How She Got There

An interview with Mule Design’s Erika Hall about philosophy, phone calls and her professional journey.

In the fall of 2013 I interviewed Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design Studio, one of the most influential design practices in North America. It was the first of fourteen interviews that I would conduct for my book How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers, and so in many ways it was the most important, too.

Erika had been profiled numerous times in many different forums, and her insights on design, business and technology were well known. I was after something narrower, though. I wanted to hear about the nitty gritty of her professional journey, the trials and tribulations she encountered in finding meaningful work, and the stories of her lucky breaks and less lucky mishaps. The goal of How They Got There was to document the random things that conspire together to forge every career, even very high profile ones like Erika’s.

I knew that, if it went off well, our discussion would serve as a kind of template for the others that would follow, and so I was relieved when Erika talked about her professional life with such unaffected candor and incisive wit. Her tales of the first dot-com bubble and burst, and how she salvaged from that wreckage the building blocks that would lead to Mule Design, were exactly what I was looking for. This interview remains one of my very favorites from all of the ones I conducted for How They Got There.

You studied philosophy at Dartmouth. How did you get from there into doing the kind of work that you’re doing? What was the first step?

Well, let’s see, the first step was graduating into a recession with a philosophy degree [laughs].

Perfect.

Then the first job I got, amusingly, was — you know how venture capital partnerships frequently have girls in the front office? That’s the job I had immediately after graduating. Well, not as immediately as I would have liked — I got it six months after graduating. I did not know what a venture capital partnership was, but I knew that my philosophy degree qualified me to sit at a front desk while I figured things out. It was a pretty unsuccessful partnership. It wasn’t even on Sand Hill Road. I had no idea what they did. So I spent a couple of years working at this grunty VC job for no money with horrible people, and all my friends were working at Apple.

Dartmouth sent a lot of graduates to Apple. When I went there it was an all-Apple campus. So I wasn’t really aware of what it meant to have what I had there. All of the dorms had AppleTalk and we all had Macs. All the Macs had HyperCard and I taught myself HyperTalk.

This was at the end of the ’80s, early ’90s?

Yes, early ’90s.

That’s pretty impressive.

I’d always been interested in computers, too. Actually, going back further, one of my great holiday meltdowns was when I’d asked for a computer and my parents got me an Atari video game system. I had gotten out the Sears catalog, the “Wish Book,” and I thought, “Hey, the Atari 800, there’s a computer. I want to learn how to program.” Then the box showed up under the tree, and I thought, “Yes!” I opened it, and I thought, “A video game system, really? Really?!” I was just so angry.

How old were you?

I was 10 or 12, somewhere in there. Maybe middle school-ish. I hung out at RadioShack more than most little girls. I got Omni magazine. I read a lot of sci-fi, too.

Then for my birthday, six months later, I got a Commodore VIC-20, plugged it into the TV, and I learned BASIC and made little weird graphical things happen on the screen.

When I went to college, I drew on that and took a programming class. It was fun. I learned a lot and I learned the basics of programming.

Did you think then that you would work in technology?

Not necessarily. I was surrounded by technology in a way I didn’t realize. In the fall of 1988, at Dartmouth, they introduced an email system, BlitzMail, which looked a lot like Eudora, and all the students used email. Here it was, the end of the ’80s, I have a networked computer. I send my papers to the library laser printer and then go pick them up on my way to class. I’m learning HyperTalk. I just thought, “Oh, everybody has Macs. That’s just the next evolution.” Then I graduated and found out 3 percent of people have Macs. I saw Windows for the first time and I thought, “What are you people doing? This is hideous. This is really horrifying.”

Anyway, technology had always been in the background. And maybe I had a very early version of that “everybody should code” mindset. I’d always had really nerdy and geeky friends. The first guy I dated in high school was already programming for NASA.

This was just something that really appealed to me, especially coming from Los Angeles. It seemed more substantive. I thought, “We’re going to make things with technology and it’s going to be awesome.”

