Collaborate on Alto Invoice for Corporations with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Alto invoice for corporations

So I'm the guy that got it wrong apparently but I wanna -- I came here today to talk to you about a product called Alto and in particular I wanna talk a little bit about being a zealot. So I work at AOL. Yes, we are still in business. And I began the journey into zealotry actually at this conference actually a long time ago when I heard a very inspiring talk about this man, the one on the right. The other one is Obi Wan Kenobi. The guy on the right, George Lucas and it was a talk given by Steven Anderson and it was called the force behind Star Wars. It was all about turning your design ideas into reality. Anyone heard this talk? Hands up if you have. Fantastic talk obviously you have. But it was really how George Lucas took this kind of redonkulus idea about space and princesses and robots and these big giant hair AP things called Wookies and he made it real. And he was writing a story about rebels fighting an empire but he was living that story too. He was a rebel fighting the movie studios and the sheer force of gravity that was trying to keep his ideas on the ground. So George really was -- he was a rebel, he was a zealot and I'm a huge Star Wars fan so I of course was completely taken with the talk and thought hey, why don't I try this? That'll be great. And so I tried to do it with a little product called Alto inside a very large company called AOL. And this is that story. So this is really how Alto came to be inside of a 25-year-old Internet company. That's pretty old. And it's totally not perfect. It's far from perfect. We got tons of shit wrong and it is not even close to the model process. In fact you guys are probably heard all of these techniques before. I mean there's not gonna be anything I don't think that's too shocking. But what I'm really interested in sharing with you guys today is about the contagion of ideas and creating an environment for contagious ideas and converting others in the company to the 'cause and how do you find zealous users actually? And to me that's what being a zealot is all about because it's often that final bit of rocket fuel that gets your ideas into orbit. That's the last mile and that's the hardest mile. So this is that story and this is actually a story about e-mail. How many of you have heard about e-mail? Raise your hand if you've heard about -- okay, so a few of you. All right. Okay, great. So I have a question for you guys, how many of you guys actually love the e-mail product that you use to check your mail. Raise your hand if you love it. Okay, a few. Can you just shout out what you're using? Gmail, okay anything else? Outlook, okay all right. Okay great. This is good. So but as you see not many people are raising their hands right? Well this is the first thing about zealots. They come from desperate times and really this is about you know, evolution and revolution. So evolution is safe and it's slow but revolution is fast and it's rapid and it's dangerous. And when you talk about evolutionary design, that's all about keeping the trains running and making sure that the features are right. But revolutionary design is about overturning outdated patterns and e-mail is one of those for us. And in particular at AOL we are in a turnaround and times are pretty desperate because we're in last place. We're in AOL mail is like the fourth horse in a three horse race. So it's not good, it's desperate right, bad times. We have nothing to lose though by disrupting ourselves and we have no choice. And Alto, it's actually here today because of that so it's -- they are directly linked. It's really important. Market leaders have to protect what they have but underdogs use guerrilla tactics and they take risks. And that is really one of the key stories of Alto. So one of the things about zealots is they know their history. So they have to know where they've come from. They have to know their heritage. And we needed to do this when we tackled this product. We had to look back on e-mail and we had to frame the problem and we had to figure out like what the heck happened? How did we get to this mess of if you've used an inbox, like why don't people love their e-mail products? They use it every day. So I'm gonna take you on a little journey through e-mail history. And it ironically I'll start it here with AOL. You've got mail -- they made a movie about it right? So this big deal right? It used to mean something. It used to mean that we introduced e-mail to the masses and when Aunt Lou sent you an e-mail, that was a big deal right? That was exciting. Someone was reaching out to you. It was new, it was cool, it was fun. Right? So then you sort of fast-forward and you -- and these guys come on the scene. What did they do? Well they made e-mail free for one thing. You start to see SPAM emerge in like some really large quantities. You start to see e-mail from businesses, not just people and the volume, sheer volume of e-mail really starts to rise. And then these guys come on and I would say there's probably one of the last big revolutions in e-mail arguably and they introduce things like threading and labels but most importantly they introduce bottomless storage, unlimited supply of storage and so now all that e-mail can just stack right up and isn't that great? I think it's fantastic right? Fantastic right? Now so these guys are new on the scene. This is what most