YARN
Stage: 0-1 and beyond
What: Social video discovery
Role: Co-founder, Product Design Lead
Responsibilities: Brand & content, AI-first capabilities & product strategy (with co-founders), product design, design systems, managed design team (later on), product marketing materials
YARN unlocks the power of storytelling. It instantly connects users to the most iconic, hilarious, and unforgettable movie and TV moments, inventing a new category of short-form video discovery. Consumers can effortlessly find, share, and relive the exact clip that captures a feeling, a punchline, or the perfect pop culture reference. Whether it’s a legendary one-liner or a scene that says it all, YARN brings the magic of cinematic moments to life—one clip at a time.
Opportunity
Me and my co-founders created YARN because we saw trends in shorter attention spans, the desire to easily share favorite video content, and AI capabilities to extract meaningful layers of information from rich media. With a small team, we took the idea from 0-1 to become a leader in premium video search and sharing.
250 M
annual visitors
1.5 B
daily clip views
“YARN is one of the most dynamic content-sharing platforms in the world.”
- Andy Blacker, CEO of Clipmedia
Our team’s internal visualization of the smart timeline
Layers of Meaning
YARN users can search and connect to video moments effortlessly thanks to YARN’S AI-powered Ingestion Pipeline which uses speech, facial, and object and action recognition to analyze every second of video content and create a Smart Timeline of events. To me, this type of high-level, deeply technical, strategy, working with engineering on the back-end concepts (like the diagram above) is what drives the best design ideas.
35 M
video clips
150 k
movies & tv shows
Platforms & Partners
We wanted YARN to present a consistent brand and UX in integrations across search, web, mobile apps, messaging, and social media, from Slack to TikTok. This allows users to easily discover and share everywhere, with YARN or partner-branded content.
Timeline Driven Data
YARN combines AI event analysis with metadata and clip performance to provide a holistic, observable timeline-based view of each clip, providing novel insights for the entertainment industry. Working with the insights and possibilities drove new designs around search and discovery.
Brand & Design Systems
YARN is a cross-platform brand and UX that requires instant recognition while allowing video storytelling to take center stage. I created a modular Figma design system and simple but extensible brand guidelines to ensure clear, beautiful, consistent UX across all our platforms, partnerships, and integrations.
