Ep. 192: Maria Giudice on Creative Leadership and Cultivating Changemakers

May 30

Creative powerhouse, Maria Giudice, grew up on Staten Island painting portraits of dogs. Teens ushered in the wonderfully weird world of Rocky Horror Picture Show and the flourishing of her wildly independent, creative spirit. In the Bay Area she founded Hot Studio, a pioneering human-centered experience design practice. Now she’s harnessing all her wisdom and experience to cultivate changemakers.

Maria Giudice: When you think about changemaking it is people and process, you need both of those things.
Amy Devers: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today I’m talking to Maria Giudice. Maria Giudice is an absolute legend in the silicon valley / bay area where the tech and design worlds intertwine. She’s the founder and CEO of the pioneering digital experience design firm, Hot Studio, where for nearly 20 years, she built a thriving practice around the principles of human-centered design. Today, many of her former employees (aka “Hotties”) cite their time at Hot Studios as extremely formative, and can be found leading teams at Adobe, Google, McKinsey, Airbnb, Pinterest, Twitter, and more. Hot Studio was acquired by Facebook in 2013, and with that, a major signal was sent about how central design is to the experience, and therefore bottom line, of tech. After the acquisition in 2013, Maria led global design teams at Facebook and Autodesk, building digital experiences for millions worldwide. She’s also the co-author of Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design, and the recent 2023 release: Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World. And now, after three decades at the forefront of business and design, Maria’s new mission is to build the next generation of creative leaders - which she’s doing through her executive coaching practice. When you listen to Maria you’ll hear someone who’s young at heart, an old soul, an artist, a healer, and an architect of the future… all wrapped up in a denim jacket with a portrait of Prince hand-painted on it! Here’s Maria.
Maria Giudice: Maria Giudice, I live in Oakland, California but I really consider myself a New Yorker. And these days I am an executive leadership coach and applied Shamanic Counselor.
Amy: That’s these days, but we have a lot to cover to get to these days (laughs). Where did you grow up? You say you consider yourself to be a New Yorker, so I am assuming New York?
Maria: Even though I have lived in California longer than any other place in my life, you cannot take the New Yorker out of the girl. Like I’m like all-in New Yorker, like Melanie Griffith, Working Girl New Yorker. (Laughter) I was born in Brooklyn in the 60s and my parents moved to Staten Island when I was two years old, when the bridge was built, the Verrazzano Bridge. So I lived in Staten Island, grew up in Staten Island, I escaped Staten Island when I went to art school in Manhattan, Cooper Union, for art. So I have a degree in fine art. And that’s where I discovered design.
Amy: I need to know about your family dynamic, I need to know what kind of a little kid you were, what kind of things…
Maria: What kind of trauma…
Amy: Yes (laughter), exactly because you know that is foundational to who you are now.
Maria: Oh absolutely, when I coach people, or when we do depth hypnosis, we always go back to childhood. When we get triggered, we are still going back to childhood, to those moments that trigger us. Yeah, there are lots of great stories about my childhood. Let’s see, I was that person who always was the artist, I was the class artist. I started painting when I was eight or nine years old. My parents got me painting lessons every Saturday, I would go paint and so that was sort of my specialty as a kid. I always followed my creativity but my dream was to be a famous artist when I grew up. My uncle is Frank Frazetta and he is a well-known fantasy artist. A lot of people will be like who the hell is Frank Frazetta, but if you are interested in comics or Conan the Barbarian, any of those kinds of fantasy worlds, he was ‘the guy.’ He was the guy and I looked up to him when I was a kid. So I thought I could be a famous painter as well.
Amy: Okay that sounds kind of important to me. There was a role model in the family of somebody who was doing well…And that was not a starving artist situation.
Maria: No, it wasn’t a starving artist although my dad was still a little disappointed that both my sister and I went to art school. There was still that, hey you are talented but maybe you should go become a lawyer kind of thing. If my father said to go left, I would go right. (Laughter)
Amy: That makes me think maybe it is not obvious but you were a rebellious teenager.
Maria: Rebellious, I’m not sure if I was rebellious. I was the middle child that felt largely ignored so I think I was less rebellious but more wildly independent.
Amy: Ah, okay. Does that mean independent thinking as well? Did you deviate from the family system in terms of their code of beliefs?
Maria: I was really fortunate to grow up, even though I was born in Staten Island, which if you know anything about Staten Island it is a conservative… I grew up in a very progressive family dynamic. My father was a Republican and my mother was a Democrat and they would constantly talk about politics but in a more lovingly way. I had that kind of dichotomy. My father was very analytical. He worked for the phone company but I think he had this deep fantasy to be a designer or an architect. And my mother was, she grew up in Brooklyn where women weren’t actually raised to have careers. But she broke out and she started a cooking class in my house which became wildly popular. And then we had a cooking school in the basement and then she moved out and created, built a restaurant in Staten Island called Carol’s Café. So she’s rebellious…And entrepreneurial, and so I grew up in that household where there was constant… We are Italians so a lot of arguments but my mom, I think, was a role model in that, she’s just breaking out. All her life she was told just be a housewife, these were those years when women didn’t even have credit cards to their name. She was like fuck you (laughs), I’m going off…
Amy: Okay I like it; it seems like the apple might not have fallen too far from the tree.
Maria: Absolutely.
Amy: You made the decision to study art, fine arts, and dad was a little bit reluctant but you got a good sendoff it sounds like?
Maria: Cooper Union was free, so you can’t complain when your daughter is going to a school that is tuition free for four years.
Amy: That is pretty great. Talk to me about your college years in terms of studying fine art and also the newfound freedom that comes with moving out of the house and not being under your parents roof for a while. What happened to you during those years?
Maria: We are going to these places that are actually really core to my personality. When I was in high school, when I was about 15 or 16, I discovered the Rocky Horror Picture Show. And I bring it up because it was so important at the time because Rocky Horror was an invitation to be weird and different. And this was like the late 70s. It was like a blossoming, it was like a coming to age kind of movie for me where I was like oh my god, these are my people. These crazy people, who are expressing themselves visually, sexually, all kinds of ways. Tim Curry, I was like in love with him. So that kind of brought me into Cooper Union where it was the early 80s, it was an amazing time for art. I remember Basquiat. And Keith Haring was actually drawing chalk drawings in the subway at that point. You could see the chalk drawings in the subways. And Warhol was just around at every party you can imagine, right? And there were drag queen bars and I remember walking by a store called Love Saves the Day, where they were filming a movie. I went and said, who is in this movie, what is this movie called? Oh, Desperately Seeking Susan. I was like who is in it? Madonna? Who is Madonna? (Laughter) That was the era that I grew up in and it was just the best time to be in New York and the creativity and the individualism was just vibrant. There was just an invitation to be different. And that really was a catalyst for me in college.
Amy: I can totally believe that. I got to New York in ’89, which I would say was on the end, maybe after it had jumped the shark. But it was definitely towards the tail end of that moment in time and even I was romantic about the few years that New York had been before I got there. It was gritty, artists could still afford places, it was just crime ridden enough that you could do stuff without permission like permits weren’t a thing (laughs)…
Maria: Yes exactly. They were certain streets you can’t go down.
