sparking conversations around creativity, capital, and ai. by @libbiefrost & @thisisrayouf
Joined July 2026
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Creative Conviction retweeted
A few months ago Surya (@kickingkeys), a designer at Websim (@websim_ai) in New York, posted a project that went viral: “You can just RL a coding model to paint with javascript btw.”
We sat down with Surya and were shocked to learn that he only wrote his first line of code in 2024 and had not heard of RL before January. We wanted to know how someone with that background goes from zero to training models in under two years, and whether anyone else could do that too.
Our top 2 lessons from Surya:
- Anyone can learn how these systems work if you are curious and willing to put in the time.
- The best way to learn is to spend less time asking what AI can do to serve you and more time asking what it can do to serve the people around you.
Some of Surya’s recent projects include training models to paint, setting up AI for a coffee shop owner so he has more time to write, and having agents watch him in the art studio and turn the footage into a reality-TV-style story.
Surya is doing this for the love of the game.
Read our full interview in the thread!
cc @thisisrayouf
Creative Conviction retweeted
Really enjoyed speaking with @Libbiefrost and @thisisrayouf for @creativecpress
I really appreciate the care they put into understanding people's perspectives.
Link below, check it out :)
Creative Conviction retweeted
After we interviewed Surya for @creativecpress, all I wanted to do was create, and you will too after reading our interview :)
Really enjoyed speaking with @Libbiefrost and @thisisrayouf for @creativecpress
I really appreciate the care they put into understanding people's perspectives.
Link below, check it out :)
Creative Conviction retweeted
Jacob Thornton (@fat) is the founder of Pierre Computer Company (@pierrecomputer).
Pierre provides the building blocks of the computers that agents will use to do work. But Pierre is as much a brand and culture project as an infrastructure one. Jacob believes brand is the most important thing you can be doing in 2026, and his references run from MTV and skateboard brands to Godard films and the magazine racks at sf Heath newsstand.
In this interview, we talked about why MVP culture is cringe, how to find and hire obsessives, why the best creative work at Pierre starts in iMessage threads, and the real reason the company is named Pierre… sort of.
Read the full interview "Virtual computers for agents, chrome blobs, and MTV" linked in the thread.
cc @thisisrayouf
Creative Conviction retweeted
There is a good chance that your favorite designer’s favorite designer is @adamho. It was a pleasure interviewing Adam for @creativecpress
Adam thinks about design the way he thinks about music. He treats his body of work like a discography, hunting for a signature sound while trying something new with every release. His vocabulary is built from circle and square primitives, and his instincts are shaped by the fine art world and graphic design books. We chatted about his path to design, running his studio and transition to leading @fal design team.
Article in thread
Creative Conviction retweeted
Most AI is trying to be better than humans. @simile_ai is trying to simulate them (imperfections included.)
We sat down with @mihikapoor, Head of Product at Simile and an all-around design legend (she’s the reason FigJam has music and Figma Slides exists), to answer this and many more questions about building as a designer.
@creativecpress interview in thread :)
Creative Conviction retweeted
Mihika Kapoor (@mihikapoor) has a habit of making her ideas come to life.
Founding a national design conference as a student, incubating FigJam and Figma Slides from internal hackathons, starting her own company... and most recently joining Simile (@simile_ai) as Head of Product.
Simile simulates human behavior so companies can hear from the people their decisions affect. Or as Mihika puts it, “We see our work as being the voice of these humans in the rooms they are otherwise not in.”
We talk about why they add "show your work" to "simplify" as a core design principle, building the brand around the word human, and landing on a pixel game town aesthetic for an early stage company selling to F100 buyers.
Read more from our latest guest on Creative Conviction - full interview in the thread!
cc @thisisrayouf
Creative Conviction retweeted
Liz Dorman owns more than a hundred old phones. There is a 1970s Bell telephone, Siemens handsets that were released in seasonal collections like clothing, and her prized piece: a hot pink Motorola Razr signed by Paris Hilton. To Dorman, the collection is evidence that technology used to be weird, expressive, and fun, and she believes it can be again. So, she founded @eraworldsto to build what she calls "couture computing."
It was so much fun talking to @lizwandersworld for @creativecpress, whose vision of what hardware should be is rooted in delight and individuality. Read the full interview at the link in the thread.
cc @Libbiefrost
Creative Conviction retweeted
Colin Daymond Hanna (@colindaymond) literally climbed a mountainside in the Austrian Alps to take this interview with us. It felt fitting - Colin describes himself as a child of the earth.
Chapter by chapter, life showed him that software can be a force for good - if it's built transparently, with the good of the user in mind. Earendil, which he co-founded with Armin (@mitsuhiko) and creates the beloved tools Pi (@badlogicgames) and Lefos, is that belief turned into a company.
