In this teaser, Jeremy and Henrik debrief their conversation with Diarra Bousso, founder of the AI-first fashion startup DIARRABLU. They reflect on Diarra’s use of the word “yet” as a signal of growth, what it means to run a fashion brand more like a lab, and how her team “manages her back” when the ideas overflow. They also explore how AI is reshaping speed, sustainability, and experimentation in the fashion industry, and why your own lived experience might be your biggest asset in an AI-powered world. Full episode dropping next week.
In this teaser, Jeremy and Henrik debrief their conversation with Diarra Bousso, founder of the AI-first fashion startup DIARRABLU. They reflect on Diarra’s use of the word “yet” as a signal of growth, what it means to run a fashion brand more like a lab, and how her team “manages her back” when the ideas overflow. They also explore how AI is reshaping speed, sustainability, and experimentation in the fashion industry, and why your own lived experience might be your biggest asset in an AI-powered world.
Full episode dropping next week.
[00:00:00] Henrik Werdelin: Welcome to Beyond the Prompt, back with another teaser. What you're about to hear is Jeremy and my takeaways after speaking to next week's guest. Who might that be? You may ask. Well, she's only the second guest we ever invited back. Last time we called her founder of the Future. This time she's back showing what that actually looks like. Hope you enjoy our takeaway so much that you'll listen to the full episode next week.
[00:00:24] Diarra Bousso: Hi, I'm Dara Bussell. I'm the founder of Dara Blue, a fashion company. And today I'm very excited to talk about how I'm using AI to grow liquidity, to improve productivity sustainability, to optimize for joy, and to really think about what it looks like to update the operating system of the fashion industry.
[00:00:49] Jeremy Utley: Dude, Jeremy Ley. That's Henrik. Uh, Jeremy. Uh, Eleanor Rigby remix. Gray album, what would you call it? The, okay, so if Danger Mouses created the Gray album as the mashup between the White album and the Black album, you're more of a green guy than, than the Black. So like what would your mashup be?
Would it be the Lime album? I don't know. I
[00:01:08] Henrik Werdelin: think about that. I'll take the Lime album. I think that Back to Business though, professor
[00:01:16] Jeremy Utley: Gira, I mean, first of all. I love students who become heroes, and Diara certainly fits the bill student who's become a hero, just incredible founder. I mean, when we talked to her 18 months ago, she was ahead of the curve, and I think she's only stayed farther ahead of the curve.
Now she's just, she's accelerating, which is really exciting. And to hear some of her more recent updates are super fun. You know, one, one word that she used, which I loved and I wrote down to talk with you about later is the word. Yet. Yet she said that at the beginning. Right. I can't do that yet. And that I have found is a hallmark of a growth mindset.
You talk about this whole, the classic kind of growth versus fixed mindset. One of the ways it's manifested, as I understand it, is the use of the word yet implies someone has the expectation of progress. And I just love that she started there because so much of her personality and potential gets unleashed.
By that sense of she is someone in motion making progress. And I think for anybody who feels stuck adding the word yet to your statements, especially about your abilities, I can't launch a fashion design company yet, is a totally different posture. Anyway. Yeah, that's, that's one word that I think has enormous uh, power.
[00:02:36] Henrik Werdelin: I mean like we talk a lot about experimentation on the podcast. I think sometimes. It's, as we talked about in the conversation here, sometimes it's misused a little bit because it's kind of like mm-hmm. Becomes the excuse for mediocre, kind of like ideas and, and a little bit like also just, you know, I was just testing.
So I think there's two things, which if we double click on the experimentation part I thought was interesting. The one thing is that. She kind of talks about how she's helping specifically some of our junior folks with the origination, which I think is interesting 'cause I think there's been like this kind of business practice for many years where's like, you know, I'll just set overall goals and I'll just let my team do that thing.
Right. And I do get the sense that you is like active in her brainstorm and probably even has like a strong voice I would imagine too. But on the flip side, I think she also is aware of her abundance of ideas and you know, she talks about how. She's like, I don't know if she said they used all over the place, but she used kind of terms realizing that she kind of has a lot of ideas and a lot of stuff going on, and so she asked her staff to help manage output, right?
