In this episode, we dive deep with Diarra Bousso, founder of DIARRABLU, as she shares her journey from math teacher to fashion-tech entrepreneur. Diarra explains how she uses generative AI and algorithms to design sustainable fashion, significantly reducing textile waste. She highlights how AI has accelerated her design process, enabling her team to meet growing demand and rethink their approach to fashion. Diarra emphasizes the importance of embracing AI as a creative partner, sharing her philosophy of transparency in growth: “I can’t tell you to level up if I’m leveling up in private.” By openly sharing her processes, she fosters collaboration and continuous learning within her team. The episode concludes with Diarra’s vision for the future of fashion, where technology, tradition, and creativity merge to challenge industry norms. Her insights offer inspiration and practical advice for designers and entrepreneurs looking to leverage AI in a human-centered, innovative way.
In this episode, we dive deep with Diarra Bousso, founder of DIARRABLU, as she shares her journey from math teacher to fashion-tech entrepreneur. Diarra explains how she uses generative AI and algorithms to design sustainable fashion, significantly reducing textile waste. She highlights how AI has accelerated her design process, enabling her team to meet growing demand and rethink their approach to fashion.
Diarra emphasizes the importance of embracing AI as a creative partner, sharing her philosophy of transparency in growth: “I can’t tell you to level up if I’m leveling up in private.” By openly sharing her processes, she fosters collaboration and continuous learning within her team.
The episode concludes with Diarra’s vision for the future of fashion, where technology, tradition, and creativity merge to challenge industry norms. Her insights offer inspiration and practical advice for designers and entrepreneurs looking to leverage AI in a human-centered, innovative way.
DIARRABLU's website: Conscious Contemporary Lifestyle Brand – diarrablu
Diarra’s TED talk: TEDTALK – diarrablu
Diarra's website: Diarra Bousso
00:00 - Introduction to Diarra Bousso
00:40 - From Math Teacher to Fashion Designer
01:18 - Using AI to Visualize Fashion Designs
02:09 - Speeding Up the Fashion Design Process
03:34 - Fast, Sustainable Fashion with AI
05:40 - Customizing Fashion with AI Tools
07:59 - Creatives’ Resistance to AI
09:37 - AI as a Creative Amplifier
12:09 - Celebrating AI Successes in the Team
15:26 - AI as a Thought Partner for Strategy
23:11 - AI in Hiring and Operations
30:24 - Selling Designs Before They Exist
40:03 - “Leveling Up in Private”
49:33 - Teaching and Leading with AI
51:06 - Final Thoughts and Reflections
📜 Read the transcript for this episode: Transcript of Founder of the Future: Diarra Bousso on AI-Powered Sustainable Fashion |
[00:00:00] Diarra Bousso: I think, the creative industry still sees AI as a threat. Unfortunately, and the way it's being received, I think people are not being curious as like, let me experiment this thing and see what happens. They seeing it as, Oh my God, it's taking all our jobs
I'm Diarra Busso. I'm the founder of DIARRABLU and I've been using Gen AI for a while now. And I've been using generative technology in general for my brand from the beginning. And we are a fashion tech company using math, AI, and algorithms in general to design clothes and reduce textile waste in order to be more sustainable.
[00:00:35] Jeremy Utley: Diara, it's so good to see you.
[00:00:37] Diarra Bousso: Good to see you too. It's been a while.
[00:00:39] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, it has. It sounds like things are going really well. Yeah.
[00:00:42] Diarra Bousso: Things have been going well. Yeah. Growing and learning a lot of things the hard way.
[00:00:48] Jeremy Utley: That's the subtitle of entrepreneurship, right? Learning things the hard way.
[00:00:52] Diarra Bousso: But then you learn, you're so proud.
[00:00:54] Jeremy Utley: When you sent over the stuff that you've been doing with Gen AI thought, wow, that's so cool. We've got to get you on the show just to talk about how generative AI is impacting your business because it's, you've already got a fascinating origin story. I mean, high school teacher, math teacher turned fashion designer who uses algorithms to inspire her patterns. Senegalese, craftsmanship, and just incredible. Then you layer on generative AI. To me, it's, I'm dying for an update to hear what has changed since you started leveraging generative AI.
[00:01:32] Diarra Bousso: Yeah. A lot has changed. I feel like I've always been into the generative stuff, like the whole idea of using algorithms and equations. To design prints was so out of nowhere. That's what got the brand all this attention in the beginning, because it's like, what is she doing exactly? And at the time it was no AI. It was just like literally sitting. I was a math teacher. So I would write equations on Desmos, which is what you used to teach kids how to graph. And I would graph patterns. And then I'd make those patterns dresses and it's gen AI that process become, became like a million times faster. So I'm still using the math and stuff, but I've found a way to, Just amplify , and just like optimize so much more. And it's really affecting my sleep because now I'm too excited because I've always been a daydreamer and I'm always in my head and I can't focus too much. I'm like a little child, but now with these things where you can visualize your dreams live, it's insane. So
[00:02:23] Jeremy Utley: Okay, wait, you said visualize your dreams live, , tell us about a recent time where you got to visualize your dreams life. Just what happened?
[00:02:30] Diarra Bousso: Literally just like 20 minutes ago, I had a meeting. So we had a design meeting and we're working on our spring collection., so I'll just tell you that the typical product development process in fashion is that, you know, you do a sketch. Then somebody takes the sketch and turns it into a tech pack, meaning they make it into an engineering document with all the measurements. Like this is the measurement of the shoulders and the arms. And then they hand it to a factory. Then the factory makes a sample using that tech pack. Then they ship it back to you. That whole process takes a month and about a thousand dollars leave or take in terms of all the fees, the designer, the tech pack maker, the factory, the shipping back and forth. I get this done now in like, Less than a minute. So I completely eliminate that step before we move to making a sample because I just use gen AI to visualize whatever we're thinking about. And I can see it in my colors. And , I feel like I had an advantage that already built a propriety app that allowed me to visualize things really quickly with you know, I would write an equation and see it on a dress right away. And now I can do that. But also instead of it being a flat 2d dress, I could see it on a real model. I could be like, I want to see it on a. Brazilian model with blue hair and whatever with like mid journey and stuff. And I can literally just see it so we can eliminate design so much faster, like with the team and like, Oh my God, how fast is it? You're doing this. This would have taken us a month. I'm like, yeah.
[00:03:48] Henrik Werdelin: That's pretty concrete. How do you actually do that? Cause obviously sometimes. When you want to try to take, real product into the artificial world, it kind of, it'll make weird artifacts and stuff like that. So have you build your own little stable diffusion model? Do you mind telling a little bit more detail how you do it?
