNA, I have a number of friends who have gone more adverse course like I have friends who went to Stanford, and studied law and everything, there is a really clear path for them going forward, and through this other path, my constitution is a little bit different than how they go about taking risks and making decisions.
Scott: Yeah, when the mics were off, I was telling you, you remind me a lot of Vanessa who like basically had a lot of great experience early in the career but then just decided to start Kruze Consulting and it’s been awesome for me to work with her because I was always the person with the very clear path, and then for me to take the leap and join her I can totally relate to your skill set and the way your brain thinks about just seeing an opportunity and going forward and like I probably, looking back at my career, maybe a little less overthinking would have been good for me and a little bit more jumping into the deep end and figuring out how to swim would have been better. I eventually got here, which is all that matters but, I really respect people who can take that risk and know what they want and go for it.
Jeff: Yeah, it’s a really funny thing. So I sometimes look enviously at the people who have gone the more clear path to what they do, and because it is like a little bit more straightforward but it’s- you just don’t know where you are going to be in five years and that’s pretty compelling. I will say like at every juncture it’s still and it goes back to our original thesis or theme, it all depends on someone giving you that opportunity right, even if you are willing to go out and take those risks and everything else, someone else has to take a risk on you, both when it comes to investing or the opportunity to lead a project or whatever, and so it is, it’s still that kind of cosmic alignment that is really important to be able to for everyone to kind of progress and grow.
Scott: I love that part about your post, so you mentioned like going and grabbing coffee, people are like how did you do that, did you called email, did you phone call people, did you turn around at people at a bar and be like hey you want to talk design, like what did you do?
Jeff: Yeah, I think with one of those people I can’t remember how I first got connected with them, it was probably at some meetup or someone connected us kind of informally. Another one was a friend of a friend- like a friend’s family’s brother in law and he was just this happening designer at Square at the time, which is the company when I was kind of like getting my start that everyone aspired to on the design scene. And being able to just grab coffee with him and talk about design and how best to make the path forward was like pretty amazing. And yeah, I took a lot of risk putting yourself out there and I can’t, it’s funny if I look back at my emails and I have happened to kind of- and I shudder at this, like look at those emails I sent when I first moved to San Francisco and tried to get connected, and there were so many people who didn’t respond or responded negatively. And yeah, it was kind of this tenacity to just get told no again and again both with looking for work and getting those first jobs and meeting up with people for coffee, but there were those handful of people who do, yeah, that makes all the difference.
Scott: There is a guy I am friends with named Jesse Middleton he might be listening, who is one of the co-founders of WeWork, and he wrote a great Twitter post the other day, where he was like, “I respond to every single call or email I get, people have to start somewhere”. And I was like, I retweeted it, I was like that was amazing, but that was you, I’ve been that person too. And that was you three or four or five years ago whenever it was. So how, so you did that, you did a lot of coffee, what was like your kind of springboard job until like, because you were doing a lot of freelances, sometimes freelance is hard because you can’t quite support yourself, maybe sometimes people are working in a coffee shop while they are doing freelance, like what was your path to making this like your career?
Jeff: Completely. I think with everyone’s story a part of it is tenacity and a part of it is happenstance, my first real design job was not really a design job, I was an engineer for like front-end engineer/designer at a small consultancy.
Scott: I remember that you had a combo, you could code and design, I remember that when I first met you.
Jeff: Yeah, and then, that company got acquired by a GoPro which really catapulted me and is still the thing, even though I don’t think working at GoPro is necessarily the place where I grew the most, that name recognition made all the difference when it came to going and working at Thoughtbot and then ultimately working at Facebook because you just have that recognition on your resume. And, yeah, I ultimately had to leave GoPro because I felt like I had been pigeonholed into this designer engineer role and needed to move on and that’s how I ended up at Thoughtbot and then from Thoughtbot I felt like again, I wasn’t growing enough within the design discipline and I moved to Facebook.
