Rafa Jiménez

Are you, as Brian Eno offers, an architect or a gardener? Do you need ideas meticulously dictated or might you be willing to curate and see where they grow?

It’s hard to imagine a better metaphor for my conversation with Rafa Jiménez, founder of the AI creativity and innovation platform Seenapse. This is the second iteration of the Curiosity+Courage interview series, and we cover a lot of territory.

Rafa tells the story of a childhood focused on making culture versus merely consuming it, discovering how an audience reacts to your ideas, and how to learn from their perspectives. This is the difficult, yet critical development of a successful creative mindset.

Then we venture into the heady days of the late 1990s as technology and advertising become strange bedfellows, and Rafa’s company is acquired by WPP and he finds himself discovering the world of advertising and characters like Neil French. In that period, Rafa witnesses a computer win at the game Go, and has his epiphany—the notion of a computer generating useful, fresh ideas alongside humans. Seenapse is born.

But the journey is long, winding, and never obvious. Product Market Fit proves illusive until the current generation of AI begins to emerge, and Seenapse is reimagined.

Ultimately, we discover idea people need to be in constant dialogue with their tools, to see where they might take us.

Listen via the podcast above (subscribe via Apple and Spotify), or watch our conversation below.

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