The most-clicked piece of software ever designed is a thumbs-up. Soleio designed it. He was twenty-three at the time, one of the first two product designers at Facebook, working on the version of News Feed that placed a Like button next to every story on Earth. The button shipped. A trillion thumbs followed. Soleio went on to lead design at Dropbox, growing the team from three to over forty, and then quietly to invest in some of the more interesting design companies of the last decade. Figma. Cursor. Granola. Vercel. Perplexity. Framer. Replit. Companies whose products are what other designers use to make their own work.
On the closing afternoon of Tokyo Design Forum, February 18, 2026, Soleio walked to the front of a room at Trunk Hotel and gave the final talk of the conference. His family was in the room. He warned us he was going to put them on stage. He did. The talk runs twenty-four minutes. It is called The Geometry of Luck, and it is the first piece in The Forum Library.
Why we wanted him in the room
When we started planning the first Tokyo Design Forum, we wrote down a small list of people whose work has the property of being used. Not admired from a distance. Used. Built upon. Picked up by other people and turned into their own thing.
The Like button is in that category. So is everything in Soleio's investment portfolio. So is the argument in the talk above, which Soleio is shaping into a book and which already feels, in its first public form, like a piece of infrastructure for thinking about the design of one's life.
He flew across the Pacific to be in our room. He brought his thesis to Tokyo before publishing it anywhere else. We are honored, and the form of the gift is exactly the kind of gift the talk itself is about.
What comes next
This is Issue 01 of The Forum Library, the permanent archive of the talks and conversations from Tokyo Design Forum 2026. Through the rest of the year we will publish another piece roughly every two weeks. Each speaker, panelist, and contributor is a founding member of TDF, and each of them will appear here in the months ahead.
The next piece in this Issue features Ryo Lu on the design of Cursor.
From the room
What it actually looked like.
Candid moments from the morning Soleio took the stage. Pick them up and move them around — this is your desk.
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About the speaker
Soleio
Design Leader & Angel Investor
Soleio was one of Facebook's first two product designers, where he led design of the version of News Feed that introduced the Like button, plus Groups, Video, Chat, and Messenger over six years. He then joined Dropbox as Head of Design, growing the team from three to over forty. Today he is an angel investor and advisor whose portfolio includes Figma, Cursor, Granola, Vercel, Perplexity, Framer, Replit, Vanta, and others, most concentrated around the next generation of creative and AI-forward software. He lives in San Francisco with his family. His personal site is soleio.me.