Amy: But the police had other things to worry about than if you were following certain rules with art.
Maria: Yeah, right, you get to a point because you grow up in that sort of gritty environment where it is dangerous and creative at the same time. I feel like growing up in New York during that time prepared me for anything. I live in Oakland; it is not the safest place in the world right? But you know what, I grew up in New York, I am really street-smart. My kids are street-smart and that prepares you for whatever comes your way when you get older.
Amy: I 100% agree. I grew up Detroit adjacent and then I went to New York City and both of those experiences were foundational to me. And then my experience in Oakland reminded me of both of those places and I love, love, love Oakland, it is so dense with flavor and grit and heart and creativity and scrappiness and resourceful, I just love it. I am not surprised you landed there and found yourself a new tribe on that side of the country. Get me to your career. Because you became a very powerful business leader in tech.
Maria: I know! Who would have guessed? (Laughter). There is a picture of me in the background, it is a picture of me from college and it is high hair. It’s like teased high hair with the hair parted on the side, like Prince and the Revolution days. That was my persona and then when I came to California accidentally. I went to art school, that’s where I became a designer. I went to work in Soho for Richard Saul Wurman. And he got the gig to redesign the Pacific Bell Yellow Pages. It sounds like a horrible project but I found it to be incredibly fascinating. It was the only thing that connected people and communities together back in the day, the Yellow Pages.
Amy: It was like the Encyclopedia of your neighborhood.
Maria: Exactly.
Amy: If you were charged with redesigning it, were they reimagining the Yellow Pages?
Maria: Yes, reimagining it and I was part of a team. It was also a time, when I got here in the late 80s, 1987, I grew up old-fashioned, paste up and mechanical, I had a stint at Rolling Stone magazine. And I came here and computers wound up on desktops within a year I was here. It was like you guys have to figure out what this tool means for design. It was this amazing moment that, sort of like design was going through a major transition. What does it mean to be a designer plus technology? And that kind of kept me here because I had just sublet my apartment in New York. I was not planning to stay here. I sublet it for three years, it took me three years to realize that I actually was living here, I was in denial for three years. But what kept me here was this incredible opportunity to use technology in new ways and everybody was a pioneer because it was brand-new to everybody. Everybody was trying to figure it out and sharing information and it was a super exciting time to be here. Because everybody embraced technology early on.
Amy: I got goosebumps because I’m thinking about the times that I’ve been involved in a kind of scene that was taking off, whether it was a music scene or an art movement or something and there is an incredible coalescing of energy and creativity and people around it. It tends to be really supportive at that time too because you’re lifting it up off the ground as opposed to competing with each other about it. I still have goosebumps. It is the most exciting place to be, it’s like being in a greenhouse when all the seeds are germinating.
Maria: Yes, exactly, everybody’s curious and trying to figure it out, and nobody has the leg up. Everybody is just supporting each other, what does it mean to do this thing in illustrator to make this thing happen? And so we were doing things at the understanding business that nobody was doing before. The kind of work we were doing with the Yellow Pages was reimagining it is a community access journal that people got. But then I was in charge of cartography. Maps, we did Yellow Pages for California, Nevada, I don’t know, they thought oh, she’s a pain in the ass. The people in California, my bosses didn’t really get me with the high hair and the loud voice. They weren’t really appreciative of my New Yorkness. So they threw me to cartographer it, as if it was like the bad thing to do. And I blossomed as a cartographer. I thought cartography was such an amazing, it was a combination of art and design and that every design decision you make is a piece of information. The size of the typeface connotes some kind of hierarchy. The color or the weight of the highway, I loved it, and I blossomed. It was constant delivery. It was like finish one Yellow Pages and start another and every map had to be built. So I had to build a team to keep the cadence going. So at 24 years old I was suddenly a creative director of 20 people. We had to figure out how to make the maps using computers and then we had to figure out how to collaborate, so all the maps looked like one person did it. You were saying how I became a successful entrepreneur, it really started with my superpower as a collaborator. And that goes back to my childhood because I was the person who threw the parties in Staten Island. I coordinated parties are coordinated events and so I had this ability to really bring people together, to believe in something bigger than themselves. I always believed that more brains equals better ideas, equals better solutions. So you bring brains together and you pick the best ideas. I never believed that my ideas are the best ideas.
Amy: In terms of coalescing people around something that’s greater than themselves, did you also find that you could convert the control freaks into collaborators?
Maria: Good question. One of the things about being a creative director, you get to pick the people you work with. The people with the biggest egos didn’t really last very long around me and I would just shut that shit down.
Amy: Yes! (Laughter) I believe it!
Maria: Again, coming back to my childhood, the upbringing, I have a lot of confidence in myself and I knew who I was. I didn’t have ego when I was a kid. Again, I believe in the power of the collective and as a woman designer you are surrounded by so many egos constantly. I was surrounded by male egos. In college all the great designers apparently were men. A teacher literally told me that.
Amy: Fuck that. Because all the great women designers got swept under history's rug.
Maria: Exactly, exactly! I was a tomboy growing up so I always had this. I’m going to prove to you that girls are better than men. I had that chip. So dealing with people with egos, those egos that were in power I still didn’t fare well with people who were in power with big egos.
Amy: Okay, would you say that now as an executive coach you are hands on with converting egos into collaborators?
Maria: People come to work with me, they recognize that they are either going through a transition in life or the things that they are doing aren’t necessarily working. People who come to me for coaching, come with a fair amount of humility. We all block. As a coach people, everybody shows up with a mask. Everybody comes with a mask. As a coach you can identify the type of mask based on what scares them. I find it to be a personal victory when people actually break down and cry because then I feel like I have gotten past the mask.
Amy: I do too, not because I’ve made them cry but because together we have gotten to some place vulnerable and they felt safe enough to have a release. That feels not only cathartic but some intimacy and trust has been built and from there we can really work on something meaningful because we are no longer trying to get in the door, we are now in the room.
Maria: Absolutely, and if they can’t break down and they can’t get past, to really take stock and be really honest with themselves, and have some self-awareness where their saboteur isn’t in charge, then they’re not going to be very successful, from a coaching perspective right? There has to be a certain amount of vulnerability to really get to the core and essence of what the problem is. So people come to me, I’m going to go there. I tell them usually, I say, you might be coming to me because you want advice on how to become a VP of design, but we are not going to stay there. We are going to go to other places that might be painful, so you should be prepared for that.
Amy: You sound like you are really relishing all of the learning that is coming with these robust challenges, cartography, computers, leading teams. So that probably sets you up with the confidence and the wherewithal and the know-how to launch your own studio, which you did, and ran for 20 years. It is pretty landmark, so talk to me about hot studio.
