Everyone’s a Part-Timer: An interview with Cam Diamond of ITM

Having spent the last 15 years building identities for the likes of Western Digital, Esteè Lauder and more, Cam Diamond's moving onto helping you define your own.

When a new friend asked me, “What do you do for work?” during an early evening dinner last week, I paused. I run a startup, I get paid to make memes, and I used to be a lawyer. I do a lot of things, but no single title really captured it all. What seemed like a straightforward question suddenly felt surprisingly difficult to answer.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one facing this dilemma. Recent data shows that the average person will now have up to seven careers in their lifetime. This non-committal trend isn’t just affecting our jobs either but also bleeds into other aspects of our lives. Among a certain crowd of 20- and 30-something urbanites, it’s certainly not uncommon to bounce between a grab bag of careers, cities, and even relationships.

Designer Cam Diamond has been wrestling with the concept of fragmented identities for the past decade. “We’re no longer a nine-to-five generation,” Cam told me.

“Nobody is just one thing anymore. You’ll be temporarily a lot of different people. You might only be a New York founder once or an SF venture capitalist for a particular part of your life.”

Cam’s latest venture, ITM, is a natural outgrowth of these ideas. On the surface, it’s a CRM platform for brands to manage customer loyalty. But its deeper purpose is about unifying the fragmented parts of our identities into a new layer for understanding taste. Fascinating stuff. 

In this interview, we sit down with Cam to learn more about ITM, his thoughts on taste and identity, and his perspective on the role of design in tech from his unique vantage point as a designer-founder.

What can you tell us about ITM? 

ITM (pronounced item) is a CRM for the experience economy. 

When I first came up with ITM, it began as an exploration around the disconnect between our digital and physical selves. I wanted to figure out how we could use our experiences across both wavelengths to create a new form of identity, and see how that identity could be used to help us self-taste through the world. 

At a high level, imagine you’re travelling. What if instead of using CLEAR to board, you had ITM ID, and the ID would curate the films onboard or suggest restaurants, galleries and hotels for when you land all based on your previous interactions, or taste as we call it.

When I met my cofounder Saarim in FWB, we wanted to figure out how we could get to this end state. We decided the best way was to build a CRM for the experience economy with a view to eventually creating a whole new identity layer. 

Today, brands use five to seven different platforms for CRM and loyalty management, like Mailchimp for emails and Ticketmaster  for events. With ITM, we will be the first platform to connect experiences, content, commerce, interactions, and services into one storytelling platform. Instead of using multiple tools, brands will finally be able serve attendees through multiple touchpoints and tier access levels under one roof.

With AI on the precipice, and content becoming so much more easier to surface. What do you think is the role of human identity and taste? 

I think the biggest issue with AI is that we’re losing the ability to explore independently. 

Taste is experience and taste is personal. Algorithmic doom scrolling has killed taste because we’re no longer exploring on our own but following trends. We’re producing content trying to be seen which I think is hurtful for taste.  

Right now, everyone’s trying to be somebody else or copy somebody else. There’s a generation of kids that grew up on Virgil Abloh’s ‘3 %’ rule and believe that changing something 3% is enough to create something new. By doing this, you’re actually losing the references and meaning behind what you’re doing, and that’s sad. 

How did you cultivate your own taste? 

I come from a design background - I studied industrial design and I was a graffiti rat throughout most of my childhood so I take a lot of inspiration from being embedded [in that subculture] and creating alternate realities. Cam Diamond’s not even my real name! I’m also one of those people who will go down a rabbit hole for six days straight researching something niche like, I don’t know, Korean hand dyed indigo yarn that is later  sun faded post garment, and that habit of trying to understand the source is where my taste comes from. 

People need to get lost in the world, they need to find themselves in strange, even uncomfortable situations to understand the world around them and from there, form a level of taste. I am endlessly travelling the world solo exploring the unknown and then using those memories later on as starting points of discovery and questions to dive into more rabbit holes.