teens, college students, you know there's obviously some debate about them flocking away from FaceBook but this is what they use for a lot of their inboxes and they do something where they emphasize unified messaging. They don't distinguish between SMS, e-mail and communication. So now we sort of see the history like where do we sit? Where are we in this lineage? So let's talk about another thing that zealots need which is a 'cause. Right? The struggle, the 'cause, it's what defines the zealot. It's what is infused into their core. They eat it, they drink it, they sleep it, they breathe it. We knew our history now right, so but now we need to figure out well what's our 'cause with this product? By the way I am gonna show you the product so just in case you're wondering. So we had to really to figure out the 'cause we had to look at okay, so now where are we today? Today's world what do we have? Well there's a lot of talk about how e-mail's dead and honestly it's really link bait headlines. I mean this to me; this stat shows about how vibrant e-mail still is. Tons of people still use it. Three quarters of e-mail users have more than two accounts. I'm sure you guys probably have a ton more. And mobile access is obviously growing, three percent growth in category, it's going anywhere. So it's one of the three things that people do in the morning. First they go to the bathroom, then they check their mail and then they check FaceBook. So it's not at an end it's at a beginning right? And you've got mail in particular used to mean something positive but it's changed. Now it's really changed. That sucks actually. Because before it was person to person and now a lot of that has moved to FaceBook and texting, to other mediums. And so what's left? Well what's left is you don't get your e-bills via FaceBook messages and you don't get your 401K statements over text right? So what's left is this. This is what's left in today's inboxes. E-mail is about life management. It's transactional but the problem is we don't have very good tools to organize this. And this is really one of the problems that Alto is trying to solve, to try to tame the deluge of this unending stream. This became our 'cause. This became something that everybody could believe in and everybody felt very passionate about. And we were basically about fighting inbox fatigue. So another thing that zealots do, zealots have to turn their weaknesses into strength because typically the zealot is the underdog. The zealot is usually the weaker party sort of against a more powerful foe. And the more powerful foe in this case is like Paul Graham's list of top ten things that startups should focus on. They're huge problems. E-mail is like one of them right? That's a big deal. That's a huge thing to try to tackle. So zealots have to fight asymmetrically. They have to -- you have to sort of look at all of the different brands that -- or we have to look at all the different brands that we had from e-mail from AOL to Gmail et cetera. And we had to go back and look at that and figure out gee, our biggest weakness is our own brand. That's kind of a problem. No one's gonna switch to an AOL address. There's NPR articles about how you should not use that if you want a job 'cause that's bad, very bad. So your address actually, it matters right because what's happening is you're attaching your personal brand to ours and so let's just go through a quick little exercise here. So what do you think of when you see an e-mail from a person with this address? Just shout it out, what do you think? Private? Private, okay that's interesting. Anything else? A person? Oh personal, okay. How about this one, 97, gold, okay. How about this? Now these guys changed recently. What about this, any different? Okay, how about this huh? Grandma there you go. Internet on training wheels, grandma, yes. Believe me I've heard it at so many cocktail parties it's not even funny. So the thing about Alto is that Alto, you don't need another address actually and this was a big C change internally. That was a big deal because a lot of people at AOL were like what? Not gonna have an AOL account? What will we do? The earth will stop spinning. And it actually turns out that when you go out and talk to people, no one needs another e-mail address. The last thing they need is another e-mail address right? So it's just an uphill battle. So we did some judo on that and we turned it into turn that weakness into a strength and I'll show you how that works in a second. So another thing that zealots do, zealots have to convert others to their cause. That's both internally and also externally with customers. So we talked about the addresses of e-mail but I wanna talk a little bit about on the inside of e-mail because on the inside it turns out that we did a study where we went to a lot of different people who used Gmail, Yahoo, all those guys. We asked them to grade their own service like what do they -- you know scale A to F, what do you guys give your service? Turns out that most people get a C, right, it's pretty average. And for a lot of normal people, not people in the Silicon Valley or high tech areas but a lot of normal people, they're not normal. E-mail experiences on the inside are like this, it's a commodity. It's like the gas and the electric, it's not that exciting. And if you really back up and look at e-mail products at the macro level, I mean really back up, there's a lot of details in there but if you really go back they're all