[00:04:06] Diarra Bousso: Yeah. So I haven't built my own. The model I've built is not even a model. It's more like a tool. And I can, if I can share my screen, I don't know if that helps. Sure. Visualize it.
[00:04:15] Jeremy Utley: By all means, we'd love to see it.
[00:04:16] Diarra Bousso: So I'm just going to show you, this is something that I built in the very beginning, early parts, early days, and with a friend. And this used to allow me, like I used to teach in the middle is like the kind of stuff I used to do. Like I would graph all these equations and they would create these prints. And this is how I wish to teach math to my students and have them pay attention. So we like, we designing a dress, we're not doing math and then they'll pay attention. But I built something that would allow me to just take the image in the middle and overlay it on different bodies and ethnicities of like the archetype of who shops our clothes. And also the different silhouettes. So I'm doing this new dress called, I don't know, the Alays jumpsuit or the Satu dress or whatever. So I could easily see it, but this was very flat in 2D, but this was enough because this process, is the old way. I used to just do that and then run a poll. So I'll just put it live on social media and people would vote. So within 24 hours between my app and social media, I would know what people liked. So that would eliminate guesswork because I'm like, okay, I'm not doing the blue tile stuff. Because people said no, but I'm going to do the black dress with the gold flowers at the bottom. So this used to be V1. With Gen AI, I can get this black dress with the blue flowers on the bottom, and actually turn it into a real human image. Now with even videos, you can even get her moving and walking. So not for the public, like from the public and crowdsourcing side, this is enough for me to know what I'm going to design, but for our teams to actually move forward in terms of sampling, construction, product development, all of that stuff. We can now turn this visual into an actual like 3d, like a real person. And I'll show you an example.
[00:05:50] Henrik Werdelin: Fast fashion is getting a completely new meaning now, huh?
[00:05:54] Diarra Bousso: Yeah, but fast in a responsible way, which is cool because fashion used to be associated with, you know, pollution and all that stuff. This is giving me fast in terms of design and decision making, but responsible. So if you look at these three, can you see these three nits that I have on the screen?
[00:06:09] Jeremy Utley: Yes.
[00:06:09] Diarra Bousso: Okay. So this is all AI. So it's like the process I showed you earlier, but then we took it one step further with Gen AI. We can use mid journey and all these stable decisions and load a picture and you can get an actual like visual. So the sweater on the left was created this way in May, and now I'm wearing it in real life. Wow. And so like, I just basically took this photo and just handed it off to the factory and it was like, I'm wearing it now. This got done within, in terms of production. It happened in less than two weeks, which was a sample. So the sampling took two weeks, but the actual design and creation and all of this stuff took me like, I don't know, two hours versus two months, showing you the process I showed you before and we are launching it for fall. So it's just completely. Exploded my creative ability, and before I used to have a problem is how am I going to have time to design? I'm teaching all day, you know, I'm busy. Life is intense. So that's how I came up with the math stuff to save time. And now it's like, how do I have time to sort through all these designs? Cause I have way too many options and I'm like, it's constant. It's amazing. And like, when I say the gap between dreaming and seeing it come to life has become so short. That I have a hard time sometimes falling asleep. Cause I'm like, I can just like visualize and imagine everything. And from a prototyping standpoint and for a small business, it's great because this is all costs. Like this is all stuff you would have made created ways, I'm showing you three nits here. It was like over 200 and we narrowed it to the top three, looking at our sales data, the colors, people like, , all of the materials we had available with the factory we're working with and stuff. And this is just the fashion side. I mean, I'm using the same idea in art. I just launched an art collection and we did an exhibition in Senegal and opened the store there. And just with steam in general, like whether it's marketing you know, communication.
[00:07:58] Henrik Werdelin: What's your trick or advice on taking an image you have from, for your inner eye and bringing that to life? Do you just describe in very much detail what you're kind of seeing, or do you have a process?
[00:08:14] Diarra Bousso: Yeah. So I describe what I'm seeing. Sometimes what I do is there are apps where you can actually upload an image, a sketch. So I would sketch it. Okay. Um, actually don't sketch it. I use my other app to just generate an image because I have like sketches in I call them ghosts. It's like white sketches that I can overlay any print and color on. So this is like ghost images that we added stuff to. And then I can just take this or like just resketch it by hand and then upload it to all these public, AI apps and say, give me a one shoulder dress worn by a black model of this height in this fabric. Some apps will give you a lot of bad stuff at first, but then you start really reverse engineering how the tool works because different apps use. Like the different, the prompting is different. Like some apps will recognize fabric. If you say cotton, they will generate something different. And if you say silk, some don't. Some care about you saying dress versus top. But most of them, last year when Dolly started, that's the first thing I was like, the fact that you can upload images and then have it guide the prompting was really amazing. And as you test, you get to see which ones can be true to the image versus not. And I don't see them as like a way to solve the problem and do the work for me, but It just kind of expands visualizing. And as a designer, it's all about visualizing and seeing things. And yeah it's been really powerful.
[00:09:34] Henrik Werdelin: When do you think you will start to see this? Like you obviously very early in using it as, as much as you do. When do you think you'll see like this kind of like a river of new designers that are using these techniques to bringing new designs out?
[00:09:51] Diarra Bousso: I think there's a cultural shift that has to happen. I think, the creative industry still sees AI as a threat. Unfortunately, and the way it's being received, I think people are not being curious as like, let me experiment this thing and see what happens. They seeing it as, Oh my God, it's taking all our jobs. Like I see so many groups and like treads on X or like, you know, videos and TikToks and reels and creatives complaining that, companies are replacing them with AIs. Like if you used to be an illustrator and sit and sketch that AI is doing it now and it's taking their jobs. And I think we need to reframe for me. , it's not taking your job. It's helping you do it better. And those people need to actually embrace it and really champion it. Like I'm always very public about from the beginning about using algorithm and generative ways to do work. It doesn't make me less than a designer. It actually makes me a better designer because I can actually design, which is what designer is. I have time now because all of this stuff is operations, getting a design to show you a picture of what you want. That's operations. That's not designed. Design is the original idea and intention. Like I had to decide. That I had to make an orange fabric with black things in between, like that requires brain space and the more you can hand stuff off to generative operatives tasks, the more time you have to be creative. So I think it's actually, that's how I would position it and how to frame it. And, if you're an illustrator or somebody who thinks their job is being replaced by AI, I really encourage you to actually try it. And still illustrate, but see how it can amplify as your illustrations where you can have it like a thought partner. You can draw one thing and have it generate 10 versions of it. And then you have the best one to present to your team. So I think there has to be a mental shift around how we approach this and how we see it as it's a collaborative tool. It's your friend and it helps you amplify your work versus taking your work. And I think once creatives. And the branding around this becomes more positive, then it can be more mainstream. Cause I've talked to a lot of designers who are like embarrassed to say that they use AI or they use generative stuff. Cause then it feels like I'm not an artist anymore. And I'm like, well, you asked me earlier what words I use and how I do my prompting. Like that's art. Like I need to have an idea in my head. It's not just click a button and you could be using the same tools, even using the same prompts and we'll have completely different collections. And there's a lot of work behind. By the time I ended up with this sweater with the girl wearing it and the knits and stuff. Yeah, that took me a very short time, but it's also years of like inspiration and understanding. Like my customers like these colors and understanding the kind of shapes they want and understanding geometry and building those designs. So there's a lot of design. Equity that you still need to have.