Maria: You sound like it was so planned and strategic, but alas it was not. (Laughter) Just like accidentally moving to the bay area, I accidentally founded a design studio that was wildly successful. (Laughter)
Amy: I can believe that you accidentally founded it but I can’t believe that the success was accidental.
Maria: No, it wasn’t. I had this mantra in life, you treat everything in life like a design problem. If you have that sort of curiosity and you think of it as a design problem, you don’t really get intimidated by what you don’t know. As long as you are curious, you can do research and…Figure it out. Which is my cavalier attitude towards running a business.
Amy: I just want to underscore that and highlight it and put an asterisk next to it because I think so many times students and professionals in any category get in their own way when they think they should know something, they’re insecure that they don’t, so they don’t let their curiosity lead. Instead they sort of hide behind whatever they don’t know and that is also incredibly disempowering to them because admitting that you don’t know something just opens the door to figuring it out. Hiding from the fact that you don’t know something, leaves you feeling helpless and disempowered.
Maria: Absolutely! In the spiritual world, and even in the neuroscience world, we are made of multiple parts. But there are two parts of us, there is a part of us that we call the ‘higher self.’ A lot of people use different terms for that part of us, but that self-energy is where you are curious and creative and open and optimistic, right? And in neuroscience we call it the ‘reward part’ of our brain, those parts of our brain where we light up and we are in flow, and that’s where art and music lives, so that is one part. The other part is the saboteur voice, the inner critic, the shadow, the mask, there are so many terms. And that part of the brain is where the threat response is. The threat response is when you are in threat you shut down. We are all wired for survival, so it’s fight, flight, freeze. That is in every single human being. So when I coach people, and especially leaders, I am like how are you going to show up? Are you going to show up as your saboteur or are you going to show up as yourself? Because other people will pick up that energy and then their saboteur self will show up. I can’t remember why I am bringing this up but I think this is really critically important around accessing that creative part of your brain and staying open there. And it is harder to do than it is to access the scared self. Oh yes we were talking about how people are afraid. So how do we access this part of us that we all have that gives us the confidence to step into things that are new versus listening to that part of us that’s saying you are not good enough, you don’t know enough, you don’t have the expertise. When we listen to that part of ourselves, you are not going to get very far in life.
Amy: You said something really powerful there too, when you listen to that part of yourself and you show up as that part of yourself, the scared part, that other people then are interacting with the scared part, with their scared part. So then you are setting the whole culture for your team or your organization based on everyone showing up with their saboteur. If I’m on a team I want people who are good in a crisis, people who are in flow, not the saboteurs.
Maria: So you have to show up as your higher self at that creative place. Kind of getting back to why I was a successful businesswoman, really did start with this ability where I could access that higher self, that creative part of me and bring it out in others. And that becomes an attraction…It is infectious. Even though I didn’t have experience running a business, I did have a sense of how to make money doing my work, doing art. But I didn’t go to business school, so I had to learn as I went. When I decided to go out on my own it was after the earthquake that happened here in ’89. I was traveling in Nepal, Thailand and India, the earthquake happened while I was out, and when I came back I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have a place to live, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have a job. Oh, I’m going to start freelancing. So I started freelancing and then I got busy, I’m like I’m busy, I’m going to hire people I know who could help. So I started Hot Studio because I got busy and because I knew how to be a good creative director and lead others, I can bring other people in to work with me. And then it became this domino effect where more people… We were getting busier because we were delivering really good work and the internet happened and that was like another pioneering moment where we were at the forefront of that. Because I brought my creative self, my higher self and inspired people to do their best work it became this domino effect where it became attractive to work at Hot Studio.
Amy: Well, I can feel it, and as you know we have heard from Sarah Brooks, who is a previous episode of Clever, that she worked at Hot Studio and was profoundly impacted.
Maria: An ex-hottie!
Amy: Yes (laughter). Yes. So Hot Studio grew and you proved yourself very handy at managing teams and delivering outstanding digital experiences. But not only that, shaping a bunch of designers along the way. I really want to talk about your acquisition in 2013 because…That is a moment in history where the good guys won! (Laughter)
Maria: I know. I know, I know, who would have guessed that I was able to negotiate the deal of the century, with my fine arts background. (Laughter) Those dog portraits and jean jacket paintings paid off. Yeah, I was shaping culture, learning as we go, encouraging others to learn and caring about the quality of work and the quality of the culture. And I was one of the few female business leaders running design studios. That also attracts a certain amount of people. We had an equal amount of women as men at Hot. We had a lot of diverse talent. Because I didn’t have a traditional business background, if a problem came up we would solve it creatively. For example, I have two kids, I had to figure out how to lead a company and be a mother at the same time. I would bring my babies to work with me. And then I figured out how to get the support I needed while taking client calls. That turned into a Babies at Work program at Hot Studio where mothers and fathers had support before they left for maternity leave and when they came back. Where they could actually bring their babies and dogs, for those who are non-breeders, who are like hey, equal rights. So we had these programs that came out of creativity because we didn’t have to deal with any business norms. That was the environment of Hot. It was really welcoming, it was about create good ideas, it was about collaboration and we survived multiple downturns. And then around 2013 is when Hot Studio got acquired by Facebook, and it was one of the largest design acquisitions that was done at the time. Again it was perfect timing. And a couple of things happened during that time that are noteworthy. I think Hot was around 15 or 16 years old at that point, I can’t remember how old it was, but it was over 15 years old because we threw a massive party (laughter). When I was starting to approach my late 40s, and Hot was about 80 people, it was in two locations, we had an office in New York, we had an office in San Francisco and we had survived so many downturns it was exhausting. Downturns are just super exhausting and scary. The company was at a size and scale where I was starting to feel like it was becoming a hamster wheel. For me personally, I felt like I had a lot of growth, from no business experience to being a CEO of a large company. I had learned a lot up until that point. I was in my late 40s and I am starting to really think ahead and going, I don’t think I can handle another downturn. I think I want to try something else in life. I kept telling my employees I’m not going to be 80 years old running Hot Studio, that is not going to happen. And I was always transparent with people. I was like you know, if it’s the right time and the right money and the right situation, yeah I would sell Hot Studio. So I was clear that could happen and through the course of the years there was a lot of acquiring interest for Hot over the years. Getting back to those ego driven people that we know and love so well, so many of them are in the VC world. I would meet with these guys, no women, and they would be like here is what your company is worth and blah blah blah. And I would sit there and I’m like these guys have no fucking idea what this company is about and its value proposition. They didn’t get it. They were just looking at it as numbers on a balance sheet. There were other offers but I was not interested in any of