pretty much the same. You got a folder list, you got a list of messages and you read and you write so pretty much the same stuff right? So like when I ask my wife who loves when I do this by the way, what do you like about your e-mail? She's like, "Come on, I do not care. It's my e-mail. That's all I need it to do, just work, that's' it." So for most people e-mail is good enough and that's a problem because how do we convince people to use a new product when things are like just kinda okay and fine right? Turns out there's another industry that had a very similar problem. These got vacuum cleaners right? Up until about 2002 the industry had a lot of C players just like e-mail does. And people bought new vacuum cleaners when their old ones broke. That's why you'd go and buy a new one. And vacuum cleaners were sold at these really tiny margins and they were razor thin. They made money on vacuum bags actually. And most consumers were like hey, this is great, it's fine. I don't even know I had a problem until this guy comes onto the scene. This a Dyson in case you didn't know. And he said, "Hey, there's a big giant problem out there, it's called suction." You don't trap, like if you trap a dirt against a vacuum bags that's really inferior to actually sucking the dirt out of the air. And so he created this whole line of products based around that concept. He convinced the world that they had a suction problem. So we kinda have a similar challenge 'cause we had to convince the world that you've got an inbox problem and actually the problem is you've really got an organization problem. That's your key problem with e-mail right? So another thing about zealots is they believe and they believe strongly and as I go through I'm gonna show you guys the product and I'm gonna come back to this because this is the key thing that keeps you alive and a lot of really dire situations. We believe that organization is beautiful and really that's the key line behind Alto. It's all about organization. But really the best way to understand Alto is to see it. So I'm gonna show you that if we could switch over to -- I'm gonna do my Julia Child moment and pull a fully baked Alto out of the oven. There it is. So Alto's a pretty deep product but I am going to just show you the key part of it 'cause I just wanna focus on one piece and that is called stack. So as you can see here, just to kinda orient you, left side, you've got your different accounts. You can add up to five accounts to Alto. They live in here and you can do contacts, calendar, et cetera. Your list of messages here and then you've got these things. So what Alto does is it actually crawls your account and it goes and it sucks out all of the stuff kind of like Dyson's vacuum right? Sucking it out like -- and what that does is it creates these things called stacks. And so the first kinda stack that we create is this, called a photo stack. So it goes through and it pulls out all the assets. It doesn't care about the message, cares about the assets 'cause a lot of times e-mails uses a transportation vehicle for assets, the message doesn't matter. So we do the same thing with attachment. Some previews, you can go in there, you can even go into the gallery mode in photos, missed this one. You can go through here, you can cruise through them, it's pretty fast right? So we're sort of turning traditional inboxes on their head by we're really focusing on the assets, not the messages. So it also does it with daily deals. So it can actually go through and look at different senders and group them into these tile views and that provides you the ability to suck those out of your inbox. So when you first come in here what that does is say hey, do you wanna skip your inbox? And if you say yes it's gonna suck all those daily deals out and put 'em into that stack. Does the same thing with retailers. And it presents it in a different kind of view because in a lot of cases with retailers you don't have to reply, forward, you don't need all those commands. So we just cut out a lot of that stuff to just show you the actual HTML, the e-mail. You can cruise through it and do window-shopping right? And we also do things around social notification so it sort of looks at the different senders, it graphs them for you and it shows you some basic analytics. So I'm just gonna show you one more quick thing and then we'll go back 'cause I wanna show you how you make a stack. To make a stack I can basically go like this. I just take it and I drag it and it's gonna get -- create a stack for all living -- for all messages from living social, yes. I wanna skip it. Fantastic. There it goes, sucks it out, boom. So those guys are now removed from my inbox and put into this stack. Okay, so I wanna show you one more thing. I'm gonna switch over to my fully mined account. This is my actual account so don't send me an e-mail right now. That would be very bad. But the basic gist I wanna show you here is this, this after what we get to is about a point where we notice where stacks sorta plateau and you get to a point where you're in a pretty good equilibrium. The left side is my messages, the right side are stacks. This is what that same data is on Gmail right? That's the same data, it's exactly the same Alto's running off of the same back end. We don't do anything. That's kind of the mess, like I can't find anything. So if I go back to Alto, Dirk Cleveland is the guy who I know actually, his message is way, way, way, way, way, way down