Soleio is often credited with inventing the Facebook "Like" button.
As one of Facebook's earliest designers (he was there from 2005 to 2011), he was also instrumental in composing the earliest incarnations of many features we are today familiar with—Messenger, Groups, Video and more—and shaping how we interact with each other online.
Following his 6-year stint at Facebook, Soleio joined Dropbox as Head of Design, and helped grow the design team from three to over 40.
But even before finding his footing in "software design," Soleio was already adept at creation: music, specifically. Soleio credits his musical background for a very useful life skill: being able to create something from nothing.
These days, Soleio has traded in Javascript for financial models, and Illustrator for Figma—the latter not in the capacity of a designer, but as an investor and advisor. Soleio is an investor in startups globally that are redefining how we live, work, learn and create: Figma, Cambly, Read.cv, Equals, Framer, Vercel and more.
Visualist speaks with Soleio about the soundtrack to his day (humming), design as a muscle, and charting the future.
In Soleio's own words.
Muscle memory
It's been years since you have been in an official design role. Is design a muscle that needs to constantly be trained? What muscles are you flexing more/less of today as an investor?
All mental activities are like a muscle that needs to be trained, and design is no exception. But like riding a bike or playing poker, one retains a lot of the work previously put in, almost like muscle memory.
I’m tickled by how easy it still is to drive around in old design tools—whether it’s writing JavaScript, editing a file in Illustrator, or fidgeting with CSS.
These days the muscles I’m flexing more are relationship management, defining then honing processes, writing, and building and managing models in tools like Equals. The work I do as an angel investor requires me to exercise judgment and efficiency, and to do a fair bit of research and synthesis—skills I feel I honed as a maturing software designer.
What's a creative habit, good, bad or otherwise, that you can't seem to kick?
I’m constantly humming music under my breath. Music I’m just making up as I go about my day.
Inner gifts
What's something that you know or think you're really bad at which, contrary to popular opinion, has not hindered your design career?
I’m not great with colour management.
I find myself to be a very monochromatic designer (and sometimes thinker) which provides a very strict constraint on the work I produce—sometimes to my detriment but just as often to my benefit.
I envy people who are skilled with combining colours into visual palettes and finding the right combinations to produce a particular overall effect: whether it’s for a visual brand or when arranging flowers or when coordinating an outfit. It’s a gift!
What's one thing in daily life that your background as a creative has made you really good at?
Before I became a professional designer, I played and studied music. I even received my undergraduate degree in music composition. My journey as a violinist and saxophonist taught me improvisation: the value of creating things on the fly and riding your intuition.
This still required me to put in my tens of thousands of hours of practicing scales and learning the structure and theory of music. I don’t know how to short cut that, unfortunately.
But I now find myself just composing music on background whenever I’m in deep thought or in an active flow state. It’s a handy mental hack for getting into a generative mindset without letting apprehension or insecurity get in the way of getting ideas out into the world. Generally speaking: If I ever have to make something from nothing, I feel pretty comfortable with just winging it.
And what's one thing that it has really hindered?
I think this personal bent has steered me away from true mastery in any particular domain. I get more excited about novelty and learning new things than about developing deep proficiency in any one thing. This may not be an active tradeoff for others, but it has been for me.
Luckily, this pattern has served me well in life: I decided to abandon math for music, then later music for design, and then design for investing. And lately I’ve been much more interested in writing and world creation.
I don’t know if I have a clear idea of what I’ll be doing professionally in a decade or two, and I prefer things that way. Like I said, it’s served me very well.
Off the cuff
Creativity is innate. Agree or disagree?
Positively agree. I am a student and disciple of the Suzuki school of thought: that humans are universally creative and that their creativity needs proactive cultivation to be expressed.
Complete this sentence. Once a designer, always a designer, unless...
Once a designer, always a designer, unless you’re out of breath.
Sandcastles and songwriting
You've described designing as being like building sandcastles. What other analogies for design thinking do you reference?
The most useful analogy I’ve used when talking about design, especially with founders who do not have a design background, is that of residential architecture.
Very roughly speaking, you can think of a complete design process as two sides of the same coin: the work that goes into creating a model of what you want to build (the blueprint) and then the work that goes into producing that model and bringing a product into the world (the house).
