Flora Guo - How to accelerate your design career with AI

Flora Guo 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) -

com/ - UI Engineering 101 by Mariana Castillo and Derek Briggs - com/pixeljanitor/uiengineering-101-for-designers - We talked about Rauno Freiberg's portfolio (Vercel design engineer) - me/ - New tools: Paper - club/paper-ad-email Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿 🌐 club 🐦 com/joindiveclub Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪 Chapters 0:00 Intro 7:04 The impact of sharing online 12:01 How Flora landed an internship at Vercel 17:57 Flora's Twitter experiments 20:55 Starting to tinker with v0 23:04 Flora's approach to learning 26:[redacted address] she works with Claude 28:52 Mental models for collaborating with AI 31:43 How Flora works at Paradigm 35:41 What it's like designing an AI native product 38:53 How Flora stays up to date with how tech is changing