here. In fact I can't even find it. There it is right there, right there. So that sorta shows you some of the mechanics, some of the design behind what we did and what we try to do. So if we could actually go back to the other slide of the original deck. All right now so that was just a snapshot of Alto but let me tell you how we got here 'cause it wasn't pretty. So one of the things that zealots are really good at is they adjust their tactics constantly and boy did we. We failed. We failed a lot. We're actually on the seventh generation of solving that problem. So that is the seventh iteration of us like cooking up ideas. Some in various stages of completion and it spanned about four calendar years. So this is a long struggle deep in the trenches and there's a parade of previous versions. This is one box and they each have a unique angle. This is the social one, some were contact focused, some were inbox barnacles that sat on top of your Gmail account. Some were standalone products. But as each new concept emerges you start to see the good ideas and the genetics sorta passed on to the next generation of the ideas and we're constantly adjusting our tactics behind the scenes. And you can start to see the bones of Alto, especially here emerging and along the way we're borrowing from other, from findings from other research and other communication products and applying them to ours. Some died because of the organizational climate because the company at the time just wasn't ready for a new kind of product. Like you know you're talking about AOL who invented e-mail. The last thing I wanna do when I come in and say like "We're gonna hide folders." Like what, what, what, what? What are you doing? That sounds dangerous. And this is one in particular that I wanna focus on because I think it talks a lot about where we started and how e got to Alto. This is Alto's predecessor, it's called Phoenix. This was designed to stem the tide of attrition from AOL mail, from people leaving AOL mail and going to other products. And it's really a life raft for existing AOL mail users to get something kind of you know different and modern. This required a new e-mail address unlike Alto and it leaned into composition. You can see at the top there is this thing called the quick bar. The funny thing is that 9 out of 10 e-mails are read, not composed. Whoops, that's a bad one. Aggregation was in here but it was a sort of loosely based on the side and you know what happened is we aggregated all your accounts but we didn't give you any tools to manage that huge fire hose we just turned on so everyone was like horrible, turn it off, oh my God. And the biggest problem with Phoenix was that overall this is rear view mirror thinking. This is looking back at the past. It looks too much like traditional mail. It's like mail, now with more stuff. And it -- you know we went out and we talked to people and we're like what do you think about this? Well it's not very innovative. It's not innovative enough for me to switch. And wow, when non-techie people tell you that your product isn't innovative enough to switch, these are like housewives, college students, insurance people, you know normal people. They tell you your product doesn't go far enough you've got a big problem. And so what do did we do? Well the problem was that we had built on some incorrect assumptions and one of those problems actually comes from the way we looked at users for Phoenix. We looked at -- this happens a lot actually in the tech sector. We striated along technical savviness. You know novice users versus expert users and that doesn't really get you anywhere. We really needed to be looking at behaviors and the only way to see behaviors is to really go out and watch people in the real world right? So we went out and we did a lot of testing and we looked at people and went into their homes and you know talked to them where the dog was barking, the baby's crying and we saw them actually using their e-mail products in their actual environment. And the whole team went, not just the designers but the QA team, the dev team, the VP of engineering, everybody went. And we saw seven key things right? Well the first one is that e-mail's pretty frigging depressing and that's an important piece. The emotional piece of that is really important because that weighs everything, weighs on everything that you put in front of somebody. It's no longer about personal communication. It's a deluge and it's overwhelming. The second thing is actually pretty interesting is that there's so much junk in these products that people are asking for features that already exist right? They're like hey, filters. That'd be cool if we had those. I mean these are actual user quotes. Hey, couldn't I have something that when I'm on vacation that can sort of let people know that I'm away? Or how about a box that you can like type a term in and it gives you back messages that match that term? That is a real, that's real stuff right? So that kinda says something that like there's so much junk in these products that people are getting lost. They're not seeing the actual features that are baked into there. They're just totally gone right? So another thing that we saw in I'm sure you guys are experiencing this too is people's inboxes are just the endless lists of e-mails right? And they're overwhelmed by the volume of mail. Some don't even know that they're overwhelmed. This is like the new normal and that ties to this which we also saw which is most people just don't manage their inbox. You know those are aspirational now. They are like gym memberships. You're still paying for them but you don't actually go. Right? Like that is what folders have become. And you pay a fee in terms of pixel space and Alto really says screw it, we're not, those are gone, they're in there but they're sort of buried underneath. And because the problem is when you have a folder stuff is out of sight and out of mind. This is like poor information radiators. And organizing really isn't something I wanna spend a lot of time doing or I'll try once and I'll fail and actually that's a pretty common pattern we saw. Everyone's like I'm gonna totally manage my inbox this Christmas. Okay, I'm gonna get two weeks off, here's what I'm gonna do. All right, we saw this a lot. I'm gonna create a filter. Okay, how do I do that? Okay. You guys might know this but out in the real world this is tough to do. Okay. Okay, I'm gonna go to help and I'm gonna -- I set my filter up and then one day I miss a message 'cause the filter's not quite set up right. Okay, well that's that. I can't do that. I'm gonna delete that filter and now my inbox grows and now I just pan and scan. You know like that's it. So these people have just given up. This is a massive problem with all inboxes out there that has yet to be solved. And so a lot of people are just saying like you know if I make a filter it goes into a filter, it's outta sight, outta mind. I don't know about it, dangerous stuff. So it's a pretty common story. Another thing we saw, before -- people actually scroll to find messages before they search right so if you say like, "Hey go find that message from John." "Okay, hold on." Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Maybe if you don't find it then you search but that's pretty interesting because that made us think like well wow, maybe we should build a more browsable e-mail product, not something that's like search where you have to figure out a term. That's hard for a lot of people to figure out. It's what's the term I search on right? Last but not least, oh sorry, not quite last. People rely on a lot of work arounds. You guys probably have seen these right? So we actually found in talking to people that they're actually -- these are really important hierarchies. When you mark something on red that means something. It means maximum visibility. This is super important. I'm gonna mark this unread even though I've read it because I gotta get back to it. I'm gonna star something 'cause I gotta come back to it for later. Labels are often used around prioritization using color. Obviously a Gmail only kinda thing. And folders are really for future reference after a critical mass has been achieved. That's where you sort of create a little box for it. But the most important thing that we saw was this, is that people are more likely to be keepers than deleters and this is really very much against the industry of e-mail because right now the industry is very much focused on inbox zero. It's a Shangri-La of nirvana in achieving Zen with your inbox and there are a ton of startups focusing on this right? And if you look up inbox zero on Twitter you're gonna find a lot of people like these Tony Robbins style personalities that are proclaiming ways you can change habits to deal with your inbox. If you could change yourself to deal with your inbox. That sucks. Right? That's totally lame. It's like a a bunch of fad diets right? And so Alto really runs counter to a lot of products in the industry in that respect. It doesn't attempt to get you to inbox zero, it actually attempts to categorize stuff and organize. Okay, so we knew what we didn't want to build and we, now we had all these stories right, that we had all shared together because we all went out in the field together. So we have to now figure out what it should be and that takes inspiration and zealots have to be inspired. So I'm gonna tell you the story about stacks. Not snacks, stacks. They were actually inspired by snail mail. So we needed something that the app could galvanize around. We needed a central character of this. We need the lead character of the movie so to speak right? And more specifically you know we were inspired by snail mail but more specifically my wife. So I actually often watch her use her e-mail product which she hates as I've said. And you know she, one day she was sort of working with her Nordstrom e-mail that was coming in. It comes in every week and I was watching her and she'd take it, delete it. The next day I watched her, done the same thing, same product or same e-mail. Day after that she keeps deleting 'em. I'm like why make a filter? Well it's hard and if I send it to a folder then I wouldn't see it. Okay, so that's interesting. That's a great point. And really this is something I think that was important for all of us to remember in our team was that we often talk about unmet needs and there really are a very few things that are unmet. We actually have to talk about -- we should be talking about poorly met needs and this really was one of those poorly met needs that the tam really galvanized around and locked onto. Because when I actually watched her handling physical mail something like this showed up which is a pretty common pattern turns out. So this is our mail bin in our house. We have a little slot in our garage door. The mail comes in, it goes into this giant bin and she grabs the mail from this pile and