Payam Rajabi

Looking backwards, the dots connect into two obsessions: tools that help people create, and tools that help people learn. At InVision and Abstract I designed the tools designers themselves work in. At Coursera, back when free courses from the world’s best universities still felt improbable, I saw what software could do for learning at scale. Uplimit, started by early Coursera people, merged those threads into learning that AI makes personal and adaptive. And Handshake connects it all to what learning is ultimately for: opportunity.

My approach has stayed the same while the tools keep changing: think in systems, and work by making. Not artifacts about the product, but the product itself — rough at first, shared early, refined in the open. I’ve never thought of design as a solo instrument; the best work I’ve been part of is a team’s collective thinking made visible. AI has collapsed the distance between designing software and building it, and I’ve leaned all the way in: most of what I make today, this site included, is designed and built in the same motion.

I started as a self-taught photographer, and the lesson that pulled me into design still holds: creativity solves problems. Fifteen-plus years later, from the BlackBerry PlayBook to the Vision Pro, I keep arriving at the same belief — software is at its best when it widens who gets to participate. Helping millions of people build real skills for the AI economy, and turn what they make into proof of what they can do, is the most consequential version of that idea I’ve worked on yet.