[00:12:23] Henrik Werdelin: I think that's a, such a powerful point. And , I think a lot of people miss that. I saw this quite stunning at the other day that somebody had created for Volvo and it was sent around and it was just this Volvo driving through this kind of urban deserted place and then trees was kind of like growing out from where this car was driving. And. I looked into who had made it, and it was a car photographer, like somebody. And I think that's one of, I think the points that people miss that is, AI can do quite a lot of stuff, but you can't write, make me a stunning Volvo ad. Like then it just comes up with average and bad. You will have to go in and actually describe in very minute detail what you can envision from your, in your imagination, and then it can bring that to life. And so I think to your point, prompting is then the new canvas for that type of creativity.
[00:13:19] Diarra Bousso: Exactly. And prompting, it's like writing a creative essay. Like it's very laborious, actually. And you know this when you start prompting a lot and you get the wrong output and you're like, literally, it's problem solving. And, I used to be a teacher and last year I went to see my kids graduate. And I was talking to the other teachers there and they were talking about, you know, how the school approaches AI and stuff and they were like, it's banned. And we don't talk about it. It's like this black box. I'm like, I would happily come and lead a training on AI etiquette because in the workplace I use it. And I am like, I do AI chat shout outs in my team. Like as soon as someone joins, I have this amazing marketing girl. She's based in Brazil. And when chat GPT came out, this woman is so smart. In the beginning, she wasn't super fluent in English. I would say she was 80 percent fluent and she was doing our newsletters. And I had to spend, I don't know, two, three hours a week, just going through all her copy all the time for newsletters, SMS, all this stuff that had copy in it. And then when chat GPT came out, I kind of just had a call with her and I showed her how she could use it to improve her work. It's like a rockstar right now. And last year we had to do this very complex report on Excel on like influencers and like engagement rates and stuff, but we had data in all these sheets and it was all messy and even I couldn't process it, she went to chat GPT, told her all the sheets she had and what it had and had her, You had to give her functions and equations to make it a report for, so that I could see what I need. When I saw this report, I was mind blown. I was like, wait, I didn't know I had an expert business intelligence data analysis. And she's like, I used to activity in the cutest way. And I was like, this is how you use AI. Like she's grown so much. And I'm always shouting her out in the team, whenever someone else joins, I'm like, just have a call with Carol because she'll show you, she knows has all the hacks and more than I do, but For me, it's a tool that makes you better, but you have to be good already. It's not going to turn you into a genius over there. Your intelligence is within you, but it's a tool that allows you to just solve things faster and access things faster and then really tap into that intelligence you already have in a way that's maybe more effective. Like if you wasted hours doing that Excel table and functions, she would have never gotten it because that's just not her background. It doesn't matter. What matters is getting the result and the engagement rates and the number she cared to present to me. And she got that. And that's kind of a good example for me of like, how I approach AI and everything. It's like, it just gets you there faster. And then it gives you the time to do the things that are really important.
[00:15:40] Jeremy Utley: And so when you say AI shout outs, tell us about that. Like, what does that look like? And how do you do it? Why do you do it?
[00:15:46] Diarra Bousso: So we have meetings. I do it because I want people to not be embarrassed about using, I think a lot of times, you know, people At least, I don't know, in my educational system when I grew up, I grew up in Senegal and like school was all about memorizing things and coming to class and seeming very smart and like you don't collaborate with others and you act like you didn't get any help and you just like know it all. I remember when I started working, I worked in finance and I was on Wall Street on a trading floor and I was completely lost. Like I was, I'm like always bragging Oh, I went to Wall Street, whatever. I was the worst trader you could imagine. And I lost so much money. I just couldn't, it just wasn't for me. And one of the big reasons I wasn't doing well is because I didn't understand what I was doing and I was too embarrassed to ask for help. Like I didn't, I thought that asking for help or showing that you've got assistance in something makes you weak. And I think with AI and all these tools, people feel like, and I saw that also in the school setting when it's hidden and you can't use it. It's like a bad thing that makes you like you're faking it or you're faking being smart. So I always do shout outs when I see someone who uses it in a well good way, like if you go to chat GPT and have it write all your emails in the copy paste, I'm not going to give you a shout out. Cause it's very obvious when something is written by a robot that there is no thoughtfulness to it. But I really love giving shout out to people who I can look at their work and I can tell because sometimes the finesse and the level of the work, this is AI assisted, but I welcome it because I know it allows you. To deliver something better. So in this case, I would have in the meeting, I'd be like, this person did this, she was able to, take the call notes from the last meeting and run them to AI and send me an executive summary that was super clear and give me action items. And I like, you know, somebody gave me a marketing roadmap of something, Oh, they told me that they use a certain tool or this is how they did it. And I just blasted to the team because I want to encourage them to do it in a way they can feel empowered and not embarrassed, but I also share bad examples that I'll be like, don't just go and copy paste. Sometimes somebody will email you something and they just copy pasted the output from chat dbt, but at the bottom, you'll see the text that say, here's an email that address is blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, now you're doing it the wrong way and you didn't put it in your thought and that's not the point. And the same thing with school. When I went back to see the students, I was talking to the English teacher. I was like, how do we teach kids to use AI to enhance their critical thinking skills? Because her biggest fear was. In her classroom, kids had to learn how to write essays and how to write comparisons between different regions or different books and stuff. And she felt like some of them were just going to chat GPT and I'd write it for them, but they actually don't learn anything. And I'm like, I agree. But she gave me the example of this one kid. He basically used the AI to scaffold and give him structure for how to write this essay. But then he wrote it himself and she was like, I'm torn. I don't know how to handle him because AI is technically banned in the school, but he used it very well. Like he used it to scaffold and structure his essay. And then he then use it as a thought partner. Like the back and forth was very clear, but he's going to get in trouble because we know he used AI. And I was like, he shouldn't get in trouble because the skill he used to do that is a skill that's going to get him far in life. And at the end of the day, that's what school is to teach you how to think and to solve problems. And clearly he did it very well. So I think , there's a huge mindset shifts that need to happen, in schools, in companies. And I think it's those shout outs are important, like celebrating and reinforcing this is how to do it right. And this is what we champion. And this is how to not do it. Right. Don't do it this way. And I think it was petition. Yeah.