There’s a recent crop of hardware companies Rabbit releasing products that look good on the surface and seemingly care about design, but ultimately have fallen flat.  From your perspective as a designer founder why do you think this has happened? 

Rabbit outsourced their hardware design to Teenage Engineering which gained them PR hype but it left them with a product that acts more like a collectible that sits on my desk rather than something that I would use in my daily life. The bigger issue, however, is that these companies don’t understand or place importance on the pre and post product experience. How do people get to my product? How does the product live in their lives? In tech, where the goal has to become ship fast at all cost, we’re losing those threads. 

Design has been devalued so much with the advancement of quick to market technology over the last decade and investors have exacerbated this through the importance they place on having a tech founder. It’s very difficult for a design founder to fundraise alone. 

Design is storytelling, it’s the foundation of everything. Everything in the world has been designed whether it’s by a human or by nature. Yet, there’s a tendency to attribute design to a logo or a set of visual guidelines. I’ve worked for a lot of VCs in the past and they see design as an afterthought - a layer you put on at the end. 

Some designers also enable this. Our feed’s been taken over by a lot of ‘internet art directors’ who produce fantasy concepts that look great but don’t understand strategy, research, or the importance of asking the right questions. It’s created a market of subscription design businesses which offer rapid output but don’t provide any foundation or narrative that can form an emotional connection with the consumer. What ends up happening is that brands will believe everything can be done at a flat rate and in a matter of days only to realise later down the track that they’ve missed a lot of the crucial foundation steps necessary for good design.

What we need is better design education that puts storytelling as the hero followed by visuals as the final step. 

How do we lift the value of design? 

We’re starting to see a pivot of design agencies turning into venture studios where 20 to 30% of their business is now actually designing and building products where they lead and hire the engineering. I think that is going to be the wave of change where these investors are going to see the rising success rate of designer founders. 

They’re going to have a story, it’s going to have an emotional connection to customers and it’s going to work because the UI and interface is designed alongside the product team, not after.

That’s the one thing I think AI is helping in design because designers can now be early stage product engineers. You can’t really have engineers using design AI because it’ll all look the same and it’s all based on what’s being fed to it which is generic Figma UI Kits . So I think in the next two to three years, you’ll start to see a lot of interesting products coming from design founders who have been enabled by UI to get products out. 

Is anyone doing it right? 

Honestly, Brian Chesky from AirBnB. He’s a designer founder coming from an industrial design background and he understands the importance of asking the right question. If a designer founder like Brian opened a fund or venture studioI think he would crush it. 

On the hardware front though, no I don’t think anyone’s winning - not even Apple.  Right now there is a complete disconnect between hardware and software where it feels they are designed in silos.

For a new era of hardware designers to win, the experience needs to feel seamless. The best way to put it is the feeling of "it just makes sense" when a product after a few minutes of use already is a part of you.

Daylight Computer is the first hardware release I’ve seen that actually makes sense. I am yet to use it, but the human connection, the why and the hardware + software relationship looks beautiful for a V1 release. I’m excited to see where they take it.

—

Cam’s Taste 

What are you listening to? 

I’m a huge fan of UK drill so Fumes the Engineer is a go-to. I’ll also listen to Jacques Green when I’m at the airport or walking around a new city. I used to have a lot of James Blake in there as well. 

What’s on the wishlist? 

997.2 GT3 RS. I love driving, I love manuals. That’s my dream. It’s not the type of car that is attainable in Australia but there was a point when I was working in LA that it was within my grasp and I regret not pulling the trigger. 

Where are you hanging out? 

It sounds like a fuccboi thing, but when I’m in New York, I love to go to Balthazar and in LA you will find me at Bar Stella knocking back negronis.

What are you reading at the moment? 

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You.

—

Socials

Follow Cam Diamond on X. 
Sign up for the ITM Beta. 
Hire a part-time designer