Scott: Did you teach yourself how to code too, or because you were like an art major, like how did you do that?
Jeff: Yeah, that’s a good question. So definitely, it’s kind of a necessity when you are doing, if you can be the full package for an early stage company or freelance, it’s way easier to sell yourself, whereas if you are just a designer or just an engineer you kind of get bucketed very easily; and it’s a double-edged sore because when you are a big company if you do both you can be viewed as less quality as a designer, less quality as an engineer. And that’s changing, and I think that’s a really important thing for people who aren’t in design or designers to be aware of just how those roles are starting to shift as more and more designers starting to code and vice versa.
Scott: But it helps, right, like you know what actually can work and you know.
Jeff: The analogy I use is it’s like being an architect versus a contractor. Right, a contractor has mastery of the resources and working with people, and they just know their shit when it comes to whatever they are building, whereas an architect doesn’t work with the people who are implementing things and doesn’t necessarily know the materials. But if you are an architect, you can understand the materials that you are working with and I think you are going to have a much higher level of quality and what you ultimately produce, and I think that’s completely true of design, it’s a second language for me, engineering, so I feel like when I talk to engineers or think about the projects, I inherently know the constraints that they are working with, and can gauge how difficult my design is to implement, that sort of thing.
Scott: Do you feel the love back from them, because they are like oh you know how to build the building, you know like-
Jeff: I think it depends, I definitely don’t know nearly as much as the engineers I work with on this stuff, and I think it’s probably the same as if someone knows design, like I know enough to be dangerous so I can make claims that may not be as easy to execute as I would think they would be, so yeah, who knows.
Scott: So you taught yourself how to code, as a way to also sell your design services, and then you are at the GoPro, Thoughbot, and with Thoughtbot it’s like a top consulting firm, like I am really good friends with the Thoughtbot people, that’s where we met, and then you are like I think I am going to go to Facebook. What was that experience like?
Jeff: Facebook has been amazing, I think that they have a phenomenal balance of traditional design thinking, as well as more contemporary like engineers who can design or people who come from engineering background who can design, originally Facebook, was- to be a designer at Facebook five years ago required knowing how to code, you were required to implement your designs which is a real handicap if you are a designer because you always designed what you know you can implement, but I think that caused, that caused a sort of deep within their DNA an appreciation for this hybrid role
Scott: That’s actually really interesting, so they loved people like you? With that special skill set?
Jeff: Yeah, and I think you can see in those early designs too it’s like clearly this is not either the most well engineered or the most well designed but I think-
Scott: Move fast and break things, right.
Jeff: Exactly, like if you can do both you can move really quickly, and that’s been something that’s still to this day a part of their DNA. And I think that again, it cuts both ways, you can move too quickly, you can build things that aren’t of the highest quality because you are moving so quickly, but it’s really phenomenal place to be, I mean it is the reason why we’ve been able to build, and it’s not just me, there are dozens of designers who work at Facebook on these resources, but it’s that sort of mentality is what has allowed me to move so quickly inside of the company that is tens of thousands of people. And I think doing what we have done would be so much harder to place without naming names other large tech companies that have more layers of bureaucracy.
Scott: I love how you describe yourself as like entrepreneur inside of Facebook, you know, as you talked about Facebook a big company, it is a big company but it’s also like so on the cutting edge of the world, it’s just amazing. By the way, I should also say I own stock in Facebook, so this is not a commercial for Facebook, but that was a cool description. Can you talk about this specific, is it called Facebook.design or…?
Jeff: Yeah, Facebook.design so it’s the, we have I think it’s intended to be an ultimately is becoming the expression of Facebook’s design team, and we try to a lot of the work we do is very broad, it includes a broad range of designers from across the company so we wanted it to be expression of the diversity there and we want to ultimately both inform people about what design is like internally at Facebook but also give back to the community and give resources that will make designers’ lives easier.
