👋 Howdy to the 1,784 new legends who joined since our last edition! You are now part of a 522,532-strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

⚡️ The Fintech King & BILL’s 20-Year Race To $1 Trillion. Serving small businesses all the way to 1% of GDP.
🔮 Middle-earth, Big Brother & A Philosopher King: The Palantir Story. The interesting story of Alex Karp and Palantir.
🏹 Unfinished Business, Product Intelligence & The AI Moment. An interview with Jen Taylor, CEO at Mixpanel.

PARTNERS 💫

Meetings aren’t the problem. The challenge is everything that comes after them. With Granola, the AI Notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, it's no longer about scrambling to keep up.

Take notes the way you always have. Granola works in the background, turning conversations into clear summaries, action items, and next steps. Before, during, or after a meeting, you can chat with your notes to quickly understand what needs to happen, write follow-ups, or share context with others.

Framer helps teams design, build, and launch their marketing sites lightning fast. With the ability to publish hundreds of CMS pages in a single click, operate at a global scale with seamless localization, and even host unified content across multiple domains, teams have never been able to ship faster.

Trusted by companies like Miro, Bilt, and Perplexity.

_{Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.}

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Our new Intelligence product at Athyna is on fire. It's exciting because, for the first time in a while, it’s a bet that can radically change the company's trajectory. There are a number of ways we are working with partners today: recruiting AI talent (this is our existing model), done-for-you post-training (RLHF, SFT, red-teaming) with the best STEM PhDs and Masters grads, and building custom datasets.

The even cooler thing is the ICP for this product is really Big Tech: the LLMs and the biggest and best application layer players in the space today. If you are an ambitious AI company and want to improve your frontier models, hit us up today!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Luke Des Cotes, CEO at Metalab

Luke Des Cotes is the CEO of Metalab, a product agency headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia, that has been fully remote for 20 years and operates across 21 countries. Since its founding, Metalab has worked on some of the most consequential products in tech, including early versions of Slack, Coinbase, Uber, and Midjourney. In 2022, Metalab launched Metalab Ventures, a $15M venture fund, which the firm completed deploying in early 2026 and is now raising a second fund.

Luke joined Metalab nearly 11 years ago, long after the brand had already earned its reputation, which means his job has never been to build it from scratch. It's been to protect it, extend it, and often that has meant resisting the temptation to do too much with it. That's a different and arguably more challenging task, especially for an agency whose whole value proposition is helping other companies define theirs. The venture fund adds a natural extension: Metalab was already doing diligence on founders before deciding whether to take them on as clients, now they're writing cheques too.

What does Metalab build that other agencies can't?

I think agencies are a unique beast unto themselves. People who join agencies generally love the idea of constantly building new things. You have to have that builder's mindset. Where Metalab has been able to play in a way that's incredibly unique and puts us in a different spot is the constant wave of inflection point work we do. Beyond just designing products in moments of change, often we’re being asked to reshape the actual business behind the product in our process. Very few agencies in the world actually get trusted with that process.

I sometimes say that within six months a designer, developer, or product person who joins Metalab—after they've had two or three projects under their belt—probably has more experience shipping zero-to-one or huge monumental inflection point work than a lot of people do in their entire careers. After a few years at Metalab, you've got incredible experience in that. It's a very different way of thinking and handling the symbiotic and yet sometimes contradicting nature of business needs, complex user needs, systems thinking around UX patterns that are needed to shape new categories, while at the same time, building something that's beautiful and going to be beloved. Challenging work.

What's the biggest myth about running a top agency?

Probably that everything's easy, that once you've established yourself, you can keep going and building. I think what I've developed a newfound respect for over the years is just how both simple and complex the idea of brand is.

Since then, and especially since stepping into the CEO role, my focus has been on how you maintain a brand, how you keep what's already there, and how you look around corners to see what might become a threat to it. If you do all the right things, doors open, and it's incredible. But you need to be careful about doing too much or taking what you have for granted and destroying what you've created.

What separates good product design from world-class?

So much of that comes down to care, attention, and the harmony between brand, user experience, features, and the business itself. The same things that go into making a truly world-class product are the same things that people often can't put into words when a product feels slightly off. There are a lot of great businesses that have brought themselves to market and established themselves as trusted, but when you pull the product open to use it, it just doesn't quite feel like that brand promise was there. A lot of what we focus on is how to connect brand with the experience and product, how to deeply understand the promise of what that business is: what's the value they're trying to bring to market, why do they exist,, and then how do you translate that into both a seamless expression of that. Finding those moments to wow and delight.

Still, it's not just about confetti and joy. Think back to the work we did on Slack, with the sassy robot and all that - sometimes that's exactly what's needed to bring people out of their almost expected position, give them something different, make them feel uncomfortably wonderful. There's always an opportunity to do more. A lot of what we do at Metalab is figure out what the symptoms or the systems are that keep us at ‘good enough’ but not incredible, and then try to break those down. We're constantly trying new things, whether that's building in extra time for what we used to call polish and delight or finding ways through our process to drive more divergent thinking and innovation. We're constantly trying to inject new shocks into our system to force us to go beyond what is and find something new.

How do you decide which clients Metalab takes on?

That's a big one and one I'm directly involved in. There are many parts of the business where I create the systems and let them work, but our portfolio and client makeup are a big part of what I do day to day. A lot of it comes back to brand. When we look at which clients to take on, I want us thinking about what will create the portfolio of the future we want to be known for. Part of that is looking for ways to continue enhancing our skills. If there's a product challenge we just haven't seen in a while, and our team needs to push on that area, that excites us. Sometimes it's about impact and reach. Sometimes it's about matching up passion areas with the right people on the team, since we know that often produces the best outcomes.