[00:19:12] Jeremy Utley: You've mentioned this phrase thought partner a few times, I'd love to hear other examples because that's exactly how we think about generative AI in the power there is in thought partnership. What are other ways in which you collaborate with generative AI as a thought partner?
[00:19:30] Diarra Bousso: So this is I think my biggest use case is actually not the design. It's the thought partner. I always have. The tab open on my browser to just think things through. I assume it's another person. I don't treat it as this tool that's doing work for me. I assume it's another person who can help me in terms of thinking and my whole thought process. So I'd be in a meeting, let's say, and something awkward happens, , you're all working remote and I don't know, someone in the middle of the meeting is saying something very off or clearly they are not at their work office and they're at the beach or something random, happens. And sometimes I'm just taken aback. I'm like, how do I handle this? I'm not sure, do I do something, do I say something, or somebody is not feeling well, or someone just dropped out of a meeting out of the sudden. And I don't want to be like intrusive about their life situation, but I know something happened. Those are things where I just go to AI. And now with the audio feature and chat GPT, I don't even bother. I just like therapy. I'm like, Oh my God, I just had a meeting with Jeremy in the middle of the meeting. I saw his kid running in the back and then his camera went off and he dropped off. I'm not sure how to approach it, but I really want to show him that I care as a manager, but I don't want to be nosy. How do I address this? Literally as a voice note, and then I get, you know, and I'm like, can you please just draft me something that I can send him via text? cause it gives me this long email. He feels super corporate. I'm like, no. And then I'm like, this is how I talk to Jeremy. This is, the email chain, how we text, these are some examples, please write me something that can share that I care, but without being nosy, because I'm really concerned.
[00:20:59] Jeremy Utley: You just do for your examples where you just do screenshots of past text or yeah, yeah,
[00:21:04] Diarra Bousso: yeah, I'm very lazy. And I don't like that word because I don't think I'm lazy. I think I'm strategically very incompetent when AI is around. And I really channeled and my energy and then I checked on Jeremy and Jeremy feels very loved and it's not fake. I checked on him, but I took the time. It's like talking to my mom. When I was little, these are the things that I would ask my mom about. Like, you know, my friend is not feeling well and I don't know how to address it. What should I do? But now I can do it in 30 seconds. So that's one way. Another way, and this was very helpful , last week. . I was doing some scenario analysis that were very complex and it was 2 a m. and I had no one in the team who was up to talk to me about for a wholesale partner, and I had all these assumptions about the economy and how, our performance is going to improve next year and the return rates and shipping and logistics. It was a lot. And when I did an audio, I'm like, here, this is the buyer. Ex retailer. This is my relationship with her. This is , what she cares about. This is how many millions of dollars we've done with them in the past two years. This is the challenges we face. I'm trying to convince her to do this and these are the thoughts I have. Can you help me like turn it into either a presentation or an email or something that could really show her that we are ready for the future. Like I just left it broad. So at 2am and I got all these ideas like, okay, I think I want to go with the presentation with the scenarios you know, baseline and aggressive and stuff with clear assumptions. Can you help me design those slides and help me think through these scenarios? And by the end of the evening, I had this amazing deck that I did myself because he didn't do the deck for me, but it gave me so much thought to build a deck that could get this person to feel like. This brand is legit is growing and we should give them a chance. And then that's what, I sent to the team to kind of clean up and we sent it, but the thought partner part is really, really strong because I feel like not just as a founder, but as humans, we're not isolated beings. We just think on our own, we need to discuss, we need to think, we need to analyze and like having that. And for me, it's also helpful when you work with the team. I feel like before I would go to the team is V0 or V1, and then we iterate together all the way to V10. And then we lose a lot of time. I feel with AI, I can get like to V8 on my own. And then with the team, we got it from V8 to V10, but that's really important work we get to do. And we focus our time on really, really. amazing stuff, but all the original preliminary things were pre done. So it's been really helpful from a strategic planning standpoint and it's business management. Yeah.
[00:23:25] Henrik Werdelin: Jeremy and I, we also love this first drafting thing, , like how do you get away from The empty piece of paper. Question for you on the hiring , you speak about, uh, your Brazilian colleague. And I think for a lot of us entrepreneurs, we would love to find more people like her. How do you go around finding somebody like her these days?
[00:23:49] Diarra Bousso: I think having been a teacher before. Don't really do crazy interviews. I give people test projects to do right away. So I can see how they think, especially when hiring creatives or people who are just going to be delivering outputs of things. Yet when I'm hiring, I don't know someone who's more like a strategic leader and stuff, you're hiring them for their experience and their ability to make right decisions. And that's very hard to assess without like interviews and multiple talks. But when you're hiring someone who actually has to produce output of some sort, like, a designer, a marketer, or Someone who I just have to produce something. I create these school like assignments that I get them to do. And it's like, instead of doing the first interview, and it also allows me to filter people because if you don't do the assignment, you're not really interested. So I'll set up an assignment, for example, for design, I was like this girl, actually, I hired her back then when I was a teacher, I was like, it was, she was my first hire as an intern. I went on Upwork and she had a very beginner profile. She didn't have a lot of ratings. She was literally just out of college. I think she was 21 or something. And I had pulled this assignment, I was like, this is our brand. Please put together a content marketing plan for the next week. Give us three ideas for the next newsletters and design one of them. And two ideas for the next blog posts. And if you had to pick influencers, who would there be? And back then there was no AI. So she had to actually do this on her own. And not only did she do it all, she came back to me and she was like, I'm sorry, but you don't have a brand guide of like colors and font and stuff. And before I do this project, I need to know what that is. You haven't sent it to me. Let me know if you have one. If not, I can build one for you as part of the project. I was like, Oh, okay. And not only did she,
[00:25:22] Jeremy Utley: would you please go ahead and build that brand guide? Thanks so much.