Scott: When you are doing this like I always think, as Facebook is on the cutting edge of this too, like getting the next billion people on the internet, like when you are putting this project together, I’d like to hear more about the project, because I looked at the Medium post, I looked at the pages, it’s beautiful, right, the design stuff, but just this just kind of came on mind like when you were doing this did you think about like future designers in Africa or future designers in Asia, like people who are learning, just like how you were, maybe not like in America but like did you put stuff together for them, or how were you thinking about providing them access through this project?
Jeff: I so it’s not something you necessarily think about in the beginning, I think with a lot of things that we do on the internet, we don’t realize just the scale and how impactful the internet can be, so it’s such a good question, last night I was up like at midnight looking at our analytics and seeing more people were across the world on the site at any given point in time and it is exactly that is absolutely amazing to see people from China and Indonesia and places that were just waking up at the time that I am going to bed using this. And it’s amazing to come across billboards that use the devices that we recreated in Sketch and people tweeting, it was I am blanking on his mane but he is a pretty prominent thinker when it comes to entrepreneurship and investing, and he had put together like two slides comparatively on twitter comparing like two companies and he is using our devices, so a guy completely outside the realm of design. And he is using the device that we have put together and it’s not only humbling, but it’s kind of we are so connected, you know.
Scott: It’s super humbling too, for my [00:19:28][indiscernible] friend’s patient hours [00:19:30][indiscernible] networks, I used to always love it the most when I would see people on the sites from like Africa or India or place that didn’t have limited access and was just trying to tap in, and these were the people who were, this was about the disease patient support, but they were reaching out and being really adventurous in figuring out what else is out there and how they could derive support, and I could see the same things for like the young entrepreneurs, in Africa and Asia who are just like you, trying to learn how to do design and finding this amazing resource and teaching themselves. There is so much good, I can jumpstart not only someone’s career but someone’s life or a whole family’s life, in these areas.
Jeff: Yeah. I think there is a concern within the design community, the more resources that are out there the easier it is to become a designer, almost the more homogeneous design becomes, but I think for what we are seeing right now with the VR and the beginning of new mediums that people are designing within, it’s not as you some game and the quicker we elevate the other people to what we are doing and progress what we are doing, the more incredible, you know the tools and the technology we use day in and day out our-
Scott: It’s also just you just on a fundamental basis like giving someone the tools to change their life, through their profession, and like you are really adventurous and found all these stuff on your own, you know, form your old boss or from your new bosses when they weren’t even at Facebook, there is people across the world who are finding the resources you put up.
Jeff: And it’s funny because the engineering world has this kind of figured out, open source is really core to any business, any sort of engineer who wants to get hired, there is this aspect of giving back.
Scott: You are totally right, that’s an amazing analogy.
Jeff: Yeah.
Scott: Because a lot of times when engineers interview people ask them for like what open source projects have you contributed to and how can I, and they want to review that code, right?
Jeff: Exactly. Yeah, even I think Disney put up an open source library this week like every company it was like, I think it was somewhat pretty high on Hacker News, this week, and if that speaks to just how necessary it is within the engineering world, that is a part of it. And I think design is, product design and digital product design, is pretty on point with that, but design traditionally has been sort of a subjective field and so it’s a very interesting place to be in at the intersection of both design and engineering as a product designer because you see these two this really I don’t know- it’s technocratic like-
Scott: It’s subjective, meaning objective you know, there is yeah.
Jeff: No it’s true, yeah. Exactly that.
Scott: Some aspect of the web design is like what do people intuitively understand and what the metrics say, and the other part of that is like how do I make something really beautiful that the world has never seen before. So just spend a couple of minutes just talking about the package you put up on the internet, what people can get out of it.
