Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.Related Resources:Join the Cue waitlist — https://sharedcontextlab.comSida Li on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sida-li-35729698/IDEO U's AI x Design Thinking Certificate — https://www.ideou.com/products/ai-design-thinking-certificateIDEO U's Designing a Business course — https://www.ideou.com/products/designing-a-businessListen to our episode with Johannes Seemann: Designing GenAI for the Emotional Side of Money — https://shows.acast.com/creative-confidence-podcast/episodes/designing-genai-for-the-emotional-side-of-money-johannes-see In This Episode: Timestamps are approximate due to edits and ad breaks

Mina introduces the Startups in Residence series

Becca Carroll returns as guest host

From consulting's rulebook to IDEO's blank page

Sida's zero-to-one path: IDEO, a venture studio, and a Series A with Arcade.ai

AI has democratized building — and that's not entirely good news

The long tail of personal life: "death by a thousand cuts"

What Cue actually is: part assistant, part advocate

Why she built for personal life instead of work

The deliberate choice to live inside iMessage, not a new app

Proactive, not reactive: the line between helpful and creepy

The word Sida refuses to use, and the conversation with Tim Brown that confirmed it

AI is less trusted than ICE right now — designing for that

Total transparency: why users can see, edit, and delete everything Cue remembers

Bringing Cue into a group chat changes everything

The founder's journey isn't linear — it's a squiggle

"Wandering in the dark": IDEO's desirability, viability, feasibility framework in practice

Finding investors who can see through the pitch

The business model is a prototype too

A B2B idea everyone loved — until the budget didn't exist

Why she's keeping pricing simple for now

Building a company while the tools underneath her keep changing

From not knowing how to code to building the front end

The sci-fi problem: building something that knows everything about you

The open question nobody's answered yet: what is this relationship, exactly?

The bank-app test: designing trust into a world with no fixed screen

What she got from building inside IDEO that she couldn't get alone

Inside Sida's toolbox: the stack behind Cue

The five-to-ten-year vision: software defined by the people who use it