[00:25:25] Diarra Bousso: She built a brand guide. This is like 90 percent of what we use today is that guide, like the colors found based on what she saw and she had like examples, she overperformed what I asked, she did more, and she was so thoughtful and she was a beginner, she had zero experience, but I had people I was interviewing with a lot of experience and, had all these things, but it was like what she executed , It's like when you are in school and you have a student and , you see the potential. I think as professors, Jeremy, you can confirm, you can see someone, you see the potential, even if they are not there today. And I saw that in her this person is going to grow because she's curious and she is not afraid to challenge the status quo. , I haven't even hired her yet. And she's already telling me what's wrong with my company. Like she clearly. It's good.
[00:26:07] Henrik Werdelin: So I've got a tip for you on the brand guide at Barg. We obviously have a brand guide now also, and make all these products. And so now I just took the brand guide and I put it up in a chat to be T and I now asking people to check stuff that they are putting out against that. And then just prompted it to say, you know, like you are the creative director and then. Come with basically critical feedback. And it's incredible how good it is of even just taking a PDF, which is the brand guide, and then applying it to things that people uploading.
[00:26:40] Diarra Bousso: It's like, if you're not performing and doing your job in marketing and all these things, it's honestly your fault these days, because you have, so much. Amazing tools. It's just, you need to have the right mindset and the patience and the willingness. For some people it's very hard to switch their way of thinking and working and incorporate these new tools, but it's been really powerful. And I think for me we are a fashion company. We operate like a tech startup. I think something I took away from the school that I will never forget is test small and iterate. I feel like I repeat it so much. It's a broken record, but anything anyone want to do, I'm like, okay, go ahead and test it. What do you mean by it? I'm like, I don't know, test it small and come back to me with some numbers. You have so many opportunities to just try things out or visualize or prototype, just test and bring me something more than be zero of where we are in this talk. And AI allows us to do that in so many ways. There's another example that came up last week. So in fashion as you know, the, lead times for collections are very long. And when you have a fashion business, in my case, you can either sell direct to customer on your website, which we do, or you can do wholesale and sell to other retailers. Like we work with Nordstrom and ShopBob, we work with Stitch Fix and stuff. And to show to retailers, you need to send them the collection six months ahead of time so that they can place their orders so that the collection can be ready six months later. So right now retailers are going to fashion week in New York. It starts tomorrow. And then after that, they're going to be ordering collections. For spring 2025. So in September they place orders for what's going to be in the stores in February, March onwards. And , this year I've been investing a lot in product development because I didn't have a product dev team. I just had my tech tools and I was doing it on my own, which was great digitally. But on the product side, you need experts. Like you need garment techs. You need expert to actually build the final thing. So humans are nowhere. They're not going to disappear. , we have jobs for them. , So I had a meeting last week with my new product development team. And, I have a designer she's in London. And then the team here is in SF we're on a call together. And there's something called a line sheet, which is a catalog you make of a few collection to send to the buyers so that they can place orders. And we are looking at my spring line sheet together. This is my first time ever getting it ready on time. In the past, I sent it two weeks before because I didn't have a six monthly time. I could produce anything to order. And I don't know if you can see my screen. So we send a line sheet to the buyers and one of the buyers already placed an order. So on the Friday call, I'm like, Oh, this buyer already placed an order. And the designer, she's in London. She's like, but those styles don't exist. I'm like, yeah. She's like, wait, you sold things that don't exist. I'm like, that's all I've ever done. I've never sold anything that actually exists. This is an AI image. She's like, oh my God, that's so risky. Generally you need a pattern. You need to be in a space. You need to show the samples. I'm like, yeah, I know that's how it works because I don't come from the fashion industry. I didn't know any of that. So I just did things my own way. And then we're on this call and she's just so surprised. And then the lady in LA, she's, used to also like traditional fashion companies and she's really, really strong. She's like, yeah, we don't want to do that anymore because it's very risky. I'm like, yeah, it also saves you a lot of money. millions of dollars of clothes like this. I sell things that don't exist. And that's just how I've built my company. And that's why, again, , we're in launchpad. One thing that Jeremy was telling me was like, are you cashflow positive? That's all that matters. It was not about, you know, PNL cashflow positive? This is why I'm cashflow positive. I don't know about this year because this year has been really intense, but just how I've been cashflow positive is that I don't buy in the inventory and buy things that people don't like. I just sell things that don't exist. And then once we pay for it, then we make it. So it was so surprising to her. And she's like, how have you been doing this? I'm like, well, I use, my math things and my app to design things in 2d, but now with AI, I can do things like this, where she's at the beach, the Maldives wearing our dress. In a viscose or cotton poplin and we got it ordered. So it's not just about saving time. It's also about saving money and just being more responsible as a person and as a founder and more sustainable, like the amount of waste we save. In this business model is really, yeah, it's amazing.
[00:30:38] Jeremy Utley: Do you think that you'll continue to be counter conventional or as the business grows, as you start interfacing more with conventional players, are you going to have to lose some of that launchpad mindset? What do you think?
[00:30:51] Diarra Bousso: I don't want to lose it. , I'm going through it this year and this year has been very tough for that reason, for the counter conventional versus conventional, The counter conventional stuff is what got us here. I remember when we first did our first podcast, I was a teacher back then, and I had received my first order. It was a million dollars and I turned it down. I'm not doing this. And I wasn't doing it because I didn't have the team or structure to make it possible. And I would have had to hire a bunch of artisans in Senegal, give them all this hope and then fire them after two months, because this order is not going to keep coming back. So I just took it, turned it down. And I had taken pride so much in just doing things my own way and turning things down and being very stubborn. And I don't even consider to me, I'm not stubborn. I just common sense. I don't want to do this wasteful thing. And oftentimes I would doubt myself because I feel like a little, like, you know, the black sheep over there who's doing her own thing and who doesn't seem to be , you know, I look at all these other fashion companies that are growing turning into unicorns and stuff. And I'm like, am I going to get there in this way of operating? And. A lot of my mentors have been really supportive. And what I'm realizing now is that the industry is not doing well because of that way of operating, it's very wasteful. A year and a half ago, I got an email from Ted. I don't know how they found me. And I want you to come and give a TED talk about your work because it's the future. And when I gave that TED talk, the amount of encouragement and support I received, it came out in March this year, so I'll send you guys a link. Um, I think I'm onto something. I just need to make sure to not be scared because I have moments where I was very hesitant and I'm like, Oh my God, maybe I shouldn't have turned this down or maybe I should do things differently. But the industry, this traditional inventory model of designing things six months in advance, buying a lot of inventory, sitting it in a warehouse and only selling 60 percent of it is killing brands. A lot of brands are shutting down. You end up with all this inventory you cannot sell. You end up sending it to a landfill, you're creating more waste. Like fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world. So I feel like the model I've built has allowed me not just to be cost effective and like cash savvy, but also sustainable and scaling. It is going to be tricky because I have to build the supply chain model I have was very small. And, I built a factory in Senegal and stuff. And now we're expanding our manufacturing and we're looking at factories in India, in Spain and Dominican Republic and all of these factories operate differently. So we are in the process right now of figuring out how do I keep doing this, like very not typical way of doing things while also scaling and it's not easy at all. So to follow basically, I have no, no example.