Jeff: So the site Facebook.design features now features all our Medium posts which have been there for a long time, but haven’t really been aggregated or curated in way I think makes it easy for people to find those resources; videos, which I think we’re going to expand on pretty significantly here in the future and a bunch of design resources. So Sketch, Photoshop files primarily, for rebuilding the IOS interfaces that we used, many of us used day in and day out, we material design is pretty well covered by what Google is doing so we haven’t really gone in that direction, and a bunch of devices so you can easily put your designs in context on those devices, I think even more importantly that we have a bunch of diverse hands, which, and this is, this predated me, it’s the work of a guy named Julius Tarn who was really passionate about diversity, and a lot of design comes before these were out, just featured a white guys hand.
Scott: Oh like the actual hand in the book, yeah.
Jeff: Exactly, so it seems really weird if you are not a designer that we had released these diverse hands, but it’s so important that the stuff we consume represent both the diversity of the products we are building but also reminds us as designers that we are not just building for ourselves, we are building for what we were talking about before the diversity of the entire globe and so we release these hands that can like hold those devices, and both communicates the audience that you are trying to communicate to but also to the designer that as a reminder of who we are building for.
Scott: Yeah, that’s really cool. So where can people find that it’s on Medium, but like do you have URL or?
Jeff: Yeah, facebook.design is the URL.
Scott: So where do you like, this is awesome, you are going to obviously keep working on this, but where do you see yourself going forward? Like what is your next big- is there another kind of chapter to facebook.design, what do you think?
Jeff: I think we are just- so what we tried to do with this release was just get to a good foundation. Aggregate all the resources that are currently there, and begin building up on top of that so video content is a really good example of places where we can go, Facebook’s live platform is incredible and I think we can do a lot with that and just kind of being authentic through that medium and we’d love to do more with that within Facebook.design, and I think I mentioned this before, but VR is burgeoning filed-
Scott: You guys bought like one of the big VR players, so you know what’s going on.
Jeff: And I think there are tons of resources, that is even more so at the intersection of engineering and design but I hope that we can help support that more and we have some I am not one of the designers who works within the VR, I know very little beyond like some of the basic tools like unity and so I hope that we can give a platform for the designers internally to be able to release more.
Scott: Yeah. What are some- kind of going back who you were five years ago when you were breaking in, what are some, or even now, just what are a couple of tips, like aspirational designers can take away from you, like what have you learned or what are some other great resources on the web that you can point people to?
Jeff: Yeah, I think one thing be willing to take risks and take them often. I just think that whatever domain you are in, whether it’s design, engineering, entrepreneurship-
Scott: Accounting.
Jeff: Accounting.
Scott: Take the risk starting the business, not in the accounting.
Jeff: [laugh]
Scott: No risk in the accounting.
Jeff: Yeah, I think taking risk, it sounds like such a platitude, but that has been the defining feature I think of my career and growth, has just been continually taking risks both large and small, emailing the guy that you don’t think you should email, coming on the podcast that you don’t feel equipped to speak to, speaking to the audience you feel like why am I up here, that’s so important. You obviously don’t ever want to bullshit people, especially clients, that kind of thing, you don’t want to oversell yourself to the extent that you can’t deliver, but that’s really important.
Scott: I think just to add on to that, like when you are actually doing the work, and doing those coffee meetings, and looking at all these open source resources, you are doing the work, and you are not bullshitting, like maybe you are overselling yourself a little bit in some, but you need to do that sometimes just to get going, so I totally agree to your saying, like take the risk while simultaneously doing the work.
Jeff: Completely. And then as far as the other resources or things that people could be doing it’s hard to say people, and especially designers are in such different places in their careers and the ways that they grow are so different so it’s hard to like give prescriptive, I would say, I mean it goes back to the medium post like grab coffee, like, within your sphere of people, there is someone who is better than you, at whatever you do. If it’s design, there is someone you know who is better than you at design, grab coffee with them. And learn from them.
Scott: Also on the flipside of that like younger people, like the older kind of mentor person on that coffee relationship gets something out of it too, like we were just laughing at that we don’t really understand VR very well, but I’m sure there is like a 23 year old designer out there who understand the code, and that person maybe reach out to you because they found you and you actually get a lot out of that, it’s like a way of staying fresh and young and knowing what’s going on.