If you assemble a crew of builders onto a job site on day one and start putting up framing and laying foundation, you’ll quickly find that you might create a lot of excess work for lack of a blueprint that answers many questions in advance. Sure, you can build a structure without a blueprint, but it’s not a recipe for excellence!
On a similar note, you can get fooled into thinking that a beautiful blueprint is sufficient for building a lovely home. In practice, there are a lot of real-world factors that should get fed back into the plans, and there are often a lot of questions that aren’t answered by the blueprint that need to get answered once it’s time to install the doors and put up the trim.
For instance: we might change our minds about decisions made in the blueprint phase that have cascading effects on other aspects of the house design. Or a new constraint (budget, existing conditions, access to materials) might rear its head mid-build and force us to reconsider the model we started producing. Or we might find that the acoustics of the house are different than what we anticipated, which might make us want to reconsider the flooring we selected.
Design as a complete process is one that requires different skill sets as you progress from idea to model and then from model to product. And in many cases, you’ll find that some people really excel at the concept stage are not as talented as folks who thrive at the production stage, and vice versa.
As such, a healthy design practice strives to excel at all these areas and clearly communicates to all participants where in the process the team currently is—both for the sake of avoiding costly mistakes but also for the sake of efficiency. You don’t need a crew of framers to revise an elevation.
I’ve observed that a lot of creative fields reflect this loose framework of concept work and production work: screenwriting then storyboarding then animation, in the case of Pixar films, for example.
A second analogy I regularly use is that of product making as an act of songwriting.
When you’re building something that is profoundly new, it is difficult to merely reason your way into something truly innovative or rely on customer feedback alone to guide your hand. At some point, you need a combination of intuition, and originality, and courage to produce a hit tune.
Being a great musician doesn’t make you a great songwriter by default.
In all, analogies are a useful way to explain new concepts or frameworks to others. But analogies are a double-edged sword. A bad analogy firmly held is more likely to cause you harm than bad advice! So it’s healthy to treat analogies as helpful abstractions rather than fundamental truths.
Children and (hypothetical) teenagers
You've got a young family. What's 1 area of design that your kids are much better at compared to you?
My firstborn is exceptional at drawing, a bonafide cartoonist. He’s terrific at capturing the essence of characters and people. By contrast, I am not very good at drawing things and haven’t put in the time and effort he has, even at my age.
I’ve come to appreciate how useful a skill it is to be able to quickly sketch something from your mind for others to consume. Being able to draw a portrait of someone or of a scene strikes me as a fundamental visual skill worth cultivating as a designer.
It's the year 2072. How would you describe what you did as a 'designer' at Facebook/Dropbox to an intelligent teenager in the year 2072?
I’ve always treated Mitch Kapor’s seminal definition—back when he first coined the term “software designer”—as the gold standard for explaining the work we do:
Software design is not the same as user interface design.
The overall design of a program is to be clearly distinguished from the design of its user interface. If a user interface is designed after the fact, that is like designing an automobile's dashboard after the engine, chassis, and all other components and functions are specified. The separation of the user interface from the overall design process fundamentally disenfranchises designers at the expense of programmers and relegates them to the status of second-class citizens.
The software designer is concerned primarily with the overall conception of the product. Dan Bricklin’s invention of the electronic spreadsheet is one of the crowning achievements of software design. It is the metaphor of the spreadsheet itself, its tableau of rows and columns with their precisely interrelated labels, numbers, and formulas—rather than the user interface of VisiCalc—for which he will be remembered. The look and feel of a product is but one part of its design.
So here’s how I would describe what I did to teenagers from the future:
“Soleio helped design the systems people used to communicate and collaborate across the globe in the first part of the 21st century. He designed software for computers, smartphones, and tablets, distributed to billions worldwide via the internet.”
A star map
'Designer x Investor' is at the top of your read.cv. In your mind's eye, how is this represented graphically?
This terrific quote from the architect Daniel Burnham is what comes to mind when I think about the work I want to support as a designer and investor: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realised. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.”
So, how to represent it graphically? I imagine something akin to a diagram depicting the evolutionary tree of human technology and what is still to come.
Or the detailed schematics for the great pyramids of Giza but juxtaposed by a basic ledger of principal materials and labor costs. Or maybe it’s a simple as an American flag on the side of a future spacecraft orbiting a Galilean moon.
In any case, my aim is to help entrepreneurs chart the future. Maybe a star map would suffice.
Find Soleio on X and Instagram, or view his Read.cv.elizabeth g