them because I really cared about the legacy of Hot Studio and the story. I did not want to see the company being acquired and then dismembered bit by bit by bit, which is what happens in acquisitions. So I told the universe I wanted to do something different by the time I was 50. We started working with Facebook back then, they became clients of ours. Basically at the time Facebook only had about 50 designers in the entire company, it was early, early days. So they were hiring Hot to supplement their design team. And eventually they were like, do you want to be bought? (Laughter) And I was like yeah. My friend and colleague and client at the time Margaret Stuart, she was my client, she said, “Hey, Sheryl Sandberg wants to have coffee with you.” I was like okay; I’ll drive down to Facebook and have coffee with Sheryl Sandberg. This was around December 2012. I go down to Facebook thinking I am having an informal discussion with Sheryl Sandberg and I get whisked into a conference room with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg grilling me about why I would be interested in selling my company to Facebook. (Laughs) No preparation whatsoever, zero. It’s not like I came with a balance sheet or a deck or anything. He just straight up asked me questions and I straight up answered those questions. And eventually that led to the sale of Hot Studio to Facebook which was in March 2013.
Amy: Yeah, March 2013, do you think that was in a way that was circumventing the mask that a lot of people show up with when they go to those kinds of meetings?
Maria: I think so. I think he smartly wanted to say, what is this woman about and what is her core motivation? Is her core motivation just to make a pile of money and that is it? So I was completely disarmed and I wasn’t prepped and that was probably a really good thing. And then the negotiations happened and what I had the benefit of is I had a great team of people around me that had been with me for years. I had a great accountant, I had a great lawyer, I had an M&A counselor, coach. And I also had an inner circle of people who had been acquired before, CEOs, friends of mine, both men and women who had had the same thing happen to them. So I was armed with all of this information of experience that they went through. So that kind of help me understand that world of M&A and negotiate a deal that not only benefited me, but it allowed us to end Hot Studio completely on a good note and that was important to me.
Amy: Yes! I can hear it and I can also imagine that being whisked off into that meeting and being caught off-guard was a good thing because you had already been thinking that you wanted to move onto something, you had already analyzed what the success and the value of Hot Studio was and how do you put a number on resilience and culture. So you could answer those questions from the heart in a room like that. And then with this support network around you that has all the background information that you might need, you can treat this acquisition like a design project. And you can put together what is going to end up with the best outcome for not just you, but Hot Studio and its next chapter.
Maria: Yes! And of course I asked for unconventional things because again I didn’t have the rulebook right? For example there were three pregnant women during this acquisition… Because they didn’t take everybody. They took a percentage of people from Hot and then there were other people that they didn’t take. I made sure that I could make sure that the people who were going had a great deal, but the people who didn’t go got money and health insurance, they got a long lead time. So if you worked at Hot for more than five years, you got a year’s salary, and that’s pretty wildly generous for a small company, right?
Amy: Yeah.
Maria: I really designed it with everybody in mind and I also insisted that they take the pregnant women. (Laughs) Which technically it is not legal, so I’m probably saying something very illegal right now. But it was so important to me that we weren’t going to kick out these people who were the breadwinners, who were suddenly going to have kids. I did a lot of unconventional things and then I say that the acquisition of Hot Studio was a Thelma and Louise moment. We went over the cliff, it ended, cleanly, no death by a thousand paper cuts! And I’m super proud of that legacy. And what I’m super proud of is that 10 years later, the acquisition was 10 years ago, people are talking about Hot Studio, which was my hope, that it was this time in their lives, the best time in their lives where they met lifelong friends, where they got to do their best work and they had a lot of fun. That’s what is so deeply gratifying. And then all of these people from Hot are now in positions of power in large companies all over the world. And I tell them, and I told them then, I take complete credit for their success! (Laughter) I can’t stress enough how important and powerful that is, that people have such an impactful and strong experience at Hot Studio, that then they carry that with them out. And then the positivity that is cultivated in Hot Studio around making change gets disseminated out to other corporate cultures and therefore the world because of these people that are out there in positions of leadership. And you are also really instrumental in ushering in the era of design leadership, both because of writing the Rise of the DEO, but also because this acquisition signaled the value of bringing design inhouse. It was a… What do you call that thing when there is a big shift? There was a seismic shift.
Maria: Yeah, the acquisition of Hot Studio made the news. And I like to say it was the ‘oh shit’ moment for technology. It wasn’t Hot Studio, at that time technology companies like Facebook had this ‘oh shit’ moment because customers were demanding good experiences. Thank you iPhone. That was a seminal moment for us. When the iPhone came out it changed everybody’s requirements for what good design could do and things had to be more intuitive, they had to be more customer focused. And all of these companies were like, it’s not about cool technology anymore, it is about user experience and we don’t have people who know how to do that. And so it created this buying spree of design companies and Hot Studio wasn’t the first to go, but it was a very powerful moment to have a company of that size being acquired by a technology company. And it just set off years of acquisitions for design studios. And around that time. Actually the Rise of the DEO, which was my third book, when I was the CEO of Hot Studio, so it must have been a year before, I think it was 2011, and I was at Hot Studio I was asked to give a TEDx talk. And I was like you know, I don’t do anything special, I don’t know what I’m going to talk about. I had a coach at the time, the name of the company was called TechTalk, Christine Dames, Kevin O’Malley ran this company and they were like my speech coaches, I was giving a lot of talks. So she looked at me and said, “Maria, you run companies differently than anybody that we’ve ever worked with.” I didn’t know that I ran companies differently, right? She’s like, “You know what you are Maria? You are a DEO.” So I have to give credit to Christine Dames who coined the phrase ‘DEO.’ Design Executive Officer. And that became the basis of that TED talk I gave in 2011 where I said rather provocatively that designers have special superpowers. But when you apply them out of the context of design and into business. Those are going to be the future leaders of America. Those are going to be the powerful leaders of America. So the superpowers are being a change agent, being a risk taker, using intuition, being a systems thinker, being people centered and getting shit done. Those are the qualities that designers have and if you apply those qualities to the business world you are going to get much better leaders. And that was the provocation in 2011. And then one of my partners in crime Christopher Ireland, who is a woman, she was CEO of a company called Cheskin. She was one of my mentors around acquisition. She had sold her company, Cheskin, a year or two before me, to WPP for a shitload of money. And she saw me give that TED talk and she said, “There is a book in it, let’s do a book together.”
Amy: Oh, that’s how it came about?
Maria: So we collaborated and the book came out in 2013 around the time that I was at Facebook. It talked about design at the executive level. And here we are 10 years later and you see design now in some of the top levels. So a little prophecy, a little bit of a prophecy there. I am so glad that Rise to the DEO was a rallying cry for people about the power of design. If you fast forward, the book that I’m doing now, Changemakers, that just came out in January, it’s almost like a sliver of the DEO, that change agent on steroids. I kind of say that being a changemaker is next level up leadership.