I was also fleeing from being an English major, which is what everybody thought I was going to be because I was interested in language. I majored in Russian, and then I went to Russia for a while and got back and I thought, “No, I feel like I’ve learned all the Russian I really want to learn.” Also I saw the state of Russia and the economy there, and I knew, “My friends who majored in Chinese and economics, they’re the ones who made the correct bet.”

So, I had this stupid VC job and thought, “Okay, what am I going to do now?” One of my friends had Lynx and showed me, “This is the World Wide Web and all of these different servers are connected.” Then another friend of mine who worked at Apple said, “Oh, hey, here’s this thing called Mosaic.” My reaction was, “This! This is everything I’m interested in. This is everything that interested me in philosophy. This is everything that interested me about design and being an architect. This is everything that interested me in publishing.”

So when you saw the web, you said, “This is what I want to do.” How specific was that idea? Was it like, “I just want to do something in this industry” or was it “I want to be publishing here” or “I want to be programming”?

I wanted to somehow be involved. At that point, everybody was making it up as they went along. At the time, we were asking ourselves, “What is this for?” There was no commercial Internet. Having things online, being able to communicate asynchronously, always being networked — that was what I loved about being in school and communicating by email, and hating the phone. That was so natural to me.

I saw that and I thought it was exciting and I wanted to be involved in it, but I wasn’t totally clear on what that could be. What kind of job can you do with this? So I just started calling people up. “Hey, I want to do Internet-y things. ”Something that I totally recommend is calling people up or emailing people and saying, “Hey, can I buy you coffee and have you talk about your career?” People will do that, and I totally did this.

Who were you calling up?

It was tech publishers and maybe more magazine-oriented people. Because of that, it ended up that somebody at IDG Publishing got my name.

So you were calling people looking for job opportunities?

Or just looking to talk. I’d say, “Hey, I’m interested in this stuff.” Again, the willingness of people to just talk to you is real. This is my number-one advice for anybody starting out in their career and especially after interviewing a lot of people for jobs. Having a thing you want to do in an industry and being super-excited about that thing is the hugest asset. If you just come in to a place, even if you say, “I want to have coffee,” and you talk to somebody who’s in a particular field and you say, “What you do is so kickass and I want to do it. Tell me how you did it,” that person is going to want to help you.

Sometimes people are kind of shy. They think, “Oh, I’m going to wait until there’s a job opening” or “I don’t want to take somebody’s time up.” Seriously, that’s a break for somebody who’s really advanced in their career. As long as they have any free time at all, they’ll say, “Oh, God, I could talk to all these annoying people I work with or I could go talk to a young, idealistic person who’s going to look at me like I’m their hero and talk about myself for an hour.” That is candy to an experienced professional.

And it totally worked. This was ’94 or ’95, at this point. I’d quit my stupid job and I’m running out of money in my checking account. Then the phone rings and it was somebody at IDG in San Francisco saying, “Hey, we have this research job. Would you be willing to just come in and we’ll give you 15 bucks an hour.” My reaction was, “Wow, that’s so much more than minimum wage. That’s amazing.” They had all these tech publications and this was the unit that had Publish magazine, which was about print publishing.

How long do you think you guys will run Mule Design? Is this until you retire? Or is this…

Until we die. I feel like, Mule is what we do. What Mule is could change.

We don’t have a strong idea about what Mule has to be. It just has to be the place that supports the kind of work that we want to be doing. If someday Mule is the name of the island that we’ve retired to, great, but I can’t even imagine that. And this might be true for a lot of designers — to me the idea of retiring sounds just horrifying. No longer having problems to solve, other than when I’m going to schedule my knee replacement or where I’m going to play a round of golf or whatever. I have to solve problems for other people. I just love solving problems for other people so much. I can’t imagine not doing that.

There’s a quote that goes, “You think everybody’s highlight reel is their documentary.” People have this sense that everybody else has it figured out. And then you’re doing it, and you think, “Oh, my God. I don’t know what I’m doing.” If you do it long enough without knowing what you’re doing, then you realize no one actually knows what they’re doing. That is the liberating insight. People running these enormous companies, they know some things but they’re making stuff up and hoping it works out. That’s 90 percent of it. Once you accept that about the world, I think that’s very calming.