she'll open it. She'll open up any sort of personal or important stuff first. And then she does something that most e-mail clients don't let you do. She makes stacks. She makes stacks for catalogs. She makes stacks for bills. She makes stacks for coupons and they have a lifespan actually throughout the house which is very interesting. The bills go on the desk for me to deal with. That's fantastic. The catalogs actually go near the bedside table or near the television so that she can read them when she has time. The coupons go on the fridge to remind her when she is going to the store. Don't forget me. These stacks are radiating information constantly. That doesn't exist. There's no analog to that in most e-mail products today. And that is actually how stacks were born. And the reason I'm telling you all this is because those stories are extremely important for creating zealots. They serve a very high purpose, a much higher purpose for us than just getting to the right design solution because eventually like us you're probably gonna get hit with some serious organizational headwinds. When you take a product like Alto and show it to most people at AOL they run the other way. It's scary. You're messing with the bread and butter of the business. That's something you don't do but we're doing it anyway. And I'm gonna tell you quick the story about our executive vice president. So when -- so we had Phoenix which is the one on the upper left and we had gone through all of this stuff that I just talked to you about and we said you know we were in the room going through the research and seeing like no one wants this product, Phoenix, what are we gonna do? Okay, so my team got in a room and we went through all the inspiration stuff that I showed you and we came out with this. And we're like oh my God, what have we done? We just gave birth to this thing and I don't even know what it's gonna do. We're gonna send it to 'em. So we e-mailed it to 'em over Easter break and I get an e-mail back within 30 seconds with lots of expletives and like what are you thinking? We're just gonna throw all that work away? What is this? Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, get out. You know that kinda stuff. And the reason that's important is because when this is -- the best part is this, when we all went back to work after the break and we literally had an intervention with 'em. We pulled them into a room. We waited for him to come out of his office and pulled him into a room and all eight of us, not just the designers but the developers, the product people, the QA folks, everybody, eight people waylaid him and said, "We don't wanna build that product." That's not the right thing to do. It's what our organization like 1,000 compromises created but that's not the right thing. That's the right thing. So what did he say? He said, "I love that product but we're gonna keep building that one." So that's real man. That's reality. There isn't always a happy ending. There were lots of times when the developers would get in fights about like well who asked for this? Did product ask for this? Why can't they be fine with this normal search box? Why does it have to do all this? Like literal arguments and fights. People could almost be fired over doing that and we still did it. Or how about when the CEO says, "That's great and all. I wanna live that dream too but what are you doing about the current AOL mail product?" I like, "I don't even know where to start to answer that question. That's what we should be doing." So these are all stories that all that stuff that we went through together was so important for us to help us stay on track, to help us say no, to help us persevere in this. Another thing that zealots need is an ideology because actually the most powerful design tool that you have isn't Photoshop, it's not Illustrator, it's not whatever you use. It's words. Those are really important things. And why? Because you know people from all over the organization, well meaning, some well meaning, some not well meaning, they're gonna try to attach like a plethora of must have features to your ideas. They're gonna try to turn into a Homer car. They're gonna try to shoot it in the head. This has happened to Alto. Alto's constantly on the chopping block. They're gonna try to blunt the sharp edges of your product so that "normal people" get it. Well the normal people actually want the crazy thing actually, turns out. And so it was really important for us to collect our design principles as we went. So I'm not gonna lie, we didn't start with like some super insightful principles. These came, they were vague and they were fuzzy and we made these as we went and it was, we were building the plane as it was flying in the air and it's extremely easy to lose your way and that's why these things are important. Should we add this feature? Should we spend two weeks on that little animation of the stack thing coming over? Like we needed compasses and north stars. And so one of the first key things about Alto was it had to pass the 15-foot test. When you were watching somebody at a café using this product you had to go like, "What the hell's that thing?" That's really important. That reaction, that visceral emotional reaction, super key, super critical and you're not gonna get that by looking like the competition. That immediately sets you apart right? We're immediately at odds. Another thing that Alto tries to do is it tries to open up spaces. It tries to calm the