Which is obviously a very kind and not very forceful approach, and so I thought that was an interesting dualism in her approach to experimentation, which is, is this okay to be somewhat explicit with some of the ideas that you have for what people should experiment with? There's also kind of like a stand, what you can say, but I realized I also say a lot of different things and maybe I'm just saying all this 'cause it resonate a lot with me.
So you have to manage me back when I come with 10 different things that you can't kind of like run experiments on. Maybe just manage me back and saying, you know, hey, here's the two things I heard that I like the most from all these ideas you had. And those are the ones I'm gonna test for next week.
[00:04:19] Jeremy Utley: Hmm hmm. Yeah, I love. The fact that the culture of experimentation leads people to be excited about sharing ideas. She mentioned, you know, her, uh, operations lead who's going, oh, you gotta see this. I'm creating this tool. But having that leading with that kind of attitude. It has a ripple effect on others that they start sharing work in progress.
They start sharing ideas that are maybe outside of their lane, and it has a really fabulous impact on culture. When the founder is the kind of person who says, you actually manage me. It allows other people, I think, to have that attitude too, which I thought was cool. I saw
[00:04:57] Henrik Werdelin: this beautiful episode. I'm a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain's and he have an episode where he goes to Denmark to visit Noma, and this is an old episode.
Obviously 'cause he's not been here for a while. And in that episode there's a scene where they, after final close at the restaurant, which probably is like 11 o'clock, midnight, every week, all the chefs at the restaurant stay back and they show different things that they have, like different ideas. They have like experiments and they do it in front of everybody else and then they talk about them.
And Rene, who owns the restaurant then critiques it. What was also beautiful is after that. So one is like this whole kind of idea, we are all here to try to come up with great things and do great work. Now, at one point Anthony be says, what are you going to do? Are, you know, are you then gonna put like if somebody doest really well are you gonna put it on the menu?
And he goes like, of course not. He goes like, what do you mean? He goes like, well this is their dish. This is not my dish to put in my restaurant. This is their dish. Mm-hmm. To put whatever they wanna do. Right. Which just thought was like such a beautiful thing that they were not out there to mine new ideas to just make his restaurant better.
They were here for the intellectual interestingness of trying to come up with great stuff, and then when they came up with stuff, it was theirs to keep, which I thought was like such an interesting stuff. And so. Beautiful. I think there's, there's also the idea, which cannot make me think more about, as business owners, we should probably allow people to experiment more with their own things,
[00:06:28] Jeremy Utley: like have their own side project
[00:06:30] Henrik Werdelin: they're working on, which they should be allowed to be just theirs, because that by experimenting something that is just theirs, they probably lean even more into it.
And then I'm sure they'll come up with ideas then that is useful for the business. But doesn't have to be that direct idea that they kind of were, we're talking about. Right.
[00:06:47] Jeremy Utley: One of the things that I wrote down, this is kind of like a mantra, but I wrote down Your life is your preparation and there's something to the conversation we were having about folks being intimidated maybe by how fast younger people are getting up the learning curve, or we talked about the experience designer who's gone wait, you know, the, the person who can lift 300 pounds, but somebody can only lift a hundred.
If AI is gonna be 10 xing them, they're gonna be able to outperform. And Dara's comment that you've already done the hard work. It learning how to collaborate with AI is actually not the hard work you have done. The thing that can't be replicated, you've got, you're able to bench 300 pounds right now.
Imagine what will happen if you get unleash. And I just, I really liked that that kind of, that felt like a very uplifting statement. Like your life is the training. You've been training now. Use AI to get the supercharge use, use AI at the uplift, the augmentation. That was really cool. And the last thing I, that I wrote down that I thought was kinda interesting is just this validating of the novice perspective or the kind of naivete.
As you know, I'm a glutton for kind of origin stories of innovation. And so many great origin stories come from the person who doesn't know that it shouldn't be done that way. And Diara said, that's one, one thing she said is like, I, I did this because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to. You know, and you said, I mean, it seems like that's the way that everybody should do it.