So it comes down to the people, the passion, the driving conviction they have around that product and solution. Also, a lot of times it's their belief in the design process, whether they truly believe design will be a differentiator. Typically, people who come to Metalab already believe that, but we're always looking for it.

What does a typical week as Metalab's CEO look like?

Always curveballs. The areas I focus on most are probably our portfolio and hiring. On the portfolio side, I'm involved a fair bit in our pipeline, looking at the clients coming in. I'll sometimes be directly involved with clients, but we've got a great team that works with them, so a lot of what I'm doing is looking at the overarching makeup and making sure we have the right balance of interesting venture clients alongside awesome Fortune 500 enterprise clients. Also looking at how we can challenge and stretch ourselves in different ways.

On hiring, as a services business, there's nothing more important than being in tune with the type of people, personalities, and culture you're building through who you bring in. I put a lot of trust in our team and leaders to make ultimate decisions, but I spend quite a bit of time getting to know everyone we're evaluating. Overseeing whether we’re bringing the right skill sets, if we’re adding joy to our experience of building an incredible product together, or whether there are any flags to watch out for. And finally, when the teams let me, I'll get involved in product strategy. I love to dust off the old cobwebs and get involved in that side of things, but I don't spend as much time on it as I used to.

Where is product design headed over the next five years?

I think two things are happening simultaneously. There's a deepening respect for the craft, taking things from good to world-class, and I think that delta is becoming more evident and visible. At the same time, there's a deepening value placed on systems that can create huge efficiencies in the world of product and design. Where AI is having some of its biggest impacts is in the speed to translate ideas into something on paper that you can feel and work with, and also in taking what's been shaped and building systems so you can drive consistency and roll things out. So product design, along with product thinking, is heading toward a place where there will be a lot more time and energy available to put into the work of going from good to great or truly world-class.

Most of us internally at Metalab are really excited about the opportunity. What we've seen is a kind of rising tide. The bottom of product has risen. We're at a place where the lowest level of product should be good pretty soon. That creates an enormous opportunity to spend your time on something different. Rather than spending bits of time here or there to focus on innovation, what if the majority of your time was spent on that? How incredible could your products be? That's the drive that pushes us toward the next iteration of our mission: to push the product industry forward. How do we build products that are truly worth talking about, that people want to keep coming back to and dissecting, saying, “How did they do that?” You can't just expect that to happen. You need to build the workflows, systems, and a clear mandate for it to become a core part of your DNA.

Why launch Metalab Ventures with a $15M fund now?

I've always believed that major launches of new areas of a business should feel ambitious but natural. When teams try to force their way into new things, that's where it goes wrong. A venture fund for us felt completely natural. Our DNA has always been in the world of venture. In the early days, 15 or 16 years ago, we built incredible relationships in Silicon Valley, and startups started coming to us. We built relationships with venture funds where we could advise and help partners work with their portfolio companies to shape better experiences. Over the years, two things happened. One, we worked with incredible companies that went on to do great things (early days of Coinbase, Slack, Uber). We saw them come through our doors, worked with them, and maybe had opportunities to take equity but chose to take cash instead. There's a little regret there, but we're not going to live life in a state of regret.

I still have the email from a fellow named Kris Marsalek in my inbox, excitedly telling me they'd just secured the URL for crypto.com and were building a business. Pre-seed, earliest days. We worked with them, launched the brand, the product, and now, every NBA season, I get to see my team playing against the Los Angeles Lakers at none other than Crypto.com Arena. Those are the types of opportunities I hang onto as evidence that we should be doing more than just building together. At the same time, when I talked about gatekeeping our portfolio for the future, I realized we were already doing much of the diligence work. We were already spending time understanding what makes a great founder, how they think about product, where their conviction comes from, how their internal systems work, and why they have a reason to win. We were already going through that process, and then quickly realized there was an opportunity to formalize it and take it to the next level.

It's another thing to take someone else's money, look them in the eyes, and say, “We're going to build a portfolio that delivers real returns.” We launched about three years ago, finished deployment of Fund One a few months ago, and we're about to start raising Fund Two. We've built internal systems so our teams actually share in the fund's upside, creating a highly aligned incentive model. The teams that work on projects that go on to be incredibly successful share in that upside.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

For me, I'm ultimately a brand builder and a people person. I care deeply about people and their growth.

So a lot of what I'm looking for in terms of the types of clients and the types of people we bring on is people who have incredible talent but have potential that needs to be unlocked, who can do more. And it's clients who have incredible potential and great ideas that need some real sifting through to help them reach it. I think that's what I do to motivate myself: put us in a position where we want more and to be better. To do that, you have to look for potential more than you look for the finished product. That excites me. The day when we're doing the thousandth version of a thing and feeling like we've been doing this for five years and it's still just happening over and over, that's the day I shouldn't be working in this space.

Extra reading

• Inside Metalab, Silicon Valley’s Best-Kept Design Secret - February, 2026

• AI Delivers Mediocre Results—By Design. So How Do You Stand Out? - February, 2026

• Designing a New Relationship with AI - November, 2024

And that’s it! You can follow Luke on LinkedIn or check out Metalab on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Mochary Method—an executive coaching firm that specializes in helping growing startups.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors, and leaders in tech. 👀