[00:33:25] Jeremy Utley: You're writing the playbook, my friend, you're writing the playbook that we all will be reading.
[00:33:29] Henrik Werdelin: How much of the TED talk was written by CHATgpt
[00:33:31] Diarra Bousso: oh, this part, I actually did it myself. That's the part, yeah. So I'll be honest. The TED talk was very emotional because at the time when Ted contacted me, I didn't want to talk about fashion. I always thought I was going to do a TED talk about mental health because that's something I really care about. And my whole life flipped 10 years ago and that's how I left Wall Street and decided to do this. So in my , manifestation of like, Oh, I'm going to give a TED talk one day and stand there in front of everyone and tell them everything I went through and you know, the usual sappy story. And then when they contacted me, they were like, we want to talk about passion and math and AI and sustainability. It's like, Oh my God, that's so boring. So I was like, I still need to find a way to connect it to mental health and love and all of that stuff that I care about. So it was a very personal talk. And the way it began. You don't even think I'm going to talk about fashion. It's like about my life and my accident. And I basically reframed sustainability, not like a word, but an act to protect everything you love and how that's rooted in my culture. And we protect, traditions, we protect resources, we protect culture and protecting the planet is just another way of loving it. So that one, I didn't use AI and I chose not to. At a time when I was writing the talk, it's when chat GPT had just started and I had fallen into this trap of being embarrassed of using AI in the beginning. I was like, Hmm, I don't think I AI for something as, because as a TED talk, so I'm a bit of a hypocrite in that way. But now if I had to do it again now, I would probably use more of it.
[00:34:51] Jeremy Utley: Okay. Wait so let's go there. You are falling into the habit of being embarrassed. I know you said earlier that that's something that you're trying hard to combat in your organization for people to not be embarrassed. When did you flip from, I'm embarrassed to use it to, I want to be vocal about how much it's unlocking and unleashing my creative ability.
[00:35:15] Diarra Bousso: Honestly, it's when I started I already know it was unlocking and unleashing. I didn't know how it'd be like assess or judge. It's when I saw that person in our team. Her name is Carol. When I saw her improving so amazingly and she has another, so at some point she hired herself an assistant who's now our content lead in Brazil. And the assistant was also not fluent. And at some point there was like a six month period in 2023 when I saw them all like the output and their work was just. Amazing. And when I would ask him Oh, who wrote this? Or who did this? He's like, Oh, it's me and Gabby. And we did this and thing, we used chat GP. And then I was like, wait, what? So I think they are the ones who actually encouraged me to be like, wait. It's not just me being in my little corner using this tool. It's really changing these people's relationship with work and their performance. I need to be more, you know, enthusiastic about being. Yeah.
[00:36:08] Jeremy Utley: So then here's my question. As you think about the future, we've talked touched on a little bit of the future in regards to, the fashion industry and sustainability, et cetera. As you think about employees, the future and your expectations of them, you said earlier, If you're a marketer, you don't have any excuses anymore because you have so many tools. In terms of, you know, KPIs, OKRs, however you might think about managing people, how do you think about ratcheting up expectations versus also creating bandwidth? Because we hear about burnout. You talked about mental health, right? There's a sense in which right now. You know, non AI powered humans are overworked. With AI we can get tremendous gains. How much do you think about increasing your expectations of people versus giving them their lives back?
[00:36:55] Diarra Bousso: So I had actually an experience with that this year . So one of the main things we focus on this year is, Leadership and building our supply chain because the supply chain I had built was like literally ad hoc. I built it together with my mom and we had a consultant and it was good for where we were, but it wasn't set up for where we need to be. So I brought in experts from LVMH and very funny story. , they, we used to work at. I think Louis Vuitton or Dior in Paris for 10, 15 years, like very good at supply chain. And then they moved to Argentina because they're from Argentina and they started a consulting firm to support luxury brands with supply chain. And , they still work with the LVMH group, but I was able to get in there. So now they work with me. So we had a meeting and they all flew in from Argentina to meet me in Philly because that's where our warehouse is. And we're all together. And we spent four days for me to Hand over all the operations of D. R. A. Blue to them for them to build it into what it needs to be for the next six months. This was in April. And we're in this, we work every day. And we have these meetings and this whiteboard and I'm writing all these things and it's going great. And then one of the days they put something called a mind map of all the different things that the organization is going to be now in the future and the departments and how they want to build it and everything. And it's an amazing meeting. Like the mind map is so inspiring and it's really cool. And we talk about it all. And then afterwards I'm like, how long did it take you guys to put this together? And they're like, it took us all week. Cause we've been, taking into account all the input you've been giving us and all this stuff. And then I'm like, I'm going to say something that's maybe going to upset you, but I just have to, do you guys use AI? And they're like, we hear about it, but you don't use it much. I mean, they were not very familiar. Okay, let me show you how I can create this mind map. You just gave me. And with all the backup texts it needs and everything in 30 seconds. So I just dumped all the notes from all, because every meeting we're having during the week, we're taking notes and like the whiteboard photos and everything. I just literally dumped it all in chat GPT. And I gave it a prompt that was very detailed. And I showed them and I said, look, and they just were like, Oh my God, like what? I'm like, yeah. So this means we have more time to do other things. And once I went back home, I share with them some screenshots and videos of how I use AI. And in terms of this overall organizations of thoughts, I showed the guy, cause they ended up hiring them after doing three months of interviews for a VP of operations. And I showed them the AI thread where I was doing the interviews. And what I was doing was every interview is fully present. I was recording the call. And at the end of the interviews, I had five top candidates, including them. And I literally showed it to them shamelessly. I was like, I'm going to show you. I dumped all the transcripts of in chat GPT. I gave you the job description. And I gave it all the issues I have currently with my company. And I said, give me the best one or rank them. And I showed them the output and they were like, wait, what? I was like, yeah. So just to show you things that I do, that saves us a lot of time, which means we have more time to do strategy and really creative stuff. And to this day, all of them, I'm constantly sending them things and shortcuts and they love it. But I also share how my expectations are a lot higher. in terms of communications, in terms of like, if you're going to send me a document, if you're going to send me a PowerPoint, like anything you send me, it has to be done. Perfectly, because you have no excuse. You have the tools to make the language flawless. You have the tools to make it presentation. You have to bullet it out. Like I need to be able to digest this very quickly and know where I should get to. And that's summarizing and synthesis work. It used to take people a long time,
[00:40:17] Jeremy Utley: and you're saying just to put a fine point on this, because the story kind of melded, I, and I was thinking about the LVMH people you're saying you are sharing with your employees all of the things you're doing to hire this person, to help you sort, to, you are giving your employees all of these examples, which is the basis for you ratcheting up the expectation.
