Flora Guo - How to accelerate your design career with AI

Flora Guo (https://x.com/floguo) has one of the more impressive career trajectories of anyone I've interviewed on this show.

She's currently the founding design engineer at Paradigm. But before that Guillermo (Vercel CEO) personally DM'd her to join the Vercel team.

So we're going deep into career growth, design engineering, what it's like being a founding designer at an AI-native startup.

- What it’s like being a founding design engineer at Paradigm

- The challenges of designing AI-first products that work at scale

- Flora’s experiments with new design tools like Paper and Variant

- What Flora learned working alongside top design engineers at Vercel

- How Flora evolved her workflow with Claude Code over the past year

- Mental models for using AI as a learning tool rather than just a task executor

- + a lot more

- Tokyo Design Forum (February 2026) - https://www.tokyodesignforum.com/

- UI Engineering 101 by Mariana Castillo and Derek Briggs - https://maven.com/pixeljanitor/uiengineering-101-for-designers

- We talked about Rauno Freiberg's portfolio (Vercel design engineer) - https://rauno.me/

- New tools: Paper - https://join.dive.club/paper-ad-email