We talked about the seven principles they wrote before building anything, why you should own your harness, and why every small detail - down to the waves coded on the landing page and a hand-drawn elven boat logo - traces back to one ethos: light in the darkness.
cc @thisisrayouf
Creative Conviction retweeted
had some visitors at the office recently ( @thisisrayouf and @Libbiefrost ) who happened also to let me talk into a microphone for a while!
interview up, along with some designers i really admire, on creativeconviction.ai
Diego Segura (@messybirkin), founder of the design studio, Family Office (familyoffice.is) joins us as the next guest for @creativecpress . He broke into design as a teenage dropout and became the youngest designer at COLLINS
We paid him a visit at his sun-drenched Tribeca studio, lined with shelves of books covering everything from geopolitics to money markets to, of course, design. The range of titles is a useful introduction to how Diego sees the world, and it goes some way toward explaining Terms-Eccles, his platform covering capital and culture, which also hosts an annual Tax Day party. Read the full interview in the thread.
cc @Libbiefrost
Creative Conviction retweeted
if someone pitches you on trash can robotics, this might be your sign.
also - new interview drop with diego, full link in thread!
Creative Conviction retweeted
Diego Segura (@messybirkin), founder of the design studio, Family Office (familyoffice.is) joins us as the next guest for @creativecpress . He broke into design as a teenage dropout and became the youngest designer at COLLINS
We paid him a visit at his sun-drenched Tribeca studio, lined with shelves of books covering everything from geopolitics to money markets to, of course, design. The range of titles is a useful introduction to how Diego sees the world, and it goes some way toward explaining Terms-Eccles, his platform covering capital and culture, which also hosts an annual Tax Day party. Read the full interview in the thread.
cc @Libbiefrost
Creative Conviction retweeted
im excited to see scaling tech companies hiring for creative directors!! here's a short list hiring now: creativeconviction.ai/hiring…
Creative Conviction retweeted
A core design decision early for @tolanworld was figuring out how to get around models that weren’t up to date on the world. The clever insight by creative director @lucas_zanotto was to have this little AI friend assume the visual identity of an alien, making its lack of knowledge feel endearing rather than like a product flaw
read more in thread 🧵
Creative Conviction retweeted
why a little alien is a good friend!
read our latest interview on creative conviction with Quinten Farmer (@quintendf), founder and ceo of Tolan (@tolanworld).
we trace the creative decisions behind Tolan - betting on voice early, treating memory as its own primitive, prototyping with artists, awful AI poetry, a 1970s social theory, and lessons from busy dinner tables.
full interview in the thread. cc @thisisrayouf
Creative Conviction retweeted
We sat down with @PaulJun_ , Creative Director of Brand at @tryramp, for a conversation on the future of brand design: how brand and product are converging, how AI enables small teams to go from story to software and what it means to make brand programmable.
cc @Libbiefrost
Creative Conviction retweeted
ben hylak (@benhylak) and zubin koticha (@snarkyzk), two of the three co-founders of raindrop (@raindrop_ai), join us as the next guests in our series spotlighting creative leaders building in AI.
being honest with themselves is the culture that shapes every creative call they make. it is why they decided to build where they are also the user, and why one of the most creative things at raindrop is the nouns themselves. an entirely new problem set needs an entirely new vocabulary - stumbles, issues, experiments - kept consistent from the UI to the SDK to the DB, both for humans and for agents. get the nouns right and the whole platform becomes comprehensible.
link to full interview in the thread. cc @alexisgauba, @thisisrayouf
Creative Conviction retweeted
nir zicherman (@NirZicherman), co-founder and ceo of Oboe, joins us as the next guest in our series spotlighting creative leaders building in AI.
nir taught himself to program in law school, co-founded Anchor, sold it to Spotify, and went on to build the audiobooks business there (thank you nir, i use it every day). now he’s building Oboe, a consumer learning platform rooted in the belief that billions of people already use the internet to learn, and yet none of the tools they reach for were built to teach them.
Oboe stands out as one of the rare consumer AI products going broad and global rather than narrow, built by a founder building for the ambitious, long term.
link to full interview in the thread.
Creative Conviction retweeted
@paper is one of my favorite design tools and @stephenhaney is one of the most thoughtful founders i have met, so it's incredibly exciting to have him join us for a second interview series for creative conviction.
he shares the story behind the tool, the philosophy of caring deeply for the person who adopts your product, and why design is a forcing function.
link to full interview in thread!
Creative Conviction retweeted
Today we are launching our first creativeconviction.ai interview series, and we are starting with Dylan Babbs (@dbabbs), co-founder and CTO of Profound. Dylan has one of the clearest views on craft as a competitive advantage, so we are honored to open with him.
Over the coming weeks we will share conversations with more creative leaders: Stephen from Paper (@stephenhaney), Nir (@NirZicherman) from Oboe, Ben and Zubin from Raindrop (@benhylak; @snarkyzk), Paul from Ramp (@PaulJun_), Quinten from Tolan (@quintendf), and Diego from Family Office (@messybirkin).
All of this lives on creativeconviction.ai, a platform sparking conversation around creativity, capital, and AI. The "why" is that we believe craft, product quality, and creativity are what build durable competitive advantages in the age of AI. The companies that compound fastest have the clearest point of view on how they want to look, feel, and be understood. As investors, we meet so many people building this way, and Creative Conviction is our attempt to create resources in service of this community, connecting people and championing the products and missions worth following.
Dylan's interview: creativeconviction.ai/interv…
Subscribe link: creativeconvictionpress.subs…
cc: @thisisrayouf
