In 2011, Koen and I sold Sofa to Facebook. We were based in Amsterdam, the product had won awards, and it had a community we genuinely loved. Selling it taught me more about what I value than anything I’d built before.
It wasn’t an easy decision. Sofa was ours. We’d poured ourselves into it. But Facebook was a chance to design at a completely different scale, to work on things hundreds of millions of people would use. At that point in our careers, that felt important to experience.
We moved to San Francisco. Spent a few years designing there. I learned what it means to work inside a large company: the politics, the process, the strange distance between a decision and its effect. And I learned, pretty clearly, that it wasn’t for me.
What I missed wasn’t independence in some abstract sense. It was the connection between a decision and a result. When you’re building something small and direct, you can feel the consequence of your choices. That feedback loop is what makes the work feel real.
We left and started Framer. The Facebook chapter made that easy, not because it was bad, but because it made the alternative feel urgent. I’d seen the inside of the biggest thing in tech and what I wanted was to build something small and mine again. That’s worth knowing about yourself.