Amy: Yeah, that makes sense.
Maria: It is like dialing it up, right? And when I say ‘leader,’ I’m not saying that you have to be a VP of design to be a leader. Leadership is in all of us and being a changemaker is at any level of the organization. It’s a mindset and a strategy.
Amy: I think there is something underscoring your definition of a changemaker that is important to call out right now. Which is that this doesn’t mean being… Like leading the business to more success for their bottom line. Being a changemaker means using the organization to serve the public and doing that in a way that is mutually beneficial so that it creates a healthy feedback loop and a reciprocal relationship and positive change is being implemented in the world through the arm of the business.
Maria: Yes, that is the hope but everybody is on their own path…In terms of what their core motivation is. But part of being a changemaker is that people centeredness and caring about people. Kind of going back to what I was telling you about that reward versus threat response. This is in the book around change starts with you and how you show up. When you think about changemaking it is people and process, you need both of those things. The big thing, the big learning I got from these last couple of years around, to coaching and also through research of changemakers is a lot of people have this relentless focus on the customer or the product, whatever they are doing. We don’t do as good of a job paying attention to our peers or our bosses and what their needs and wants are. There is age-old discussion about designers have to speak business. No, designers, as all changemakers, need to be multilingual. If you can really detach what people, the words they are using and get to what they are trying to achieve, if you can get through that layer and look at what the shared purpose and goals are, you can be operating on a very different level. That’s true in society now today. We are so divided but if we can get to… And we have very different differences and belief systems, but I don’t inherently believe that most people that don’t agree with me are evil, right? I have to say, it takes a lot of discipline not to believe that in today’s world.
Amy: It does, you had a head start in a family that was lovingly bipartisan. (Laughter)
Maria: Yes, it was lovingly, lovingly, it’s not so much now. So this is where, okay the Shamanism is coming in. Learning more about empathy and compassion for others. If you do have that asshole boss or you have that stakeholder that you just can’t get along with, I often ask the people, my clients, what scares those people? Why is their threatened self showing up to become that asshole? What are they hiding behind? What is scaring them and how are you fueling their fire? And if you can get deeper and say okay, what do they need to get out of this? What do I need to get out of this? In any relationship, even a marriage, what do we need to get out of this? What is our shared humanity? Let’s start there and then we can kind of separate the differences and start talking about them without being so charged about it.
Amy: Right, or defensive.
Maria: Defensive, charged, because again, if you’re working with that triggered self, you are going to get a different answer than if you were working with that part of them that is creative and curious.
Amy: And empathy is a huge piece of it but I think there’s also a kind of acknowledgement or reverence for the fact that everybody is kind of on their own path and in their own stage of development. You may have been there in the past but that doesn’t mean… Everybody is kind of on their own timetable too for their own personal development…I think when I started to allow for that in all of my interactions, I started to have a lot more success just in circumventing, I don’t know, whatever it was that was getting in our way and getting to a place of mutual understanding a lot faster.
Maria: Yeah, I love that, mutual understanding. Change is scary for people and it depends, it could be a reward like I am getting married, or it could be I just got fired, right? There’s a core emotion attached to that event. We need to be understanding and compassionate that people have their own response to change and they have their own path in terms of self-realization, self-actualization, in terms of how that change will have an impact on their lives. We need to really realize that there’s differences there.
Amy: Do you have some advice for somebody who might be going through change to just recognize maybe where they are getting triggered and how they might be able to guide themselves or soothe themselves through the change? Because you don’t want to resist it and that’s what happens normally, we clamp down and resist it.
Maria: In 2018 I was the VP of Design and Autodesk, I was a changemaker, I was killing it, I was navigating change at scale, I was helping change hearts and minds. I was advocating people centric design; I was doing all the things. And I felt like I was in flow, I loved the CEO, I loved my boss, Amar Hanspal, he was the Chief Product Officer. He gave me a lot of latitude, he got me, both Karl and Amar got who I am and I felt I could be authentically me in this company. And then Karl decides it is time to retire and then the shit hits the fan at that level. The CEO steps down, a new CEO comes in, who actually knew me and liked me, he was in the company already, but he basically, when he became CEO, he basically in a very honest way was like, I respect you, I like you, but I don’t think your role is that important to the company right now, it is not that important, design is not that important. It is not as important as you think it is. Basically there is no need to have an executive design leader kind of thing. His focus was different. I can’t fault him for that. So I was pushed out, I was fired, I was laid off, fill in the cute little name that people want to say right? And it was utterly devastating to me. We have been talking about my incredible career up until this point. Because I am like a freaking hyper achiever, always had to get 100% on the report card kind of girl. And suddenly it’s like I had the scarlet letter on me. It was like oh my god, the F word, it happened to me.
Amy: It is weird because it’s not even because they said you fucked up or you did a bad job, it’s because they’re saying we don’t think what you do is that valuable.
Maria: For the business, right, at that time. And this is what’s happening now anyway, people are getting laid off left and right not because they didn’t do well, it is because the business doesn’t value what they are bringing at this point in time, right? And that happens. I got laid off, it was November 2018 or something like that, and I was giving a keynote talk in January here in San Francisco for In/Visible Talks and it was going to talk about my great career as a successful VP of Design at Autodesk.
Amy: Oh shit! (Laughter)
Maria: That was the talk I was going to give, here are all the amazing things I was able to accomplish at Autodesk. I went through this real depression, as we all do when these kinds of events happen to us. This was traumatic for me. For the talk I decided all right, this is something I don’t want to hide, I’m feeling shame and anger and all of these emotions. I didn’t tell the conference organizers what I was going to do, but I basically turned the talk into, here is a summary of what I did at Autodesk and by the way, I just got fired. I said this to the group and it was like [audible gasps]. And then I said how many of you have left a job when it wasn’t your decision? Most of the people in that group raised their hand and it was like okay, this terrible thing happened to me I’m going to let it free. I’m going to use it as a source of strength for me. And so I got really curious about… I was so proud of my accomplishments but yet it yielded in getting fired. What could I have done differently? That’s why I decided to get curious again and I was like I’m going to interview other people who are doing this role. Again, learning on the job. What did I do right and what did I do wrong? That embarked me on doing these interviews which became the basis of Changemakers. And so this book is really a collection of stories from over 40 people, like Sarah Brooks, who shared their vulnerabilities, being in situations like this. And that became the content for the book.
