Ryo Lu went from Notion's founding designer to cloning himself with AI at Cursor. This is the full conversation.
From building anime fansites at 11 to architecting Notion's core systems to creating his own OS in a browser - Ryo reveals why the best designers are actually tool makers in disguise.
We dig into creative burnout, why he stopped asking permission, and how AI is turning designers into parallel processors of their own brains.
Get the UX Tools Newsletter (written by me): https://uxtools.co
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Building websites at 11 years old
02:00 - The Chinese Apple fanboy community
03:50 - Failed startups and depression
07:00 - Creating "Chinese Stripe" in Shanghai
09:00 - How payment friction created China's internet boom
11:00 - Ivan's daily 4:30pm design critiques at Notion
14:00 - "I was not wrong either" - handling creative friction
17:00 - Becoming a sponge for information
20:00 - The fog of war problem in design
24:00 - "There is one ultimate solution"
27:00 - Why all SaaS tools are the same underneath
30:00 - From Figma to code - killing the abstraction layer
35:00 - Building prototyping environments
38:00 - Why Notion and Cursor solve the same problem
42:00 - What is RyoOS really?
45:00 - "Constant flow state" - rediscovering creative joy
48:00 - Designer burnout and serving too many masters
50:00 - 16-year-olds will out-build senior engineers
52:00 - "We're just builders and makers"
LINKS:
UX Tools Newsletter: https://uxtools.co
Follow Ryo: https://x.com/ryolu_
Try Cursor: https://cursor.ai
FOLLOW ME:
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@designertom
Instagram: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco
