Ben Blumenrose - How designers can be successful startup founders (Dive Club Ep. 71)

There was one day the head of growth was like, raging through the office, going like, who the changed the profile layout? We're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on? Why are you so upset? He's like, why am I so upset? He's like, friending is down 3%. And you're like, okay, well, all the buttons should be together. It just looks better that way. And he's like, oh, okay, it looks better that way.

Great.

Well, here's the thing. 3% less every day compounds. So I want you to go to Mark Zuckerberg's office and tell him why at the end of this year, instead of 378 million users on Facebook, we're actually going to have 260 million. And you tell them it's because you like all the buttons altogether.

Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid. And this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Ben Blumenrose, who's a co founder of Designer Fund, where he's invested in a lot of the design founders that you've heard from on this show, like Joran from Framer or Colin from Visual Electric. So the goal of this episode is really to tap in to Ben's perspective as a designer turned investor to create a little bit of a blue for people who maybe you're interested in working at startups or maybe you're even considering building a company for yourself. But before we get into all of that, I asked Ben to share a story about what it was like as one of the very earliest designers at Facebook, early 2007.

That's when I joined pre iPhone. MySpace was the social network du jour at the time. And if you were in college or you had friends in college, all of a sudden you noticed that they were using some other thing that was called the Facebook or Facebook. It had a Mark Zuckerberg production at the bottom. It looked undesigned, Right. It looked almost like wireframes. When we started talking, I would say there were four or five designers and about 25, 30 engineers. That was the crux of the people building Facebook at the time.

Right.

So the kind of responsibility you got as as one of the few designers was typically like one designer would build profiles, another designer would build the Facebook platform. Another would be newsfeed, another would be photos. You're probably working closely with seven or eight engineers on a number of different roles. And then that was your primary task.

Right.

And then beyond that task was all the other things people wanted of designers. Marketing assets, T shirts, like you name It. It was kind of a barter system internally. So that's the environment. In 07, when I joined, my first project was helping with the Facebook platform, and it was around marketing the Facebook platform. How do we talk about this? What's the marketing site look like, all that stuff. And within a week or two of joining the company, I kind of said to myself, I have two goals here. One is, I want a mental model in my head of how does this whole company work, who's doing what, who's responsible for what? Within, like, you know, six to nine months. I realized how foolish that was because it was changing so fast and we were hiring so fast. I'd go, hey, where's this person that was head of blah, blah, blah? And they're like, oh, no, now that person's, like, responsible for this. And this person's moved here. It was such musical chairs and things were growing and shifting so fast. But I actually had a goal of, like, I want to know everyone at the company, and I want to know, like, who's owning what. And then the third piece was, and for people who are heads of some area, could design be a lever for them? If you're a designer, founder of something, whether it be an agency or a startup, you're always looking for where design can be a lever for whatever. Sales, marketing, recruiting, etc. And so I was kind of curious because we only had. We had product design, you know, five product designers, and we had like a marketing designer, and that's it. And it's like, okay, well, how's the rest of this company doing design? You know, how's the sales team doing design? How's the marketing team? How's customer support doing design? Hr, right? Like, people are onboarding at this company constantly. What are the materials people get when they join the company? So basically within the first month, and I made sure I was doing my core work. But outside of the core work, I would email ahead of X and I would say, like, hey, you're running marketing. What would you do with design resources? Hey, you run customer support. What would you do with design resources? One, the email would be replied to within like 14 seconds. And, you know, it's like, hey, I can give you a list and how soon can we meet and are you offering? So that was really interesting. And B, that once I met with folks, it was very clear that almost universally, if we gave folks design resources in some capacity, that it could be a big difference maker for that organization. So, like, one of the first things I did was ask the customer Support team. So we had about 40 people, all of them recent grads from MIT, Stanford, Harvard. And they were almost like judge, jury and executioner. Of all the things that were happening on Facebook, what are the things that are going wrong that I should surface? How do I resolve disputes between two users? How do I surface things to law enforcement? I mean, the stuff they were dealing with, I mean, you just cannot imagine. It's like managing. At the time it was a city, right? You know, 10, 15 million people. So imagine 40 people that are straight out of college and you have to manage a 15 million person, you know, the size of LA and all the disputes that go with it. I just spent a day and I looked at what tools were they using to do this, and it was very clear within a few hours that they basically just had bad tools to do the job. So the, the, the, the software that they were doing, their job was meant to be used by a single user for one. So every setting that you would change would change for everyone, right? So it's like everyone had the same view of the thing and then once you watch how they used it, it was just so easy to see how there, there were so many low hanging fruit for product updates. So a couple of easy ones. One was like we used to have this list of common responses. So the first person I sat with said, oh, okay, this person wants their account reinstated. Typically I would use the common response for that. And then he looks over his shoulder and he says, but look, the common response we have is not good. And I've written my own and I keep it in this like text document and I just copy paste. And he goes, but I'm the only one that does it this way. I was like, okay, cool. 20 minutes later, I go watch another woman doing her, her job. And someone writes in with, I don't know, it was like a photo dispute. She's like, oh, it's a photo dispute. Okay, we have a common response for this. She looks over her shoulder and she goes, listen, our common responses are not good. Don't tell anyone about this. But I have this, all these sticky notes and I just copy and paste from the sticky notes. And she's like, but don't tell anyone. I do it this way because we're not supposed to do this. I was like, okay, okay, two for two. Interesting. And then I go to the third person and sure enough, like, one had a text edit, the other one had like whatever, some, some doc, online doc, same thing. He's like, yeah, we have crs. I have I have my own. I have my own. So much better. Like, I've just seen it, and I'm thinking to myself, my God, man. Are any of you talking to one another about, like, how you do your job and what's working and what isn't? And so instantly I was like, okay, if we rewrite this tool, one of the very simple things we need to do is let people write their own versions of common responses and also send up the chain. Anything that's improving. You know, it's like, hey, when I use this cr, fewer people write back. It resolves faster. So, like, the best practices should bubble to the top and everyone should be notified. Right? Very simple stuff like that. Similarly, they would spend about five to seven minutes when someone wrote in trying to understand that person's history. They would go through logs, go through their, you know, like, what did this person do? Did we did it? And I'm thinking, my God, it's. And I'm like, what are you looking for? And they're just like, we're looking for, like, key moments in history. Was this person ever disabled? Were they reinstated? Da, da, da, da. And I'm like, oh, that's it. Those are, like, the key. The key, like, things you're looking for. They're like, yeah. I'm like, okay, well, imagine if we just had icons for each one of these key things, and through a visual story, we could just show you, like, you know, it's like this person's account was disabled, reinstated, disabled, reinstated, reported for harassment. Basically, just show you through icons very quickly. And they're like, that would be incredible. That would save me an hour a day. And by the way, we ended up rewriting that tool. Me and two engineers. Took us, like, two to three months once we turned it on that customer support, that new customer support tool doubled their productivity. So if you were a customer support agent and you could handle 100 or 150,000 users, you can handle 300,000. And think of the business. The business impact is how much do 40 people and their salaries, right? So it's like you take 40 times 100, 120k, whatever. Let's. Let's call it 4 million plus their benefits, 5 million and now over in two months. We just created $5 million worth of value and reduced expenses by 5 million bucks, right. Let alone all the, like, cost of managing that people, the space that, you know, Right. So that. That's kind of the thinking, like an owner mentality I was trying to bring to the table. And I. And I think I Brought that because I. In the previous job, I was an owner, and so I kind of understood how to approach it that way. And I just think too few times I. I just see too few designers thinking that way, even though they do have equity in the companies they. They work at when it's. When it's a startup.

Right.

So I'm in this slack group with a bunch of really awesome designers, and there's this trend that I'm noticing. People are switching to Framer like crazy. And not just anyone. We're talking Joey Banks, Ryan Scott, I mean, like, really, really good designers. And it makes sense because Framer feels a lot like Figma. So the learning curve is almost nothing. Which is probably why Ryan said that building his new website felt like pure magic. So if you are ready to join us, head to Dive Club Framer to get started.

Okay, now onto the episode. Okay, so I could ask you about Facebook stuff for probably four or five.

Hours, but really what I'd like to.

Talk about is what are you doing now? Because you're a co founder of Designer Fund, and a big goal for me in this conversation is to tap into that perspective that you've kind of refined over the years as a designer turned into investor. But before we get into, like, all of the weeds and everything, can you.

Give us just a little bit of.

Context for what Designer Fund is?

I had this experience at Facebook where with every year that passed, I just, like, fell deeper and deeper in love with the whole thing with Facebook, with startups, with the impact we were having with. With the impact design could have at a company with engineers, with the idea of, like, people having equity in their company and what that does. And I just thought, my God, like, what an incredible way of working and building companies and all this stuff. And the more I fell in love with Facebook and what we were doing, the more I got frustrated and angry about my design school upbringing, because basically I was like, wait a second. I'm experiencing this thing. And it almost felt like I stumbled into it, you know, I was like, someone reached out to me and they're like, hey, come see this thing. And all of a sudden, it's like, it opens your eyes. You're like, wait a second. This is the way. And why weren't we told about this? I studied at ucla, so it's not that far away, right? A couple hundred miles, 300 miles. I was like, why weren't we told about this magical way of building companies and running companies and all this stuff? So it was like these two threads. One is like more, more excited and happy and amazed at like what we were building and also more frustrated and angry that this was like this thing that was kept from us. Well then another thing that was happening is I was starting to get more startups reaching out to me, asking me for design help. Because all of a sudden, like Facebook gets successful, people are like, who are the leads of X and let's see if they can help us. And here I was, I was like, wait a second, I thought this was the magical Silicon Valley way of building things. And it was around year three or four where I was starting to find out, actually, no, this is a Facebook thing. And maybe a few other companies had it, have it, but it's not a Silicon Valley thing by any means. And design is still largely an afterthought in Silicon Valley. By the way, the folks that are building in Silicon Valley now are building the future of the world. The healthcare companies that we're all gonna require, the education companies that all our kids are gonna, and their teachers are gonna rely on, right? The financial service companies that we're all gonna need. All of a sudden it dawns on me that designers are not part of the conversation. They're certainly not investing and they're very often not on the receiving end. And the people who are receiving investments from Silicon Valley are often people who don't really value design. They kind of see design as a thing that, you know, we can add later on, right? Whether that be make the product look a little nicer or some flashy marketing or whatever it is, it's like it's an add on. And so that's what got me to start investigating Silicon Valley and investing and what are the backgrounds of investors and what does the ecosystem need if we want to move to a world where company's value design early on and bake it in early on. If that's the world you want to build, you're not going to be able to get that by staying at Facebook. So that was why we started Designer Fund is because we have this vision of the world where the next generation of great companies value design and invest in design and use design to do right by people in society. And we could only do that by creating our own fund.

What do you believe about where design can make the biggest impact for startups that shapes the way that you craft an investment philosophy?

When we were starting out, it was kind of this belief that design was where value was created, that technology eventually gets commoditized and basically like take any company or any problem and you layer design and it's going to be five times more valuable. And the reality and the way we've thought about it over the years, that's a more refined way of thinking about it, is that industries kind of go through this cycle and, and I think we can look at AI as a way to look at the cycle. So when you start out, there's often like fundamental technology that needs to get invented, right? So in the terms of AI, it's like we have all these like LLMs and fundamental technology that just needs to make the thing work, right? And if the thing fundamentally doesn't work, the no user experience that you layer on top of it matters. So another example is like Waymo, I was thinking about like things that we. If you live in San Francisco, you've maybe started to use these self talking cards.

I just took my first one. It was quite an experience, actually.

Incredible, right? So, but the problem. So if the fundamental experience, like let's say you came in. Beautiful, beautiful. MUSIC PLAYS There's a nice little button. Hey, Michael, please buckle up.

Great.

Press the button when you're ready. Okay, great, I'm ready. Boom. Crash right into a tree within three seconds, right? It's like, okay, Michael, please like exit the car, you know, so the fundamental tech needs to work, right? And there's a lot of work that, that happens with an industry is nascent, where we build the fundamental technology. As that technology gets built slowly, the user experience layer is where the value accrues more and more. And so with AI, I always laugh. It's like with new industries, you can almost bet that the first UI that engineers are going to use is the terminal, right? So basically it's, you know, whatever, 50 years old, 60 years old now, text input, blinking, underline, thing waiting for you to like type something, right? So it's like, hey, we created this thing, it creates images automatically. How should I input my. What I want? Write it down. You know, a room with a sunshine and blah, blah, blah, and a candle looks sort of like this, right? It's so clear as day that that's when engineers own an industry, when the, when it's a text input ui as the tech gets better and better. And we can argue whether an AI like the LLMs probably will. A lot of them will get commoditized and whatnot. But then the user experience layer is where a lot of the value is going to accrue to, right? So in the case of a product that, that helps you create marketing images as an example, you want to have a Lot of control to create that image. And there's a reason why Photoshop doesn't work as a text input product or figma. But actually it's let me create shapes and colors and put them where I want and define these things using a very sophisticated user interface.

Right.

Because that gives me the control over the output. And right now we're in a space where with these AI tools, where a lot of the times you'll try to explain something to the tool and it gives you an output that's 80 or 90% of the way there and then there's no refining. It's like if it doesn't get there, okay, try to describe it a little differently or make like 10 of these. Maybe one of those will, I don't know, maybe one of those will be close to what you want. Close enough.

Right.

And it's just very clear that that's not the user interface, the user experience that none of any of us want.

Right.

So we're eventually going to see products that are very elegant in the way you input and modify and expand the things that you want AI to do for you.

Right.

And the user experience layer is where that's going to shine. And then eventually industries get to a place where all of a sudden you have dozens of products that are well designed. This is kind of the mature phase of an industry. So like I would say like consumer social is probably in that place where, where user experience, good user experience becomes de facto at that point, like design becomes much harder of a difference maker for the product.

Right.

So if you are going to start a new consumer social product today, the bar for the user experience is super, super high. Just to have table stakes and then probably you have some other angle distribution, some, some other like product. If you're going to do that, right, you're going to try to do some other thing with it, not just improve on the product experience. So for us, as an investment thesis, what do we look for? We look for places where NPS is super low. People are really unhappy with the products and services that exist there. We love when there is an incumbent that people hate.

Right?

Hey, there's a $20 billion company, everyone uses it, no one likes to use it.

Right.

That's a place where, if you bring a new user experience to that place, like you'll see a lot of value accrue to a company if they execute well. So that's kind of how we look at it, is basically where are spaces that are starting to mature where user experience can create a very big Delta and design can create a very big delta and those are the spaces that we're constant looking at.

Is there an example of a recent investment that you've made that kind of paint the picture of that criteria?

I mean, sure, yeah. Look at Visual Electric.

Right.

Like I've looked at a lot of visual design creation tools. A lot of them are exactly what I described a text input into the thing. Visual Electric does start with that and my sense is eventually we're going to add other ways of inputting. What they do beautifully though is once you've created the first thing, the ability to modify and adapt and iterate feels much more like a design tool as opposed to this like image creation tool.

Right.

And for designers, I think they instantly just gravitate towards a tool like this or kind of that way of building. So that's an example where I just think it's very clear to me that these, these tools that we want to create images, you know, we want easier image creation, they're going to feel a lot more like a tool like Visual Electric and much less like a text box that just like pumps out an image and then you have to like write and write a text box again. Write a text box again. Write a text box again.

We had Colin on just a few episodes ago, so it's kind of interesting timing to see the other side of the table now with like the investor perspective.

Yeah.

You also were one of the early.

Investors in Framer and you had Yournon was one of the early episodes here.

So can you tell that story too?

Like why did you invest in Framer where you know that criteria wasn't exactly the same. So I'd be curious like how you evaluated the opportunity, what made you excited to partner with them and then maybe just anything you want to share about, like what that process was like? As you know, a lot of the people listening probably haven't actually went through a fundraising round before.

So one other lens that we think about when we're investing in companies and people is, is basically are these the people that have the ability to build the best in class product in this space? Kuhn and Joran are like, you know, I worked with them at Facebook, they're second. And like when it comes to building design tools and creative tools, if you basically told them, I'm not going to pay you anything, what are you going to spend the rest of your life on? They're still going to do that. They're still going to build and design like design tools. Like, they're just, it's like, in their blood at this point, right? And so I love founders like that, where it's just like they're obsessed with this thing and they're really, really good at building. Because when you're really, really good at building, it makes everything else easier, right? Sales become easy, distribution becomes easier. It's not to say that it's for sure going to win. We have plenty of examples where the best products don't win because they get outmaneuvered through distribution or price or all these other things. But, man, it makes everything else easy. So one thing is just like, okay, Coin is starting a company in the design tool space. You know, you almost have to talk yourself out of that. So I'm almost already starting with a de facto will write a check unless there's something scary or weird or whatever. Their thesis at the time was basically that prototyping was design and that the idea that we would first start with kind of a visual design for a lot of the products and services that we build and then take that into a prototyping tool and then take that prototype and then turn it into a real thing. Their belief was just like, that's not the future of how we build products and services. And that designers would much rather just start with kind of building a thing you can play with and interact with. Having come out of Facebook, a place where a lot of the best builders and designers at Facebook kind of had this mentality where it's just like, just build the thing. It wasn't even prototyping, you know, we just thought it was like, build a rough version of the thing, let me play with it, and then I can tell you if it's, like, good or not. Because Photoshop, it's just like, you can make anything look good in Photoshop. You can make it look, you know, kind of feel the way you want to feel, whatever. But it's like, until I get, like, real user data and until I feel like the way it, like, goes from screen to screen, it's very hard to react to a thing. So we often at Facebook at the time, we just, we would just like, build the thing right out the gate. And so they said, like, if. If that was the. What the best people were doing, that's where the industry is going to go. And to me, that made a ton of sense. If we could do that, why wouldn't we?

Right?

And that was enough for us to say, okay, like, someone's going to build the next Adobe, why not them?

Right?

Okay, so let's talk to someone who's listening to this and they have this desire internally to be the next Yarn Kuhn, create the next generational company. Yeah, let's assume that they have some of the obvious boxes checked. Like they have domain expertise, they understand and care deeply about a space. They have pinpointed a product that is addressable but also has like a big enough TAM to get you excited.

So what are some of the other.

Things that a first time founder could do on top of that baseline to get you to the point where you would be really excited to partner with them?

So there's a few archetypes of designer founders. One is kind of like they're the craftspeople who want to build out of the gate, super elegant, super refined, kind of the highest quality, MVP type product. And we see this especially true for folks that have come from successful companies prior. They put so much weight on that V1 that they move too slow and they're too precious with it. So the first thing I look for with a designer founder that can build is like, show me the product that you've built. And ideally, as we start talking, you know, my favorite thing is, is like you meet a designer founder on Monday and you go through the product and you say, hey, this looks amazing. But you know, I really wish that onboarding worked a little bit like this. And then on Wednesday they're like, hey, I was thinking about the two or three things you said. Here's like a couple iterations on what I built. Check this out and check this out. And to me that's, that's kind of the engine I'm looking for, is like, how quickly do you take feedback? Think about it, prototype on top of it and ship and ship and ship and ship, that's a superpower. Because when you think about someone who doesn't work that, who doesn't have that skill set, what I just described, that feedback comes on Monday and Wednesday. There's a new, there's a new product experience. If you can't build or if you're not the designer, right? It's like, oh, okay, that's interesting. Then we need to get a designer to mock it up. Then an engineer needs to like code the thing. Then the engineer and the designer need to hash it out. And that's if you're an engineer, founder. And then there's a lot of founders who basically come from finance or domain expertise or whatever who are reliant on some other people. And now they have to go convince the people to try this, right? It's like, so when you're that close to being able to manifest a new experience. It's a real powerful superpower. So I would say if you're a designer founder, that can build, like, lean into that and showcase your building abilities, Showcase the speed at which you build. The other superpower designer has is like, the ability to manifest the future and make it feel real when it's not real. So I'll give you another, like, Facebook story. So, like, one of the things I did early on was work with the sales team. So we had. We had a situation where one of our sales folks was. Was going down to Microsoft to try to get them to agree to a deal where we would embed some Microsoft products within Facebook. And his challenge was to show them kind of what these things would look like inside of Facebook. As you can imagine, as someone with a background in sales, he was using PowerPoint, right? Like, hey, here's what, like, Microsoft search would look like in Facebook, or here's, like, what Microsoft ads would look like in Facebook. Whereas, if you're a product designer, I can make that thing look so real. I can make it feel like that thing is already live. And we just took a screenshot of it. So designers have the ability to, through being able to visually manifest mockups or marketing sites or prototypes. What that is, is it like, that's showing the future, right? You have that ability. And so when I see, to me, it's like, use that superpower. Show me, like, hey, here's what, in five years, here's what this thing could look like in five years. Here's what the world looks like if we're successful. When I don't see that and you're a designer founder, I'm just thinking to myself, it's like you're a designer founder, and you send over a text memo, like, why? I think it's good. Like, writing is important. Writing is a way of communication for sure. But, man, there's so many ways that you can, on top of the writing, show, not tell. And so that's another thing I look for. And I think that is a special power that designers can have is basically for investors manifesting, hey, here's what this thing could look like in the future. Here's what the ecosystem could look like. It's just much better effective communication if you have designer on the founding team. And that should be evident. And then the thing that we also tell designers to understand is, where are your gaps? Because the thing is, like, if you and I just wrote up all the things that a designer CEO or a designer Founder needs to do right, accounting, sales, go to market, recruiting, legal. Right. It's like you just can, you can write them on about on a whiteboard. There's probably like 40 areas like that. As a designer founder, there are areas where you have excellence in already and you should lean into those strengths. Then there's areas where you think you can bring your unique point of view and you want to learn more about that. So let's say I want to make sure that we get the most talented people at this company. It's going to be a big focus of mine as a founder for the first two years to have like the highest talent density at this company to get the best people here. And I want to understand what is moving the best people to decide what company they work at right now. And I'm going to bring my design superpower to that.

I love that. Right.

And so you as a designer founder, think about what areas you want to learn and grow into and become excellent at. And then understand what are the areas where you're like, I'm not touching that.

Right.