Amy: I am getting really moved right now, that is incredibly powerful because in order to be a changemaker you have to also be brave enough to go where people don’t want you to necessarily yet. They don’t want you to force them into change and so there’s a lot of resistance and that can come out in rejection or roads blocked or lots of different ways that your sense of self can get lacerated. (Laughs)
Maria: Absolutely and the book I was telling you about, at the same time I picked up this book called Managing Transitions. I was like why am I so sad and angry, I can’t get my emotions together. This book talks about whenever there is an event, a change in your life, whether it’s good news or bad news, right, it triggers grief. It triggers the stages of grief. The anger, the doubt, the acceptance…Bargaining, and it’s not linear with grief. Grief is not linear; you go up and down. You can be angry and then you can be bargaining and then you could be avoiding… All of those stages. And it basically says for any kind of stages of grief, you can’t rush it, you have to move through it. You have to let yourself grieve, and you have to give yourself time… It is okay that you are grieving because you are grieving the life that you had to step into a life that is unknown to you. And that is scary for anybody. It starts with that stage and then once you pass through grief you hit the stage called the ‘neutral zone.’ And I like to define it as you are lying in a coffin above ground waiting for your soul to rise. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be in that coffin. You might be there for six months, you might be there for a year, but you are processing, you get through the emotional processing and you start getting to this point where you are trying to figure out what’s next for you. And then there is a moment of clarity that happens and it is called ‘post-traumatic growth,’ it happens in trauma patients where there is a moment of clarity and the creative part of your brain gets sparked. And when you get to this moment of clarity, new synapses form and that is where new beginnings start. Once you can clear the voices out of your head and once you get to this neutral zone, you can start thinking about what is possible in life. You can start really accepting and getting excited about what is possible. This is in that book and I highly recommend it for anybody who is going through a transition in their life to pick that book up because it gave me a framework to understanding why I was feeling what I was feeling during this time of transition for me.
Amy: Thank you for that, that sounds incredibly helpful and it made me think that one of the places so many of us get stuck is in that stage of, why can’t I just get over it? I shouldn’t be feeling this way. And if you do that to yourself and deny and push down the feelings, then you’re not actually moving through the grief and the grief is just always going to be there, waiting to be dealt with.
Maria: Yeah it is. You have to move through grief. You can hide it, shame is where it happens here, you’ve just got to give yourself time to go through it. For me it involved a lot of massages and going to the beach and staring at the water. I needed to do that in order to move through the grief. So you’ve got to do what you need to do to move through it.
Amy: You’re a much better executive coach having gone through that?
Maria: Yes, and getting fired too. I think everything in life is a gift, the bad times as well as the good times, because it is all about lessons learned, I ask the universe, what do I need to learn from this bad experience? And going through that experience of being fired has really helped me deal with people who are getting fired right now. I am good. During this time of transition, that neutral zone piece where you start thinking about new possibilities, this is what happens to people, they get really scared when they lose a job and they start immediately feeling like oh my god, I’m never going to work again, all these voices in our head. And then you start going after these recruiters and it becomes an anxious, scary time where you are speaking to recruiters. And I went through that too. I was like oh my god, I have to continue to be a VP of Design, I have to continue making a shitload of money. If I pause, I am going to become irrelevant and people are going to forget me and not know who I am anymore. I went through all of those discussions in my head. I was at a party and I remember, it was a party and Clemont Mok who is a well-known designer, he worked for Apple back in the Steve Jobs days. He sold his company to Sapient, he was one of my mentors when my company got acquired. He’s kind of like a reserved guy, it’s not like you would expect to get monumental advice from him. I was talking to him about oh my god, I’m going on these interviews with Google and Twitter, you name it. I was telling him; I feel like I’m faking it. I’m worried, I don’t think I care about technology anymore, what happened to me, I don’t care, (Laughs) And he looked at me dead pan, he’s like, “Why are you doing this? You sold your company to Facebook, you don’t need the money, and that is a gift. Why are you doing this? You worked your whole life, since the time you graduated college, why don’t you just stop?” I didn’t even think about that, it wasn’t a consideration because my brain was saying, Go-go-go, you’ve got to keep going or you are going to be forgotten. It was like yeah, why am I doing this? And so I said I am going to cut off the calls with the recruiters, I cut the faucet. This is being in that neutral zone, I’m like okay, who am I becoming? Who am I now if I am not a VP of X. If I’m not making this, if I’m not traveling the world and doing all the things that that life gives you. I took stock of my life and I looked at my career, and this is really helpful for coaching because we all keep thinking of the career ladder, I’m here and I have to go a rung up, the constant moving up metaphor. So I decided to look at the through line in my career. I said okay, when I look at my career rather than what’s next, what did I love to do the most? Going back to that time when I was 24 years old trying to figure out cartography, working with a group of curious people, what I love to do the most is bring out the best in people and help them achieve great things. That was the through line, my whole life, I get the most enjoyment out of helping others be successful. And that’s why I became a coach. Because it was that realization that it wasn’t about, I love great design and I love art and I still do calligraphy and art and all of the things that I do, but at the end of the day it was never really about the thing, it was about the people making the thing and having them do their best work.
Amy: Hallelujah! I can completely relate; I’m trained as a furniture designer but I make a podcast because one of my favorite things to do is to have meaningful conversations with people who are making the world a better place and sharing those conversations with others so they can connect to the built world in a more meaningful way. When I realized that was what I wanted to spend my days doing, then I just designed myself a job to do it! (Laughs)
Maria: Yeah, treating everything like a design problem.
Amy: And I truly do love celebrating people, that’s my favorite thing. I think people are fascinating and what they do is amazing. Anyway I totally understand how you got to where you are and that it is not about the thing, it is about the people who do the thing. Talk to me about the coaching because I’m fascinated… A lot of people have a lot of different ideas about what coaching is right, depending on whether you’re talking about athletics or life coaching or spiritual coaching. But it sounds like you kind of mix a little bit of all of that.
Maria: I have a pantry of things, I really do!
Amy: Including hypnosis and shaman and…
Maria: Yeah, it’s all part of it right? I was going through this transformation during the pandemic. I got curious about coaching. I was curious about coaching but also I wanted to take coaching classes, largely because I realized also with the through line in my career that I am really good at talking but not very good at listening. (Laughter) My husband could double down on that! He has constantly caught me not listening to a damn thing that he was saying. So he has caught me.
Amy: Listening is a lot harder than people think it is.