aspects of the interface down so that it lets the content sing. So lets the key features become self-evident. We use buttons sparingly. We use negative space generously, all the basic good design stuff. But that's a big deal for an industry that has density. It's really important that you get 30 frickin lines of e-mails in there right? So that's countervailing to what most people ask for. Alto is a visual product. It is designed to reveal what's in your inside of your inbox. It turns it on its head. Most e-mail products are about folders that contain messages that contain sometimes attachments and Alto flips that in a lot of cases. It turns your inbox inside out. It's not a technology about moving mail 'cause we rely on the servers, the servers of the other product, the service providers to do that. It's more about understanding what's' in your inbox. And the last principle was that we needed to tell the story with motion. It was really important that Alto feel alive and organic. When you make a stack and you see those e-mails get sucked out, like that's a -- that is a very important emotional crescendo that's super key that we get that right. They aren't the icing on -- those kinda transitions, that's not the icing on the cake, that is the cake. That's very key to get. So now let's talk about funding 'cause all zealots need funding. And our form of funding was this. This is AOL mail. So it turns out that we actually redesigned AOL mail while we were doing Alto. They're separate products. They're not designed to be -- they are totally meant for different audiences. Alto is a growth vehicle, AOL mail is for people that use AOL mail and maybe a few other people. But we address this current product to fund our revolution because what it district was it showed near term results and it kept building runway for Alto. It allowed us to keep going. And there was a side benefit that was pretty cool; it actually diverted all attention away from Alto. So we just said like hey, look at this, don't worry about that. And that's also key because zealots always need a hideout. It's very important. This was ours. So we actually did a lot of what we call work camps. I don't know doesn't sound so fun. They were actually a lot of fun. But I forget somebody was mentioning how like we are distributed team. We're on two coasts. It was really important that we bring people together in the same room because that's where the zealous culture is created. That's where you're telling the same stories, where you're sharing ideas with each other. You know and these are often, these kind of products they're not often your day job. This is like your night passion work right? So you also have to be careful that you eliminate outside distractions or the stuff's never gonna get done. That's why we would take people for a week at a time and we would go to places like you know, Asilomar and Holiday Inn at Paso Robles and stuff like that and just lock everyone in a room and we'd sleep, live, drink, that's what we, we'd stay there and we'd work on it. And it was a very safe place for these controversial ideas to exist outside of the corporate culture. Alto was done with zero exec involvement and there's a user quote that when we first showed it to some people they were saying, "You know what, when I see this product it actually feels like it wasn't designed in a board room. I love that." And that's why, because it wasn't. It was designed in places like this. Okay, so this was not obviously a cakewalk. There were some major organizational headwinds against it. It was a tricky problem to attack. I'm not saying that this product is the end all be all. What I'm here to talk to you about is how we did it and what, and how important it was for the people involved in the process. There are still multiple attempts to shelve this product actually believe it or not. And when we launched it was actually, turns out it was one of the biggest launches that AOL has had in years. The press had over 170 pieces. It was all over. There were a ton of tweets about it. And what you saw was actually people saying amazing things. I was blown away by things like, "Could AOL be back?" You know like is this a turnaround? Like that's a big deal. That's a huge deal. You got a lot of people trying to figure that out and somehow a group of zealots tried to start something small. We started with one thing but I think it can actually go somewhere. All right so I'd like to end with some advice from another film visionary. This is Terry Gilliam. I don't know if you know him but he did some awesome movies. And he was actually giving advice to Quentin Tarantino who was making his first movie way back when, Reservoir Dogs. And what he said to him was -- or Quentin asked him like, "You have this amazing vision in all of your films. Like how do you capture it? How do you go about capturing what's in your mind and getting it on film?" And Terry Gilliam said to him, "You don't conjure your vision. Like you're not in charge of that. You need to know what your vision is and then you go hire really talented people and explain it to them. And if you can articulate it and they're talented, then they're gonna give you your vision." And to me, like Terry Gilliam and like George Lucas, you have to create believers every day and I think to me that's what being a zealot means. It's not just our job; it's actually probably one of the hardest things to do in design. Okay, that's it, thank you. [Applause] [End of Audio]