Legal, I don't know shit about it. I'm just going to hire like an incredible legal firm. I'm going to know enough to be dangerous. I don't need to bring my whole like design worldview to legal and redo our legal docs and maybe we can have a different legal process and blah, blah, blah. Choose the areas that you're just going to outsource and have them be done good enough so that you can be excellent in the other areas. And that's really important because I think oftentimes what we see is designers basically just have a total gap. They focus on product, they focus on marketing, they have gaps in things distribution or price. You know, it's like, hey, how are you going to price a thing? I'm not really sure. It's like, okay, what are other products priced at? I'm not really sure what you're going into space. You don't know what, you don't know what everyone else is charging for the thing. Do you even know that the thing you're building is pro? Like, can you actually profitably make the product you're making? So I think there's things like that where oftentimes a designer founder, because we don't come, typically we don't come from business or we don't come from these other areas that could be real gaps as designers. What do we love? Blank Figma files and you know, blank notion docs and the ability to create those. But you know, give you a spreadsheet. And it's not exactly like, hey, interpret this spreadsheet, and what's working well and what isn't. It's like, for most designers, that's not. That's not how they want to spend a Tuesday morning, right? And so they just avoid it. And I think that it's like you avoid it at your peril, because those things, if you get them wrong, can really kill a company. I would urge designers to understand all the different parts of what it takes to build a business and understand where you're going to be, excellent where you're not, and then get people, whether it be investors or partner. You can get partner. Like, we outsource our accounting, we outsource our back office, and so find good people who can do that for you. And don't spend, you know, spend the vast majority of your time on the other areas. And the last thing I'd say is, like, where you're working right now is an excellent place to do a lot of that learning. I hear from a lot of designers that they're like, you know, sales. Who wants to, like, spend time design sales decks? Who wants to design decks? You know, if your founder is going out to fundraise, then, yeah, you should be designing some decks. You know what I mean? Or if sales aren't going, you should be, like, looking at, like, why aren't sales moving? Right? Is it product or is it just like, the way you're talking about product? Right? So again, that's the owner mentality, but, like, it's such a great learning experience. Like, if you're in a company that's 200, 300, 500 people, 50 people make it a point to understand how all the different parts of that company work so that when it comes time to start your own, you're not just starting from scratch on that stuff. Like, you actually have those people, and most of those people want to work with a designer.

They. They're.

They're more than happy to show you and teach you and inform you on how these things work, especially if you're like, hey, maybe I can help you with design on some of these things, right? So like I said, it was a barter. There was almost like a. A barter system early at Facebook. And guess what? Like, design was almost like gold in that barter system. So, like, take advantage of that.

Hey, guys, real quick. If you know me, then you know I love products. So I want to take just 30 seconds to tell you about three of my favorites. Now, anytime that I'm designing and building a website. You better believe that I'm going to use Framer. I made the switch recently and I'm never going back. Now once it's time to animate my designs and showcase my work, that's when I'm going to use Jitter. It's like Figma, only for motion design. And every step of the way I'm going to be using Raycast constantly. It's the cornerstone of how I use my computer and the way that I stay in flow while I work. Now I hand selected Framer, Raycast and Jitter to partner with me so that I could do these interviews full time. So if you want to show them some love, it would mean a lot.

Okay, now onto the rest of the episode. It's interesting to hear you talk because in many ways what you're kind of pointing to as an archetype is like you kind of have to be a generalist if you're going to be a founder because you have to wear a bunch of different hats. And so it's like what is the core skill that you bring to the table? And the value of design as the core skill seems to be increasing pretty rapidly.

Especially even just like, I don't know.

About you, Like I open up Twitter right now and my entire feed is just non engineers building products that they couldn't previously do just based off of all of this new AI tooling. So the future feels quite bright.

One nuance that I think it is important actually the design generalist and not just design generalist, but more of a generalist period. Like someone who's just curious about how a company works and all different pieces and what actually moves the needle for our company. That's more important in a designer founder, that is the CEO. You don't have to be a designer founder and be CEO. And in fact, probably for a lot of designer founders, they'd be best served to not be the CEO. Because if you were like the designer founder, head of product.

Right.

You can way narrow your aperture.

Yeah.

And it might be just a way better fit for a lot of designers that to be able to just like, hey, I want to be the product overseer. Everyone has this architect, the hero of the CEO. And I think that, you know, you can be that.

Right.

And I do think we celebrate, you know, the, the next generations, like the Dylan Fields of the world and Brian Chesky and those guys. But you don't have to be. So I do think there's room for people who love the craft and want to stay in the craft and the design and the product to be a founder, but you don't have to be the CEO.

Okay, so let's talk to someone who maybe.