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Andy Dahley

Andy Dahley

Tech design veteran with 20+ years of experience at startups & industry leaders and MIT Media Lab grad. Led AI design at Google and Meta. Expert in growth, emerging tech (AI/AR/VR), and building new products and high-performing teams.

An Open Innovation Blueprint: Lessons to learn from Bell Labs

An Open Innovation Blueprint: Lessons to learn from Bell Labs

And Why We Need to Recreate It On a December afternoon in 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated a small piece of germanium that could amplify electrical signals. The transistor. Within 20 years, it would enable the entire computer revolution. They weren't trying to build computers. They

America's Innovation Engine is Choking on Its Own IP

America's Innovation Engine is Choking on Its Own IP

The $50 Trillion Lesson We Keep Forgetting In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee made a decision that would define your digital life. As the inventor of the World Wide Web, he could have patented his creation and become incomprehensibly wealthy. Instead, he gave it away, releasing the protocols (HTTP, HTML) freely to

Three Questions to Think About When You Use AI

Three Questions to Think About When You Use AI

Directive thinkers ask these questions. Most people skip straight to the prompt. 1. "Am I trying to decide or produce?" AI can't make decisions. It can produce variations. ❌ Don't ask: "Should we redesign our checkout?" (Requires judgment, user insight, business context) ✅ Ask:

You Can't Un-Invent Fire: Designers Should Explore, Not Block

You Can't Un-Invent Fire: Designers Should Explore, Not Block

A startup wants you to design an interface for AI that analyzes human behavior from video. It could revolutionize eldercare—or enable mass surveillance. Do you take the project? Today's tech ethics creates pressure to avoid potentially harmful technologies. While few designers explicitly refuse projects outright, many hesitate,

One Great Thing Beats Five Mediocre Things

One Great Thing Beats Five Mediocre Things

The most successful products in history didn't win by doing everything - they won by doing one thing exceptionally well. Feature bloat happens when insecure product teams compensate for weak core value by adding more features. This creates the illusion of progress while actually overwhelming users and diluting

We Want AI That Reads Our Mind (But Should We?)

We Want AI That Reads Our Mind (But Should We?)

I'm frustrated with today's AI assistants. They're glorified search engines that wait for me to tell them exactly what I want. I want an AI that anticipates my needs, organizes my scattered thoughts, and suggests what I should do next before I realize I

Latency: Every Millisecond Matters!

Latency: Every Millisecond Matters!

A user taps "Send" on their message and waits. Two seconds pass. They tap again, assuming it didn't work. Now your system processes the same action twice while the user's trust erodes. This scenario plays out millions of times daily, yet teams rarely connect