And she goes, well, that's not how the industry does it. And the only reason I did it is because I didn't know you weren't supposed to. Mm-hmm. And I think that that just vindicating and validating sometimes not knowing is really important. So is, you know, acquiring knowledge and apprenticeship and all that stuff.
It's these things they seem to contradict, but they don't. That your naivete or your fresh perspective is sometimes a tremendous advantage. To see an existing system in a new way, and there are tons of examples of this throughout the history of innovation. I just love seeing it before our eyes with how she's disrupting the fashion industry.
[00:08:52] Henrik Werdelin: The last thing I added, which I think is building on that, is this kind of like world that I think started way back in making an easy landing page day where, I mean, I remember the first bar box we did that was just a photoshopped cannel box, right? Like there wasn't. Really a BarkBox at the time when I went out to a dog park and tried to sell it to people with my co-founders.
Now obviously now you can just render that very fast. You can make the website all these different things. And so I wrote this post a long time ago about morality versus virality, about where do we as founders feel we have a responsibility to the people that we are asking to serve the customers. Mm-hmm.
And what's nice about this example is that. She already have the raw material she already have, to your point, the system in which she can make this thing come to life. And so she feel very comfortable that she can actually go out, sell it, and then actually deliver on it. But some people without her ethics might not kind of feel like what?
And so I am curious and scared and inspired by this whole next two or three years. I think the internet just will be filled. All this stuff that is rendered and we all will have to figure out how we navigate in this world.
[00:10:11] Jeremy Utley: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:10:12] Henrik Werdelin: Like as founders for sure. Because we will need to, we'll get tempted to just
[00:10:16] Jeremy Utley: stewardship.
[00:10:18] Henrik Werdelin: And then I think there, as we talked about and premise of the book and all that stuff is relationship capital. Like authenticity and authority and being a trusted partner is something that's gonna matter a lot therefore. Hopefully people will gravitate to it because the internet will also be transparent.
So if you're somebody who just renders stuff and then don't deliver, uh, you're, you're gonna have a short career.
[00:10:39] Jeremy Utley: Well said Henrik. Well said.
[00:10:42] Henrik Werdelin: Sounds like you wanted to stop the podcast. Well, as it like Can I go now? No,
[00:10:47] Jeremy Utley: but I, I love, we gotta keep that part in 'cause that's hysterical. But the, um, you know, it's funny, anarch you saying that is collaborators mind at Stanford for years especially because like you're, if you're In the middle of a lecture or whatever. Sometimes you can lose track of time. And a, uh, shorthand that we used to use on stage was if while the other person is speaking, you say, that's really interesting, what that meant was shut up. We've gotta keep going. Uh, uh, uh, you know what we, we did. And so you'd be like, and, and like you use it a few times, you'll be like, that is really interesting.
I was like, you know, that means to be quiet.
[00:11:26] Henrik Werdelin: We have at Prehype, uh, which is this kind of incubator product studio I worked in for a long time. We had this phrase called Elmo, which I think I ponder my Philip kind of came up with, which is short for enough. Let's move on. Oh, that, that's good. And so he would just go like, you know, I am gonna throw an Elmo here.
So a very kind of non-threatening way. It was basically like, please shut up. That's, that's good. There you go. We're Elmo. We're El mowing it. Until same. Thank you, Elmo.
[00:11:52] Jeremy Utley: Until further notice.
[00:11:54] Henrik Werdelin: So. Until then, thank you so much for listening in and as ever, do you wanna do the begging today, Jeremy? Begging, begging, begging, pleading, begging for likes and subscribes and all that.
[00:12:05] Jeremy Utley: Yeah, just do it. Do the thing. Do the thing that you know, by the way, I did, I did notice on Apple Podcast we got a rude, like a comment recently, which I would love to bury. So maybe we say the code word is bury the rudeness, and if you've made it this far. You haven't ever written a review. We need your help to bury the rudeness that is currently at the top of uh Apple Podcasts.
[00:12:34] Henrik Werdelin: And with that,
[00:12:35] Jeremy Utley: bye-bye. Bye-bye.