[00:40:39] Diarra Bousso: Yeah. Cause I'm like, I can't tell you to level up when I'm leveling up in private. Cause I've leveled up. I do things now that two years ago I couldn't do. I sound 10 times smarter. I'm a lot faster. I'm a lot more organized. I'm a lot more polished in my presentations, but it's not fair for me to do this. Cause then the gap just keeps getting bigger and then expect you to do the same. So anytime I find something and these people are so smart they have so much experience. They've built the most incredible, supply chains, like some of the Dior. Like moving from France to the U S was done by them. They are just really smart people. And I'm like, if you have really smart people and you give them tools to superpower it's just amazing. Like our ops manager now, last week he wrote an SOP for something and I saw it and I was like, this is really good. Like it was really well done. It was beautiful. It was just amazing. And he's like, yeah, I used chat GPT and I added a few things and I was so proud of him because I know in the beginning they were reluctant about these tools and even culturally, I don't think it was as, I mean, we live in the Bay area. We are open to everything and we're always excited, but the rest of the world, not so much, but he's also his performance and his communication. I see his emails and this is people for whom English is not the first language. One of the guys in the team speaks like six languages. Super smart.
[00:41:53] Henrik Werdelin: Maybe I can ask you less as an entrepreneur, more as a teacher. If there are people listening to this and envious on your ability to use it yourself, but also to get your organization to use it, how would you teach somebody who is just getting into it of how to kind of go through the journey that you've done over the last few years?
[00:42:15] Diarra Bousso: So what I've done, and this is what I did with , the junior marketers in the beginning. I use loom a lot to screen record and I literally would just screen record how I'm working. And I would just send her these looms let's say, you know, we were talking in the beginning about the newsletter plan for the next six months and how to build it, or what kind of series should we do more in our blog to get more engagement and blah, blah, blah. So I'll literally go on my computer. I open all the tabs of the different things I'm working on. I'll record a loom and I'll show her how I'm going from one tab to the next and what I'm inputting in. I went on the blog and sorted it in the data by like the top three performing blogs. article from last year, I copy pasted that content, loaded it into chat GPT and said, this is the top performing blogs based on these content and topics. Can you give me 10 blog ideas for the next year? And then boom, then I have the 10 blog ideas and I go in another follow up and be like, okay, for each of these, give me an outline and make sure it covers topics such as sustainability, size, inclusivity, blah, blah, blah, . Okay. Now pretend that you are a reader and criticize this blog post for me. And find all the holes. Okay, good. And then I keep just going and this rabbit hole, it never ends, but it's just to show them , I'm not trying to get to a destination here. I just want to show you the process of how you can structure these things. And then I would just make it a loom and send it to them. And I can see because when somebody gets, watches a loom, you get a notification, which is very gratifying for me. I'm like, yeah, they watched it. And then I see the comments and the hearts and then, yeah, they put into practice. And honestly, everybody uses AI in their own way. I think , you just need to show people how to start. And that's get back to like your intrinsic intelligence. Is what's going to make you use it in the way that works for you. So like how it works for me, I can show you how to start and do it, give you like, you know, a few five minute looms, but once you get a hang of it, you're going to use it and get an output. That's completely different from mine and even better. So to me, and that's the teacher side is like make your thinking visible as much as possible. And instead of telling you, I just show you, or two weeks ago we had a, not a fight, but we had a little bit of an argument with our warehouse company. And we had a call with them and we had given them all these things that they need to respect and whatever. And, I went in AI and put in all the transcript and put it all together into something. And then I sent it to our ops manager and showed him, this is how I addressed it using AI, using, the bullets we wanted to cover, the tone from the call, their personalities, and just so you know, this is a screenshot of what it gave me of an output. And most importantly, this is how I'm changing it because I can't just copy paste what it gives me, but it's done 90 percent of the work. And I just shared it with him on WhatsApp. I randomly come up with something that's fascinating. And I just took a screenshot and I just send it to you on WhatsApp. I'm like, check it out, see if you like it. So for me, it's just share with people. I don't gatekeep anything because I've seen how it makes people with work better. And for me, , I don't want you to be overworked or burnout. The happier you are in your life, the better you're going to perform and do work for the company. So it's in my best interest to give you all the shortcuts. So you don't do busy work. Everybody that you hire ideally is intelligent, right? I want you to have the time to really leverage that intelligence and meaning all the operator and busy work stuff. Just hand it over to. A thought partner called, Chad, GBT or Claude or whatever you call it. , and give me your best creative work.
[00:45:36] Henrik Werdelin: What is the thing that you haven't done yet, but that's next on your to do list, but haven't got around to, I haven't figured out how to quite do yet.