Maria: It is, it is super hard, it requires discipline. So I started taking classes to learn how to ask better questions and to learn how to listen with intentionality. And I got really curious and interested in it and then I just kept taking more classes, just like accidentally moving to the Bay area. Oh, this is interesting, I’m going to take this class now, and this class. And then I took all the classes and it’s like, okay, you took all the classes do you want to become certified as a coach? Do you want to commit? We have been dating, now do you want to really make it official? Then I went down the certification route for coaching. When you start going down a coaching pathway it is really about listening to people checking in with their energy, getting to their core motivations, there is a lot of expertise that gets into doing the coaching practice. It is like an onion, once you start learning about coaching you start learning about neuroscience and you start understanding the brain mechanics and your body mechanics and how has that had an impact on your behavior and how you show up and all that, and that is super interesting to me. And then there is the somatic stuff, it’s like how is all of this stuff showing up in your body? So you can learn all about that. And then it’s like oh, you can coach individuals, how does that apply to coaching teams, which is different than facilitating teams. It is coaching teams, looking at team dynamics. And then Shamanism was, a lot of coaching is connected to yourself and spirituality, so when you talk about self-energy, you can define that as your soul, you can define it as a part of you that is connected to your brain, that fires creativity. Some people put themselves closer to God when it comes to that. Or you can say that there are spirit guides that are guiding you and one of those spirit guides is your higher self. There’s all sorts of ways to get to that self, either through science or through spirituality. So then I got curious about spirituality. I grew up Catholic in Staten Island and I had, let’s say I just had really bad role models when it came to religion. I did not subscribe to Catholic ideology at all. I never considered myself religious but always considered myself spiritual. I have always considered myself that there is something there, there is a higher power that we can’t just explain. So spirituality gave me that pathway into really understanding spirit. And how do you use spirits, which could be considered parts of you, how do you access those good parts of you to go to places that could be potentially scary, that have to be unlocked, those places of trauma that happened in our childhood? Or it could be things that you brought in from another lifetime, if you believe that. Or it could be a lineage line, like people from the Holocaust, people who are Jewish today still have that trauma from the Holocaust that they carry over from one generation to another.
Amy: Right, and it is both learned and epigenetic.
Maria: Absolutely. So the Shamanic work and the depth hypnosis is a way to guide people into their inner spirits, their inner soul, their inner self, and try to understand where the pain is and try to heal the pain, or lessen the pain. So when that pattern arises with them today, they have a connection to why they are triggered. So a lot of triggers are connected to something that has happened to them that has to be dealt with and not swept under the rug. We talked about how people hide things, it doesn’t mean they go away, they just get hidden.
Amy: Right.
Maria: And then they get re-traumatized through the way you behave. Could you think of parts of you, things that trigger you where it’s like oh my god, why am I so triggered? Why am I annoyed by this person? (Laughs)
Amy: Yeah, and I’ve been doing the work where I’ve been starting, not starting, I been doing this for a long time, but I’ve gotten to a place where I can kind of name, when I realize I’m triggered I can trace it back to what is at the root of it and I’m like, oh, that’s that part of me. And I just need to understand that I’m triggered and I can also calm myself down and move through it. But until you understand that or are even able to recognize that you are triggered, and you’re not focused on the external thinking that person did something wrong to me, so I have every right to be feeling this. As long as you are recognizing and able to name it, you can get closer to it and start to be kinder and more compassionate to it, in order to gently…
Maria: Yeah, I don’t know if you studied any work in this part, there is some great stuff, like internal family systems talks about parts work…I do want to shout out to Sacred Stream here in the Bay area, Geshe Thupten Jinpa is the one who has… And the Sacred Stream Foundation does these incredible classes when it comes to energy healing. Again, you could just take a class and get curious and if you’re interested take another class and it might take you down a pathway that you did not expect in life. Again, a girl growing up in Staten Island carrying around sage sticks and clearing spray, that’s a far cry from that girl with the high hair. (Laughter) I can’t believe it myself that I have crystals…
Amy: I don’t know, let’s trace it back. At high hair, he said it was kind of like Prince and if we think about Prince, he was clearly spiritual, he could speak to God and the devil at the same time right? He could get into the shadow and be transcendent, I don’t know, I think it’s a natural progression, honestly, if you start with Prince you’re going to get to the beautiful afterlife. (Laughs)
Maria: And we didn’t even talk about Prince, I have a Prince tattoo right here.
Amy: Oh my goodness! (Laughter) We have to talk more deeply; we have a whole other conversation about that.
Maria: Yeah, we could just do this every week!
Amy: Yes! (Laughter) Before I let you go is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you feel is important to share?
Maria: I belong to this activist group called Flip the Vote, and we’ve been doing it for a couple of years, a small group of ragtag people started it here in the Bay area and it’s a small group of people who invest in grassroots organizations across the country to help underrepresented people get out and vote. We target certain states and we fund grassroots areas like in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Georgia and North Carolina and Arizona. We fund these grassroots people who go door to door and build relationships with underrepresented populations to make sure that they have a voice during elections, both local and federal level. I’m bringing this up because we have a mantra there, because it is so easy to get depressed with what’s happening in the world right now. I look at my two kids, 20 and 23, and I look at the generation and that generation is what gives me hope. And hope is a discipline, because even though things are bad right now, I’m seeing younger generations all over the country, kids who are now being villainized or cast aside or punished. Thinking about Zoe from Montana and the two Justin’s in Tennessee, these are young, young people who are standing up for what they believe in. And even though it is hard for them right now, the fact that they are there gives me hope that that generation is going to turn things around. I guess I want to end with hope is a discipline and I believe in hope and I believe in progress. Even though there are setbacks, you’ve got to realize that you’ve set a stake in the ground for somebody else to take it and push it further. That’s how I want to end, with that hope is a discipline.
Amy: That’s brilliant, and I love that you’re ending it on a hopeful note. I agree with you, as an educator, I work with college students and I see how they take care of each other and how they accept each other and it gives me a great deal of hope. You have to choose it. You have to actively choose hope. It is a discipline and a practice and I love that you honed it and you’ve shared it with us and you’ve left us feeling much more optimistic. Maria, you are a powerhouse and an inspiration, thank you so much for sharing your story, your philosophy and all the ways that you work your magic in the world.
Maria: It was so much fun, I had so much fun. If my story can inspire somebody else then it is all worth it.Amy Devers: Hey, thanks so much for listening for a transcript of this episode, and more about Maria, including images of her work, and a bonus Q&A - head to cleverpodcast.com. If you can think of 3 people who would inspired by Clever - please tell them! It really helps us be out when you share Clever with your friends. You can listen to Clever on any of the podcast apps - please do hit the Follow or subscribe button in your app of choice so our new episodes will turn up in your feed.We love to hear from you on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter - you can find us @cleverpodcast and you can find me @amydevers. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements and bonus content. You can subscribe to our newsletter at cleverpodcast.com to make sure you don’t miss anything. Clever is hosted AND produced by me, Amy Devers with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan and music by El Ten Eleven.