Jeff: Yes. Completely. Yeah, it’s hard to, I think if there is anything that I continue to be surprised by is just how beneficial those connections and those relationships are to once obvious professional growth but also just personal development and being willing to listen and pay attention to the people around you, and not shout down people because you think that they don’t know anything or because you think they are more junior than you, or yeah, I think just being attentive to your surroundings is really important to being able to like- leverage sounds like such a utilitarian word but yeah build upon those connections.
Scott: We have a lot of young people that work at Kruze Consulting and it keeps me young, it keeps me happy, you get a lot of satisfaction out of teaching people and I can see that- I came through on the Medium post and I can see it just on your face right now that’s why you wanted to do this project, like put these resources out there, help people get better and you clearly live that path and I have a lot of respect for you for doing all this work.
Jeff: Thanks a lot.
Scott: Before we go, because you are a designer, because you have this great eye, like what are some of your favourite besides the Facebook news feed, what are some of your favourite sites out there, like where can a dude like me go and be like inspired on the web?
Jeff: Well I think the first thing is that a lot of the best design that we are seeing is not like websites per se but mobile apps and even that is becoming a bit more codified like the standard patterns that are there. I always loved what Airbnb does. Pinterest actually did a really interesting redesign, it’s not even redesign, they created these components that both map to what they are doing in the engineering site to what their visual designers are working on, and I thought it was like a really incredibly thorough way of rethinking their DNA, and both improving their engineering standards, but also improving the visual design that is there, so obviously, Airbnb and Pinterest are good examples of that. I am trying to think of something- and the final company that really impresses me or a group that really impresses me is an agency called Ustwo they are kind of, you wouldn’t have necessarily heard of them but you’ve definitely heard of their projects, they have released a product called Monument value which is this game that is incredible, incredible when it comes to designing, and they have been able to build a business that both couples their products with their consulting.
Scott: I didn’t know that, I thought there were just a game studio, but they are actually-
Jeff: No, no, they are consultancy as well and I think both strengthen that balance is really challenging to do and I know a number of consultancies that have tried to do that and failed miserably, and they have been able to figure out, I have no idea what the secret sauce is when it comes to that, but I feel like they have kind of opened up new domain when it comes to both gaming, and gaming on mobile but stuff that is incredible aesthetically compelling and even their first VR game which I can’t remember the name of right now, was just this aesthetic marvel, it was my first time being completely immersed and lost in a completely artificial reality.
Scott: Yeah. I mean Monument value is really cool. Ok, we’ll tell the audience where they can find both the Facebook stuff and also where they can find you, people like to email I guess sometimes so-
Jeff: Completely, yeah, no I am totally, I am always open to-
Scott: Or Twitter, whatever is publicly acceptable place to reach you at.
Jeff: So facebook.design, our resources are coming from Facebook, and I can be found at @jeffpersonified which is potentially the longest twitter handle you’ll find out there, but Jeff Smith is a hard one too.
Scott: What’s your Facebook?
Jeff: My Facebook profile?
Scott: Yes.Or is that closed to the public?
Jeff: Well it’s definitely open but again, searching for Jeff Smith- Jeff Smith is both benefit and the curse within the online world, there is complete anonymity but there is complete anonymity. So @jeffpersonified at Twitter and you can probably find my Medium post I think it was called Giving back to the design community and yeah, I think that kind of covers it.
Scott: I mean I really wanted to take my hat off to you, it was a beautiful post, and it really talked about like your mentors before and who helped you get here and then I can’t believe it came full circle to the person you are working for now.
Jeff: Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
Scott: The internet is a beautiful place. Thank you Jeff, thanks for coming on, Jeff Smith, and we’ll continue to see your stuff in Facebook news feed, we’ll also look for more Medium posts and we’ll go to Facebook.design to check out your stuff.
Jeff: Thanks a lot Scott.
Scott: Awesome. Bye bye take care.
Jeff: Cheers.

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