[00:45:45] Diarra Bousso: You mean with AI in general? Yeah. Huh. That's a tough one. I haven't thought about that yet. Maybe video. I've done some like video like a friend
[00:45:53] Henrik Werdelin: runway ML kind of things
[00:45:55] Diarra Bousso: . Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a friend working for this video AI startup, and I was able to take from my 2D app to the 3D AI to put it in a video and make it dance and stuff. I did it once or twice and it was mind blowing. One of them is called Dream AI or something. I need to check the name, but I was like, this is going to be a rabbit hole. It's going to take my life away from me because it was so good. It's so powerful. I'm just going to stay in my room and do this all day and not go out anymore. I cannot. So I've been purposefully avoiding it, but I think I want to play more with video for sure. And then in the art world, I, so I mentioned this to Jeremy, I worked on a project in June that I launched, which was an art collection. And in the art world, the word AI is very badly seen. And I spoke to an art curator last week. And she explained to me that basically art is all about history and citations. When you do an art piece you have to cite everyone who inspired it. That's part of the art is the respecting, you know, if you did something that's inspired by Picasso, you have to cite Picasso. And as an artist, and she felt like with AI, people are just pressing a button and copying all these past artists work. You'd say, I want a Picasso inspired painting and whatever, and then they don't get cited and they feel like that's theft and they are very not, receptive to it. And then I was like, I agree. And I understand what you mean. She's like, how do you use AI? So I had to walk her through. I'm like, for me, AI is, again, it's a crowdsourcing tool. Even in art, I've always painted, , I've done exhibitions and stuff. And I've always considered myself an artist. What I've always struggled with is how much art you create that nobody likes. And with AI, you can crowdsource your art. So you can start designing something or painting something. And then you can use AI to create a version of it without showing the real one and get people to vote if they like it and start getting a feel for what people like. Because I think as an artist, you want to express yourself, but let's be honest, you also want to sell your art and you can express yourself all you want. If nobody's buying it, you're not going to be an artist for long because you're going to be broken you know, suffer. So. I shared with her that for me, AI and technology in general is for crowdsourcing and showcasing preparatory drawings and work before it's live to understand. It's like product market fit again. , it's the d. school just brainwashed me and I'll never go back, but that's what happened. It's like, I'm trying to do product market fit for my painting. And AI allows me to do that. And then by the time I actually release an art collection that I've sat down and painted myself, or sometime I'll have an AI generated something, but I'll change it and add more. Then I know this is going to work. And I know it's going to resonate. I know it'll give the message it needs to give because I've already crowdsourced it. So that's something that I've been working on. And I'm struggling with how to communicate it to the bigger art community without getting trashed, because I'm like, I still don't want them to feel like, oh, that's not how art is. And this curator was amazing. She's, very high profile museum. She said, if you do an exhibition, what I want you to do is have an exhibition that transforms from day one to day hundred with people's inputs to show the real life version of what AI is doing for you. Cause I think that would be more welcome. because basically with AI, , you're allowing normal people to be art critics through social media, which sounds very like, cheap and not art, but it's actually art. I'm posting things and iterated constantly and getting you to vote and tell me what you think. And by the time, I'm doing my final painting. It has a million people's opinions, which I want. She's like, what if you could do this in a museum setting where you have a painting to start exhibition and every day when people come in and add inputs and comments, you improve the painting and change it. And maybe that's how you can show to the art community. What AI does for you, because that's very powerful and that is laborious. And that's not clicking a button and copying Picasso. I was like, okay, I know what my next project is. So, that was very nice to get, because I think sometimes it's good to get other people's perspectives on why these things are not welcomed and how it affects their respective industries. Cause it's valid. I understand her point. And it also pushed me to think further and more responsibly about all of this stuff.
[00:49:47] Jeremy Utley: That's so cool. You're awesome, Diara. You're so great. , I love seeing your journey. I mean, to me, probably the most inspiring thing is actually how you're bringing others along. and helping other people learn. And you're not hoarding any of these gains for yourself. You're really eager to see others be unleashed. And I think it's such a tremendous model of what a AI driven leader can look like. So thanks for your time.
[00:50:13] Diarra Bousso: Thank you. I mean, for me, the teaching part. This can be lonely. I think there's a part where also you don't want to feel like you're this robot. And I think that's how, sometimes my family and like people in Senegal looks at me like this, like robot girl who lives in the Bay area and who talks to aliens and she's in her room. And I'm like, that's not who I am. What I'm doing is very relatable and anyone can do it. And I think the more I get to share what I'm working on, you know, whether it's the AI stuff, the math stuff, like it's all as soon as I develop my math fixed out. Printing thing, I turned it into a lesson plan and made it public. And 20, 000 teachers now use it in the U. S. For me the more people can use these things, the more impact it can have. And for me, , the long run was always to I think that's the teacher in me. Like I want to inspire people to think differently and do things better. And you can only do that if you have more people doing it. So you have to share.
[00:51:04] Jeremy Utley: Bravo. Bravo. Thank you so much.
[00:51:06] Diarra Bousso: All right. Thank you.
[00:51:07] Henrik Werdelin: I'm going to go and buy a few dresses from her wife. It's incredible stuff.
[00:51:11] Diarra Bousso: Yay. Thank you. All right. Thank you all so much.
[00:51:16] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. Thank you. Have a great day. See you soon.
[00:51:18] Diarra Bousso: Okay. Bye. Bye.
[00:51:20] Henrik Werdelin: Jeremy Odley.
[00:51:22] Jeremy Utley: Live before studio audience. Diarra Bousso, how amazing is she?
[00:51:26] Henrik Werdelin: She's incredible. I think she's such a iconic kind of like archetype of what I think will be founders of the future. The ones that has a very clear vision for something she wants to create, and then just use these new tools to , make it, get that reality to materialize as fast as possible. A few things that I thought was interesting is, and we've heard it from a few people, it is that if you want your organization to use AI, you have to use it yourself. And I really think she is a very good example of that. And then you have to show by doing. And I think as simple as it is, Loom seemed to be such an incredible tool for just doing that. Hey, I just saw you did that. I have this idea of how you might be able to do that faster, better with high fidelity, with AI, without having to go all the way down to actually have the output, but just saying, Hey, have you thought that? And the reason why I think it's so important is that I'm still blown away by how many people who actually don't really know how to use the tool or think about how to use the tool. And if they're shown a concrete example from their world, go like, Wow. So I can only imagine working in her organization and just get looms with kind of like these tricks on how to free up more mental capacity so I can spend that on better things.
[00:52:53] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, I love her teacher's heart really comes through. She's trying to create capacity and others. She wants others to succeed. I love her AI shout outs, and, making sure people aren't embarrassed. Of using a I think is really cool for me. Obviously, I resonated with the idea of her biggest use cases as a thought partner. I love the example of two a. m. I'm trying to deal with the supplier. I'm trying to make a case for why we're a brand that's growing and all this stuff. And you know, everybody's asleep. That doesn't mean that you can't have thoughtful, strategic collaboration now in the era of AI. I think that's very cool. And then, probably my favorite quote of the entire episode is, I can't tell you to level up if I'm leveling up in private. I thought that was so great that she's finding ways to make her thinking visible and to celebrate how she's improving herself so that she's, Not just telling her team to get better, but she's showing her team, you all are seeing me get better. And here's how to me, she's leading from the front. And maybe that's what the founder of the future does is the founder of the future leads from the front and demonstrates the journey and transformation that they're on themselves.
[00:54:07] Henrik Werdelin: Amen.
[00:54:09] Jeremy Utley: Folks. Diara Busso is a leader who should be known. Would you please share this episode with a founder or a leader who you think might be inspired by Diara's incredible approach to unleashing her team? Feel free to share with your boss. Feel free to share with your partner. Feel free to listen again, leave a comment, post it on social media. People need to know about the wisdom of Diara Busso. I know that my day and my life is better because I had a chance to talk to her and Henrik today. Thanks for listening.