What is your earliest memory?

That’s such a hard question? What comes to mind are the birthday parties my mother used to throw in our basement. I remember the themed cakes we made, birthday hats, and pin the tail on the donkey. I remember kindergarten and walking to school with my mother.

Maria’s jean jacket paintings in the 80s.

How do you feel about democratic design?

More brains = more ideas = better solutions. I believe there is no such thing as a purely original idea. We get our ideas by the things and people we’ve been exposed to and influenced by. I am passionate and celebrate great ideas regardless of where or who they come from.

What’s the best advice that you’ve ever gotten?

Early on in my design career, while I was an art student at Cooper Union, Richard Saul Wurman was a guest lecturer in my design class. I had a lightning bolt to the chest moment when we said something to the effect of “Stop designing for yourselves. Design is about helping people make sense of the world.” That statement profoundly impacted me. It provided meaning to the work that I was looking for and from that point forward put me on a path as a human-centered designer for the rest of my life.

How do you record your ideas?

I’m a visual thinker so I record most of my ideas on paper using Muji gel pens.

What’s your current favorite tool or material to work with?

I love to draw and paint so my favorite tools are markers, paints, lots of paper and when the mood strikes me, calligraphy pens and brushes.

What book is on your nightstand?

These days I’m reading “Your Brain on Art” by Susan Magnesen and Ivy Ross

Why is authenticity in design important?

I believe authenticity is important in every thing you do in life. When you life an authentic life, you have nothing to hide, and that’s a very freeing and liberating way to live. I try to be honest about who I am, what I’m good at, and things I struggle with.

In terms of design, I believe that designers must lean into their moral compass then they choose to work on a product or for certain people. Not only to set good intentions to create things in the world that benefit humankind, but to also take responsibility to do no harm, which means that we need to do a better job designing to prevent worst case scenarios.

Favorite restaurant in your city?

Well, I would have to say my favorite restaurant of all-time was my mother’s restaurant in Staten Island, NY Carol’s Cafe. My mother retired and the restaurant closed when she turned 80. But, you can read all about it in her memoir, “Kitchen Bitch” by Carol Frazzetta, available on Amazon.

1988 Yellow Pages which includes Maria’s cartography work

What might we find on your desk right now?

My art studio contains a collection of things I am doing right now. I’m surrounded by art supplies that are trying to catch my attention. I have a computer station for my coaching practice. I have an altar of offerings for my shamanic and energy healing practice. I clear the space with sage on a regular basis to keep the positive energy flowing in between coaching sessions.

Who do you look up to and why?

My mother, Carol Frazzetta. She really gave us permission to be our authentic selves. She fully embraced and encouraged our creativity. She was raised in an Italian household at a time when women weren’t encouraged to have careers. She overcame a lot of resistance to push through, studying cooking wherever possible, and ultimately running a very successful cooking school and restaurant for over 40 years.

What’s your favorite project that you’ve done and why?

Building a successful and well-respected design agency, Hot Studio as a woman CEO. I was surrounded by not only really talented, creative people, but incredible human beings. We worked hard, did incredible, high quality work, and had a lot of fun along the way. I’m really proud to see all the people continue to thrive and lead companies all over the world.

What are the last five songs you listened to?

Everything and anything Prince:)
Alanis Morrisette: Ironic
Four Non Blondes: What’s Up
Rihanna: Rude Boy
Beyonce: Freedom

Where can our listeners find you on the web and on social media?

www.changemakersbydesign.net
LinkedIn
Twitter
Instagram
www.hotstudio.com (sorry hasn’t been updated in a while :)

Clever is produced and hosted by Amy Devers with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.